James S. Dunbar served more than 35 years with the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research, where he had the opportunity to participate in numerous discoveries of early prehistoric sites, primarily in Florida. This volume is based principally on his doctoral dissertation from Florida State University, “The Search for Paleoindian Contexts in Florida and the Adjacent Southeast” (2012). It could easily have been named “Archaeological Sites in the Drowned Territory Karst Region of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico,” which was, indeed, the title of a 1988 publication by Dunbar. Based on research, much of which he participated in over the years since 1988, Dunbar presents and synthesizes extensive information, perspectives, and interpretations about the initial settlement of the lower Southeast and the dynamic late Pleistocene-early Holocene landscape. The author remains an active researcher as an archaeological consultant and is a founder of the Aucilla Research Institute, Inc.

The volume begins with a discussion of Paleoindian research in the United States that many readers will find informative from both paradigmatic and historic perspectives. Specifically, Dunbar has provided context to the well-known resistance that Aleš Hrdlička posed to the acceptance of a human Pleistocene presence in the Americas. Besides Hrdlička's objections, which Dunbar quotes in detail, the author provides space for additional commentators, such as Charles Abbott, from the early twentieth-century debate on the peopling of the continents. The mention of well-known aspects and participants in the debate such as Vero Beach and E. H. Sellards are to be expected, but Dunbar's generous coverage of that debate is illuminating and informative to read. For “first-timers,” such as students, to the recent “Clovis First” debate and present-day acceptance of the “Pre-Clovis” paradigm, Dunbar provides a very readable backstory. Later chapters provide details on stratigraphy, chronology, climate changes, paleoecology (“habitat, resource, and subsistence”) and material culture (“artifacts and technology”). Chapter 7 lays out a methodological approach termed the Context Approach.

In his introduction, Dunbar critiques what he calls a misguided reliance on Old World origins to validate New World evidence that had previously stalled research into Paleoindian studies. This earlier discussion sets the table, so to speak, for Dunbar's “Context Approach,” in which he analyzes five areas of contextual data—stratigraphy; chronology; paleoclimate; the combined consideration of habitat, resource availability, and subsistence; and artifacts and technology—to resolve the many, still unanswered questions surrounding the Paleoindian colonization and occupation of the Americas. Dunbar argues for an understanding of the lifeways of the region's people that identifies the animals they hunted and the geography and diversity of food sources unique to that period. In this he has provided the reader with an extensively referenced exposé.

Dunbar is, without apology, an underwater archaeologist and his subject matter derives primarily from his professional focus. That said, his focus has been squarely on a suite of prehistoric locales that are, in the present, receiving the recognition that they have deserved from the larger archaeological community as a whole. Chapter by chapter, Dunbar follows a fairly well-prescribed path seen in other works of this nature. James Dixon's recent publications spring to mind. Dunbar's volume should be considered along with those of Dixon and others, although the latter have, perhaps, a more hemispherical view of the Pleistocene Americas than does Dunbar. Paleoindian Societies of the Coastal Southeast is, as advertised, an extensive evaluation of the current scholarship of the late Pleistocene Southeast with a focus on Florida per se.

If there is really “truth in advertising,” the editors at the University of Florida Press might have reflected on that earlier mentioned 1988 title. As a venue for reference for a present-day discussion of Paleoindian societies, Dunbar emphasizes “drowned” sites that have been found and studied in the karst geology of modern Florida. In his defense, Dunbar does give a passing mention to other Paleoindian research in the Southeast, such as the Topper site in South Carolina and a discussion of Dalton adzes from the Brand site of Arkansas. I found it curious that Dunbar did not use well-published distributional plots of Clovis/fluted points for the Southeast as a whole to bolster his argument for a pan-Southeast Paleoindian presence. This is a small quibble. Paleoindian Societies of the Coastal Southeast is a readable and welcome compendium to the scholarship of the Paleoindian period in the United States.