Surficial Deposits of the United States, Charles B. Hunt, 1986, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 189 p. (w. map in pocket), $39.95
✍ Scribed by Rhodes W. Fairbridge
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1986
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 257 KB
- Volume
- 1
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0883-6353
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
as generalists, incorporating fish, plants, and mammals into their diet. Dent sees no evidence to support the notion of a specialized mega-fauna adaptive pattern.
Shawnee-Minisink is an important report on an important site. Inevitably, it will be compared with the contemporary excavations at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, also in Pennsylvania, and while the final results of the latter project are not yet available, preliminary reports indicate quite a different flavor to the management and multidisciplinary involvement of a major research program (Adovasio et al. 1978). Between the two sites our knowledge of the earliest inhabitants in northeastern North America is greatly advanced.
One of the costs commonly associated with modern interdisciplinary archaeology is the length of time from backfill to final publication, in this case about eight years. To judge by the references, most chapters were written prior to 1980, which made it difficult to include the spate of northeastern Paleoindian research published in the early 1980s. In addition to a number of typos that slipped by the editorb), more serious errors occur; for example, on pages 115 and 116 of McNett's chapter on artifact morphology, radiocarbon dates of 1640 2 200 radiocarbon years and 1564 *95 years are said to equal 310 B.C. and 385 B.C. respectively! Prehistoric archaeologists should leave A.D./B.C. to the historians. Despite these problems, McNett is to be congratulated for encouraging his co-authors to distill chapters from their dissertations, and for organizing the results in a smooth-flowing, well-integrated package. In a previous review of an Academic Press offering on archaeology this reviewer criticized the extravagent use of space on each page. The format of this volume is more economical, but the volume itself is hardly thrifty.
References