Archaeology, History, and Predictive Modeling: Research at Fort Polk, 1972-2002 Review

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(More customer reviews)Anderson's work synthesizes the results of 30 years of cultural resource archaeological investigations conducted on the US Army's Ft. Polk installation. Located in an upland environment, Ft. Polk is off Louisiana's archaeological beaten path. However, the insights gathered from decades of work have been of immense help in understanding the history and prehistory of central and western Louisiana.

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Fort Polk Military Reservation encompasses approximately 139,000 acres in western Louisiana 40 miles southwest of Alexandria. As a result of federal mandates for cultural resource investigation, more archaeological work has been undertaken there, beginning in the 1970s, than has occurred at any other comparably sized area in Louisiana or at most other localities in the southeastern United States. The extensive program of survey, excavation, testing, and large-scale data and artifact recovery, as well as historic and archival research, has yielded a massive amount of information. While superbly curated by the U.S. Army, the material has been difficult to examine and comprehend in its totality.

With this volume, Anderson and Smith collate and synthesize all the information into a comprehensive whole. Included are previous investigations, an overview of local environmental conditions, base military history and architecture, and the prehistoric and historic cultural sequence. An analysis of location, environmental, and assemblage data employing a sample of more than 2,800 sites and isolated finds was used to develop a predictive model that identifies areas where significant cultural resources are likely to occur. Developed in 1995, this model has already proven to be highly accurate and easy to use.

Archaeology, History, and Predictive Modeling will allow scholars to more easily examine the record of human activity over the past 13,000 or more years in this part of western Louisiana and adjacent portions of east Texas. It will be useful to southeastern archaeologists and anthropologists, both professional and amateur.

David G. Anderson is an archaeologist with the National Park Service's Southeast Archeological Center in Tallahassee, Florida, and coeditor of The Woodland Southeast. Steven D. Smith is with SCIAA in Columbia, South Carolina. J.W. Joseph and Mary Beth Reed are with New South Associates in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

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