This edited collection features 17 essays by 20 authors in honor of Samuel Brookes and in memory of John Baswell. In the Foreword, Jeffrey P. Brain reminisces on Brookes's career and shows him at home among the doyens of Southeast archaeology in a photograph from the 1978 Lower Mississippi Valley Conference at Avery Island, Louisiana. This volume stems from a symposium at the annual Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2011. Introductory remarks by the editors set the stage with biographical notes for a well-deserved Festschrift. The succeeding chapters are organized in five parts under the headings Public Archaeology and Professional Practice, the Archaic Period, the Woodland and Mississippian Periods, the Contact and Historic Periods, and Reflections. As the authors demonstrate, Brookes's contributions to Mississippi archaeology have advanced both general knowledge and specific datasets, or as expressed in the 2011 SEAC symposium title, “the forest AND the trees.”

In Chapter 2, Evan Peacock examines Brookes's contributions in a survey of U.S. Forest Service (USFS) archaeology in northern Mississippi. Peacock frames the millennia of occupations from Paleoindian through historic periods in terms of Brookes's outsized influence on archaeological methods, resource management, public participation, partnerships, and education. In Chapter 3, Cliff Jenkins prefaces an informative GIS inventory and lidar assessment of earthworks in the Lower Yazoo Basin by demonstrating the importance of revisiting mounds for effective stewardship and site management. Part II begins with a chapter by Brookes and Melissa Twaroski on the metaphorical “forest”—Early Holocene climate in the eastern United States—followed by a trio of chapters on the “trees” or, in this case, stone beads and Poverty Point objects (PPOs). As seen in Mississippi and the Midsouth, the Hypsithermal climatic disruption was a hotbed for cultural complexity and exchange. Jessica Crawford's examination of the temporal placement, distribution, and function of effigy beads in Chapter 5 provides an overview of that distinctly Middle Archaic cultural phenomenon. In Chapter 6, Alison Hadley and Philip Carr find shortcomings in an econocentric “organization of technology” model for understanding specialization in chert bead production during the Archaic. Their conclusion that craft specialization should be understood in terms of degree and social contexts is well reasoned, and it is influenced by Brookes's interpretation of evidence for ideological-supernatural sources of power in Middle Archaic social complexity. Part II culminates in a detailed glimpse of the distribution, composition, and stylistic variation of PPOs from Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi. As another installment in their ongoing thin-section analyses of PPOs across the Southeast, Christopher Hays, James Stoltman, and Richard Weinstein have amassed a wealth of data to better understand the breadth and character of Poverty Point exchange.

Part III, on the Woodland and Mississippian periods, unsurprisingly includes the most chapters, with five substantive contributions by Peacock, Keith Baca, Andrew Triplett, Janet Rafferty, and Ian Brown. In Chapter 8, Peacock reports on the artifact assemblages from two Early Woodland Tchula-period sites in Holly Springs National Forest, adding details to his previous overview of Woodland occupations. Using artifact diversity and restricted tool forms as indicators of relative site use, he finds seasonal and special-purpose occupations at two sites in comparison to an upland site with evidence for short-term sedentary occupation. In Chapter 9, Baca reports on the investigation of Slate Springs Mound, an enigmatic if not unique platform mound built and used during the Middle Woodland to early Late Woodland periods in the North Central Hills. Reporting on sites to the south, in the Ackerman Unit of the Tombigbee National Forest, Triplett marshals ceramic evidence for cultural (“lineage”) and settlement continuity between Late Woodland and Mississippian components. The conclusion that separate components may in fact represent arbitrary divisions of single occupations is well placed, especially as it relates to variation in pottery temper. Moving eastward, Rafferty considers bet-hedging in Chapter 11 as it relates to large, “peripheral” Mississippian mound sites such as Owl Creek, Thelma, and Bessemer. While accounting for similarities, she concludes it is only part of the explanation for these and other upland mound groups. Closing out Part III, Brown revisits the Anna site, located on the Natchez Bluffs along the Mississippi River. His analysis of mostly atypical pottery from Robert Prospere's Great Ravine collection shows how difficulties in applying type-variety classification can illuminate the unexpected.

In Chapter 13, Jay Johnson and Edward Henry provide a wealth of new data on the Chickasaw during the contact era from a small multicomponent site discovered during pipeline monitoring in northeastern Mississippi. In Chapter 14, Maria Schleidt explores the “symbiotic relationship” between the Civilian Conservation Corps and National Forests of Mississippi through a historical overview of the Chickasawhay Ranger District. Mary Evelyn Starr's chapter on logging and the railroad in the Delta demonstrates how documentary sources can provide more than historical context and background for archaeology. Galloway closes out the volume with Chapter 16, reflecting on how Brookes's career with the USFS advanced public archaeology throughout Mississippi. If this were still in doubt, his nomination for the USDA Forest Service National Heritage Award is appended. The importance of this volume likewise extends beyond Mississippi, where most of its chapters concentrate. In retrospect, its ambitious title is merited, as this excellent collection provides an up-to-date and fairly comprehensive examination of Southeast archaeology from the viewpoint of Mississippi and the Midsouth.