taught me to understand the complex interactions among ecology, economy, society, and politics. Archaeology graduate students of that time focused on what was to be labeled "social archaeology"-how to describe the organization of prehistoric human groups and how to explain their social evolution. Prime-mover theories of societal adaptation were attacked, as we grappled with the variety, complexity, and specificity of historical sequences from Oaxaca and the Valley of Mexico to Iran, Madagascar,

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... and the Pacific. My first academic job was as an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I stayed for 22 years. I was hired to provide an intellectual bridge between archaeology and sociocultural anthropology. With my training at Michigan, this breadth came to me naturally, but my colleagues and graduate students continued my education. My closest intellectual allies were Allen Johnson and Jim Hill, strong cultural ecologists interested in understanding how humans make a living successfully in diverse environments. Colleagues in social anthropology included the senior academics Hilda Kuper and Sally Falk Moore and the younger scholars Francesca Bray, Nancy Levine, and Anna Simons; each in turn helped me understand how social institutions were established. A new assembly of colleagues at Northwestern University now continues to educate me. But my real education was not in academe. It was in the fields of archaeology. Here a confusing chaos of human debris documented viii