Many readers approach an edited volume with plans to read just those chapters they think will be most interesting to them, rather than the entire book. Yet every chapter in Bradley Vierra's The Archaic Southwest: Foragers in an Arid Land is a valuable contribution that should interest a wide variety of readers. The Archaic period in the Southwest (circa 10,000–1500 BP) has highly varied archaeological expressions. Early and Middle Archaic sites often have sparse records of chipped and ground stone, stemmed or corner-notched projectile points, and a few small hearths, storage pits, or shallow pits houses produced by mobile broad-spectrum foragers. During the Late Archaic period, some groups established maize horticulture and sedentary villages, evidenced by sites with dozens of pit structures, hundreds of pit features, and irrigation canals, whereas others continued as broad-spectrum foragers.

This volume has 16 chapters divided into four parts: “Introduction,” “Desert Southwest and Plains,” “Plateau and Mountains Southwest,” and “The Southwest Archaic.” Part I includes a detailed historical overview of Archaic research for northwestern New Mexico and the Four Corners region by Vierra (Chapter 1) and a short but thorough synthesis of Holocene climates and plant communities by Stephen Hall (Chapter 2).

The seven chapters in Part II consider lower-elevation portions of the Southwest, including the Mojave (Chapter 3), Sonora (Chapters 4–6) and Chihuahua (Chapters 7 and 8) deserts, and the Great Plains (Chapter 9). Each chapter follows a similar structure, providing a detailed discussion of each region's culture sequences and chronology, subsistence practices, mobility and land-use strategies, and social and ritual life for Archaic period hunter-gatherers in these areas. Sutton (Chapter 3) proposes a new culture-based framework for understanding shifts in technological, economic, and social strategies from the Late Pleistocene through the middle Holocene in the Mojave Desert. Three chapters—Vint's (Chapter 5) discussion of the Tucson Basin, Carpenter and colleagues’ (Chapter 6) review of the Sonora area of northern Mexico, and Miller's summary of Jornada Mogollon (Chapter 7)—present extensive discussions of the timing and nature of the introduction of maize agriculture and the irrigation systems that often made farming productive. These contributors also explore contemporary changes in the health, demography, and ritual/social/trade networks of these early farmers. The chapters on the Phoenix Basin by John Hall (Chapter 4), Chihuahua by MacWilliams (Chapter 8), and southern High Plains by Montgomery (Chapter 9) illustrate that Archaic groups expressed regionally distinct lifeways and land-use patterns. In many regions of the Southwest, horticulture was absent or archaeologically visible only by the preservation of a small number of maize kernels or pollen at a few sites. Even in areas lacking evidence for early horticulture, however, one often sees trends in increasing sedentism (or at least frequent reoccupation of sites around important resources) and a broadening of local diets.

Part III of The Archaic Southwest focuses on the higher-elevation portions of the Southwest and includes five chapters covering the southern Rockies, Colorado Plateau, Rio Grande Valley, and the Mogollon Highlands. Stiger (Chapter 10) presents a comparative analysis of early hunter-gatherers in the southern Rocky Mountains. Chapters 11 (Geib and Jolie) and 12 (Kerns) focus on new data from the Colorado Plateau; both summarize the current understanding of regional chronologies, shifts in foraging patterns, and the evolution of weaponry technology. Chapter 13, in which Vierra and colleagues discuss the Northern Rio Grande region, extensively describes changes in rock art. Part III ends with McBrinn's overview (Chapter 14) of the Mogollon Highlands, an understudied but critically important region that is best known as the setting for key early farming localities, including Bat Cave.

Part IV includes reviews by Hanselka (Chapter 15) and Roth (Chapter 16) of patterns in the archaeology of the Archaic period across the greater Southwest. Hanselka's excellent chapter provides a detailed overview of recent work on the forager-farmer transition, with a focus on the dispersal and adoption of key cultigens, including maize, squash, bottle gourd, and beans. Roth takes an historical perspective on the nearly 50 years of research on changing human–environmental relationships during the early and middle Holocene and provides some suggestions for future research.

As noted throughout this volume, the archaeology of the Southwest is dominated by research on sedentary, agricultural communities of the Formative period. It is often believed that the archaeology of hunter-gatherers in the Southwest is ignored or “gets no respect” (p. 1). The contributors to The Archaic Southwest deserve our respect for their carefully cultivated insights into the fascinating and rich archaeological record of broad-spectrum foragers and early horticulturalists across the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. Within Archaic period cultural manifestations of the Southwest are the origins of much of the technology, infrastructure for irrigation agriculture, the plants that eventually became important cultigens for indigenous groups, and the trade networks and sedentary villages that characterize later Formative period groups in this region.