To celebrate the XVI INQUA Congress, The Quaternary Period in the United States was organized and published, "devoted to advances in understanding of the past ca. two million years of Earth history-the Quaternary period-in the United States" (p. ix from the Preface). Realizing that "[n]o review volume can provide comprehensive treatment for a topic as vast and rich as the Quaternary," the editors therefore limited the volume "to highlights from an admittedly incomplete selection of fields that are of widespread current interest today" (p. ix from the Preface).
Given that the human record in North America, even by the standards of the most extreme proponents of a "pre-Clovis" population, represents only a few percent of the Quaternary's time span, many chapters will be of only passing interest to geoarchaeologists unless they also teach or research other aspects of geomorphology or Quaternary geology. Nevertheless, some chapters are of direct relevance. The two volumes take roughly similar topical approaches, though the 2004 version is, as noted by the editors, much more limited, devoting roughly half the number of pages (and exactly half the number of chapters) to a discipline that is much broader and much more complex than it was in 1965.
A significant portion of the 2004 volume, not surprisingly, is devoted to the record of glaciation in the United States Glacial stratigraphy, and reconstructions of glacial processes are provided for the southern Laurentide ice sheet (Mickelson and Colgan), the Cordilleran ice sheet (Booth, Troost, Clague, and Waitt), the Rocky Mountains (Pierce), and Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, Sierra Nevada, and Hawaii (Kaufman, Porter, and Gillespie). Some chapters focus more on glacial processes (e.g., Mickelson and Colgan), while others deal more specifically with stratigraphic records (e.g., Booth and others). All chapters present useful, up-to-date discussions of the glacial history for each region. The terminal Pleistocene records from along the edge of the continental ice sheets and in the mountain West, and Holocene glacial activity in the United States Cordillera are important for reconstructing the landscape evolution, depositional environments, and formation processes of archaeological sites.
Three other chapters deal with topics related to the glacial record: (1) coupling ice-sheet and climate models (Marshall, Pollard, Hostetler, and Clark), (2) research on permafrost processes (Hallet, Putkonen, Sletten, and Potter), and (3) sea-level history (Muhs, Wehmiller, Simmons, and York). The modeling chapter will be of limited direct interest to geoarchaeologists, but will be an important reference for studies that attempt paleoclimate models. The chapter on permafrost deals almost exclusively with research on processes, and has little to say about the Quaternary record of permafrost and the paleoenvironmental implications of paleo-permafrost features. The sea-level discussion is an excellent review of research and