This a reconstruction of the waxing and waning of political fortunes among the chiefly elites at an important centre of the prehistoric world.

From 1933 to 1941, Macon was the site of the largest archaeological excavation ever undertaken in Georgia and one of the most significant archaeological projects to be initiated by the federal government during the depression. The project was administered by the National Park Service and funded at times by such government programs as the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and Civil Works Administration. At its peak in 1955, more than eight hundred laborers were employed in more than a dozen separate excavations of prehistoric mounds and villages. The best-known excavations were conducted at the Macon Plateau site, the area President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed as the Ocmulgee National Monument in 1936. Although a wealth of material was recovered from the site in the 1930s, little provision was made for analyzing and reporting it. Consequently, much information is still unpublished. The sixteen essays in this volume were presented at a symposium to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Ocmulgee National Monument. The symposium provided archaeologists with an opportunity to update the work begun a half-century before and to bring it into the larger context of southeastern history and general advances in archaeological research and methodology. Among the topics discussed are platform mounds, settlement patterns, agronomic practices, earth lodges, human skeletal remains, Macon Plateau culture origins, relations of site inhabitants with other aboriginal societies and Europeans, and the challenges of administering excavations and park development.

This study was well-established as a pioneer work on archaeological methodology, the theoretical basis of all archaeological analysis whatever the period or era. The first edition of the book presented and evaluated the radical changes in methodology which derived from developments in other disciplines, such as cybernetics, computer science and geography, during the 1950s and ‘60s. It argued that archaeology was a coherent discipline with its own methods and procedures and attempted to define the entities (attributes, artefacts, types, assemblages, cultures and culture groups) rigorously and consistently so that they could be applied to archaeological data. The later edition continued the same general theory, which is unparalleled in its scope and depth, adding notes to help understanding of the advances in method and theory to support the student and professional archaeologist. Review of the original publication: "One might venture that this is the most important archaeological work for twenty or thirty years, and it will undoubtedly influence several future generations of archaeologists." The Times Literary Supplement