Octavo, green cloth (hardcover), gilt letters, xii + 156 pp. Fine in a Fine, mylar protected dust jacket. Illustrated with numerous black & white photographs, maps, charts, etc. From dust jacket: The Tombigbee Watershed in Southeastern Prehistory is a synthesis of ten years of archaeological research along the middle course of the Tombigbee River. In the synthesis, the Tombigbee watershed is considered a microcosm, a restricted universe, but one within which the events and processes that shaped the broader sweep of Southeastern prehistory could be better understood. The book offers new theoretical and interpretive contributions to the study of human activity in the Tombigbee River Valley from approximately 1000 BC to AD 1450. The authors have devised a new taxonomic scheme which they have applied to their study and interpretation of the artifacts from the Tombigbee River Valley. This new scheme abandons, in part, the traditional Òstatic phaseÓ approach in favor of one that can be used to sketch Òcontinuity in time and space.Ó The authors portray cultures as they gathered momentum and peaked in their potential as social, economic, and political structures. The data acquired for this study are from the massive cultural resource management program that accompanied the construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. The book's introductory chapter describes taxonomic systems and interpretations and discusses the taxonomic properties of aspects, foci, components, stages, periods, variants, phases, traditions, and horizons. The first substantive chapter creates a regional taxonomic edifice composed of (1) the Gulf Formational stage; (2) three sequent Gulf Formational periods; and (3) in the western range of the region four variants (Bayou La Batre, Poverty Point, Wheeler, and Alexander). The next chapter argues that in the Tombigbee drainage the Woodland stage followed the Gulf Formational and preceded the Mississippian. The authors divide the Woodland stage into three periods, and they see further the Tombigbee as the home of two temporal variants during the Woodland stage, the Miller variant of the Mimddle period and the Baytown variant of the Late preiod. The Mississippian stage is the last girder in the authors' taxonomic superstructure. They divide it into three periods and introduce the Moundville variant to join the Moundville One, Two, and Three phases and the Lyons Bluff One, Two and Three phases.