Hunter-gatherer archaeology does not readily yield iconic sites. The archaeology of prehistoric foragers in California is no exception, despite a massive cultural resource management (CRM) industry since the late 1960s, as well as the investigations done by hundreds of colleges, universities, and museums since the early twentieth century. From this vast body of work, the Golden State's best candidate for a widely known site is arguably Emmeryville Shellmound, on San Francisco Bay. Most students of archaeology learn about the pioneer methodological approaches developed at this and other San Francisco Bay region shell mounds by Max Uhle and Nels Nelson. California archaeology has continued to innovate and influence over the last century despite its lack of many well-known sites. The recent volume by Terry L. Jones and Brian F. Codding, Foragers on America's Western Edge: The Archaeology of California's Pecho Coast, offers a modern example of coastal California archaeology applicable to archaeologists practicing anywhere.

The volume reports on 13 years of research by Jones and his students at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, along the rugged 20 km Pecho Coast in central California. It was occupied by the northernmost Chumash cultural groups, fairly far from the Channel Islands, which have received far more attention from ethnohistorians and archaeologists. The authors supplement their own investigations with data and interpretations from a major CRM project initiated in 1968 by Roberta Greenwood at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. The investigations at Pecho span 10,000 years of hunter-gather adaptations, including responses to climatic change such as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, anthropogenic changes to the environment, and the impact of Spanish contact during the mission era. It is certainly the most authoritative project in central coastal California to date and provides innovative and cogent analytical discussions of the most common types of ecofacts and artifacts encountered throughout the west coast. All scholars of the archaeology of North America's west coast will want to have this reference at hand, especially when they are grappling with midden analyses.

The remainder of this review will focus on three major contributions made by the volume for those who are not particularly interested in California culture history. First, the study is a template of how to design, implement, analyze, and publish a long-term archaeological study following current professional modes and standards. This would particularly benefit advanced graduate students and other early career professionals in the midst of designing their own projects. It is an outstanding example of a modern archaeological monograph with clear and efficient presentation of background, methods, results, and significance. The authors have mastered the nuts and bolts of reporting archaeology: laying out chronology, line drawings, data tables, maps, and the design of appendices. One minor quibble would be the lack of color photographs.

A second reason this volume has broad appeal is the rigorous analytical methodology brought to bear on the past 10 millennia along the Pecho Coast. It would most benefit archaeologists studying hunter-gatherer societies and coastal adaptations. Many would profit from what I consider to be a textbook example of the diet breadth model and techniques for calculating resource post-encounter profitability and resource encounter rates for marine (shoreline/intertidal, offshore, and deep-water) and terrestrial patches. Shellfish and other faunal data are investigated synchronically and diachronically through a series of tables and regression analyses that allow clear identification of changes within and across the resources of each patch. It is in short a recipe for how to do shell midden analysis—a modern California lesson building on the legacies of Uhle and Nelson.

The Pecho Coast project is also a model for what many academic archaeologists may and perhaps should try to achieve. The research was conducted by undergraduate students enrolled in field and laboratory classes rather than traditional summer field schools. Jones designed a project close to campus that built on existing CRM work in the region. Over the longue durée of classes (lab in fall and winter, field in spring) his students compiled the data. This has had the added benefit of producing outstanding undergraduates who have become colleagues, as is the case with Codding. It also trained a new cadre of folks for the CRM industry. While most of the students involved did not become professional archaeologists, there can be little doubt that they benefited in diverse ways and add considerably to the ranks of public supporters of the worthiness of archaeology. Archaeologists at academic institutions faced with their own low resource encounter rates (funding, space, equipment, time, relevance) would be well advised to follow this efficient and productive example of the teacher-scholar approach.