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The Recovery of Meaning is an unabridged reprint of the 1988 Smithsonian Institute book of the same title, with a new prologue by Mark Leone. Although it discusses historical archaeology in the eastern US, it is not a `narrative' history of the subject but rather it explores the ways in which archaeologists recover meaning through material culture and theorising. Based on a lecture series at the Anthropological Society at Washington (1984-5), the contributors look at case studies from 16th-century Spanish America, the 17th-century contact period in southern New England, the 18th century and the `Georgian worldview', and 19th-century plantation slavery.