Plainview: The Enigmatic Paleoindian Artifact Style of the Great Plains ed. by Vance T. Holliday (review)

Plainview: The Enigmatic Paleoindian Artifact Style of the Great Plains is an important collection of work for the archaeological community, including students and advocationalists. It may not be best suited for the general audience but certainly is a useful resource for anyone interested in the late Paleoindian period, specifically of the Great Plains. Holliday, Johnson, and Knudson are some of the principal authorities in this field and have done a great job of gathering experts to collaborate on this collection of work. By detailing the nature of the Plainview view site near Plainview, Texas, the authors are able to illustrate the complex and difficult nature of archaeological excavations through time, site preservation and management, and artifact analysis. As time and technologies have progressed and improved, the field of archaeology has been able to reexamine early classifications of sites, artifact types, and chronologies; this book does that very thing and provides a clarification of this Paleoindian point type that for so long has been a catch-all for morphologically similar lancelet points.

Although the book focuses on archaeological sites in the Great Plains, chapters 7 through 10 discuss sites and their point assemblages from the Southwest and the Great Basin. Therefore, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the earliest peoples of North America in general. Specifically, the chapter “The Plainview Assemblage in Context,” by Ruthann Knudson, is a useful comparison of Plainview versus other point assemblages. The chapters as independent articles or the book as a whole would be useful and beneficial in collegiate course work, such as Plains Archaeology, North American Archaeology, and Lithic Technologies. The editors have amassed, in one book, archaeological investigations that will be informative and educationally necessary for future researchers for some time. Not only does this work clearly demonstrate point type delineations and morphological specifications of Plainview against other Paleoindian points, but also features analyses and discussions focused on the fauna assemblage of Plainview.

Clear photographs of the early excavations and artifact images, beautifully illustrated point type morphologies, and an array of tables, maps, and figures are integrated throughout and visually contribute to the shared knowledge. The authors of this book provide new in-depth analyses and elaborate on earlier understandings of this “enigmatic” point type. The Plainview site is a critical archaeological site of the Great Plains and has much to offer our current understandings of Paleoindians of the region. However, the authors clearly demonstrate the difficulty of reinvestigating this site as the preservation and accessibility is poor. The book stresses the significance the Plainview site and how the point type offers a greater understanding of some of the first peoples of the Great Plains and the North American continent.