Edwin Shook, Jorge Lines, and Michael Olien have put together a useful bibliographical series on Central American anthropology. This compilation is part of an interdisciplinary study of the Central American environment sponsored by the Tropical Science Center of the Central American Field Program established by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. Bibliographical entries concern mainly archaeology, ethnology, and linguistics. They include some works on incidents of discovery and colonization in each country, the contact with aboriginal groups and their geographical setting, and a few items concerning the physical environment. Every country has been covered as a separate entity, and each book is published independently in a series of Occasional Papers.
There is considerable overlapping in these bibliographies. Numerous references referring to works that cover all of Central America should probably have been published in a separate section, rather than repeating them in each volume, as is the case. Several general items of doubtful value to a particular country have been included, such as “The Theory of Evolution and the Evolution of Man,” by George S. Carter, which is listed under Costa Rica, British Honduras, and El Salvador, but for some strange quirk of reasoning is omitted in the other volumes.
The bibliographies are by no means exhaustive, nor do they pretend to be. Omissions are found in the fields of physical anthropology, human geography, folklore, and social anthropology. However, other bibliographies are listed so that the reader can penetrate rather deeply into Central American anthropology with the aid of these Occasional Papers. The compilers have brought to light numerous items which are often ignored, doing a valuable service for researchers. This series of bibliography should prove to be a useful tool to field workers.