Cultural Resource Management in the Great Basin, 1986–2016 ed. by Alice M. Baldrica, Patricia A. DeBunch, and Don D. Fowler (review)

This volume contains contributions by fourteen practitioners of archaeology and/or cultural resource management (CRM) of the Great Basin and was derived from a symposium held at the 35th Biennial Great Basin conference held in Reno, Nevada, in October 2016.

"Cultural Resource Management (CRM)," as discussed in the volume, is the archaeological profession and applied archaeological pro-cesses derived from the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966, including the several amendments to the Act since then. Practitioners of CRM generally document the discovery, evaluation, and preservation of culturally significant sites within the federal historic preservation system through working with individuals and communities whose heritage is often the subject of projects implemented through federal actions.

This volume provides an updated review of the state of CRM in the Great Basin thirty years after a 1986 examination of the state of CRM affairs in the region. The product of a 2016 symposium, the papers pulled together by the editors include some articles not a part of the original symposium. The reader will encounter a wide range of perspectives by and about the multiple sets of stakeholders who are involved in heritage management in its myriad forms—Native American tribal members, highway archaeologists, academic archaeologists—and anyone involved in the legacy of heritage preservation resultant from federal involvement identified through the National Historic Preservation Act.

The fourteen chapters within the volume do not address every aspect of archaeology in the Great Basin, but rather focus primarily on Nevada. The editors acknowledge this in the Introduction, and note that other authors were invited to submit chapters to try to alleviate this shortcoming.

Fowler's opening paper offers an academic perspective on the development of CRM within the Great Basin, but I found the most important contribution to be the history presented in the Footnote in pages 7–8, where he gives a concise description of the development and early history of CRM and its relationships with the discipline of archaeology, especially the importance of the University of Nevada Reno training program. The following chapters by Roper and Halford proved a State Historic Preservation Officer's perspective and the role of Section 106 of the NHPA in compliance proceedings.

Chapters 5 and 6, by Ingbar and Branigan, respectively, examine some of the more technical aspects of CRM, including "informatics" and the expansions of GIS (geographical information systems) within the development of archaeology, especially CRM.

Chapters 4, 7, 8 and 9 by Hanes, Bengston, Frampton, and Teeman generally deal with tribal issues within CRM in the Great Basin. Hanes discusses Programmatic Agreements as a means of moving beyond the "single site-single issue" compliance processes and into other, more holistic approaches to compliance; Bengston looks at the availability (and some of the problems of) ethnographic studies provided as a part of CRM programs, primarily at the federal agency level; Frampton writes about the history of tribal consultation within the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada and eastern California; Teeman discusses the perspective of a Tribal Historic Preservation Officer involved with the practice of the NHPA in the Great Basin.

Chapters 10, 11, and 12 are not so easily lumped as a coherent section, yet they provide necessary information for this sort of regional presentation. Bunch and DeBunch (Chapter 10) discuss highway archaeology and its impact on CRM in the region; Kolvet (Chapter 11) offers an overview of the historical archaeology that has been conducted under CRM impetus in the region; and Cannon (Chapter 12) offers a discussion of the ways that the business of CRM has changed over the past thirty years.

The final "section" of the book (Chapters 13 and 14) offer a couple of concluding summary discussions on the way things have progressed or changed since the original 1986 symposium. Barker's chapter...