People have long been fascinated about times in human history when different cultures and societies first came into con­tact with each other, how they reacted to that contact, and why it sometimes oc­curred peacefully and at other times was violent or catastrophic. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, seeks to define the role of culture contact in human history, to identify issues in the study of culture contact in archaeology, and to provide a critical overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of culture and contact.

Contributors consider three forms of culture contact—colonization, cultural en­tanglement, and symmetrical exchange. Part I provides a critical overview of theo­retical approaches to the study of culture contact, while Part II contains eleven case studies of specific contact situations and their relationships to the archaeological record. Studies in Culture Contact pro­vides an extensive review of the history of culture contact in anthropological stud­ies and develops a broad framework for studying culture contact’s role, moving beyond a simple formulation of contact and change to a more complex under­standing of the amalgam of change and continuity in contact situations.