Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947: A Landmark Study in American Archaeology

One of the hallmarks of the new archaeology was a shift from “sites” to regions as the investigatory universe appropriate to most archaeological problems (e.g., Binford 1964). This new emphasis was accompanied by a call for multidisciplinary investigations. The precedents usually cited are studies such as MacNeish's Tehuacan Valley project (Byers 1967-1972) and Braidwood's Jarmo project (Braidwood and Howe 1960). Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947 (Phillips, Ford, and Griffin 1951), which shares many of these features, is not commonly cited and is one of the more undervalued classics of its time.