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Caborn-Welborn
Constructing a New Society after the Angel Chiefdom Collapse
David Pollack
University of Alabama Press, 2004
An important case study of chiefdom collapse and societal reemergence

Caborn-Welborn, a late Mississippian (A.D. 1400-1700) farming society centered at the confluence of the Ohio and Wabash Rivers (in what is now southwestern Indiana, southeastern Illinois, and northwestern Kentucky), developed following the collapse of the Angel chiefdom (A.D. 1000-1400). Using ceramic and settlement data, David Pollack examines the ways in which that new society reconstructed social, political, and economic relationships from the remnants of the Angel chiefdom. Unlike most instances of the demise of a complex society led by elites, the Caborn-Welborn population did not become more inward-looking, as indicated by an increase in extraregional interaction, nor did they disperse to smaller more widely scattered settlements, as evidenced by a continuation of a hierarchy that included large villages.

This book makes available for the first time detailed, well-illustrated descriptions of Caborn-Welborn ceramics, identifies ceramic types and attributes that reflect Caborn-Welborn interaction with Oneota tribal groups and central Mississippi valley Mississippian groups, and offers an internal regional chronology. Based on intraregional differences in ceramic decoration, the types of vessels interred with the dead, and cemetery location, Pollack suggests that in addition to the former Angel population, Caborn-Welborn society may have included households that relocated to the Ohio/Wabash confluence from nearby collapsing polities, and that Caborn-Welborn’s sociopolitical organization could be better considered as a riverine confederacy.
 
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Caciques and Their People
A Volume in Honor of Ronald Spores
Edited by Joyce Marcus and Judith Francis Zeitlin
University of Michigan Press, 1994
A volume of essays by Mesoamerican scholars on topics ranging from Zapotec archaeology to Cuicatec irrigation and Mixtec codices to Aztec ethnohistory. Authors use a direct historical approach, the comparative method, or develop models that contribute to ethnological and archaeological theory. Contributors: J. Chance, G. Feinman, K.V. Flannery, F. Hicks, R. Hunt, M. Lind, J. Marcus, J. Monaghan, J. Paddock, E. Redmond, M. Romero Frizzi, M.E. Smith, C. Spencer, and J. Zeitlin.
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The Caddo Nation
Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Perspectives
By Timothy K. Perttula
University of Texas Press, 1997

First published in 1992 and now updated with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Thomas R. Hester, "The Caddo Nation" investigates the early contacts between the Caddoan peoples of the present-day Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas region and Europeans, including the Spanish, French, and some Euro-Americans.

Perttula's study explores Caddoan cultural change from the perspectives of both archaeological data and historical, ethnographic, and archival records. The work focuses on changes from A.D. 1520 to ca. A.D. 1800 and challenges many long-standing assumptions about the nature of these changes.

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Caere
Edited by Nancy Thomson de Grummond and Lisa C. Pieraccini
University of Texas Press, 2016

The Etruscan city of Caere and eleven other Etruscan city-states were among the first urban centers in ancient Italy. Roman descriptions of Etruscan cities highlight their wealth, beauty, and formidable defenses. Although Caere left little written historical record outside of funerary inscriptions, its complex story can be deciphered by analyzing surviving material culture, including architecture, tomb paintings, temples, sanctuaries, and materials such as terracotta, bronze, gold, and amber found in Etruscan crafts. Studying Caere provides valuable insight not only into Etruscan history and culture but more broadly into urbanism and the development of urban centers across ancient Italy.

Comprehensive in scope, Caere is the first English-language book dedicated to the study of its eponymous city. Collecting the work of an international team of scholars, it features chapters on a wide range of topics, such as Caere’s formation and history, economy, foreign relations, trade networks, art, funerary traditions, built environment, religion, daily life, and rediscovery. Extensively illustrated throughout, Caere presents new perspectives on and analysis of not just Etruscan civilization but also the city’s role in the wider pan-Mediterranean basin.

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Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power
Thomas E. Emerson
University of Alabama Press, 1997

Examines the authority a ruling elite exercised over the surrounding countryside through a complex of social, political, and religious symbolism

This study uses the theoretical concepts of agency, power, and ideology to explore the development of cultural complexity within the hierarchically organized Cahokia Middle Mississippian society of the American Bottom from the 11th to the 13th centuries. By scrutinizing the available archaeological settlement and symbolic evidence, Emerson demonstrates that many sites previously identified as farmsteads were actually nodal centers with specialized political, religious, and economic functions integrated into a centralized administrative organization. These centers consolidated the symbolism of such 'artifacts of power' as figurines, ritual vessels, and sacred plants into a rural cult that marked the expropriation of the cosmos as part of the increasing power of the Cahokian rulers.

During the height of Cahokian centralized power, it is argued, the elites had convinced their subjects that they ruled both the physical and the spiritual worlds. Emerson concludes that Cahokian complexity differs significantly in degree and form from previously studied Eastern Woodlands chiefdoms and opens new discussion about the role of rural support for the Cahokian ceremonial center.



 
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Cahokia and the Hinterlands
Middle Mississippian Cultures of the Midwest
Edited by Thomas E. Emerson and R. Barry Lewis
University of Illinois Press, 1991
Covering topics as diverse as economic modeling, craft specialization, settlement patterns, agricultural and subsistence systems, and the development of social ranking, Cahokia and the Hinterlands explores cultural interactions among Cahokians and the inhabitants of other population centers, including Orensdorf and the Dickson Mounds in Illinois and Aztalan in Wisconsin, as well as sites in Minnesota, Iowa, and at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Proposing sophisticated and innovative models for the growth, development, and decline of Mississippian culture at Cahokia and elsewhere, this volume also provides insight into the rise of chiefdoms and stratified societies and the development of trade throughout the world.
 
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The Cahokia Mounds
Warren King Moorehead, edited and with an introduction by John E. Kelly
University of Alabama Press, 2000

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

Provides a comprehensive collection of Moorehead's investigations of the nation's largest prehistoric mound center

Covering almost fourteen square kilometers in Illinois, Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is the largest prehistoric mound center in North America and has been designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. Built between A.D. 1050 and 1350, Cahokia originally contained the remains of over 100 earthen mounds that were used as places for Native American rituals, homes of chiefs, or elite tombs. Earlier scientists debated whether the mounds were part of the natural landscape, and many were destroyed by urban and industrial development

This book is a report of archaeological investigations conducted at Cahokia from 1921 to 1927 by Warren K. Moorehead, who confirmed that the mounds were built by indigenous peoples and who worked to assure preservation of the site. The volume includes Moorehead's final 1929 report along with portions of two preliminary reports, covering both Cahokia and several surrounding mound groups.

John Kelly's introduction to the book sets Moorehead's investigations in the context of other work conducted at Cahokia prior to the 1920s and afterwards. Kelly reviews Moorehead's work, which employed 19th-century excavation techniques combined with contemporary analytical methods, and explains how Moorehead contended with local social and political pressures.

Moorehead's work represented important excavations at a time when little other similar work was being done in the Midwest. The reissue of his findings gives us a glimpse into an important archaeological effort and helps us better appreciate the prehistoric legacy that he helped preserve.

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Cahokia, the Great Native American Metropolis
Biloine Whiting Young and Melvin L. Fowler
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Five centuries before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, indigenous North Americans had already built a vast urban center on the banks of the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. This is the story of North America's largest archaeological site, told through the lives, personalities, and conflicts of the men and women who excavated and studied it.   At its height the metropolis of Cahokia had twenty thousand inhabitants in the city center with another ten thousand in the outskirts. Cahokia was a precisely planned community with a fortified central city and surrounding suburbs. Its entire plan reflected the Cahokian's concept of the cosmos. Its centerpiece, Monk's Mound, ten stories tall, is the largest pre-Columbian structure in North America, with a base circumference larger than that of either the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt or the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico. Nineteenth-century observers maintained that the mounds, too sophisticated for primitive Native American cultures, had to have been created by a superior, non-Indian race, perhaps even by survivors of the lost continent of Atlantis. Melvin Fowler, the "dean" of Cahokia archaeologists, and Biloine Whiting Young tell an engrossing story of the struggle to protect the site from the encroachment of interstate highways and urban sprawl. Now identified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and protected by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Cahokia serves as a reminder that the indigenous North Americans had a past of complexity and great achievement.
 
 
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Cahokia's Complexities
Ceremonies and Politics of the First Mississippian Farmers
Susan M. Alt
University of Alabama Press, 2018
Critical new discoveries and archaeological patterns increase understanding of early Mississippian culture and society

The reasons for the rise and fall of early cities and ceremonial centers around the world have been sought for centuries. In the United States, Cahokia has been the focus of intense archaeological work to explain its mysteries. Cahokia was the first and exponentially the largest of the Mississippian centers that appeared across the Midwest and Southeast after AD 1000. Located near present-day East St. Louis, Illinois, the central complex of Cahokia spanned more than 12 square kilometers and encompassed more than 120 earthen mounds.

As one of the foremost experts on Cahokia, Susan M. Alt addresses long-standing considerations of eastern Woodlands archaeology—the beginnings, character, and ending of Mississippian culture (AD 1050–1600)—from a novel theoretical and empirical vantage point. Through this case study on farmers’ immigration and resettling, Alt’s narrative reanalyzes the relationship between administration and diversity, incorporating critical new discoveries and archaeological patterns from outside of Cahokia.

Alt examines the cultural landscape of the Cahokia flood plain and the layout of one extraordinary upland site, Grossman, as an administrative settlement where local farmers might have seen or participated in Cahokian rituals and ceremonies involving a web of ancestors, powers, and places. Alt argues that a farming district outside the center provides definitive evidences of the attempted centralized administration of a rural hinterland.
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Calculating Brilliance
An Intellectual History of Mayan Astronomy at Chich’en Itza
Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos
University of Arizona Press, 2021
To the modern eye, the architects at Chich’en Itza produced some of the most mysterious structures in ancient Mesoamerica. The purpose and cultural influences behind this architecture seem left to conjecture. The people who created and lived around this stunning site may seem even more mercurial.

Near the structure known today as the Great Ball Court and within the interior of the Lower Temple of the Jaguar, a mural depicts a female Mayan astronomer called K'uk'ul Ek' Tuyilaj. Weaving together archaeology, mathematics, history, and astronomy, Calculating Brilliance brings to light the discovery by this Mayan astronomer, which is recorded in the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex. As the book demonstrates, this brilliant discovery reverberated throughout Mayan science. But it has remained obscured to modern eyes.

Jumping from the vital contributions of K'uk'ul Ek' Tuyilaj, Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos critically reframes science in the pre-Columbian world. He reexamines the historiography of the Dresden Codex and contextualizes the Venus Table relative to other Indigenous literature. From a perspective anchored to Indigenous cosmologies and religions, Aldana y Villalobos delves into how we may understand Indigenous science and discovery—both its parallels and divergences from modern globalized perspectives of science.

Calculating Brilliance brings different intellectual threads together across time and space, from the Classic to the Postclassic, the colonial period to the twenty-first century to offer a new vision for understanding Mayan astronomy.

 
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California’s Ancient Past
From Pacific to the Range of Light
Jeanne E. Arnold
University Press of Colorado, 2010
“California’s Ancient Past is an excellent introduction and overview of the archaeology and ancient peoples of this diverse and dynamic part of North America. Written in a concise and approachable format, the book provides an excellent foundation for students, the general public, and scholars working in other regions around the world. This book will be an important source of information on California’s ancient past for years to come.”—Torben C. Rick, Smithsonian Institution
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California's Channel Islands
The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions
Christopher S. Jazwa
University of Utah Press, 2013
California’s Channel Islands are a chain of eight islands that extend along the state’s southern coastline from Santa Barbara’s Point Conception to the Mexican border. Popular tourist destinations today, these islands once supported some of the earliest human populations in the Americas; archaeological evidence of maritime Paleo-Indian settlements on the northern islands dates back some 13,000 years. The indigenous peoples of the islands—the Chumash of the northern islands and the Tongva of the southern islands—thrived into historic times by relying upon the abundance and diversity of marine and terrestrial resources available to them. California’s Channel Islands presents a definitive archaeological investigation of these unique islands and their inhabitants, and is the first publication to discuss the islands and their peoples holistically rather than individually or by subgroup.

Tracing the human occupation of the islands from the earliest settlement at the end of the Pleistocene by marine-adapted foragers with sophisticated stone tool technologies to the tragic story of historic depopulation continuing into the nineteenth century, contributors discuss topics including human settlement patterns on small and large scales, prehistoric trails, the use of plant resources, and ceremonialism. They also address the decisions that people made when confronted with diverse and changing environments. By focusing on distinct aspects of human relationships with California’s Channel Islands through time, they tell a story of settlement, subsistence, and ritual on the coastal edge of western North America.

This compendium of scholarship condenses decades of excavation and analysis into a single, illuminating volume that will be indispensable for those interested in the Channel Islands or New World history or archaeology.

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Callachaca
Style Status In Inca Community
Susan A. Niles
University of Iowa Press, 1987

Inca constructions, designed to conform to a state aesthetic, reveal the worldview of these masters of social and architectural engineering. In her meticulous analysis of Callachaca—the fifteenth-century estate of the royal Amaro Topa Inca and his retainers near the ancient capital of Cuzco—Susan Niles shows us that the physical order seen in this planned community reflects the Inca vision of an appropriate social order.

Callachaca: Style and Status in an Inca Community will be valuable reading for archaeologists, art historians, geographers, architects with an interest in pre-Columbian cultures, landscape architects, anthropologists, folklorists, and historians with a special interest in the Andes. Since she focuses on all the varied architectural remains at one site in the Inca heartland, Niles provides a unique model for examining royal Inca architecture and society.

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The Calusa
Linguistic and Cultural Origins and Relationships
Julian Granberry
University of Alabama Press, 2012

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Presents a full phonological and morphological analysis of the total corpus of surviving Calusa language data left by a literate Spanish captive held by the Calusa from his early youth to adulthood

The linguistic origins of Native American cultures and the connections between these cultures as traced through language in prehistory remain vexing questions for scholars across multiple disciplines and interests.  Native American linguist Julian Granberry defines the Calusa language, formerly spoken in southwestern coastal Florida, and traces its connections to the Tunica language of northeast Louisiana.
 
Archaeologists, ethnologists, and linguists have long assumed that the Calusa language of southwest Florida was unrelated to any other Native American language. Linguistic data can offer a unique window into a culture’s organization over space and time; however, scholars believed the existing lexical data was insufficient and have not previously attempted to analyze or define Calusa from a linguistic perspective.
 
In The Calusa: Linguistic and Cultural Origins and Relationships, Granberry presents a full phonological and morphological analysis of the total corpus of surviving Calusa language data left by a literate Spanish captive held by the Calusa from his early youth to adulthood. In addition to further defining the Calusa language, this book presents the hypothesis of language-based cultural connections between the Calusa people and other southeastern Native American cultures, specifically the Tunica. Evidence of such intercultural connections at the linguistic level has important implications for the ongoing study of life among prehistoric people in North America. Consequently, this thoroughly original and meticulously researched volume breaks new ground and will add new perspectives to the broader scholarly knowledge of ancient North American cultures and to debates about their relationships with one another.
 
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Camels Back Cave
Anthropological Paper 125
Dave N. Schmitt
University of Utah Press, 2005

University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 125

Camels Back Cave is in an isolated limestone ridge on the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert. Recent archaeological investigations there have exposed a series of stratified deposits spanning the entire Holocene era (10,000 BP–present), deposits that show intermittent human occupations dating back through the past 7,600 years. Most human visits to the cave were brief—many likely representing overnight stays—and visitors did not dig pits or move sediment. As a result, fieldworkers were able to recognize and remove thirty-three stratigraphic horizons; radiocarbon analysis provided a pristine, high-resolution chronological sequence of human use. The brevity of visits and the undisturbed nature of the deposits also allowed researchers to identify portions of eight “living surfaces” where they exposed and mapped artifacts and ecofacts across contiguous blocks of units.

Aside from presenting model field techniques, this volume provides new and unique information on regional Holocene climates and biotic communities, cave taphonomy and small mammal hunting, as well as updated human chronologies for Great Basin occupation.

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Canyon de Chelly
Its People and Rock Art
Campbell Grant
University of Arizona Press, 1978
With the exception of the Grand Canyon itself, none of the great gorges of the American Southwest is more uniquely beautiful than Canyon de Chelly, with its sheer red cliffs and innumerable prehistoric Indian dwellings. Of all the important centers of prehistoric Anasazi culture, only this magnificent canyon shows an unbroken record of settlement for more than 1,000 years. In this liberally illustrated book, rock art authority Campbell Grant examines four aspects of the spectacular canyon: its physical characteristics, its history of human habitation, its explorers and archaeologists, and its countless rock paintings and petroglyphs. Grant surveys 96 sites in the two main canyons and offers an interpretation of the rock art found there.
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A Canyon through Time
Archaeology, History, and Ecology of the Tecolote Canyon Area, Santa Barbara County, California
Jon M Erlandson
University of Utah Press, 2008
Long a refuge for bootleggers and hobos, Tecolote Canyon was engulfed by an industrialized oil boom for twenty years beginning in the 1930s, and endured the only Japanese attack on the contiguous U.S. during World War II. In the postindustrial era, the lower canyon was a haven for surfers, nudists, and gravediggers before being transformed into a five-star resort in the 1990s. But this beautiful area of California’s Santa Barbara coast has been occupied by humans for at least 9,000 years.
Known by the Chumash Indians as Hel’apunitse (guitar fish), the canyon was a major nexus of Chumash village life from about 2000 to 500 years ago. After the arrival of Europeans, the canyon passed from Chumash hands through successive Spanish, Mexican, and American administrations.

In A Canyon through Time, the authors summarize the deep history of this beautiful canyon, which serves as a fascinating history in microcosm of the California coastal region. Using data from archaeology, ecology, geology, geography, and history, they weave an interdisciplinary tale of the natural and human prehistory and history of the Tecolote Canyon area.
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Capturing Troy
The Narrative Functions of Landscape in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art
Guy Hedreen
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Those in the field of classical art will appreciate this investigation of the most common remnant of ancient Greek society available to the modern scholar, the painted vase. Guy Hedreen discusses how the imagery on Greek vases is only sometimes used as a narrative device, and delves further into the extent to which visual imagery depends upon literary sources. With the backdrop of one of the world's earliest, and some would argue greatest stories ever told, the sacking of Troy, Hedreen brings the reader into one of the most current and persistent topics in the art world: Narrative vs. Art. Employing a wide range of stunning visual imagery to illustrate his points, this insightful original text, Capturing Troy is a valuable new contribution to the subject, accessible to the learned scholar and beginning student alike.
Guy Michael Hedreen is Professor of Art, Williams College.
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Caribbean Paleodemography
Population, Culture History, and Sociopolitical Processes in Ancient Puerto Rico
L. Antonio Curet
University of Alabama Press, 2005

A high significant discussion of Caribbean archaeology and a fascinating introduction to paleodemography

According to the European chronicles, at the time of contact, the Greater Antilles were inhabited by the Taino or Arawak Indians, who were organized in hierarchical societies. Since its inception Caribbean archaeology has used population as an important variable in explaining many social, political, and economic processes such as migration, changes in subsistence systems, and the development of institutionalized social stratification.

In Caribbean Paleodemography, L. Antonio Curet argues that population has been used casually by Caribbean archaeologists and proposes more rigorous and promising ways in which demographic factors can be incorporated in our modeling of past human behavior. He analyzes a number of demographic issues in island archaeology at various levels of analysis, including inter- and intra-island migration, carrying capacity, population structures, variables in prehistory, cultural changes, and the relationship with material culture and social development. With this work, Curet brings together the diverse theories on Greater Antilles island populations and the social and political forces governing their growth and migration.

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Caribou Hunting in the Upper Great Lakes
Edited by Elizabeth Sonnenburg, Ashley K. Lemke and John M. O'Shea
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Bringing together American and Canadian scholars of Great Lakes prehistory to provide a holistic picture of caribou hunters, this volume covers such diverse topics as paleoenvironmental reconstruction, ethnographic surveys of hunting features with Native informants in Canada, and underwater archaeological research, and presents a synthetic model of ancient caribou hunters in the Great Lakes region.
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The Carnegie Maya II
Carnegie Institution of Washington Current Reports, 1952-1957
John M. Weeks
University Press of Colorado, 2009
In 2006, the University Press of Colorado published The Carnegie Maya: The Carnegie Institution of Washington Maya Research Program, 1913–1957. This volume made available once again to scholars the extensive data published in the CIW Year Book series. The Carnegie Maya II: Carnegie Institution of Washington Current Reports, 1952–1957 continues this project by republishing the CIW Current Reports series.

The final CIW field project took place in July of 1950, in the Maya region of Mayapán, where extensive and detailed investigations were conducted for five years. To ensure the rapid dissemination of the results of the Mayapán Project, two series of papers described the work being undertaken and reported the preliminary findings. These were volumes 50 through 57 of the Year Books and numbers 1 through 41 of the Current Reports. A total of forty one Current Reports were published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington from 1952 to 1957. All forty one of these are reproduced in The Carnegie Maya II, accompanied by an introduction by John Weeks, a forward by Marilyn Masson, and a summary table of data compiled by Marilyn Masson regarding artifacts unearthed at Mayapán.

Purchase of the print book comes with free individual access to the Adobe Digital Editions Carnegie Maya Series Ebook, which contains the complete set of The Carnegie Maya, The Carnegie Maya II, The Carnegie Maya III and The Carnegie Maya IV, thus making hundreds of documents from the Carnegie Institution's Maya program available in one source.

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The Carnegie Maya III
Carnegie Institution of Washington Notes on Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1940-1957
John M. Weeks
University Press of Colorado, 2011
The third in a series of volumes intended to republish the primary data and interpretive studies produced by archaeologists and anthropologists in the Maya region under the umbrella of the Carnegie Institute of Washington's Division of Historical Research, The Carnegie Maya III makes available the series Notes on Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology.

The series began in 1940 as an outlet for information that may have been considered too unimportant, brief, or restricted to be submitted for formal publication. However, these notes are often of great interest to the specialists for whom they are designed and to whom their distribution is restricted. The majority of the essays-most of which are on the Maya-are on archaeological subjects, epigraphy, ethnohistory and ethnography, and linguistics. As few original copies of the Notes series are known to exist in U.S. and Canadian libraries, the book will make these essays easily accessible to students, academics, and researchers in the field.

Purchase of the print book comes with free individual access to the Adobe Digital Editions Carnegie Maya Series Ebook, which contains the complete set of The Carnegie Maya, The Carnegie Maya II, The Carnegie Maya III and The Carnegie Maya IV, thus making hundreds of documents from the Carnegie Institution's Maya program available in one source.
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The Carnegie Maya IV
Carnegie Institution of Washington Theoretical Approaches to Problems, 1941-1947
John M. Weeks
University Press of Colorado, 2012
The Carnegie Maya IV is the fourth in a series of volumes that make available the primary data and interpretive studies originally produced by archaeologists and anthropologists in the Maya region under the umbrella of the Carnegie Institute of Washington's Division of Historical Research. Collected together here are the Theoretical Approaches to Problems papers, a series that published preliminary conclusions to advance thought processes and stimulate debate. Although two of the three theories published in these reports have since been proven wrong, the theories themselves remain significant because of their impact on the direction of archaeology.

Only a few sets of these three contributions to the Theoretical Approaches to Problems series are known to have survived, making The Carnegie Maya IV an essential reference and research resource.

The corresponding ebook, for individual download, contains the complete set of The Carnegie Maya, The Carnegie Maya II, The Carnegie Maya III and The Carnegie Maya IV, thus making hundreds of documents from the Carnegie Institution's Maya program available in one source.

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The Carnegie Maya
The Carnegie Institution of Washington Maya Research Program, 1913-1957
John M. Weeks
University Press of Colorado, 2006
This complete set of reports from the Carnegie Institution's Maya program collects in one thematically and regionally organized volume hundreds of documents from a foundational New World archaeological project.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington sponsored archaeological, ethnographic, linguistic, and historical investigations in the Maya region of southern Mexico and northern Central America between 1914 and 1957. The institution led the field during that time, with financial support and other resources no university could match.

Dispersed and out-of-print for fifty years, more than 350 reports from the Maya program are now available in this single volume. Reports from the institution's annual Year Books and other materials collected here tell the history of Maya research through firsthand accounts by participating scholars and reveal the progression of Mesoamerican archaeology from avocational interest to scholarly pursuit. Thematic and regional organization of the reports permits readers to monitor development of research concepts. Appendixes list all Carnegie Maya publications, Carnegie personnel, and the archival holdings of Carnegie-derived material at Harvard University, Tulane University, and the University of Chicago.

Purchase of the print book comes with free individual access to the Adobe Digital Editions Carnegie Maya Series Ebook, which contains the complete set of The Carnegie Maya, The Carnegie Maya II, The Carnegie Maya III and The Carnegie Maya IV, thus making hundreds of documents from the Carnegie Institution's Maya program available in one source.

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Casas Grandes and Its Hinterlands
Prehistoric Regional Organization in Northwest Mexico
Michael E. Whalen and Paul E. Minnis
University of Arizona Press, 2001
Casas Grandes, or Paquimé, is one of the most important settlements in the prehistoric North American Southwest. The largest and most complex community in the Puebloan world, it was characterized by its principal excavator, Charles Di Peso, as an outpost of the Toltec empire, which used it as a trade link between Mesoamerican and southwestern cultures. Michael E. Whalen and Paul E. Minnis have worked extensively in the Casas Grandes area and now offer new research arguing that it was not as similar to the highly developed complex societies of Mesoamerica as has been thought. In the first book of its kind in 25 years, the authors analyze settlement pattern data from more than 300 communities in the area surrounding Casas Grandes to show that its Medio period culture was a local development. Whalen and Minnis propose that Casas Grandes lacked extensive stratification, well-established decision-making hierarchies, and formalized positions of authority. They suggest instead that emerging elites used bribes, promises, and threats to build factions and extend their power. The communities at the periphery are shown to have had varying levels of social and economic interaction with Casas Grandes. This innovative study offers a new model for the rise and fall of Casas Grandes that departs considerably from the view most scholars have come to accept and will be of interest to all concerned with the comparative study of emergent complexity. It clearly shows that the idea of extensive regional centralization by Casas Grandes is no longer tenable and merits reconsideration by the archaeological community.
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The Casas Grandes World
Curtis Schaafsma
University of Utah Press, 1999

The Casas Grandes World focuses on a remarkable prehistoric culture that extended through parts of present-day Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona, centering on the large Mexican site of Casas Grandes. The thousands of prehistoric sites in this vast area have only recently been considered related to each other, yet it now appears that for more than 200 years, from about AD 1200 to 1425, the people of the region traded with each other, made coursed-adobe pueblos in the desert country, manufactured magnificent pottery, and produced some of the most extraordinary rock art in North America. Casas Grandes was recently designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations.

During is florescence Casas Grandes served as a conduit or nexus between the Anasazi of the ancient American Southwest and the Mexican civilizations to the south. Using the seminal work of Charles Di Peso as a touchstone, and drawing on significant new archaeological work, this volume offers a reevaluation of the extent, history, and meaning of the great site and its far-reaching connections. It also considers influences on the Hohokam of Arizona and the peoples of west Mexico, positing the existence of a vast sphere of Casas Grandes cultural influence.

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Catalogue of Byzantine Seals at Dumbarton Oaks and in the Fogg Museum of Art
John A. Cotsonis
Harvard University Press

Dumbarton Oaks houses the largest collection of Byzantine lead seals in the world, with approximately 17,000 specimens. Volume 7 of the ongoing series of Dumbarton Oaks catalogues presents a distinct part of the collection: 572 anonymous seals bearing sacred images on both sides. The seals, almost all previously unpublished, are fully illustrated and accompanied by a detailed commentary that provides transcriptions of the identifying sigla. This volume represents the first attempt to analyze this group of seals chronologically and typologically.

The depictions of Christ, the Virgin, and a remarkably wide array of saints and narrative scenes offer rich and untapped material for scholars interested in Byzantine piety and culture. Discernible trends within this body of seals help to track the popularity of various saints and the changes in devotional images over time. The variety of these images, enhanced by reference to examples in other collections, will also enable scholars to compare the renderings of holy figures on lead seals to those appearing in other Byzantine religious images.

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Catalogue of Byzantine Seals at Dumbarton Oaks and in the Fogg Museum of Art
Edited by John Nesbit
Harvard University Press
The combined Dumbarton Oaks and Fogg collection of Byzantine seals is one of the largest in the world, containing 17,000 specimens. Volume 6 in the catalogue presents the seals of emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople. Imperial seals are presented in conjunction with a representative coin of the appropriate emperor or empress to help the reader compare the iconography. Also included are select seals from patriarchs of Constantinople. More than 250 seals are illustrated and accompanied—where appropriate—by a full commentary regarding each specimen’s date, biographical information on its owner, peculiarities of orthography, and iconographic features. These seals contribute significantly to historical geography, the evolution of the Byzantine imperial administration, development in the Greek language, and decorative vogues.
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Catawba Indian Pottery
The Survival of a Folk Tradition
Thomas John Blumer, with a foreword by William L. Harris
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Traces the craft of pottery making among the Catawba Indians of North Carolina from the late 18th century to the present

When Europeans encountered them, the Catawba Indians were living along the river and throughout the valley that carries their name near the present North Carolina-South Carolina border. Archaeologists later collected and identified categories of pottery types belonging to the historic Catawba and extrapolated an association with their protohistoric and prehistoric predecessors.

In this volume, Thomas Blumer traces the construction techniques of those documented ceramics to the lineage of their probable present-day master potters or, in other words, he traces the Catawba pottery traditions. By mining data from archives and the oral traditions of contemporary potters, Blumer reconstructs sales circuits regularly traveled by Catawba peddlers and thereby illuminates unresolved questions regarding trade routes in the protohistoric period. In addition, the author details particular techniques of the representative potters—factors such as clay selection, tool use, decoration, and firing techniques—which influence their styles.

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Catawba Valley Mississippian
Ceramics, Chronology, and Catawba Indians
David G. Moore
University of Alabama Press, 2002
An excellent example of ethnohistory and archaeology working together, this model study reveals the origins of the Catawba Indians of North Carolina

By the 18th century, the modern Catawba Indians were living along the river and throughout the valley that bears their name near the present North Carolina-South Carolina border, but little was known of their history and origins. With this elegant study, David Moore proposes a model that bridges the archaeological record of the protohistoric Catawba Valley with written accounts of the Catawba Indians from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, thus providing an ethnogenesis theory for these Native Americans.

Because the Catawba Confederacy had a long tradition of pottery making, dating ceramics and using them for temporal control was central to establishing a regional cultural chronology. Moore accomplishes this with a careful, thorough review and analysis of disparate data from the whole valley. His archaeological discoveries support documentary evidence of 16th century Spaniards in the region interacting with the resident Indians. By tracking the Spanish routes through the Catawba River valley and comparing their reported interactions with the native population with known archaeological sites and artifacts, he provides a firm chronological and spatial framework for Catawba Indian prehistory.

With excellent artifact photographs and data-rich appendixes, this book is a model study that induces us to contemplate a Catawba genesis and homeland more significant than traditionally supposed. It will appeal to professional archaeologists concerned with many topics—Mississippian, Lamar, early historic Indians, de Soto, Pardo, and chiefdom studies—as well as to the broader public interested in the archaeology of the Carolinas.
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Cave Hollow, An Ozark Bluff-Dweller Site
Horace Miner
University of Michigan Press, 1950
In north-central Arkansas, Horace Miner excavated an ash bed at the mouth of Cave Hollow. In this report, he discusses the artifacts found during excavation—stone tools, animal bone, and pottery—and the site’s possible cultural connections.
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Celtic Social Structure
The Generation of Archaeologically Testable Hypotheses from Literary Evidence
Carole L. Crumley
University of Michigan Press, 1974
Carole L. Crumley draws on literary and archaeological sources to present a study of Celtic social structure during the period of about 500 BC to AD 1, prior to Roman conquest.
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Cenote of Sacrifice
Maya Treasures from the Sacred Well at Chichen Itza
Clemency Chase Coggins
University of Texas Press, 1984

Chichén Itzá ("mouth of the well of the Itza") was one of the great centers of civilization in prehistoric America, serving between the eighth and twelfth centuries A.D. as a religious, economic, social, and political capital on the Yucatán Peninsula. Within the ancient city there were many natural wells or cenotes. One, within the ceremonial heart of the city, is an impressive natural feature with vertical limestone walls enclosing a deep pool of jade green water some eighty feet below ground level. This cenote, which gave the city its name, became a sacred shrine of Maya pilgrimage, described by one post-Conquest observer as similar to Jerusalem and Rome. Here, during the city's ascendancy and for centuries after its decline, the peoples of Yucatán consulted their gods and made ritual offerings of precious objects and living victims who were thought to receive prophecies.

Although the well was described by Bishop Diego de Landa in the late sixteenth century, its contents were not known until the early 1900s when revealed by the work of Edward H. Thompson. Conducting excavations for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, Thompson recovered almost thirty thousand artifacts, most ceremonially broken and many beautifully preserved by burial in the deep silt at the bottom of the well. The materials were sent to the Peabody Museum, where they remained, unexhibited, for over seventy years.

In 1984, for the first time, nearly three hundred objects of gold, jade, copper, pottery, wood, copal, textile, and other materials from the collection were gathered into a traveling interpretive exhibition. No other archaeological exhibition had previously given this glimpse into Maya ritual life because no other collection had objects such as those found in the Sacred Cenote. Moreover, the objects from the Cenote come from throughout Mesoamerica and lower Central America, representing many artistic traditions. The exhibit and this, its accompanying catalog, marked the first time all of the different kinds of offerings have ever been displayed together, and the first time many have been published.

Essays by Gordon R. Willey and Linnea H. Wren place the Cenote of Sacrifice and the great Maya city of Chichén Itzá within the larger context of Maya archaeology and history. The catalog entries, written by Clemency Chase Coggins, describe the objects displayed in the traveling exhibition. Some entries are brief descriptive statements; others develop short scholarly themes bearing on the function and interpretation of specific objects. Coggins' introductory essay describes how the objects were collected by Thompson and how the exhibition collection has been studied to reveal the periods of Cenote ritual and the changing practices of offering to the Sacred Cenote.

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Center Places and Cherokee Towns
Archaeological Perspectives on Native American Architecture and Landscape in the Southern Appalachians
Christopher B. Rodning
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Examines how architecture and other aspects of the built environment, such as hearths, burials, and earthen mounds, formed center places within the Cherokee cultural landscape

In Center Places and Cherokee Towns, Christopher B. Rodning opens a panoramic vista onto protohistoric Cherokee culture. He posits that Cherokee households and towns were anchored within their cultural and natural landscapes by built features that acted as “center places.”
 
Rodning investigates the period from just before the first Spanish contact with sixteenth-century Native American chiefdoms in La Florida through the development of formal trade relations between Native American societies and English and French colonial provinces in the American South during the late 1600s and 1700s. Rodning focuses particularly on the Coweeta Creek archaeological site in the upper Little Tennessee Valley in southwestern North Carolina and describes the ways in which elements of the built environment were manifestations of Cherokee senses of place.
 
Drawing on archaeological data, delving into primary documentary sources dating from the eighteenth century, and considering Cherokee myths and legends remembered and recorded during the nineteenth century, Rodning shows how the arrangement of public structures and household dwellings in Cherokee towns both shaped and were shaped by Cherokee culture. Center places at different scales served as points of attachment between Cherokee individuals and their communities as well as between their present and past. Rodning explores the ways in which Cherokee architecture and the built environment were sources of cultural stability in the aftermath of European contact, and how the course of European contact altered the landscape of Cherokee towns in the long run.
 
In this multi-faceted consideration of archaeology, ethnohistory, and recorded oral tradition, Rodning adeptly demonstrates the distinct ways that Cherokee identity was constructed through architecture and other material forms. Center Places and Cherokee Towns will have a broad appeal to students and scholars of southeastern archaeology, anthropology, Native American studies, prehistoric and protohistoric Cherokee culture, landscape archaeology, and ethnohistory.
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Centuries of Decline during the Hohokam Classic Period at Pueblo Grande
Edited by David R. Abbott
University of Arizona Press, 2003
In the prehispanic Southwest, Pueblo Grande was the site of the largest platform mound in the Phoenix basin and the most politically prominent village in the region. It has long been held to represent the apex of Hohokam culture that designates the Classic period.

New data from major excavations in Phoenix, however, suggest that little was "classic" about the Classic period at Pueblo Grande. These findings challenge views of Hohokam society that prevailed for most of the twentieth century, suggesting that for Pueblo Grande it was a time of decline rather than prosperity, a time marked by overpopulation, environmental degradation, resource shortage, poor health, and social disintegration. During this period, the Hohokam in the lower Salt River Valley began a precipitous slide toward the eventual abandonment of a homeland that they had occupied for more than one thousand years.

This volume is a long-awaited summary of one of the most important data-recovery projects in Southwest archaeology, synthesizing thousands of pages of data and text published in seven volumes of contract reports. The authors—all leading authorities in Hohokam archaeology who played primary roles in this revolution of understanding—here craft a compelling argument for the eventual collapse of Hohokam society in the late fourteenth century as seen from one of the largest and seemingly most influential irrigation communities along the lower Salt River.

Drawing on extremely large and well-preserved collections, the book reveals startling evidence of a society in decline as reflected in catchment analysis, archaeofaunal assemblage composition, skeletal studies, burial assemblages, artifact exchange, and ceramic production. The volume also includes a valuable new summary of the archival reconstruction of the architectural sequence for the Pueblo Grande platform mound.

With its wealth of data, interpretation, and synthesis, Centuries of Decline represents a milestone in our understanding of Hohokam culture. It is a key reference for Southwest archaeologists who seek to understand the Hohokam collapse and a benchmark for anyone interested in the prehistory of Arizona.
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front cover of Ceramic Commodities and Common Containers
Ceramic Commodities and Common Containers
The Production and Distribution of White Mountain Red Ware in the Grasshopper Region, Arizona
Daniela Triadan
University of Arizona Press, 1997
For more than a century, the study of ceramics has been a fundamental base for archaeological research and anthropological interpretaion in the American Southwest. The widely distributed White Mountain Red Ware has frequently been used by archaeologists to reconstruct late 13th and 14th century Western Pueblo sociopolitical and socioeconomic organization.

Relying primarily on stylistic analyses and the relative abundance of this ceramic ware in site assemblages, most scholars have assumed that it was manufactured within a restricted area on the southeastern edge of the Colorado Plateau and distributed via trade and exchange networks that may have involved controlled access to these ceramics.

This monograph critically evaluates these traditional interpretations, utilizing large-scale compositional and petrographic analyses that established multiple production zones for White Mountain Red Ware—including one in the Grasshopper region—during Pueblo IV times. The compositional data combined with settlement data and an analysis of archaeological contexts demonstrates that White Mountain Red Ware vessels were readily accessible and widely used household goods, and that migration and subsequent local production in the destinaton areas were important factors in their wide distribution during the 14th century.

Ceramic Commodities and Common Containers provides new insights into the organization of ceramic production and distribution in the northern Southwest and into the processes of social reorganization that characterized the late 13th and 14th century Western Pueblo world. As one of the few studies that integrate materials analysis into archaeological research, Triadan's monograph marks a crucial contribution to the reconstruction of these prehistoric societies.
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Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology
Edited by William A. Longacre
University of Arizona Press, 1991
Ethnoarchaeology, the study of material culture in a living society by archaeologists, facilitates the extraction of information from prehistoric materials as well. Studies of contemporary pottery-making were initiated in the southwestern United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, then abandoned as a result of changes in archaeological theory. Now a resurgence in ethnoarchaeology over the past twenty-five years offers a new set of directions for the discipline. This volume presents the results of such work with pottery, a class of materials that occurs abundantly in many archaeological sites.

Drawing on projects undertaken around the world, in the Phillipines, East Africa, Mesoamerica, India, in both traditional and complex societies, the contributors focus on identifying social and behavioral sources of ceramic variation to show how analogical reasoning is fundamental to archaeological interpretation. As the number of pottery-making societies declines, opportunities for such research must be seized. By bringing together a variety of ceramic ethnoarchaeological analyses, this volume offers the profession a much-needed touchstone on method and theory for the study of pottery-making among living peoples.
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Ceramic Petrography and Hopewell Interaction
James B. Stoltman
University of Alabama Press, 2015
A highly innovative study in which James B. Stoltman uses petrography to reveal previously undetectable evidence of cultural interaction among Hopewell societies of the Ohio Valley region and the contemporary peoples of the Southeast

Petrography is the microscopic examination of thin sections of pottery to determine their precise mineralogical composition. In this groundbreaking work, James B. Stoltman applies quantitative as well as qualitative methods to the petrography of Native American ceramics. As explained in Ceramic Petrography and Hopewell Interaction, by adapting refinements to the technique of petrography, Stoltman offers a powerful new set of tools that enables fact-based and rigorous identification of the composition and sources of pottery.
 
Stoltman’s subject is the cultural interaction among the Hopewell Interaction Sphere societies of the Ohio Valley region and contemporary peoples of the Southeast. Inferring social and commercial relationships between disparate communities by determining whether objects found in one settlement originated there or elsewhere is a foundational technique of archaeology. The technique, however, rests on the informed but necessarily imperfect visual inspection of objects by archaeologists. Petrography greatly amplifies archaeologists’ ability to determine objects’ provenance with greater precision and less guesswork.
 
Using petrography to study a vast quantity of pottery samples sourced from Hopewell communities, Stoltman is able for the first time to establish which items are local, which are local but atypical, and which originated elsewhere. Another exciting possibility with petrography is to further determine the home source of objects that came from afar. Thus, combining traditional qualitative techniques with a wealth of new quantitative data, Ceramic Petrography and Hopewell Interaction offers a map of social and trade relationships among communities within and beyond the Hopewell Interaction Sphere with much greater precision and confidence than in the past.
 
Ceramic Petrography and Hopewell Interaction provides a clear and concise explanation of petrographic methods, Stoltman’s findings about Hopewell and southeastern ceramics in various sites, and the fascinating discovery that visits to Hopewell centers by southeastern Native Americans were not only for trade purposes but more for such purposes as pilgrimages, vision- and power-questing, healing, and the acquisition of knowledge.
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Ceramic Production in the American Southwest
Edited by Barbara J. Mills and Patricia L. Crown
University of Arizona Press, 1995
Southwestern ceramics have always been admired for their variety and aesthetic beauty. Although ceramics are most often used for placing the peoples who produced them in time, they can also provide important clues to past economic organization. This volume covers nearly 1000 years of southwestern prehistory and history, focusing on ceramic production in a number of environmental and economic contexts. It brings together the best of current research to illustrate the variation in the organization of production evident in this single geographic area. The contributors use diverse research methods in their studies of vessel form and decoration. All support the conclusion that the specialized production of ceramics for exchange beyond the household was widespread. The first seven chapters focus on ceramic production in specific regions, followed by three essays that re-examine basic concepts and offer new perspectives. Because previous studies of southwestern ceramics have focused more on distribution than production, Ceramic Production in the American Southwest fills a long-felt need for scholars in that region and offers a broad-based perspective unique in the literature. The Southwest lacked high levels of sociopolitical complexity and economic differentiation, making this volume of special interest to scholars working in similar contexts and to those interested in craft production.
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A Ceramic Sequence from the Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan, Mexico
Robert Eliot Smith
Harvard University Press, 1987
This volume dates the constructional development of the Pyramid of the Sun by means of the associated ceramic material from the excavations and presents a comprehensive analysis of the pottery and ceramics found at the site.
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Ceramic Sequence in Colima
Capacha, an Early Phase
Isabel Kelly
University of Arizona Press, 1980
"Kelly's identification of a nineteenth-century B. C. ceramic complex has far-reaching implications for the archaeology of western Mexico and its relationship with central Mexico and South America. . . . A well-illustrated monograph that covers much more than the title promises."—The Masterkey
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Ceramic Sequence in Colima
Capacha, an Early Phase
Isabel Kelly
University of Arizona Press, 1980
"Kelly's identification of a nineteenth-century B. C. ceramic complex has far-reaching implications for the archaeology of western Mexico and its relationship with central Mexico and South America. . . . A well-illustrated monograph that covers much more than the title promises."—The Masterkey
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front cover of The Ceramic Sequence of the Holmul Region, Guatemala
The Ceramic Sequence of the Holmul Region, Guatemala
Michael G. Callaghan and Nina Neivens de Estrada
University of Arizona Press, 2016
Sequencing the ceramics in Guatemala’s Holmul region has the potential to answer important questions in Maya archaeology. The Holmul region, located in northeastern Guatemala between the central Peten lowlands to the west and the Belize River Valley to the east, encompasses roughly ten square kilometers and contains at least seven major archaeological sites, including two large ceremonial and administrative centers, Holmul and Cival.

The Ceramic Sequence of the Holmul Region, Guatemala illustrates the archaeological ceramics of these prehistoric Maya sites in a study that provides a theoretical starting point for answering questions related to mid- and high-level issues of archaeological method and theory in the Maya area and larger Mesoamerica. The researchers’ ceramic sequence, which uses the method of type:variety-mode classification, spans approximately 1,600 years and encompasses nine ceramic complexes and one sub-complex. The highly illustrated book is formatted as a catalog of the types of ceramics in a chronological framework.

The authors undertook this study with three objectives: to create a temporal-spatial framework for archaeological sites in the politically important Holmul region, to relate this framework to other Maya sites, and to use type:variety-mode data to address specific questions of ancient Maya social practice and process during each ceramic complex.

Specific questions addressed in this volume include the adoption of pottery as early as 800 BC at the sites of Holmul and Cival during the Middle Preclassic period, the creation of the first orange polychrome pottery, the ideological and political influence from sites in Mexico during the Early Classic period, and the demographic and political collapse of lowland Maya polities between AD 800 and AD 830.
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Ceramics and Artifacts from Excavations in the Copan Residential Zone
Gordon R. Willey, Richard M. Leventhal, Arthur A. Demarest, and William L. Fash
Harvard University Press, 1994
This is the first of two volumes addressing the Harvard University excavations in an outlying residential zone of the Copan in Honduras. The book offers detailed descriptions of ceramics and all other artifacts during 1976–1977. The materials pertain largely to the Late Classic Period. Ceramics are presented according to the type-variety system.
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front cover of Ceramics and Community Organization among the Hohokam
Ceramics and Community Organization among the Hohokam
David R. Abbott
University of Arizona Press, 2000
Among desert farmers of the prehistoric Southwest, irrigation played a crucial role in the development of social complexity. This innovative study examines the changing relationship between irrigation and community organization among the Hohokam and shows through ceramic data how that dynamic relationship influenced sociopolitical development.
 
David Abbott contends that reconstructions of Hohokam social patterns based solely on settlement pattern data provide limited insight into prehistoric social relationships. By analyzing ceramic exchange patterns, he provides complementary information that challenges existing models of sociopolitical organization among the Hohokam of central Arizona.

Through ceramic analyses from Classic period sites such as Pueblo Grande, Abbott shows that ceramic production sources and exchange networks can be determined from the composition, surface treatment attributes, and size and shape of clay containers. The distribution networks revealed by these analyses provide evidence for community boundaries and the web of social ties within them.

Abbott's meticulous research documents formerly unrecognized horizontal cohesiveness in Hohokam organizational structure and suggests how irrigation was woven into the fabric of their social evolution. By demonstrating the contribution that ceramic research can make toward resolving issues about community organization, this work expands the breadth and depth of pottery studies in the American Southwest.
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Ceramics, Chronology, and Community Patterns
An Archaeological Study at Moundville
Vincas P. Steponaitis
University of Alabama Press, 2009
A clearly written description of the analytical procedures employed on ceramic samples obtained at Moundville and the new chronology discovered

Moundville, located on the Black Warrior River in west-central Alabama, is one of the best known and most intensively studied archaeological sites in North America. Yet, in spite of all these investigations, many aspects of the site's internal chronology remained unknown until the original 1983 publication of this volume. The author embarked on a detailed study of Moundville ceramics housed in museums and collections, and hammered out a new chronology for Moundville.This volume is a clearly written description of the analytical procedures employed on these ceramic samples and the new chronology this study revealed. Using the refined techniques outlined in this volume, it was possible for the author to trace changes in community patterns, which in turn shed light on Moundville's internal development and its place among North America's ancient cultures.

 
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Cerro Danush
Excavations at a Hilltop Community in the Eastern Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico
Ronald K. Faulseit
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Monte Albán was the capital of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, ca. 500 BC–AD 600, but once its control began to wane, other sites filled the political vacuum. Archaeologists have long awaited a meticulous excavation of one of these sites—one that would help us better understand the process that transformed second-tier sites into a series of polities or señoríos that competed with each other for centuries.

This book reports in detail on Ronald Faulseit’s excavations at the site of Dainzú-Macuilxóchitl in the Valley of Oaxaca. His 2007–2010 mapping and excavation seasons focused on the Late Classic (AD 600–900) and Early Postclassic (AD 900–1300). The spatial distributions of surface artifacts—collected during the intensive mapping and systematic surface collecting—on residential terraces at Cerro Danush are analyzed to evaluate evidence for craft production, ritual, and abandonment at the community level. This community analysis is complemented by data from the comprehensive excavation of a residential terrace, which documents diachronic patterns of behavior at the household level. The results from Faulseit’s survey and excavations are evaluated within the theoretical frameworks of political cycling and resilience theory. Faulseit concludes that resilient social structures may have helped orchestrate reorganization in the dynamic political landscape of Oaxaca after the political collapse of Monte Albán.

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Cerro Palenque
Power and Identity on the Maya Periphery
By Rosemary A. Joyce
University of Texas Press, 1991

Excavations at Cerro Palenque, a hilltop site in the Ulua Valley of northwest Honduras, revolutionized scholars’ ideas about the Terminal Classic period (roughly ad 850–1050) of Maya history and about the way in which cultures of the southeast Maya periphery related to the Lowland Maya. In this pathfinding study, Rosemary Joyce combines archaeological data gleaned from site research in 1980–1983 with anthropological theory about the evolution of social power to reconstruct something of the culture and lifeways of the prehispanic inhabitants of Cerro Palenque.

Joyce organizes her study in a novel way. Rather than presenting each category of excavated material (ceramics, lithics, etc.) in a separate chapter, she integrates this data in discussions of what people did and where they did it, resulting in a reconstruction of social activity more than in a description of material culture.

Joyce’s findings indicate that the precolumbian elites of the Ulua Valley had very strong and diversified contacts with Lowland Maya culture, primarily through the Bay of Honduras, with far less contact with Copán in the Highlands. The elites used their contacts with these distant, powerful cultures to reinforce their difference from the people they ruled and the legitimacy of their privileged status. Indeed, their dependence on foreign contacts ultimately led to their downfall when their foreign partners reorganized their economic and social order during the Terminal Classic period.

Although archaeological research in the region has been undertaken since the 1890s, Cerro Palenque is the first full-length study of an Ulua Valley site ever published. Joyce’s pioneering approach—archaeological ethnography—will be of interest to scholars dealing with any prehistoric people whose material remains provide the only clues to their culture.

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Cetamura del Chianti
By Nancy Thomson de Grummond
University of Texas Press, 2020

Expanding the study of Etruscan habitation sites to include not only traditional cities but also smaller Etruscan communities, Cetamura del Chianti examines a settlement that flourished during an exceptional time period, amid wars with the Romans in the fourth to first centuries BCE.

Situated in an ideal hilltop location that was easy to defend and had access to fresh water, clay, and timber, the community never grew to the size of a city, and no known references to it survive in ancient writings; its ancient name isn’t even known. Because no cities were ever built on top of the site, excavation is unusually unimpeded. Intriguing features described in Cetamura del Chianti include an artisans’ zone with an adjoining sanctuary, which fostered the cult worship of Lur and Leinth, two relatively little known Etruscan deities, and ancient wells that reveal the cultural development and natural environment, including the vineyards and oak forests of Chianti, over a period of some six hundred years. Deeply enhancing our understanding of an intriguing economic, political, and cultural environment, this is a compelling portrait of a singular society.

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Chaco and After in the Northern San Juan
Excavations at the Bluff Great House
Catherine M. Cameron
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Chaco Canyon, the great Ancestral Pueblo site of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, remains a central problem of Southwestern archaeology. Chaco, with its monumental “great houses,” was the center of a vast region marked by “outlier” great houses. The canyon itself has been investigated for over a century, but only a few of the more than 200 outlier great houses—key to understanding Chaco and its times—have been excavated. This volume explores the Chaco and post-Chaco eras in the northern San Juan area through extensive excavations at the Bluff Great House, a major Chaco “outlier” in Utah.

Bluff’s massive great house, great kiva, and earthen berms are described and compared to other great houses in the northern Chaco region. Those assessments support intriguing new ideas about the Chaco region and the effect of the collapse of Chaco Canyon on “outlying” great houses.

New insights from the Bluff Great House clarify the construction and use of great houses during the Chaco era and trace the history of great houses in the generations after Chaco’s decline. An innovative comparative study of the northern and southern portions of the Chaco world (the northern San Juan area around Bluff and the Cibola area around Zuni) leads to new ideas about population aggregation and regional abandonment in the Southwest. Appendixes present details and descriptions of artifacts recovered from Bluff: ceramics, projectile points, pollen analyses, faunal remains, bone tools, ornaments, and more.

This book is one of only a handful of reports on Chacoan great houses in the northern San Juan region. It provides an in-depth study of the Chaco era and clarifies the relationship of “outlying” great houses to Chaco Canyon. Research at the Bluff Great House begins to answer key questions about the nature of Chaco and its region, and the history of the northern San Juan in the Chaco and post-Chaco worlds.
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Chaco Handbook
An Encyclopedia Guide
R. Gwinn Vivian
University of Utah Press, 2012

Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico contains a remarkable set of Ancestral Puebloan buildings. Occupied between AD 850 and 1150, Chaco appears to have been the cultural and political center for much of what is now the Four Corners region. Many sites in the Chaco Culture National Historical Park have been continuously studied for more than a century. Vivian and Hilpert wrote this encyclopedic handbook to help organize the extensive amount of information available for Chaco, as well as to stimulate speculation and encourage further exploration. The result is a highly accessible but thorough reference.

The Chaco Handbook includes more than 270 cross-referenced, alphabetical entries, more than 100 illustrations and maps, plus histories of Chaco’s development and ensuing archaeological research. Entries address important Chacoan and related sites, place-names, archaeological and ethnographic terms, objects and architectural features, and institutions and individuals. This second edition includes a new preface, a new chapter on professional explanations for the “Chaco Phenomena,” additional entries, and revisions to existing entries. Useful to anyone with an interest in the Ancestral Puebloans, including specialists, this handbook will guide readers to greater exploration of Chacoan culture and the Chaco world.
 

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Chaco Revisited
New Research on the Prehistory of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
Edited by Carrie C. Heitman and Stephen Plog
University of Arizona Press, 2015
Chaco Canyon, the great Ancestral Pueblo site of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, has inspired excavations and research for more than one hundred years. Chaco Revisited brings together an A-team of Chaco scholars to provide an updated, refreshing analysis of over a century of scholarship.

In each of the twelve chapters, luminaries from the field of archaeology and anthropology, such as R. Gwinn Vivian, Peter Whiteley, and Paul E. Minnis, address some of the most fundamental questions surrounding Chaco, from agriculture and craft production, to social organization and skeletal analyses. Though varied in their key questions about Chaco, each author uses previous research or new studies to ultimately blaze a trail for future research and discoveries about the canyon.

Written by both up-and-coming and well-seasoned scholars of Chaco Canyon, Chaco Revisited provides readers with a perspective that is both varied and balanced. Though a singular theory for the Chaco Canyon phenomenon is yet to be reached, Chaco Revisited brings a new understanding to scholars: that Chaco was perhaps even more productive and socially complex than previous analyses would suggest.
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Chaco's Northern Prodigies
Salmon, Aztec, and the Ascendancy of the Middle San Juan Region after AD 1100
Paul F Reed
University of Utah Press, 2011
In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the ancient pueblo sites of Aztec and Salmon in the Middle San Juan region rapidly emerged as population and political centers during the closing stages of Chaco’s ascendancy. Some archaeologists have attributed the development of these centers to migration and colonization by people from Chaco Canyon. Others have suggested that the so-called Chacoan 'system' was largely the result of emulation of Chacoan characteristics by local groups in outlying areas. Research over the last five years in the Middle San Juan suggests that both of these processes were operating.

Work by two groups of contributors resulted in this synthetic volume, which interprets thirty-five years of research at Salmon Ruins. Chaco’s Northern Prodigies also puts recent work at Salmon Ruins in the context of Middle San Juan archaeological research. It is a timely synopsis of the archaeology of this region of the Southwest.
 
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Challenging Colonial Narratives
Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes Archaeology
Matthew A. Beaudoin
University of Arizona Press, 2019
Challenging Colonial Narratives demonstrates that the traditional colonial dichotomy may reflect an artifice of the colonial discourse rather than the lived reality of the past. Matthew A. Beaudoin makes a striking case that comparative research can unsettle many deeply held assumptions and offer a rapprochement of the conventional scholarly separation of colonial and historical archaeology.

To create a conceptual bridge between disparate dialogues, Beaudoin examines multigenerational nineteenth-century Mohawk and settler sites in southern Ontario, Canada. He demonstrates that few obvious differences exist and calls for more nuanced interpretive frameworks. Using conventional categories, methodologies, and interpretative processes from Indigenous and settler archaeologies, Beaudoin encourages archaeologists and scholars to focus on the different or similar aspects among sites to better understand the nineteenth-century life of contemporaneous Indigenous and settler peoples.

Beaudoin posits that the archaeological record represents people’s navigation through the social and political constraints of their time. Their actions, he maintains, were undertaken within the understood present, the remembered past, and perceived future possibilities. Deconstructing existing paradigms in colonial and postcolonial theories, Matthew A. Beaudoin establishes a new, dynamic discourse on identity formation and politics within the power relations created by colonization that will be useful to archaeologists in the academy as well as in cultural resource management.
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Challenging the Dichotomy
The Licit and the Illicit in Archaeological and Heritage Discourses
Edited by Les Field, Cristóbal Gnecco, and Joe Watkins
University of Arizona Press, 2016
Challenging the Dichotomy explores how dichotomies regarding heritage dominate the discourse of ethics, practices, and institutions. Examining issues of cultural heritage law, policy, and implementation, editors Les Field, Cristóbal Gnecco, and Joe Watkins guide the focus to important discussions of the binary oppositions of the licit and the illicit, the scientific and the unscientific, incorporating case studies that challenge those apparent contradictions.

Utilizing both ethnographic and archaeological examples, contributors ask big questions vital to anyone working in cultural heritage. What are the issues surrounding private versus museum collections? What is considered looting? Is archaeology still a form of colonialization? The contributors discuss this vis-à-vis a global variety of contexts and cultures from the United States, South Africa, Argentina, New Zealand, Honduras, Colombia, Palestine, Greece, Canada, and from the Nasa, Choctaw, and Maori nations.

Challenging the Dichotomy underscores how dichotomies—such as licit/illicit, state/nonstate, public/private, scientific/nonscientific—have been constructed and how they are now being challenged by multiple forces. Throughout the eleven chapters, contributors provide examples of hegemonic relationships of power between nations and institutions. Scholars also reflect on exchanges between Western and non-Western epistemologies and ontologies.

The book’s contributions are significant, timely, and inclusive. Challenging the Dichotomy examines the scale and scope of “illicit” forms of excavation, as well as the demands from minority and indigenous subaltern peoples to decolonize anthropological and archaeological research.
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Changes in the Cultural Landscape and their Impacts on Heritage Management
A Study of Dutch Fort at Galle, Sri Lanka
Uditha Jinadasa
Leiden University Press, 2020
This book focuses on the practical challenges of managing a World Heritage listed historic city in a South Asian context. The focal point of the author’s research is Sri Lanka’s Galle Fort, a walled town, identified as the best-preserved colonial fort in South Asia. The costs and benefits of the fort’s World Heritage recognition to its local urban community, and to the colonial fort itself, are analyzed. Shown is how thirty years of the World Heritage project at Galle Fort changed a once small seaside walled town with dilapidated colonial buildings into a tourist hot-spot and prime real estate, thereby changing the lives of its inhabitants. It argues that the best practices of participatory and people-centered approaches of managing urban heritage at the global level are slow to progress at a local level.
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Changing Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley
Michael J. O'Brien
University of Alabama Press, 1998

Fourteen experts examine the current state of Central Valley prehistoric research and provide an important touchstone for future archaeological study of the region

The Mississippi Valley region has long played a critical role in the development of American archaeology and continues to be widely known for the major research of the early 1950s. To bring the archaeological record up to date, fourteen Central Valley experts address diverse topics including the distribution of artifacts across the landscape, internal configurations of large fortified settlements, human-bone chemistry, and ceramic technology.

The authors demonstrate that much is to be learned from the rich and varied archaeological record of the region and that the methods and techniques used to study the record have changed dramatically over the past half century. Operating at the cutting edge of current research strategies, these archaeologists provide a fresh look at old problems in central Mississippi Valley research.




 

 

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The Chattahoochee Chiefdoms
John H. Blitz and Karl G. Lorenz
University of Alabama Press, 2006
An overview and model of complex society in the prehistoric Southeast
 
Along the banks of the lower Chattahoochee River, the remains of ancient settlements are abundant, including archaeological sites produced by Native Americans between 900 and 350 years ago, and marked by the presence of large earthen mounds. Like similar monuments elsewhere in the Southeastern United States, the lower Chatta-hoochee River mounds have long attracted the attention of travelers, antiquarians, and archaeologists.

As objects from the mounds were unearthed, occasionally illustrated and discussed in print, attention became focused on the aesthetic qualities of the artifacts, the origins of the remains, and the possible relationship to the Creek Indians. Beginning in the 20th century, new concerns emerged as the developing science of archaeology was introduced to the region. As many of the sites became threatened or destroyed by reservoir construction, trained archaeologists initiated extensive excavations of the mounds.  Although classification of artifacts and sites into a chronological progression of cultures was the main objective of this effort, a second concern, sometimes more latent than manifest, was the reconstruction of a past way of life. Archaeologists hoped to achieve a better understanding of the sociopolitical organization of the peoples who built the mounds and of how those organizations changed through time. 

Contemporary archaeologists, while in agreement on many aspects of the ancient cultures, debate the causes, forms, and degrees of sociopolitical complexity in the ancient Southeast. Do the mounds mark the capitals of political territories? If so, what was the scale and scope of these ancient “provinces”? What manner of society constructed the mound settlements? What was the sociopolitical organization of these long-dead populations? How can archaeologists answer such queries with the mute and sometimes ordinary materials with which they work: pottery, stone tools, organic residues, and the strata of remnant settlements, buildings, and mounds?
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Cherokee Archaeology
A Study of the Appalachian Summit
Bennie C. Keel
University of Tennessee Press, 1987
Keel's work throughout the book is excellent and in the elegant and precise tradition which we have come to associate with Joffre Coe and his students and associates. Cherokee Archaeology provides archaeologists with an invaluable source for future studies. --James H. Howard, American Antiquity

Cherokee Archaeology provides much good information about the archaeology of the Appalachian Summit Area. Bennie Keel makes a lot more sense of the prehistory of the tri-state area (North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina) than anyone else ever has. --James B. Griffin
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Cherokee Prehistory
The Pisgah Phase In the Appalachian Summit Region
Roy S., Jr. Dickens
University of Tennessee Press, 1976

After a century of archaeological research in the Southeastern United States, there are still areas about which little is known. Surprisingly, one of these areas is the Appalachian Summit, which in historic times was inhabited by the Cherokee people whose rich culture and wide influence made their name commonplace in typifying Southeastern Indians. The culture of the people who preceded the historic Cherokees was no less rich, and their network of relationships with other groups no less wide. Until recently, however, the prehistoric cultural remains of the Southern Appalachians had received only slight attention.

Archaeological sites in the Appalachians usually do not stand out dramatically on the landscape as do the effigy mounds of the Ohio Valley and the massive platform mounds of the Southeastern Piedmont and Mississippi Valley. Prehistoric settlements in the Southern Appalachians lay in the bottomlands along the clear, rocky rivers, hidden in the folds of the mountains. Finding and investigating these sites required a systematic approach. From 1964 to 1971, under the direction of Joffre L. Coe, the Research Laboratories of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, conducted an archaeological project that was designed to investigate the antecedents of the historic Cherokees in the Appalachian Summit, and included site surveys over large portions of the area and concentrated excavations at several important sites in the vicinity of the historic Cherokee Middletowns.

One result of the Cherokee project is this book, the purpose of which is to present an initial description and synthesis of a late prehistoric phase in the Appalachian Summit, a phase that lasted from the beginnings of South Appalachian Mississippian culture to the emergence of identifiable Cherokee culture. At various points Professor Dickens draws these data into the broader picture of Southeastern prehistory, and occasionally presents some interpretations of the human behavior behind the material remains, however, is to make available some new information on a previously unexplored area. Through this presentation Cherokee Prehistory helps to provide a first step to approaching, in specific ways, the problems of cultural process and systemics in the aboriginal Southeast.

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The Cherokees of Tuckaleechee Cove
Jon Marcoux
University of Michigan Press, 2012
This volume explores culture change and persistence within a late seventeenth-century Cherokee community in eastern Tennessee.
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Chersonesan Studies 1
The Polychrome Grave Stelai from the Early Hellenistic Necropolis
By Richard Posamentir
University of Texas Press, 2010

Chersonesan Studies 1 presents the painted grave stelai of the Early Hellenistic necropolis of Chersonesos Taurike, a Greek city on the northern shore of the Black Sea. This unique collection of over one hundred objects is of major interest to students of ancient art and Greek culture. Their polychrome decoration has been extraordinarily well preserved, a rarity in the ancient world. They compose a remarkable, even unique, body of evidence of Greek funerary memorial sculpture: their shapes are gender-specific, their depicted objects are gender- and age-specific, and they can be ascribed to a handful of specific workshops. Their surprising uniformity requires an explanation, since comparable assemblages from other parts of the Greek world show substantial diversity in all these aspects.

This book provides the first complete catalog and description of the stelai, together with full-color illustrations of all the significant stelai and many details. Through his painstaking recovery and reassembling of fragments, as well as the use of advanced photographic techniques, Richard Posamentir has been able to add a whole new dimension to the study of these artifacts. The volume covers the history of the stelai, analysis of the workshops, and reconstruction of the necropolis that the stelai originally graced. A comparison chapter discusses how the stelai fit into the context of Greek funerary art and provides insights into the culture and society of a city on the Black Sea.

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Children in Prehistoric Puebloan Southwest
Kathryn Kamp
University of Utah Press, 2002

Is there evidence of children in the archaeological record? Some would answer no, that "subadults" can only be distinguished when there is osteological confirmation. Others might suggest that the reason children don’t exist in prehistory is because no one has looked for them, much as no one had looked for women in the same context until recently.

Focusing on the Southwest, contributors to this volume attempt to find some of those children, or at least show how they might be found. They address two issues: what was the cultural construction of childhood? What were childrens' lives like?

Determining how cultures with written records have constructed childhood in the past is hard enough, but the difficulty is magnified in the case of ancient Puebloan societies. The contributors here offer approaches from careful analysis of artifacts and skeletal remains to ethnographic evidence in rock art. Topics include ceramics and evidence of child manufacture and painting, cradleboards, evidence of child labor, and osteological evidence of health conditions.
 

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China
Visions through the Ages
Edited by Lisa C. Niziolek, Deborah A. Bekken and Gary M. Feinman
University of Chicago Press, 2018
At the entrance of The Field Museum’s Cyrus Tang Hall of China, two Chinese stone guardian lions stand tall, gazing down intently at approaching visitors. One lion’s paw rests upon a decorated ball symbolizing power, while the other lion cradles a cub. Traditionally believed to possess attributes of strength and protection, statues such as these once stood guard outside imperial buildings, temples, and wealthy homes in China. Now, centuries later, they guard this incredible permanent exhibition.
 
China’s long history is one of the richest and most complex in the known world, and the Cyrus Tang Hall of China offers visitors a wonderful, comprehensive survey of it through some 350 artifacts on display, spanning from the Paleolithic period to present day. Now, with China: Visions through the Ages, anyone can experience the marvels of this exhibition through the book’s beautifully designed and detailed pages. Readers will gain deeper insight into The Field Museum’s important East Asian collections, the exhibition development process, and research on key aspects of China’s fascinating history. This companion book, edited by the exhibition’s own curatorial team, takes readers even deeper into the wonders of the Cyrus Tang Hall of China and enables them to study more closely the objects and themes featured in the show. Mirroring the exhibition’s layout of five galleries, the volume is divided into five sections. The first section focuses on the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods; the second, the Bronze Age, the first dynasties, and early writing; the third, the imperial system and power; the fourth, religion and performance; and the fifth, interregional trade and the Silk Routes. Each section also includes highlights containing brief stories on objects or themes in the hall, such as the famous Lanting Xu rubbing.
 
With chapters from a diverse set of international authors providing greater context and historical background, China: Visions through the Ages is a richly illustrated volume that allows visitors, curious readers, and China scholars alike a chance to have an enduring exchange with the objects featured in the exhibition and with their multifaceted histories.
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Chipped Stone Technological Organization
Central Place Foraging and Exchange on the Northern Great Plains
Craig M. Johnson
University of Utah Press, 2019
Over a 40-year period, Craig Johnson collected data on chipped stone tools from nearly 200 occupations along the Missouri River in the Dakotas. This book integrates those data with central place foraging theory and exchange models to arrive at broad conclusions supporting archaeological theory. The emphasis is on the last 1,000 years, when the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara farmer-hunters dominated the area, but also looks back some 10,000 years to more nomadic peoples. The long timespan and large number of villages and campsites help define changes through time and over large distances of local and nonlocal tool stone and its manufacture into arrow points, knives, and other tools.
 
Central place foraging theory, through the field processing model, posits that the farther a source material is from the central living area, the more it will be processed before it is transported back, to avoid hauling heavy, nonusable parts on long trips. Johnson’s data support this theory and demonstrate that this model applies not only to nomadic hunter-gatherers but also to semisedentary farmer-hunters. His results also indicate that toolstone usage creates distinctive spatial patterns along the Missouri River, largely related to village distance from the sources. This is best illustrated with Knife River flint, which gradually declines in popularity downriver from its source in west-central North Dakota but increases in central South Dakota because of exchange.
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Chipped Stone Tools in Formative Oaxaca, Mexico
Their Procurement, Production and Use
William J. Parry
University of Michigan Press, 1987
Chipped stone tools from archaeological sites can be a source of social and economic information about the inhabitants. In this volume, author William J. Parry presents his analysis of chipped stone tools found at Early and Middle Formative sites in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. Volume 8 of the subseries Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca.
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Chocolate
Pathway to the Gods
Meredith L. Dreiss and Sharon Edgar Greenhill
University of Arizona Press, 2008
Chocolate: Pathway to the Gods takes readers on a journey through 3,000 years of the history of chocolate. It is a trip filled with surprises. And it is a beautifully illustrated tour, featuring 132 vibrant color photographs and a captivating sixty-minute DVD documentary. Along the way, readers learn about the mystical allure of chocolate for the peoples of Mesoamerica, who were the first to make it and who still incorporate it into their lives and ceremonies today.

Although it didn’t receive its Western scientific name, Theobroma cacao—“food of the gods”—until the eighteenth century, the cacao tree has been at the center of Mesoamerican mythology for thousands of years. Not only did this “chocolate tree” produce the actual seeds from which chocolate was extracted but it was also symbolically endowed with cosmic powers that enabled a dialogue between humans and their gods. From the pre-Columbian images included in this sumptuous book, we are able to see for ourselves the importance of chocolate to the Maya, Aztecs, Olmecs, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs who grew, produced, traded, and fought over the prized substance.

Through archaeological and other ethnohistoric research, the authors of this fascinating book document the significance of chocolate—to gods, kings, and everyday people—over several millennia. The illustrations allow us to envision the many ancient uses of this magical elixir: in divination ceremonies, in human sacrifices, and even in ball games. And as mythological connections between cacao trees, primordial rainforests, and biodiversity are unveiled, our own quest for ecological balance is reignited. In demonstrating the extraordinary value of chocolate in Mesoamerica, the authors provide new reasons—if any are needed—to celebrate this wondrous concoction.
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The Chora of Croton 1
The Neolithic Settlement at Capo Alfiere
By Jon Morter
University of Texas Press, 2010

From 1974 to the present, the Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICA) at the University of Texas at Austin has carried out archaeological excavations and surveys in ancient territories (chorae) in southern Italy. This wide-ranging investigation, which covers a large number of sites and a time period ranging from prehistory to the Middle Ages, has unearthed a wealth of new information about ancient rural economies and cultures in the region. These discoveries will be published in two multivolume series (Metaponto and Croton). This volume on the Neolithic settlement at Capo Alfiere is the first in the Croton series.

The Chora of Croton 1 reports the excavation results of a remarkable Neolithic site at Capo Alfiere on the Ionian coast. Capo Alfiere is one of a very few early inhabitation sites in this area to have been excavated extensively, with a full team of scientific specialists providing interdisciplinary studies on early farming and animal husbandry. It provides comprehensive documentation of the economy, material culture, and way of life in the central Mediterranean in the sixth and fifth millennia BC. Most notable are the remains of a wattle-and-daub hut enclosed within a massive stone wall. Unique for this area, this well-preserved structure may have been used for special purposes such as ritual, as well as for habitation. The presence of Stentinello wares shows that the range of this pottery type extended further east than previously thought and casts new light on the development of ceramics in the area.

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The Chora of Metaponto 2
Archaeozoology at Pantanello and Five Other Sites
Studies by Sándor Bökönyi and Erika Gál
University of Texas Press, 2010

From 1974 to the present, the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin has carried out archaeological excavations in the ancient territory (chora) of Metaponto, now located in the modern province of Basilicata on the southern coast of Italy. This wide-ranging investigation, which covers a number of sites and a time period ranging from prehistory to the Roman Empire, has unearthed a wealth of new information about the ancient rural economy in southern Italy. These discoveries will be published in a multi-volume series titled The Chora of Metaponto. This volume on archaeozoology—the study of animal remains from archaeological sites—is the second in the series, following The Chora of Metaponto: The Necropoleis (1998).

Archaeozoology at Pantanello and Five Other Sites describes the animal remains found throughout Metaponto and discusses what they reveal about ancient practices of hunting and herding, domestication and importation of new breeds, people's attitudes toward animals, and what animal remains indicate about past environments. A chapter devoted to bird bones, which are a relatively rare find because of their fragility, provides high quality information on the environment and methods of fowling, as well as on the beliefs and symbolism associated with birds. The final chapter covers tools—some simple, others sophisticated and richly decorated—made from animal bones.

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The Chora of Metaponto 4
The Late Roman Farmhouse at San Biagio
By Erminia Lapadula
University of Texas Press, 2012

This volume in the Institute of Classical Archaeology's series on rural settlements in the countryside (chora) of Metaponto presents the excavation of the Late Roman farmhouse at San Biagio. Located near the site of an earlier Greek sanctuary, this modest but well-appointed structure was an unexpected find from a period generally marked by large landholdings and monumental villas. Description of earlier periods of occupation (Neolithic and Greek) is followed by a detailed discussion of the farmhouse itself and its historical and socioeconomic context. The catalogs and analyses of finds include impressive deposits of coins from the late third and early fourth centuries AD. Use of virtual reality CAD software has yielded a deeper understanding of the architectural structure and its reconstruction. A remarkable feature is the small bath complex, with its examples of window glass. This study reveals the existence of a small but viable rural social and economic entity and alternative to the traditional image of crisis and decline during the Late Imperial period.

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The Chora of Metaponto 5
A Greek Farmhouse at Ponte Fabrizio
By Elisa Lanza Catti, Keith Swift and Joseph Coleman Carter
University of Texas Press, 2014

This volume in the Institute of Classical Archaeology’s series on rural settlements in the countryside (chora) of Metaponto is a study of the fourth-century BC farmhouse known as Fattoria Fabrizio, located in the heart of the surveyed chora in the Venella valley (at Ponte Fabrizio). This simple structure richly illustrates the life of fourth-century BC Metapontine farmers of modest means.

Thorough interpretations of the farmhouse structure in its wider historical and socioeconomic contexts are accompanied by comprehensive analyses of the archaeological finds. Among them is detailed evidence for the family cult, a rare archaeological contribution to the study of Greek religion in Magna Grecia. The entire range of local Greek ceramics has been studied, along with a limited number of imports. Together they reveal networks within the chora and trade beyond it, involving indigenous peoples of southern Italy, mainland Greeks, and the wider Mediterranean world. Along with the studies of traditional archaeological finds, archaeobotanical analyses have illuminated the rural economy of the farmhouse and the environment of the adjacent chora. Abundant Archaic pottery also documents an important occupation, during the first great flowering of the chora in the sixth century BC. This study provides an ideal complement to the four volumes of The Chora of Metaponto 3: Archaeological Field Survey—Bradano to Basento and an eloquent example of hundreds of farmhouses of this date identified throughout the chora by their surface remains alone.

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The Chora of Metaponto 6
A Greek Settlement at Sant'Angelo Vecchio
By Francesca Silvestrelli and Ingrid E. M. Edlund-Berry
Joseph Coleman Carter, Series Editor
University of Texas Press, 2016

The sixth volume in the Institute of Classical Archaeology’s series on the rural countryside (chora) of Metaponto is a study of the Greek settlement at Sant’Angelo Vecchio. Located on a slope overlooking the Basento River, the site illustrates the extraordinary variety of settlements and uses of the territory from prehistory through the current day. Excavators brought to light a Late Archaic farmhouse, evidence of a sanctuary near a spring, and a cluster of eight burials of the mid-fifth century BC, but the most impressive remains belong to a production area with kilns. Active in the Hellenistic, Late Republican, and Early Imperial periods, these kilns illuminate important and lesser-known features of production in the chora of a Greek city and also chronicle the occupation of the territory in these periods.

The thorough, diachronic presentation of the evidence from Sant’Angelo Vecchio is complemented by specialist studies on the environment, landscape, and artifacts, which date from prehistory to the post-medieval period. Significantly, the evidence spans the range of Greek site types (farmhouse, necropolis, sanctuary, and production center) as well as the Greek dates (from the Archaic to Early Imperial periods) highlighted during ICA’s survey of the Metapontine chora. In this regard, Chora 6 enhances the four volumes of The Chora of Metaponto 3: Archaeological Field Survey—Bradano to Basento and provides further insight into how sites in the chora interacted throughout its history.

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The Chora of Metaponto 7
The Greek Sanctuary at Pantanello
By Joseph Coleman Carter and Keith Swift
University of Texas Press, 2018

The seventh volume in the Institute of Classical Archaeology’s series on the rural countryside (chora) of Metaponto is a study of the Greek sanctuary at Pantanello. The site is the first Greek rural sanctuary in southern Italy that has been fully excavated and exhaustively documented. Its evidence—a massive array of distinctive structural remains and 30,000-plus artifacts and ecofacts—offers unparalleled insights into the development of extra-urban cults in Magna Graecia from the seventh to the fourth centuries BC and the initiation rites that took place within the cults.

Of particular interest are the analyses of the well-preserved botanical and faunal material, which present the fullest record yet of Greek rural sacrificial offerings, crops, and the natural environment of southern Italy and the Greek world. Excavations from 1974 to 2008 revealed three major phases of the sanctuary, ranging from the Archaic to Early Hellenistic periods. The structures include a natural spring as the earliest locus of the cult, an artificial stream (collecting basin) for the spring’s outflow, Archaic and fourth-century BC structures for ritual dining and other cult activities, tantalizing evidence of a Late Archaic Doric temple atop the hill, and a farmhouse and tile factory that postdate the sanctuary’s destruction. The extensive catalogs of material and special studies provide an invaluable opportunity to study the development of Greek material culture between the seventh and third centuries BC, with particular emphasis on votive pottery and figurative terracotta plaques.

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Christians and Muslims in Early Islamic Egypt
Lajos Berkes, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2022

This volume collects studies exploring the relationship of Christians and Muslims in everyday life in Early Islamic Egypt (642–10th c.) focusing mainly, but not exclusively on administrative and social history. The contributions concentrate on the papyrological documentation preserved in Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. By doing so, this book transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries and offers results based on a holistic view of the documentary material. The articles of this volume discuss various aspects of change and continuity from Byzantine to Islamic Egypt and offer also the (re)edition of 23 papyrus documents in Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. The authors provide a showcase of recent papyrological research on this under-studied, but dynamically evolving field.

After an introduction by the editor of the volume that outlines the most important trends and developments of the period, the first two essays shed light on Egypt as part of the Caliphate. The following six articles, the bulk of the volume, deal with the interaction and involvement of the Egyptian population with the new Muslim administrative apparatus. The last three studies of the volume focus on naming practices and language change.

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Chronological Analysis of Tsegi Phase Sites in Northeastern Arizona
Jeffrey S. Dean
University of Arizona Press, 1970
The research reported here was conducted under the auspices of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, The University of Arizona, Tucson, and presents findings based on intensive dendrochronological analyses of individual archaeological sites. Fieldwork, supported by the National Park Service and the Arizona State Museum, took place on lands belonging to Navajo National Monument and on the Navajo Indian Reservation.
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front cover of The Chronological Position of the Hopewellian Culture in the Eastern United States
The Chronological Position of the Hopewellian Culture in the Eastern United States
James B. Griffin
University of Michigan Press, 1958
James B. Griffin reports on a series of radiocarbon dates from sites thought to be part of the Hopewellian complex. Material tested came from a broad area, including Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario, Canada.
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Chronologies in Old World Archaeology
Third Edition
Edited by Robert W. Ehrich
University of Chicago Press, 1992

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Churches EA and E at Sardis
Hans Buchwald
Harvard University Press, 2015

Sardis was home to one of the earliest known Christian communities, appearing among the Seven Churches of Asia in the mid-first century AD. Between 1962 and 1973, the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis excavated two superimposed churches at the ancient site, one early Christian, one Byzantine. This richly illustrated volume documents the architecture and history of these buildings from the fourth to the sixteenth century.

The early Christian church, an aisled basilica with narthex and atrium, both decorated with floor mosaics, had a long and complicated history, starting in the fourth century and continuing into the ninth century. Built over its remains is a Byzantine church dating to the little-known Lascarid period, when Constantinople had fallen to the Fourth Crusade and western Asia Minor was home to an independent Christian empire. This building’s standing remains, scattered domes, and vaulting fragments support the reconstruction of an inscribed-cross church with six columns and five domes, enriched on the exterior by a variety of brick and terracotta decoration. Together, these buildings cast new light on a millennium of Christian worship at Sardis, from the first official recognition of Christianity until the end of the Byzantine era.

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Circular Villages of the Monongahela Tradition
Bernard K. Means
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Between A.D. 1000 and 1635, the inhabitants of southwestern Pennsylvania and portions of adjacent states—known to archaeologists as the Monongahela Culture or Tradition—began to reside regularly in ring-shaped village settlements. These circular settlements consisted of dwellings around a central plaza. A cross-cultural and cross-temporal review of archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic cases demonstrates that this settlement form appeared repeatedly and independently worldwide, including throughout portions of the Eastern Woodlands, among the Plains Indians, and in Central and South America.
 
Specific archaeological cases are drawn from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, that has the largest number of completely excavated Monongahela villages. Most of these villages, excavated in the 1930s as federal relief projects, were recently dated. Full analysis of the extensive excavations reveals not only the geometric architectural patterning of the villages, but enables an analysis of the social groupings, population estimates, and economic status of residents who inhabited the circular villages. Circular patterning can be revealed at less fully excavated archaeological sites. Focused test excavations can help confirm circular village plans without extensive and destructive excavations.
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City in the Desert
Oleg Grabar, Reneta Holod, James Knustad, and William Trousdale
Harvard University Press
City in the Desert describes the results of the excavation of an extraordinary early Islamic site carried out by the Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan, and Harvard University. The ruins of Qasr al-Hayr are located almost exactly in the center of Syria, between the Euphrates and the ancient city of Palmyra. Founded around 825 A.D. by the dynasty of the Umayyads, the settlement continued to flourish until the twelfth century. At once palatial and nomadic, rural and urban in character, Qasr al-Hayr mirrored many social and cultural aspects of the medieval Islamic world. How such contrasting features were contained in a single entity for over four hundred years is a puzzle that the authors seek to solve. They also examine how, in a semi-arid region, contentious tribes were able to forge and preserve a common culture.
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The Civilian Conservation Corps in Alabama, 1933–1942
A Great and Lasting Good
Robert Pasquill Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2008

The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the better known and most successful of the New Deal programs following the Great Depression.  The causes of the Great Depression have been addressed and debated from a variety of perspectives through the years.  However, the effects explained in terms of human suffering leave little room for debate. By March of 1933, there were more than 13.6 million unemployed, and more than 200,000 of them were wandering the country looking for work. Homes and families were fractured.  President Roosevelt proposed to put 500,000 unemployed men from cities and towns into the woods to plant trees, reduce fire hazards, clear streams, check erosion, and improve the park system all across America.  With unprecedented speed, national legislation was written, passed, and funded, creating a myriad of programs—referred to as alphabet projects—in hopes of generating useful work and necessary paychecks and creating a “great and lasting good” for the American public.

CCC projects in Alabama would initially employ 20,000 men with projects in all 13 state forests and seven state parks.  This volume traces in great detail the work projects, the camp living conditions, the daily lives of the enrollees, the administration and management challenges, and the lasting effects of this Neal Deal program in Alabama.  Through archives, government documents, and more than 125 interviews with former enrollees of the CCC, Pasquill has recounted the CCC program in Alabama and brought this humanitarian program to life in the Alabama countryside. It was a truly monumental win-win situation emerging from a national and international economic tragedy.

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Cladistics and Archaeology
Michael J O'Brien
University of Utah Press, 2003

Cladistics is a method used in biology and paleobiology to establish phylogeny: what produced what and in what order. It is a very specific method, developed in Germany in the 1950s and currently the primary phylogenetic method in the world. Cladistics has also been applied to such fields as historical linguistics and manuscript history. If things evolve in a nonrandom way, they may be appropriately studied using this method.

In Cladistics and Archaeology, Michael O’Brien and Lee Lyman explore the application of cladistics to archaeology by considering artifacts as human phenotypic characters. Their fundamental premise is that particular kinds of characters (style, artifact type, tool) can be used to create historically meaningful nested taxa. Further, they argue that this approach offers a means of building connections and 'life histories' of archaeological artifacts.

In order to make a potentially difficult topic more readily comprehensible, the authors have organized the book as something of a primer. Cladistics and Archaeology includes many figures to illustrate basic concepts, as well as a case study that shows a step-by-step application of cladistics to archaeology.

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Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands
Integration, Interaction, Dissolution
Damien B. Marken
University Press of Colorado, 2015

Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands investigates Maya political and social structure in the southern lowlands, assessing, comparing, and interpreting the wide variation in Classic period Maya polity and city composition, development, and integration. Traditionally, discussions of Classic Maya political organization have been dominated by the debate over whether Maya polities were centralized or decentralized. With new, largely unpublished data from several recent archaeological projects, this book examines the premises, strengths, and weaknesses of these two perspectives before moving beyond this long-standing debate and into different territory.

The volume examines the articulations of the various social and spatial components of Maya polity—the relationships, strategies, and practices that bound households, communities, institutions, and dynasties into enduring (or short-lived) political entities. By emphasizing the internal negotiation of polity, the contributions provide an important foundation for a more holistic understanding of how political organization functioned in the Classic period.

Contributors include Francisco Estrada Belli, James L. Fitzsimmons, Sarah E. Jackson, Caleb Kestle, Brigitte Kovacevich, Allan Maca, Damien B. Marken, James Meierhoff, Timothy Murtha, Cynthia Robin, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Andrew Wyatt.

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Classic Maya Provincial Politics
Xunantunich and Its Hinterlands
Edited by Lisa J. LeCount and Jason Yaeger
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Most treatments of large Classic Maya sites such as Caracol and Tikal regard Maya political organization as highly centralized. Because investigations have focused on civic buildings and elite palaces, however, a critical part of the picture of Classic Maya political organization has been missing.

The contributors to this volume chart the rise and fall of the Classic Maya center of Xunantunich, paying special attention to its changing relationships with the communities that comprised its hinterlands. They examine how the changing relationships between Xunantunich and the larger kingdom of Naranjo affected the local population, the location of their farms and houses, and the range of economic and subsistence activities in which both elites and commoners engaged. They also examine the ways common people seized opportunities and met challenges offered by a changing political landscape.

The rich archaeological data in this book show that incorporating subject communities and people—and keeping them incorporated—was an on-going challenge to ancient Maya rulers. Until now, archaeologists have lacked integrated regional data and a fine-grained chronology in which to document short-term shifts in site occupations, subsistence strategies, and other important practices of the daily life of the Maya. This book provides a revised picture of Maya politics—one of different ways of governing and alliance formation among dominant centers, provincial polities, and hinterland communities.
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Classical Spies
American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece
Susan Heuck Allen
University of Michigan Press, 2013

“Classical Spies will be a lasting contribution to the discipline and will stimulate further research. Susan Heuck Allen presents to a wide readership a topic of interest that is important and has been neglected.”
—William M. Calder III, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Classical Spies is the first insiders’ account of the operations of the American intelligence service in World War II Greece. Initiated by archaeologists in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, the network drew on scholars’ personal contacts and knowledge of languages and terrain. While modern readers might think Indiana Jones is just a fantasy character, Classical Spies disclosesevents where even Indy would feel at home: burying Athenian dig records in an Egyptian tomb, activating prep-school connections to establish spies code-named Vulture and Chickadee, and organizing parachute drops.

Susan Heuck Allen reveals remarkable details about a remarkable group of individuals. Often mistaken for mild-mannered professors and scholars, such archaeologists as University of Pennsylvania’s Rodney Young, Cincinnati’s Jack Caskey and Carl Blegen, Yale’s Jerry Sperling and Dorothy Cox, and Bryn Mawr’s Virginia Grace proved their mettle as effective spies in an intriguing game of cat and mouse with their Nazi counterparts. Relying on interviews with individuals sharing their stories for the first time, previously unpublished secret documents, private diaries and letters, and personal photographs, Classical Spies offers an exciting and personal perspective on the history of World War II.

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Classic-Period Cultural Currents in Southern and Central Veracruz
Philip J. Arnold III
Harvard University Press, 2008

Classic-Period Cultural Currents in Southern and Central Veracruz explores the diverse traditions and dynamic interactions along the Mexican Gulf lowlands at the height of their cultural florescence. Best known for their elaborate ballgame rituals and precocious inscriptions with long-count dates, these cultures served as a critical nexus between the civilizations of highland Mexico and the lowland Maya, influencing developments in both regions.

Eleven chapters penned by leading experts in archaeology, art history, and linguistics offer new insights into ancient iconography and writing, the construction of sociopolitical landscapes, and the historical interplay between local developments and external influences at Cerro de las Mesas, Tres Zapotes, Matacapan, and many lesser-known sites. The result is a new, vibrant perspective on ancient lifeways along the Mexican Gulf lowlands and an important updated source for future research in the region.

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Clothes Make the Man
Early Medieval Textiles from the Netherlands
Chrystel R. Brandenburgh
Leiden University Press, 2017
Textiles that have been uncovered in archaeological excavations include garments, household fabrics, and sails. But until now, systematic analyses of such discoveries had not yet been undertaken for Dutch artifacts. Closing this considerable gap, Clothes Make the Man focuses on textile remains dating from between 400 and 1000 CE that have been recovered from settlements and cemeteries in what is now the Netherlands. As Chrystel R. Brandenburgh shows, such fabrics enable valuable reconstructions of burial clothing and yield important data about their production processes and techniques.
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Clotilda
The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship
James P. Delgado, Deborah E. Marx, Kyle Lent, Joseph Grinnan, and Alexander DeCaro
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Documents the maritime historical research and archaeological fieldwork used to identify the wreck of the notorious schooner Clotilda

Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship is the first definitive work to examine the maritime historical and archaeological record of one of the most infamous ships in American history. Clotilda was owned by Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher, who, on a dare, equipped it to carry captured Africans from what is now Benin and bring them to Alabama in 1860—some fifty years after the import of captives to be enslaved was banned. To hide the evidence, Clotilda was set afire and sunk.

What remained was a substantially intact, submerged, and partially buried shipwreck located in a backwater of the Mobile River. The site of the wreck was an open secret to some people who knew Meaher, but its identity remained unknown for more than a century as various surveys through the years failed to locate the ship.

This volume, authored by the archaeological team who conducted a comprehensive, systematic survey of a forgotten “ship graveyard,” details the exhaustive forensic work that conclusively identified the wreck, as well as the stories and secrets that have emerged from the partly burned hulk. James P. Delgado and his coauthors discuss the various searches for Clotilda, sharing the forensic data and other analyses showing how those involved concluded that this wreck was indeed Clotilda. Additionally, they offer physical evidence not previously shared that situates the schooner and its voyage in a larger context of the slave trade.

Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship serves as a nautical biography of the ship as well. After reviewing the maritime trade in and out of Mobile Bay, this account places Clotilda within the larger landscape of American and Gulf of Mexico schooners and chronicles its career before being used as a slave ship. All of its voyages had a link to slavery, and one may have been another smuggling voyage in violation of federal law. The authors have also painstakingly reconstructed Clotilda’s likely appearance and characteristics.
 
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Clovis Blade Technology
A Comparative Study of the Keven Davis Cache, Texas
By Michael B. Collins
University of Texas Press, 1999

Around 11,000 years ago, a Paleoindian culture known to us as "Clovis" occupied much of North America. Considered to be among the continent's earliest human inhabitants, the Clovis peoples were probably nomadic hunters and gatherers whose remaining traces include camp sites and caches of goods stored for utilitarian or ritual purposes.

This book offers the first comprehensive study of a little-known aspect of Clovis culture—stone blade technology. Michael Collins introduces the topic with a close look at the nature of blades and the techniques of their manufacture, followed by a discussion of the full spectrum of Clovis lithic technology and how blade production relates to the production of other stone tools. He then provides a full report of the discovery and examination of fourteen blades found in 1988 in the Keven Davis Cache in Navarro County, Texas.

Collins also presents a comparative study of known and presumed Clovis blades from many sites, discusses the Clovis peoples' caching practices, and considers what lithic technology and caching behavior can add to our knowledge of Clovis lifeways. These findings will be important reading for both specialists and amateurs who are piecing together the puzzle of the peopling of the Americas, since the manufacture of blades is a trait that Clovis peoples shared with the Upper Paleolithic peoples in Europe and northern Asia.

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Coastal Ecosystems and Economic Strategies at Cerro Azul, Peru
The Study of a Late Intermediate Kingdom
Edited by Joyce Marcus
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Cerro Azul, a pre-Inca fishing community in the Kingdom of Huarco, Peru, stood at the interface between a rich marine ecosystem and an irrigated coastal plain. Under the direction of its noble families, Cerro Azul dried millions of fish for shipment to inland communities, from which it received agricultural products and dried llama meat.
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Coastal Foragers of the Gran Desierto
Investigations of Prehistoric Shell Middens along the Northern Sonoran Coast
Douglas R. Mitchell, Jonathan B. Mabry, Gary Huckleberry, and Natalia Martínez-Tagüeña
University of Arizona Press, 2024
The result of nearly twenty years of interdisciplinary research, this volume contributes to the archaeological and paleoenvironmental knowledge of an important but lightly investigated hyperarid coastline at the heart of the Sonoran Desert.

Focused on the coast near Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico, Coastal Foragers of the Gran Desierto examines the diverse groups occupying the coast for salt, abundant food sources, and shells for ornament manufacturing. The archaeological patterns demonstrated by the data gathered lead to the conclusion that, since ancient times, this coastal landscape was not a marginal zone but rather an important source of food and trade goods, and a pilgrimage destination that influenced broad and diverse communities across the Sonoran Desert and beyond.

Contributors
Jenny L. Adams
Karen R. Adams
Thomas Bowen
Tessa L. Branyan
Bill Broyles
Richard C. Brusca
David L. Dettman
Michael S. Foster
Gary Huckleberry
Jonathan B. Mabry
Natalia Martínez-Tagüeña
Richard J. Martynec
Douglas R. Mitchell
Kirsten Rowell
Melissa R. Schwan
M. Steven Shackley
R. J. Sliva
Kayla B. Worthey
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Cobble Circles and Standing Stones
Archaeology at the Rivas Site, Costa Rica
Jeffrey Quilter
University of Iowa Press, 2004
In this first-person tale of archaeological adventure in the tropical forest, Jeffrey Quilter tells the story of his excavation of Rivas, a great ceremonial center at the foot of the Talamanca Mountain range, which flourished between A.D. 900 and 1300, and its fabled gold-filled cemetery, the Panteón de La Reina. Beginning with the 1992 field season and ending with the last excavations in 1998, Quilter discusses Rivas’ builders and users, theories on chiefdom societies, and the daily interactions and surprises of modern archaeological fieldwork.

Writing in the first person with a balance between informal language and academic theory, Quilter concludes that Rivas was a ceremonial center for mortuary rituals to bury chiefly elite on the Panteón. Through use of his narrative technique, he provides the reader with accounts of discoveries as they occurred in fieldwork and the development of interpretations to explain the ancient refuse and cobble architecture his team uncovered. As his story progresses amid the enchantment of the Costa Rican landscape, research plans are adjusted and sometimes completely overturned as new discoveries, often serendipitous ones, are made. Such changing circumstances lead to new insights into the rise and fall of the people who built the cobble circles and raised the standing stones at Rivas, a thousand years ago.

The only book in English that focuses on a single archaeological site in Costa Rica, which continues to develop as a destination for archaeological tourism, Cobble Stones and Standing Circles will appeal to laypeople and professionals alike.
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The Cochise Cultural Sequence in Southeastern Arizona
E. B. Sayles
University of Arizona Press, 1983
The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas.
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Cocopa Ethnography
William H. Kelly
University of Arizona Press, 1977
The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas.
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Coins from the Excavations at Sardis
Their Archaeological and Economic Contexts: Coins from the 1973 to 2013 Excavations
Jane DeRose Evans
Harvard University Press, 2018

Sardis, capital city of the Lydian and Persian kings, stronghold of the Seleukid kings, metropolis of Roman Asia, and episcopal see in the Byzantine period, has been the focus of archaeological research since the early 1900s. This monograph focuses on the over 8,000 coins minted in the Lydian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods that were excavated between 1973 and 2013 in the Harvard-Cornell Expedition.

The book places coins within eastern Mediterranean historical, cultural, and economic contexts, in order to better understand the monetized economy of Sardis. It adds important archaeological context to shed light on the uses of coins and the nature of the deposits, with attention paid to the problems of monetary circulation and chronological development of the deposits, especially in the Late Roman period. Statistical analyses, including a new method of analyzing the deposits, help define the nature and chronological horizons of the strata. A catalog of the coins concludes the main body of the study, followed by appendices on countermarks, monograms, and statistical analyses.

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Collaborating at the Trowel's Edge
Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology
Edited by Stephen W. Silliman
University of Arizona Press, 2008
A fundamental issue for twenty-first century archaeologists is the need to better direct their efforts toward supporting rather than harming indigenous peoples. Collaborative indigenous archaeology has already begun to stress the importance of cooperative, community-based research; this book now offers an up-to-date assessment of how Native American and non-native archaeologists have jointly undertaken research that is not only politically aware and historically minded but fundamentally better as well.

Eighteen contributors—many with tribal ties—cover the current state of collaborative indigenous archaeology in North America to show where the discipline is headed. Continent-wide cases, from the Northeast to the Southwest, demonstrate the situated nature of local practice alongside the global significance of further decolonizing archaeology. And by probing issues of indigenous participation with an eye toward method, theory, and pedagogy, many show how the archaeological field school can be retailored to address politics, ethics, and critical practice alongside traditional teaching and research methods.

These chapters reflect the strong link between politics and research, showing what can be achieved when indigenous values, perspectives, and knowledge are placed at the center of the research process. They not only draw on experiences at specific field schools but also examine advances in indigenous cultural resource management and in training Native American and non-native students.

Theoretically informed and practically grounded, Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge is a virtual guide for rethinking field schools and is an essential volume for anyone involved in North American archaeology—professionals, students, tribal scholars, or avocationalists—as well as those working with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world. It both reflects the rapidly changing landscape of archaeology and charts new directions to ensure the ongoing vitality of the discipline.
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Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School
Sarah E. Cowie
University of Nevada Press, 2019
Winner of the 2019 Mark E. Mack Community Engagement Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology, the collaborative archaeology project at the former Stewart Indian School documents the archaeology and history of a heritage project at a boarding school for American Indian children in the Western United States. In Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School, the team’s collective efforts shed light on the children’s education, foodways, entertainment, health, and resilience in the face of the U.S. government’s attempt to forcibly assimilate Native populations at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as school life in later years after reforms.

This edited volume addresses the theory, methods, and outcomes of collaborative archaeology conducted at the Stewart Indian School site and is a genuine collective effort between archaeologists, former students of the school, and other tribal members. With more than twenty contributing authors from the University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada Indian Commission, Washoe Tribal Historic Preservation Office, and members of Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone tribes, this rich case study is strongly influenced by previous work in collaborative and Indigenous archaeologies. It elaborates on those efforts by applying concepts of governmentality (legal instruments and practices that constrain and enable decisions, in this case, regarding the management of historical populations and modern heritage resources) as well as social capital (valued relations with others, in this case, between Native and non-Native stakeholders).

As told through the trials, errors, shared experiences, sobering memories, and stunning accomplishments of a group of students, archaeologists, and tribal members, this rare gem humanizes archaeological method and theory and bolsters collaborative archaeological research.
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The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations
Edited by Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill
University of Arizona Press, 1988
This is an excellent collection of essays on the collapse of ancient states and civilizations by historians, archaeologists. . . . excellent overviews of the relevant research.—Contemporary Sociology
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Collected Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, Nos. 12, 13, 14
Johannes Wilbert, Peter G. Roe, and Elizabeth P. Benson
Harvard University Press
This volume contains three monographs from the series of Collected Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archeology. Johannes Wilbert looks at the use and decoration of spindles, focusing on those from Ecuador. Peter Roe examines the Chavin seriations, with numerous illustrations and a pullout chart, and Elizabeth Benson considers the motif of felines and men in Mochica art.
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Collecting Mesoamerican Art before 1940
A New World of Latin American Antiquities
Andrew D. Turner
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
The untold chronicles of the looting and collecting of ancient Mesoamerican objects.

This book traces the fascinating history of how and why ancient Mesoamerican objects have been collected. It begins with the pre-Hispanic antiquities that first entered European collections in the sixteenth century as gifts or seizures, continues through the rise of systematic collecting in Europe and the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ends in 1940—the start of Europe’s art market collapse at the outbreak of World War II and the coinciding genesis of the large-scale art market for pre-Hispanic antiquities in the United States.

Drawing upon archival resources and international museum collections, the contributors analyze the ways shifting patterns of collecting and taste—including how pre-Hispanic objects changed from being viewed as anthropological and scientific curiosities to collectible artworks—have shaped modern academic disciplines as well as public, private, institutional, and nationalistic attitudes toward Mesoamerican art. As many nations across the world demand the return of their cultural patrimony and ancestral heritage, it is essential to examine the historical processes, events, and actors that initially removed so many objects from their countries of origin.
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