Utilizing primary sources that include correspondence and unpublished reports, Lyon demonstrates the great importance of the New Deal projects in the history of southeastern and North American archaeology. New Deal archaeology transformed the practice of archaeology in the Southeast and created the basis for the discipline that exists today.

Classic Anthropology is Bennett's label for the work produced by anthropologists during the period 1915-1955, which many believe represents the most productive era in the discipline's history. It is also one that can never be repeated, given the fact that most of anthropology's basic data - the ideas and customs of tribal peoples - have been extinguished or greatly transformed by modernization and nationalization. The book is composed of some fifteen essays. Among the issues examined are: the emergence of a functionalist viewpoint in ethnology; the difficulties of developing a theory of human behavior because of the focus on culture; the "search" for concepts of culture to serve specialized needs; the neglect of social psychology by the "culture and personality" field; how value judgments emerged, willy-nilly - or conversely, were neglected, in ethnological research; how applied anthropology was challenged by "Action Anthropology"; and how the interdisciplinary anthropology of the late 1940s was submerged in the postwar effort to return the discipline to traditionalroots. Individual anthropologists whose work is examined include, among others. Bronislaw Malinowski, Leslie Spier, Alfred Kroeber, Ralph Linton, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Clyde Kluckhohn, Gregory Bateson, and Walter Taylor.

This collection elucidates the key role played by the National Research Council seminars, reports, and pamphlets in setting an agenda that has guided American archaeology in the 20th century.

In Ocmulgee Archaeology, 1936-1986 more than twenty archaeologists reexamine the findings of the largest archaeological excavation ever undertaken in Georgia. The sixteen essays in this volume were originally presented at a symposium commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Ocmulgee National Monument. The symposium provided archaeologists with an opportunity to update some of the work begun a half-century before and to bring it into the larger context of southeastern history and culture 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. Some of the contributors participated in the Ocmulgee project and thus are able to offer personal perspectives on the value of the work that was accomplished and the potential of the work that still remains to be done.