Combining historical research with a lucid explication of archaeological methodology and reasoning,

R. Lee Lyman is a professor in and the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Michael J. O'Brien is a professor of anthropology and an associate dean in the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Lyman and O'Brien are the coauthors of Archaeology as a Process: Processualism and Its Progeny and Cladistics and Archaeology, among other books.