Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Archaeology, by Stephen Williams. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1991

For many years Stephen Williams has taught a course at Harvard University dealing with those aspects of Americanist archaeology that the finds to be based on fantasy rather than on carefully recovered archaeological evidence. He has now published a book based on this course, which provides a history of this archaeology. Much of the strength of this book is derived from Williams' recognition that fantastic archaeology has been an integral part of American archaeology from its earliest days, that the border between the fantastic and the scientific is problematical, and that weird ideas often fill real social needs.