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Tatham Mound and the Bioarchaeology of European Contact: Disease and Depopulation in Central Gulf Coast Florida, by Dale L. Hutchinson, 2006. Gainesville (FL): University Press of Florida; ISBN-13 978-0-8130-3029-6 hardback US$59.95; xxii+259 pp., 83 figs., 32 tables

Contributors work toward the clearer, more detailed technological descriptions that can narrow the difference (even now, though, disagreement persists on questions so fundamental as whether Fishtails were fluted). Jackson calculates a mean date for Fell’s Cave of about 10,500 bp that suggests younger age for Fishtails than Clovis points. Although Los Tapiales contains no Fishtails, Ranere and Faught cite slightly different sets of assays to date the site somewhat differently. These are not tiresome typological or culture-historical matters. Such questions can be resolved only when archaeology formulates the theory of point design and change that cries out for creation; only then will its implications, processual more than historical, become clear. Here is yet another example of Paleoindian archaeology’s theoretical burden and promise. The question should be addressed with comparative studies of diversification — south and north — that consider Folsom and Fishtail, among other prominent types, as possible examples of distinct developmental paths from Clovis technology. Unavoidably, the book is uneven theoretically and geographically; but most chapters are original, closely reasoned, data-based and theoretically pregnant. Generally, illustrations are good (fig. 5.2 is an exception, and figs. 6.3 and 9.2 show line drawing and photograph, respectively, of the same specimens). The book contains 58 pages of up-to-date citations and a good index. Yet a few demurrals. Here as elsewhere, Paleoindian archaeology remains innocent of the severe sample-quality (‘representativity’) problems that beset our data and indifferent to the surprisingly accessible methods (mostly developed in Scandinavia for different purposes) needed to measure and control for them. Compilations of fluted-point distribution and density, for instance, do not reveal routes or modes of colonization without careful attention to biases that may reside in them. Similarly, estimating regional Paleoindian population from number of known points or sites, without considering the modern population distribution and land-use patterns — not to mention simple chance — that affect discovery probability, is like estimating cities’ population from the size of their football stadiums. That Old Trafford is bigger than Emirates does not prove that Manchester is bigger than London. Some sour notes are struck. Fiedel complains that South Americans too readily accept evidence of preClovis antiquity or human-megafauna association, but Borrero’s careful taphonomic review casts doubt on this judgment. Even Borrero, however, exaggerates the popularity among northerners of the big-game view and evidence for selectivity in chert use, both of which views, although held by some, ignore much evidence to the contrary. Despite the progress displayed here, Paleoindian archaeology still lacks the close conceptual integration of joint research in areas south and north and the large geographic scale of analysis that true collaboration requires. There is no doubting the value of comparing regional records as several chapters do, but those records were compiled with different purposes in mind that complicate and sometimes defeat comparison. Paleoindian archaeology needs hemispheric studies unified at the start around questions common to archaeologists south and north. Some of us have taken small steps in field studies (e.g. of the colddesert records of small sections of the North American Great Basin and Argentine Patagonia conducted with my Argentine colleague, José Lanata), but much more remains to be done. We also must use and expand the large data bases, lithic in North America and skeletal in South America, that alone can answer questions of truly hemispheric scale (e.g. with detailed morphometric analysis to trace developmental sequences following Clovis). It is up to archaeologists north and south to design and carry out research of a nature and scale suitable to the hemisphere that Paleoindians occupied.