Review of \u3ci\u3eA White-Bearded Plainsman: The Memoirs of Archaeologist W. Raymond Wood.\u3c/i\u3e By W. Raymond Wood.

Over a period of more than 50 years, Ray Wood has published a string of major works on Great Plains culture history and other subjects. He has held important professional posts, interacted with a vast cohort, and trained a generation of midcontinent archaeologists. Beyond all that, Ray\u27s memoir, A White-Bearded Plainsman, shows him to be a fine writer and terrific storyteller. Wood presents his story in chronological order, appropriate for a culture historian, but it happens that Ray came up at a time when Plains archaeology was blooming: his story describes the growth of Plains prehistory

DOROTHY M. MCEWEN: AN APPRECIATION

Over the past 18 years, the University of Nebraska-Uncoln Department of Anthropology has seen many changes. We have moved, changed leadership, become computerized, added and lost faculty, and recruited, registered and graduated hundreds of students. Through all of those changes, the department has been blessed with a very steady hand at the helm of our office. Dorothy McEwen has been a dependable rock in a sea of change. Dorothy came to the department as a temporary worker in the Division of Archeological Research. In 1978 Dale Henning needed some help producing reports and brought Dorothy in to crank out pages of cleanly typed reports on the Cannon Project. Clearly, anybody who could do that kind of work with sanity and good humor in the basement of Benton Hall was too good to loose. Thus, when the departmental secretary\u27s job came open, Dorothy was hired and we all heaved a sigh of relie

Introduction

This serves as an introduction to eight articles on Japanese Palaeolithic archaeology that illustrate the types of research issues recently addressed and the kinds of archaeological data currently available on Pleistocene deposits in Japan. The articles also show how Japanese researchers are setting out to explain Palaeolithic variability at various scales, including the regional level. Perhaps, most importantly, given the recriminations following the relatively recent exposure of faked “early and middle Palaeolithic” artifacts in Japan, these papers show how Palaeolithic archeologists working in Japan have recognized the importance of presenting reliable archaeological and paleoenvironmental data in the context of clear research methodology

Book Review: When Skins Were Money: A History of the Fur Trade

When Skins Were Money: A History of the Fur Trade is James A. Hanson\u27s grand synthesis of the trade in furs and skins that is the focus of the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska. Like the museum itself, When Skins Were Money has a worldwide scope and a long view as it seeks to describe the evolution and impacts of the fur trade. Its basic premise, that the fur trade has been important to world history but underappreciated and misunderstood, is advanced in a well-produced volume filled with wonderful things. Most pages have handsome illustrations that support the text with period pictures of the activities and individuals under discussion. Attractive sketch maps present relevant geographic background and context. The carefully researched text, though packed with specifics, is highly readable, telling the story of the fur trade in a lively style that is anything but pedantic

Frontier Flintlocks: A Fault Tree Analysis of Firearm Use at Contact Period Sites of the Great Plains

Gun part assemblages from several Euroamerican and Native American contact period sites from the Plains are compared as a way of examining how firearms were incorporated into Native technology of the Plains region. These data are interpreted in terms of a “fault tree analysis, an operations research technique that identifies potential points of failure in technical systems in order to study patterns of use, maintenance, and reliability. The analysis indicates distinctively different patterns of gun repair and treatment by Indians and Euroamericans but suggests that Indians were quite capable of repairing firearms and that they systematically reused parts from failed arms

Archeological Interpretation of the Frontier Battle at Mud Springs, Nebraska

Between February 4 and 7, 1865, Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho warriors engaged a force of U.S. Army soldiers at Mud Springs, Nebraska. Historical records from both sides indicate that this fight marked an early phase of the Indian Wars. Based on systematic metal detections, firearms identification, and terrain analysis, this paper adds archeological insights into the arms and tactics used by the opposing sides. Well-armed Native fighters used terrain to approach U.S. troops, who maintained a defensive posture. U.S. soldiers appear to have dug a rifle pit to see approaching attackers