This volume is the first in theAdvances in Archaeological and Museum Science series sponsored by the Society for Archaeological Sciences. The purpose of this biennial series is to provide summaries of advances in closely defined topics in archaeometry, archaeological science, environmental archaeology, preservation technology and museum conservation. The Society for Archaeological Sciences (SAS) exists to encourage interdisci plinary collaboration between archaeologists and colleagues in the natural and physical sciences. SAS members are drawn from many disciplinary fields. However, they all share a common belief that physical science techniques and methods constitute an essential component of archaeological field and laboratory studies. The General Editors wish to express their appreciation to Renee S. Kra and Frances D. Moskovitz of Radiocarbon for their special expertise and assistance in the production of this volume. We also appreciate the contribution of the two reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions. The General Editor responsible for undertaking the development of this volume was R. E. Taylor.

In the fourteenth century, a culture arose in and around the Edwards Plateau of Central Texas that represents the last prehistoric peoples before the cultural upheaval introduced by European explorers. This culture has been labeled the Toyah phase, characterized by a distinctive tool kit and a bone-tempered pottery tradition. Spanish documents, some translated decades ago, offer glimpses of these mobile people. Archaeological excavations, some quite recent, offer other views of this culture, whose homeland covered much of Central and South Texas. For the first time in a single volume, this book brings together a number of perspectives and interpretations of these hunter-gatherers and how they interacted with each other, the pueblos in southeastern New Mexico, the mobile groups in northern Mexico, and newcomers from the northern plains such as the Apache and Comanche. Assembling eight studies and interpretive essays to look at social boundaries from the perspective of migration, hunter-farmer interactions, subsistence, and other issues significant to anthropologists and archaeologists, The Toyah Phase of Central Texas: Late Prehistoric Economic and Social Processes demonstrates that these prehistoric societies were never isolated from the world around them. Rather, these societies were keenly aware of changes happening on the plains to their north, among the Caddoan groups east of them, in the Puebloan groups in what is now New Mexico, and among their neighbors to the south in Mexico.

The Horner Site

As Richard I. Ford explains in his preface to this volume, the 1980s saw an “explosive expansion of our knowledge about the variety of cultivated and domesticated plants and their history in aboriginal America.” This collection presents research on prehistoric food production from Ford, Patty Jo Watson, Frances B. King, C. Wesley Cowan, Paul E. Minnis, and others.

Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory