Points in time : structure and event in a late northern plains hunting society /

For 20 years, American processual archaeologists have sought to isolate "events" of the past and explain them in ecological-functional terms. This approach granted primacy to the role of environment in shaping culture. Duke (Fort Lewis College) advocates a paradigm that concedes alternative cultural strategies within a limiting environment. His extended essay is, in his word, "experimental," and serves as a vehicle for introducing post-processual archaeologists to historian F. Braudel's (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; CH, Sep'73) notion of la longue duree. Using extant data, Duke recasts the 2,000-year prehistory of Northern Plains bison hunters, eliciting structural meaning from artifacts associated with the communal hunt at such sites as Head-Smashed-In and Old Women's, both in Alberta. He posits a long-term social order built on two primary activities: meat procurement and processing. Ongoing "discourse" between these two divisions shaped the events of the archaeological record, but without altering the enduring structure. This thoughtful volume, clearly and logically written with controlled use of jargon and technical terminology, might well serve, as its author intends, as a departure point for future archaeological studies of this type. Advanced undergraduates and up.-W. A. Turnbaugh, University of Rhode Island