Field Methods in Archaeology has been the leading source for instructors and students in archaeology courses and field schools for 60 years since it was first authored in 1949 by the legendary Robert Heizer. Left Coast has arranged to put the most recent Seventh Edition back into print after a brief hiatus, making this classic textbook again available to the next generation of archaeology students. This comprehensive guide provides an authoritative overview of the variety of methods used in field archaeology, from research design, to survey and excavation strategies, to conservation of artifacts and record-keeping. Authored by three leading archaeologists, with specialized contributions by several other experts, this volume deals with current issues such as cultural resource management, relations with indigenous peoples, and database management as well as standard methods of archaeological data collection and analysis.

Useful for academic and recreational archaeologists alike, this book identifies and describes over 200 projectile points and stone tools used by prehistoric Native American Indians in Texas. This third edition boasts twice as many illustrations all drawn from actual specimens and still includes charts, geographic distribution maps and reliable age-dating information. The authors also demonstrate how factors such as environment, locale and type of artifact combine to produce a portrait of these ancient cultures.

The region that now encompasses Central Texas and northern Coahuila, Mexico, was once inhabited by numerous Native hunter-gather groups whose identities and lifeways we are only now learning through archaeological discoveries and painstaking research into Spanish and French colonial records. From these key sources, Maria F. Wade has compiled this first comprehensive ethnohistory of the Native groups that inhabited the Texas Edwards Plateau and surrounding areas during most of the Spanish colonial era.

Much of the book deals with events that took place late in the seventeenth century, when Native groups and Europeans began to have their first sustained contact in the region. Wade identifies twenty-one Native groups, including the Jumano, who inhabited the Edwards Plateau at that time. She offers evidence that the groups had sophisticated social and cultural mechanisms, including extensive information networks, ladino cultural brokers, broad-based coalitions, and individuals with dual-ethnic status. She also tracks the eastern movement of Spanish colonizers into the Edwards Plateau region, explores the relationships among Native groups and between those groups and European colonizers, and develops a timeline that places isolated events and singular individuals within broad historical processes.

"All archaeologists whose work deals even in part with the terminal Pleistocene-- early Holocene should read this book thoroughly; there simply is no better treatment of the geoarch-aeological record of that period. Interested amateurs also will enjoy it." -- Choice "This book will be of use for years to come as the key source for the early geoarchaeology of the region." -- Jack L. Hofman, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Kansas

The Southern High Plains of northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico are rich in Paleoindian archaeological sites, including such well-known ones as Clovis, Lubbock Lake, Plainview, and Midland. These sites have been extensively researched over decades, not only by archaeologists but also by geoscientists, whose studies of soils and stratigraphy have yielded important information about cultural chronology and paleoenvironments across the region.

In this book, Vance T. Holliday synthesizes the data from these earlier studies with his own recent research to offer the most current and comprehensive overview of the geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains during the earliest human occupation. He delves into twenty sites in depth, integrating new and old data on site geomorphology, stratigraphy, soils, geochronology, and paleoenvironments. He also compares the Southern High Plains sites with other sites across the Great Plains, for a broader chronological and paleoenvironmental perspective.

With over ninety photographs, maps, cross sections, diagrams, and artifact drawings, this book will be essential reading for geoarchaeologists, archaeologists, and Quaternary geoscientists, as well as avocational archaeologists who takepart in Paleoindian site study throughout the American West.

"A welcome addition to the sparse literature on this important Native American society." -- American Antiquity "Perttula's book is an essential reference for the specialist in Caddo culture and Caddo archaeology (the comprehensive bibliography alone is worth the price of the book). It offers much to a wider audience, however. Anyone who has ever studied the impacts of European/Native American contacts and the decline of native societies will welcome this as an excellent case study that succeeds in bridging the gap between historic documents and archaeological data.... It should eventually find its way into the classroom as a text, not only for the study of the Caddo, but for the study of European impacts on native people in general." -- Heritage

First published in 1992 and now updated with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Thomas R. Hester, "The Caddo Nation" investigates the early contacts between the Caddoan peoples of the present-day Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas region and Europeans, including the Spanish, French, and some Euro-Americans.

Perttula's study explores Caddoan cultural change from the perspectives of both archaeological data and historical, ethnographic, and archival records. The work focuses on changes from A.D. 1520 to ca. A.D. 1800 and challenges many long-standing assumptions about the nature of these changes.

When Harold F. Pape moved to Gregory, Texas, in 1927, he quickly became fascinated by the wealth of Native American artifacts along the nearby shoreline of Corpus Christi Bay and what is now called Port Bay, a southern arm of the larger Copano Bay. A lifelong natural history enthusiast and collector, Pape met and married Lucile H. Tunnell, a widow with three young sons. Before long, John W. Tunnell, Lucile's oldest son, was accompanying Pape on his field studies in surrounding areas and the wider Texas Coastal Bend. Working in the days before much of the development that now covers the region, Pape and Tunnell studied more than two hundred sites throughout the Coastal Bend, making meticulous logs, maps, and notes of their discoveries. John W. (Wes) Tunnell Jr. and Jace Tunnell have organized and documented their family collection and present it, along with brief biographies of the two collectors, as a survey of the state of knowledge in the late 1920s and 1930s, as well as a tribute to these two important early researchers and their body of work.