Foragers on America's western edge : the archaeology of California's Pecho Coast /

The world of cultural resources management (CRM), or contract and compliance archaeology, has long made contributions to scientific understandings spanning prehistoric and historic contexts and findings from throughout the US. Despite this fact, the unrelenting pace of such work, academic biases afflicting "dirt" archaeologists, and those strictures that constrain scholarly dissemination (beyond contractual and archaeological compliance protocols) have necessarily obscured signal contributions made for elucidating an archaeologically rich North American cultural heritage. Jones (Cal Poly) and Codding (Utah) have brilliantly succeeded in articulating the inherent value of this dynamic body of lab and field-based scientific endeavors, often prompted by historic preservation concerns. At the same time, they do so by interrogating the profoundly significant cultural histories of California's archaeologically sensitive Pecho Coast through the lens of some 10,000 years of human adaptation elucidated in their own work. Drawing on a critical reappraisal of the pioneering works of archaeologist Roberta Greenwood and those many who followed, the authors admirably craft a nuanced and data-rich narrative of indigenous marine resource coastal adaptations forcefully mediated by way of climate change, specialization, and cultural interactions spanning the contact era. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Rubén G. Mendoza, California State University, Monterey Bay