For general readers, an introduction to the story of Arkansas’s ancient American Indian inhabitants. Ways of the Ancestors uses archeological studies in Arkansas and adjacent areas of the South to reconstruct what life was like for the ancestors of modern American Indians, from the earliest migrations around the end of the Ice Age up to the first encounters with European explorers several millennia later. The book is divided into five chapters: Entry, Settling In, Expanding, Complexity, and Encounters. These chapters correspond to five archeological periods commonly recognized for the region: Paleoindian, Archaic, Woodland, Mississippi, and Protohistoric. Archeological sites, artifacts, phases, and cultures in Arkansas are presented to give a general summary of how ancient American Indian societies changed and adapted over approximately 13,000 years. The book provides a companion to Sabo’s earlier volume, Paths of Our Children: Historic Indians of Arkansas (PS03).