Landscape Learning in the Pleistocene Great Basin
By David B. Hunt
When Pleistocene groups moved into new areas, they faced the challenge of learning unfamiliar landscapes to locate the resources needed for survival. While recent scholars have emphasized the cultural and social dimensions of landscape learning, Hunt goes further, proposing a model intended to quantify it. He examines the colonization of the Great Basin by hunter-gatherer groups about 12,900 years ago, introducing a “Discoverability Model” meant to help archaeologists quantify colonization behaviors that are often difficult to date—especially in settings where sites are frequently associated with remnants of extinct pluvial-lake wetlands and offer little stratigraphic context. Hunt asks whether landscape learning can be detected in the archaeological record and used to place stone-tool assemblages into relative chronological order based on inferred levels of landscape knowledge.
Using data from the Old River Bed (ORB) Delta in Utah and focusing on lithic sites associated with the Western Stemmed Tradition, Hunt tests a method for quantifying the level of landscape knowledge represented at individual sites. The ORB Delta dataset, he argues, provides a useful case study because the delta emerged as Lake Bonneville receded, creating an extensive new wetland area. Drawing on fieldwork at five of the 16 known toolstone sources used by Pleistocene peoples in the ORB Delta, he concludes that the model and methods show promise for ordering assemblages by increasing landscape knowledge—an attempt to measure a key aspect of human adaptation to new landscapes. The book includes color photographs, maps, illustrations, and technical detail on the software and workflow used. Written primarily for archaeologists rather than general readers, it nonetheless offers an inventive approach to quantifying landscape learning in the deep past.
University of Utah Press, 2025; 144 pp. illus.; $45 paperback, $36 ebook; uofupress.com.
The Archaeology of Illinois: The Deep History of the Prairie State
Edited by Thomas E. Emerson, Dale L. McElrath, and David J. Nolan
Foreword by Logan Pappenfort
This highly accessible synthesis of Illinois’ 12,000-year human past brings together a wide range of expert perspectives, including those of descendant communities, while dispelling common myths and stereotypes. Written for general readers, the richly illustrated volume features LiDAR imagery, color photographs, maps, drawings, and clear tables and charts. It spans the earliest occupation of Illinois roughly 13,000 years ago, the Mississippian period and the rise of Cahokia, and French encounters with the Algonquian-speaking Inohka in the late 17th century.
The book also addresses how many ancient mounds were leveled for farming, development and railroad fill, and how early investigations—such as Warren K. Moorehead’s work in the 1920s in the Cahokia area—helped push back against persistent “mound builder” misconceptions. Archaeological work in Illinois in the late 19th and early 20th centuries helped establish more systematic approaches to the region’s deep past, and the Illinois State Archaeological Survey continues to play a major role in research and cultural resource management. A closing chapter highlights sites and organizations for exploring Illinois archaeology today, along with suggested reading for those who want to go deeper.
Illinois State Archaeological Survey, Prairie Research Institute, 2025; 384 pp.; illus.; $45 paperback; www.isas.illinois.edu/publications/studies_in_archaeology
The Historical Archaeology of Michigan
By Dean L. Anderson, Michael S. Nassaney, and Krysta Ryzewski
Written by three archaeologists with years of experience conducting research in the state, this highly useful volume presents an overview of the past 400 years of historic archaeology in Michigan. The authors show how the field has broadened from an early emphasis on locating colonial settlements to more inclusive, community-centered research on Indigenous histories, immigration, labor and civil rights.
Case studies underscore the role of place: two peninsulas framed by the Great Lakes, with shorelines and waterways that powered trade, conflict, resource extraction and industrial growth—and that still preserve submerged sites. The narrative begins with 17th-century French military, religious, and commercial outposts tied to New France and their relationships with Anishinaabe communities, then follows the shift to British control after 1763 and, later, to U.S. administration; Great Britain retained key Great Lakes posts into the 1790s until agreements under Jay’s Treaty took effect in 1796.
The book tracks nineteenth-century transformations driven by lumbering, mining and shipping, then turns to Detroit’s rise with auto manufacturing and migration in the early twentieth century. By 1920, Detroit ranked as the nation’s fourth-largest city, a boom that reshaped neighborhoods and workforces. Later chapters address the social tensions, inequality and disinvestment that accompanied deindustrialization, and highlight collaborative projects that link archaeology with public history.
With plentiful illustrations and a strong scholarly apparatus—tables, notes, references and an index—this volume will be most useful to readers seeking a research-based overview of Michigan’s historical archaeology and the questions it is now asking.
University Press of Florida, 2026; 276 pp.; illus.; $90 hardcover or ebook; $180 pdf; floridapress.org
Zooarchaeology Beyond Human Subsistence
Edited by Gillian L. Wong & Amy Milson Klemmer
This edited volume presents seven case studies that examine how human-animal relationships can illuminate aspects of past lifeways beyond diet, making it broadly relevant to archaeologists across regions and periods. Organized by theme, the chapters span multiple methodologies and settings. Two address environmental and climatic forces: one considers mass guanaco die-offs in Patagonia, Argentina, during episodes of extreme cold and how such events appear in the archaeological record, while another uses osteometrics alongside paleoclimate data to explore long-term changes in cattle size and the possible influence of climate on that variation.
Other contributions take up economic and social questions through human-animal interactions across different continents and time periods, including a chapter on shark-tooth artifacts from Cahokia that uses zooarchaeological evidence to explore long-distance connections. The collection also includes methodology-focused chapters—one a review, another introducing newer approaches—while emphasizing collaboration with Indigenous and heritage communities as essential to interpretation.
The volume highlights methodological and technological developments that are reshaping faunal analysis. Among them is zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS), which identifies animal taxa by analyzing collagen peptide “fingerprints” using mass spectrometry—especially useful for highly fragmented bone that cannot be identified reliably by morphology alone. Stable isotope analysis, also discussed in zooarchaeology, is a separate technique that can help reconstruct ancient diets, mobility and ecological “niches.” Illustrated throughout, the book also includes Spanish translations for chapters focused on South America.
The University of Utah Press, 2025; 192 pp; illus; $35 paperback; $70 hardcover; $27.95 ebook; uofupress.com
