Committee on Public Archaeology issued its own “Communications and Alerts” to members and legislators. Finally, in 1983, the Bulletin of the Society for American Archaeology (becoming the SAA Bulletin in 1987) made its long-needed appearance.

Abstracts of New World Archaeology (1959– 1960) was instituted with private funding to bring together yearly summaries of articles, theses, and dissertations pertaining to archaeology in the New World. Although publication stopped after outside support ceased, this series did make the archaeological community aware of the usefulness of publishing article abstracts in journals, and American Antiquity began including abstracts of all articles in 1960.

When articles submitted to American Antiquity were thought by the editor or reviewers to be more appropriate for regional journals, authors were guided to the most appropriate one available. To help expand the range of such journals, the society, in an unusual move, provided a subsidy to initiate the Mid-Continental Journal of Archaeology in 1976.

Annual meetings (except 1937 and 1943) were envisioned by the society’s founders as a major function of the society, and they are the principal locus of membership participation. In the early years, meetings were one- or two-day sessions with 10 to 20 papers and 50 to 100 attendees. By the 1950s, three-day meetings with 20 to 150 papers and 100 to 800 attendees were the rule, and since the 1970s, meetings have usually been three and a half days long with 400 to 1,000 papers and over 1,000 people attending. Until the late 1970s, meetings were run by students and other volunteers, but the increased size necessitated hiring personnel to operate them efficiently.

In the first decades of the society, meetings were commonly held in cities in the midwestern part of the United States, usually in conjunction with the Central States branch of the AAA (later the Central States Anthropological Association). This pattern provided a central location for members from either coast. During this same period, regional meetings, often on the east or west coasts, allowed members living in those areas to get together when they couldn’t attend the annual meeting. As long-distance travel became faster and easier and the meetings grew in size, joint meetings and regional meetings ceased to occur, and the location of the annual meeting became more evenly spread around the United States and even included Mexico and Canada.

Attendance at the annual meetings is consistently around 20 percent of the membership, and, with a rejection rate for proposed papers of less than 5 percent, it is an important forum for students and for the initial presentation of data and ideas. Many papers later accepted for publication in American Antiquity or published in edited volumes were first presented at an annual meeting. Beginning in 1974, a formal job placement service was initiated at the annual meeting, which has always been an important place for initial contacts by job seekers.

Because of the citizenship of the majority of the members and the usual location of the meeting, papers on America north of Mexico have always predominated. Notwithstanding the Western Hemisphere focus of the society, papers on Old World archaeology often equal in frequency those on Latin America (Feinman, Nicholas, and Middleton 1992).

The society began during a period of large-scale government archaeology, but its role in that period was primarily as a medium of communication among archaeologists. Near the end of World War II, the society formed a committee to investigate the status and disposition of data that had been recovered by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). An index to WPA reports was one step that the committee suggested. At the same time, the enormous impact of dam construction activities along the Missouri River and elsewhere became apparent, and the society sent representatives to the American Council of Learned Societies’ influential Committee for the Recovery of Archaeological Remains (1945–1976). In cooperation with the National Park Service, the smithsonian institution, and other governmental agencies, the committee convinced archaeologists, universities, and museums to divert their archaeological research to sites that were to be impacted by construction or inundation. These river-basin survey projects conducted an immense