Perhaps this whole process of surveying the territory is bringing on that hopeless feeling again. That's a natural reaction. Another natural reaction is to randomly select the "required" number of sources and simply throw something together. Both reactions are natural but inappropriate. Here's why: All researchers, even the most advanced, are usually working under pressure to meet deadlines. Therefore, overviews are invaluable time-savers because they let us survey a lot of territory at a glance. Recognizing that "North American Indians" is way too huge, that "archaeology of North American Indians" is smaller but still too huge, and that our initial subject area, "Native American Remains and the Peopling of the Americas," is smaller but still too large--this recognition should not be despair-inducing. Rather, it indicates that we are beginning to understand the scope of the subject area. Our search for "magic solutions" has given us lots of tools that will let us survey the territory in order to choose a topic that is manageable. The extra time spent in these early stages will pay big dividends later--both in terms of time saved (in the long run) and in terms of achieving real excellence in our final research project. We are not spinning our wheels; we've made great progress and are in fact well ahead of the classmate who has already drafted a mediocre paper based on, say, ill-chosen Web pages.

You may share my feeling that the initial subject area looked interesting, so I'm disappointed to decide that it is unmanageable. But this tutorial is a real-life simulation. We have a paper to write and a deadline to meet, so we need to redirect our curiosity toward a limited subtopic that perhaps interests us a bit less (at first) but looks manageable.

I'm going to suggest a highly practical decision: let's limit our initial subject area to the repatriation of Native American remains. Here are some reasons why it looks like a manageable topic: 1) The repatriation movement is important primarily in the United States, which helps to limit the topic and the sources. 2) We've found a good, fairly recent study guide on the topic. 3) The topic of repatriating Native American remains has raised many issues that an ordinary reader should be able to grasp, whereas the archaeological aspects of Native American archaeology require highly specialized, technical knowledge that most of us don't possess. 4) We've already found a magazine article that gives us some of the background we need to move into the narrower subtopic of repatriation.

The story of the peopling of the Americas is something that we will probably have to treat briefly as a subtopic under our main topic of repatriation, so we shouldn't completely ignore good, short sources on this topic.

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