Part I : Archaeological Methods --
1. The Discovery of Archaeological Sites / Steven Ball --
2. Dating Archaeological Materials / R. E. Taylor --
3. The Conservation of Archaeological Materials / Catherine Sease --
4. Lithic Analysis : Chipped Stone Tools and Waste Flakes in Archaeology / Robert L. Kelly --
5. Learning About the Past through Archaeological Ceramics : An Example from Vijayanagara, India --
6. The Analysis of Archaeological Plant Remains / Naomi F. Miller --
7. The Study of Human Subsistence Behavior Using Faunal Evidence from Archaeological Sites / Richard W. Redding --
8. Bare Bones Anthropology : The Bioarchaeology of Human Remains / Clark Spencer Larsen --
9. Dental Deductions : Why and How Anthropologists Study Teeth / John R. Lukacs Part II : Issues and Controversies in Contemporary Archaeology --
10. Where Our Ancestors Hunters or Scavengers? / John D. Speth --
11. When and How Did Humans Populate the New World? / William J. Parry --
12. Were Early Agriculturalists Less Healthy Than Food-Collectors? / Mark Nathan Cohen --
13. Maya Hieroglyphs : History or Propaganda? / Joyce Marcus --
14. Gender and Archaeology / Cheryl Claassen --
15. Prehistoric Social Evolution / Kent V. Flannery --
16. Ethics in Archaeology / Mark J. Lynott Part III : Archaeological Case Studies --
17. Cloth Production and Gender Relations in the Inka [Inca] Empire / Cathy Lynne Costin --
18. Investigating Craft Specialization during the Longshan Period in China / Anne P. Underhill --
19. Reading the Land : The Archaeology of Settlement and Land Use / Carole L. Crumley --
20. Archaeological Survey in the Mixtec Sierra / Laura Finsten --
21. Exploring Aztalan and Its Role in Mississippian Societies / Lynne Goldstein --
22. Ancestor Veneration in Lowland Maya Society : a Case Study from K'axob, Belize / Patricia McAnany --
23. De-Mystifying the Past : The Great Zimbabwe, King Solomon's Mines and Other Tales of Old Africa / Joseph O. Vogel Part IV : Archaeologists at Work --
24. Archaeologist at Work / Richard E. Blanton --
25. Origins of Social Inequality / Elizabeth M. Brumfiel.

The purpose of this collection is to make research more alive for students like you who are just beginning to get to know archaeology. [This text] focuses on the way archaeologists find and recover data from archaeological sites and materials. [The text] tries to convey a feeling for the research process, but ... is focused on a particular issue or controversy rather than a method. [It] illustrate[s] how they applied archaeological methods to particular cases of interest to them - from the origins of complex polities in sub-Saharan Africa to gender roles in the Inka empire. [It also] includes two autobiographical articles. [In the text, the editors] hope you will come to appreciate that archaeology is not just an unemotional set of methods and data, but rather a bunch of hard-working, insightful people who employ those methods to answer particular questions about the past.--Preface.