This collection elucidates the key role played by the National Research Council seminars, reports, and pamphlets in setting an agenda that has guided American archaeology in the 20th century.

Michael J. O'Brien is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri at Columbia and coeditor of Changing Perspectives on the Archaelogy of the Central Mississippi Valley. R. Lee Lyman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri at Columbia and coeditor of Measuring the Flow of Time, also published by The University of Alabama Press.