First Peoples in a New World

Very up to date, well written and even enjoyable to read. The amount of material on the first peoples in a new world has greatly increased in the past few decades and this book will bring you up to date. It is an upper level college textbook but written so clearly that most people can easily understand it. It will help you understand the conditions that early peoples encountered as well as how they got here, spread out and prospered until Europeans entered the picture.James Kirkland, Ph.D., CPG

A thorough, up-to-date, and well-written analysis presenting the current state of knowledge on the subject. The author presents the history of research and the current state of knowledge on the colonization of America in the fields of archaeology, geology, linguistics, genetics, and anthropology.

Plates between pages 258 and 259 are not included. Otherwise good book.

A few other older reviews mentioned an issue with some of the photo plates being missing, so I reached out to the author to confirm that it has been fixed. He said it was an issue from amazon doing print on demand before the cambridge university press version was ready. My copy just arrived in the mail today and it does have the photos between page 258 & 259. I haven’t read it yet, but just looking at the table of contents and skimming through, it looks like it’s incredibly in depth & well researched/referenced (60 page bibliography).

The author is highly readable, comprehensive, and has a sense of humor. Highly recommend!

Told in a manner and with a style both readable and non-condescending to non-scientists, it’s the saga of the First Americans. It’s what we know about those hardy souls who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia to North America more than ten-thousand years ago. Their journey, with a significance for posterity unrecognizable to them, was made possible by the northern glaciers locking up enough water so the sea levels dropped and a six-hundred mile-wide landmass stretched from Asia to America. This was Beringia and with the game animals getting out there, the hunters went too.North America, when they got here, was mostly covered in ice and was awash in megafauna. Animals similar to what we have today only bigger, way bigger. Cats and wolves, even camels, and probably the best remembered today, the wooly mammoth. This wasn’t sixty million years ago, as it was with the dinosaurs. This was a time close enough to our own so Tom Jefferson thought (hoped) there might still be a few mammoths around in his time.My favorite is ol’ Buffalo Antiquus. Two thousand pounds heavier than today’s buffalo and two feet taller at the hump, we can only marvel at those brave souls who hunted them with stone points fastened onto the ends of sticks.The other side of the story are the men and women who, today, apply science and deduction to interpret from the scant materials dug up out or washed out of the ground, the story of our first Americans.

Just started getting around to reading this edition I bought over a year ago after the author was promoting it on a Zoom and discovered the color plates are missing. I hav the first edition that does have the plates, but I am very disappointed in the lack of Quality Control by Amazon. Much too late now to get it corrected I suspect.

As another reviewer pointed out, the sheaf of pages with plates I-XVI, all of which are listed as being between pages 258 and 259, are missing.The copy I received was apparently printed-on-demand in Las Vegas, well ahead of the official release date. Images are grainy, entirely black and white, typical of Amazon print-on-demand titles.The text itself is extemely detailed and well documented, with over 100 pages of notes and bibliography.Much of the text is devoted to refutation of many theories and interpretations. This made it very difficult to follow the exposition. This aspect is undoubtedly essential for someone making a career in the field, but it stops the flow of the narrative. I would have found the book much more readable and enjoyable if the academic arguments had been relegated to footnotes.Once this book is officially published by Cambridge University Press I plan to order it again in order to get a copy without missing plates.