Roots

Peoples the world over are fascinated by their past, by either the beginnings of their own or of other ancient cultures. Without a solid basis in facts, however, their reconstruction of the past becomes little more than fiction-turned-legend, a creation of the group imagination which tends to view the past either in terms of its own preconceived notions of progress or tradition or to turn it into something terribly strange and unfamiliar. In Koster Stuart Struever of Northwestern University, one of North America's foremost archeologists, undertakes a factually based reconstruction of the prehistoric culture of the Lower Illinois River Valley as it existed from about 6500 B.C. to 1200 A.D.

It is not a book for specialists. On the contrary, it is the most recent of several of Struever's publications in which the aim is specifically to interest and inform the general reader. Aided by a free-lance writer and journalist, Felicia A. Holton, Struever sets out to explain, in terms intelligible to the non- specialist, the techniques of professional archeological excavation and the complex analytical processes which lead archeologists to a fuller understanding of human prehistory.

A second (but not secondary) aim is suggested by the subtitle: Americans in Searchof their Prehistoric Past. Emphasize the word "Americans," for North American prehistory has long been overshadowed by interest in the presumably more exotic prehistoric ruins in other parts of the world. This book demonstrates that our own North American prehistory is eminently worth knowing. Indeed, it is exciting, it extends further back in time than might be supposed, and it can suggest answers to significant questions about the human condition.

The book is also timely. Our archeological heritage is a non-renewable resource, and it is being destroyed by bulldozer, covered by asphalt, and flooded by dammed rivers at an alarming rate. The hope is that by learning more about North American prehistory and the processes by which it can be recaptured and interpreted, the general public may become more interested in preserving its common cultural history.

In the first part of the book Struever tells his story more or less chronologically. The potential of the Koster site was first brought to his attention, he writes, by a local farmer who had interested himself in archeological matters. After assuring himself that the Lower Illinois River Valley was indeed an unusually rich area for prehistoric investigation, Struever turned to organizing a multidisciplinary foundation to exploit the Koster site. The Northwestern Archeological Project, as it came to be known, has now grown into an enterprise with an annual operating budget of about $500,000 (about 60 per cent of which comes from private citizens or corporations). It maintains its own laboratories near the Koster site for on-the-spot analyses, and its emphasis is on such aspects of anthropological archeology as scientific testing of anthropological hypotheses, the importance of ecology, and explanations of cultural differences and similarities between primitive peoples.

Struever devotes the second part of his book to explaining how the professional archeologist uses some of his more important scientific tools such as paleo-botany, pollen analysis, paleobiology, carbon-14 dating, and analysis of human skeletons. In his concluding chapters he uses the information derived from each of the techniques to reconstruct the prehistoric culture of the area in some detail. In a synchronic slice of life he suggests the hunting, gathering, and food-preparation methods of these early peoples. And in a diachronic reconstruction he outlines the processes by which an earlier, simpler hunting and gathering culture slowly and gradually evolved, over a period of more than 8,000 years, into a later, more complex agricultural society.

Unfortunately, photographs are often not placed near the verbal descriptions they are meant to illustrate, and some descriptions of techniques that desperately require photographs, such as a section on lithic analysis, have none at all. Nevertheless, for the general reader this book will afford a comfortable and exciting introduction to North American archeology and prehistory.

KOSTERby Stuart M. Struever '53Anchor/Doubleday, 1979. 281 pp. $12.95

Barbara McMillan, assistant professor ofanthropology, specializes in the archeology ofeastern North America.