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Historical Archaeology: A Guide to Substantive and Theoretical Contributions. Robert L. Schuyler, editor. Baywood Publishing Company, Inc. Farmingdale, NY, 1978. xiv + 286 pp., illus.

One of the major trends in American anthropology since World War II has been the expansion of its teaching and research from "primitive" to complex societies. In anthropological archaeology this trend has led to the development of a new field of historical archaeology, complementing that of prehistoric archaeology. And since the Society for American Archaeology and its journal, American Antiquity, are devoted to prehistoric archaeology, the practitioners of the new field have established a separate Society for Historical Archaeology with its own journal, Historical Archaeology. The present volume summarizes the achievements of the new field. It is an anthology of articles about historical archaeology, designed for use as a textbook in graduate and undergraduate classes and as "an ingress for the general reader or professional archaeologist who is entering the subject for the first time" (p. ix). It serves both purposes most effectively. The articles provide good coverage, with an exception to be mentioned later, and are well selected, insofar as a non-specialist like myself can judge. They are also well organized and well integrated by a series of short, plainly worded commentaries, which Schuyler, the editor, has written to introduce each part of the volume. He is particularly to be commended for his handling of disputed issues; he has included articles pro and con, and for the most part does not take sides in his commentaries, preferring to let the reader make up his or her own mind. Part 1 is entitled "Emergence and Definition of a New Discipline." It consists of seven essays on the nature of historical archaeology in the Americas. Three of the authors see it as part of the discipline of history and the other four, including Schuyler, as a division of the discipline of anthropology. Elsewhere in this issue (see Current Affairs Commentary), I have suggested a third alternative, that archaeology, like linguistics, is best considered interdisciplinary. For reasons that I present there, I believe that archaeology has unity only on the primary level of field and laboratory research and on the secondary level of time-space systematics. Through research on these levels, archaeologists provide information which they or others, acting as anthropologists or historians, can use to solve the problems of one or the other discipline. In Part 2, Schuyler deals with the "Subfields of Historical Archaeology." He first presents an article in which John H. Rowe attributes the origin of archaeology to the study of Classical remains during the Renaissance, follows this with discussions of the Societies for Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology, and ends with essays on American Colonial and Islamic archaeology. He takes the position that if historical archaeology is to reach its full potential, it will have to incorporate all these subjects; and he adds that "a small advance in that direction has already been achieved with the establishment of the Association for Field Archaeology (1974) and its publication of the Journal of Field Archaeology." But he fails to recognize that we who took this step were motivated by the belief that archaeology is interdisciplinary, as I have noted above, and that it can only be unified on the lower levels of interpretation, before the archaeologist reaches the problems of Classics, Medieval studies, post-Medieval studies, American Colonial studies, other branches of history, or anthropology, as the case may be. Part 3 is devoted to the "Substantive Contributions" of historical archaeology. Its articles fall into three groups: (1) discussions of the seriation of pipe stems, pottery, and grave stones; (2) relatively long site reports on excavations at Fort Necessity in western Pennsylvania and La Purisima Mission in California; and (3) efforts to reconstruct different aspects of culture at Victoria, northern Australia; on Mott Farm in Rhode Island; and among the Mormons in Arizona. The articles in the last group are noteworthy for their use of documentary evidence to supplement the archaeological evidence. Schuyler notes that none of the authors succeeds in going beyond cultural reconstruction to study process—this despite the relatively great amount of information provided by the documents. In Part 4, "Theoretical Positions," the volume returns to the argument over whether historical archaeology should be history or anthropology. British archaeologists Ivor Noel Hume and Ian C. Walker, trained to think of archaeology as one of the humanities, support the former view, as does Clyde D. Dollar, an American historian. Lewis R. Binford and Bernard L. Fontana argue the latter. Charles E.