in some areas, as on Cape Cod (Chapter 3) because of wind and water erosion
and sea-level rise since the last glaciation. Environments were impacted not only
by such natural actions, but they were also impacted by native peoples, with
"low-level technologies." The author of Chapter 2 makes us consider what
effects of cutting thousands of saplings to build the famous Boylston Street Fish
Weir (5300 to 3700 B.P.) would have had on the immediate environment. Other
contributors look at some of the long-standing biases in New England archae-
ology and consider how such biases prevent us from accurately interpreting
culture history, whether those biases are about the origins of raw copper
(Chapter 12), soapstone technologies and the introduction of broad-bladed points
(Chapter 5), or about land use in Vermont's Green Mountains (Chapter 7). This
volume is also significant for the variety of approaches it brings to the study of
New England's past. Such approaches include faunal analyses (Chapter 11),
analyses of native ceramics (Chapter 6), copper (Chapter 12), soapstone (Chap-
ter 5), and lithics (Chapter 4), the problematics of accurately radiocarbon dating
shell deposits (Chapter 13), and the integration of deeds, collections, archival
research, and excavation in the interpretation of colonial sites (Chapter 15). The
editors have also included several chapters that provide theoretical frameworks
for retelling this region's past. New, critical perspectives are brought to bear on
the Paleoindian colonization of New England (Chapter 1), culture history in
western Connecticut (Chapter 8) and western Massachusetts (Chapter 14), Al-
gonquian settlement and farming (Chapter 9), and seventeenth-century Mohegan
politics (Chapter 10).

I think readers will agree that this volume's editors have created an impor-
tant, insightful work on Northeastern archaeology. What makes their volume
especially remarkable is that all of the contributors were in some way influenced
by the work and advice of one eminent scholar--Dena F. Dincauze.

Laurie Weinstein
General Editor
Native Peoples of the Americas

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