Archaeological research in the Southwestern United States is reviewed in terms of advances in interpretation and in method and theory during the past quarter-century. Interpretative advances include the clearer understanding of the early Big Game Hunters, the filling of the gap between the early hunters and the sedentary villagers with manifestations of gatherers and collectors such as the Cochise and Desert cultures, the demonstration that the Desert culture has an antiquity comparable to that of the Big Game Hunters, the definition of the Anasazi, Hohokam, Mogollon, Sinagua, and Patayan variants of the sedentary, pottery-making agriculturalists, and the delineation of the connections between the Southwest and the northern Mexican portion of Nuclear America. Advances in method and theory have been most evident in the control over chronological problems, the development of interdisciplinary approaches, the establishment of culture classifications and pottery taxonomy, and the attempt to achieve problem-oriented archaeology in large salvage projects. The Southwest has long been characterized by long-term excavation at single sites or in small areas and by local development of academic and field training programs in archaeology.