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American Beginnings
The Prehistory and Palaeoecology of Beringia
Edited by Frederick Hadleigh West
University of Chicago Press, 1996
During the last Ice Age, a thousand-mile-wide land bridge connected Siberia and Alaska, creating the region known as Beringia. Over twelve thousand years ago, a procession of large mammals and the humans who hunted them crossed this bridge to America. Much of the Russian evidence for this migration has until now remained largely inaccessible to American scholars. American Beginnings brings together for the first time in one volume the most up-to-date archaeological and palaeoecological evidence on Beringia from both Russia and America.

"An invaluable resource. . . . It will no doubt remain the key reference book for Beringia for many years to come."—Steven Mithen, Journal of Human Evolution

"Extraordinary. The fifty-six contributors . . . represent the most prominent American and Russian researchers in the region."—Choice

"Publication of this well-illustrated compendium is a great service to early American and especially Siberian Upper Paleolithic archaeology."—Nicholas Saunders, New Scientist

"This is a great book . . . perhaps the greatest contribution to the archaeology of Beringia that has yet been published. . . . This is the kind of book to which archaeology should aspire."—Herbert D.G. Maschner, Antiquity
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front cover of The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age
The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age
Edited by D. Shane Miller, Ashley M. Smallwood, and Jesse W. Tune
University of Alabama Press, 2022
The definitive book on what is known about the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene archaeological record in the Southeast
 
The 1996 benchmark volume The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast, edited by David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman, was the first study to summarize what was known of the peoples who lived in the Southeast when ice sheets covered the northern part of the continent and mammals such as mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and ground sloths roamed the landscape.

The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age provides an updated, definitive synthesis of current archaeological research gleaned from an array of experts in the region. It is organized in three parts: state records, the regional perspective, and reflections and future directions. Chapters survey a diversity of topics including the distribution of the earliest archaeological sites in the region, chipped-stone tool technology, the expanding role of submerged archaeology, hunter-gatherer lifeways, past climate changes and the extinction of megafauna on the transitional landscape, and evidence of demographic changes at the end of the Ice Age. Discussion of the ethical responsibilities regarding the use of private collections and the relationship of archaeologists and the avocational community, insight from outside the Southeast, and considerations for future research round out the volume.
 
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front cover of Archaeology, History, and Predictive Modeling
Archaeology, History, and Predictive Modeling
Research at Fort Polk, 1972-2002
David G. Anderson and Steven D. Smith
University of Alabama Press, 2003
Allows scholars to more easily examine the record of human activity over the past 13,000 or more years in this part of western Louisiana and adjacent portions of east Texas

Fort Polk Military Reservation encompasses approximately 139,000 acres in western Louisiana 40 miles southwest of Alexandria. As a result of federal mandates for cultural resource investigation, more archaeological work has been undertaken there, beginning in the 1970s, than has occurred at any other comparably sized area in Louisiana or at most other localities in the southeastern United States. The extensive program of survey, excavation, testing, and large-scale data and artifact recovery, as well as historic and archival research, has yielded a massive amount of information. While superbly curated by the U.S. Army, the material has been difficult to examine and comprehend in its totality.

With this volume, Anderson and Smith collate and synthesize all the information into a comprehensive whole. Included are previous investigations, an overview of local environmental conditions, base military history and architecture, and the prehistoric and historic cultural sequence. An analysis of location, environmental, and assemblage data employing a sample of more than 2,800 sites and isolated finds was used to develop a predictive model that identifies areas where significant cultural resources are likely to occur. Developed in 1995, this model has already proven to be highly accurate and easy to use.

Archaeology, History, and Predictive Modeling will allow scholars to more easily examine the record of human activity over the past 13,000 or more years in this part of western Louisiana and adjacent portions of east Texas. It will be useful to southeastern archaeologists and anthropologists, both professional and amateur.
 
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Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest
Papers in Honor of Don D. Fowler
Nancy J. Parezo
University of Utah Press, 2014
Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest is a compilation of papers by friends and colleagues that honor Don D. Fowler. The volume encompasses the breadth and depth of Fowler’s work in archaeology and sister disciplines with original scholarship on the human past of the arid west. Included are theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers that synthesize and present fresh perspectives on Great Basin and Southwest archaeology and cover a sweep of topics from Paleoindian research to collaboration with Native Americans. Fowler has continually reminded scholars that to understand the past we must know how the local and specific is regionally and transculturally contextualized, how what we know came to be recognized, studied, and interpreted—in short, how the past still affects the present—and how regional and topical archaeology is part of a disciplinary endeavor that is as concerned with rigorous and inclusive knowledge production as it is with site description and cultural syntheses.

Readers will learn about the nature of archaeological careers, how archaeology has been conceptualized and conducted, the strengths and limitations of past and present approaches, and the institution building and political processes in which archaeologists engage. Contributors posit new thoughts designed to stimulate new lines of research and reflect on the state of our current knowledge about a wealth of topics. Each paper asks four questions about what Great Basin and southwestern archaeologists currently know: Where have we been? Where are we now? What do we still need to learn? Where are we going? This comprehensive volume will be of interest to those practicing or teaching archaeology and to students seeking to understand the intricacies of Great Basin and Southwest archaeology.

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front cover of The Archaeology of the Eastern Nevada Paleoarchaic, Part 1
The Archaeology of the Eastern Nevada Paleoarchaic, Part 1
The Sunshine Locality
Charlotte Beck
University of Utah Press, 2009
University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 126

The Sunshine Locality in the geographic center of the Great Basin has been the focus of scientific research since the mid-1960s. Authors Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones began studies there in 1992 and carried out excavations between 1993 and 1997 with the assistance of Hamilton College Field School. The area has yielded a rich and varied collection of diagnostic lithic tools, including fluted and unfluted lanceolate projectile points and a crescent, and a variety of gravers, scrapers, notches, and other tools common in Paleoindian toolkits across North America.

This volume provides the first comprehensive treatment that combines historical research with the more recent studies. Analysis and interpretations of the stratigraphic sequence in Sunshine Wash are presented, including analyses of sedimentary textures and structure, depositional processes, and chronology. Faunal remains are used to evaluate local and regional environmental changes. Finally, the authors address the nature of the processes that created the archaeological record at Sunshine Locality, its age, and whether artifacts and remains of extinct mammals also recovered at the site are associated. This work begins to answer unresolved questions about the paleoenvironmental resources of the Sunshine Locality.
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Barger Gulch
A Folsom Campsite in the Rocky Mountains
Todd A. Surovell
University of Arizona Press, 2022
At the end of the last Ice Age in a valley bottom in the Rocky Mountains, a group of bison hunters overwintered. Through the analysis of more than 75,000 pieces of chipped stone, archaeologist Todd A. Surovell is able to provide one of the most detailed looks yet at the lifeways of hunter-gatherers from 12,800 years ago.

The best archaeological sites are those that present problems and inspire research, writes Surovell. From the start, the Folsom site called Barger Gulch Locality B was one of those sites; it was a problem-rich environment. Many Folsom sites are sparse scatters of stone and bone, a reflection of a mobile lifestyle that leaves little archaeological materials. The people at Barger Gulch left behind tens of thousands of pieces of chipped stone; they appeared to have spent quite a bit of time there in comparison to other places they inhabited.

Summarizing findings from nine seasons of excavations, Surovell explains that the site represents a congregation of mobile hunter-gatherers who spent winter along Barger Gulch, a tributary of the Colorado River. Surovell uses spatial patterns in chipped stone to infer the locations of hearths and house features. He examines the organization of household interiors and discusses differential use of interior and exterior spaces. Data allow inference about the people who lived at the site, including aspects of the identity of flintknappers and household versus group mobility. The site shows evidence of a Paleoindian camp circle, child flintknapping, household production of weaponry, and the fission/fusion dynamics of group composition that is typical of nomadic peoples.

Barger Gulch provides key findings on Paleoindian technological variation and spatial and social organization.
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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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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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front cover of Coastal Foragers of the Gran Desierto
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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front cover of The Cochise Cultural Sequence in Southeastern Arizona
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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Complex Hunter Gatherers
Evolution Organization of Prehistoric Communities Plateau of Northwestern NA
William C Prentiss
University of Utah Press, 2004

The Plateau region of the Pacific Northwest witnessed the emergence, persistence, and decline of a diverse array of hunter-gatherer communities during the course of a past several thousand year period. Consequently, the region contains an archaeological record of groups who lived at times in permanent villages, employed complex resource procurement and processing strategies, participated in wide-ranging trade networks, and maintained social organizations featuring high degrees of social inequality.

Complex Hunter-Gatherers presents a broad synthesis of the archaeology of the Plateau, inclusive of the Columbia and Fraser-Thompson drainages. The contributors seek to further our understanding of the nature of prehistoric social organization, subsistence practices, and lifeways of those living on the Plateau, and to expand upon this foundation to understand the evolution and organization of complex hunter-gatherers in general.

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Contemporary Lithic Analysis in the Southeast
Problems, Solutions, and Interpretations
Philip J. Carr
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Representing work by a mixture of veterans and a new generation of lithic analysts, Contemporary Lithic Analysis in the Southeast explores fresh ideas while reworking and pushing the limits of traditional methods and hypotheses.
 
The variability in the southeastern lithic landscape over space and through time makes it a dynamic and challenging region for archaeologists.  Demonstrating a holistic approach and using a variety of methods, this volume aims to derive information regarding prehistoric lifeways from lithic assemblages.
 
The contributors use data from a wide temporal span and a variety of sites across the Southeast, ranging from Texas to South Carolina and from Florida to Kentucky. Not merely cautionary tales, these case studies demonstrate the necessity of looking beyond the bag of lithic material sitting in the laboratory to address the key questions in the organization of prehistoric lithic technologies.  How do field-collection strategies bias our interpretations? What is therelationship between technological strategies and tool design? How can inferences regarding social and economic strategies be made from lithic assemblages?
 
Contributors
William Andrefsky Jr. / Andrew P. Bradbury / Philip J. Carr / CarolynConklin /
D. Randall Cooper / Jason L.Edmonds / Jay D. Franklin / Albert C.Goodyear III /
Joel Hardison / Lucinda M. Langston / D. Shane Miller / George H.Odell /
Charlotte D. Pevny / Tara L. Potts /Sarah E. Price / Douglas Sain / Sarah C.Sherwood /
Ashley M. Smallwood /Paul Thacker
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front cover of Crowfield (Af Hj-31)
Crowfield (Af Hj-31)
A Unique Paleoindian Fluted Point Site from Southwestern Ontario
D. Brian Deller and Christopher J. Ellis with contributions by James R. Keron and Roger H. King and a foreword by Henry T. Wright
University of Michigan Press, 2011
This monograph provides a detailed description and analysis of the Crowfield Early (fluted point associated) Paleoindian site, excavated in 1981 and 1982.
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Entering America
Northeast Asia and Beringia Before the Last Glacial Maximum
David B. Madsen
University of Utah Press, 2004

Where did the first Americans come from and when did they get here? That basic question of American archaeology, long thought to have been solved, is re-emerging as a critical issue as the number of well-excavated sites dating to pre-Clovis times increases. It now seems possible that small populations of human foragers entered the Americas prior to the creation of the continental glacial barrier. While the archaeological and paleoecological aspects of a post-glacial entry have been well studied, there is little work available on the possibility of a pre-glacial entry.

Entering America seeks to fill that void by providing the most up-to-date information on the nature of environmental and cultural conditions in northeast Asia and Beringia (the Bering land bridge) immediately prior to the Last Glacial Maximum. Because the peopling of the New World is a question of international archaeological interest, this volume will be important to specialists and nonspecialists alike.

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front cover of Environmental Change and Human Adaptation in the Ancient American Southwest
Environmental Change and Human Adaptation in the Ancient American Southwest
Doyel and Dean
University of Utah Press, 2006
Archaeology provides an ideal avenue for examining long-term processes and interrelationships between human behavior and environmental stability, variation, and change. The American Southwest is particularly well suited for such 'deep-time' investigations because of its comprehensive archaeological record, rich ethnographic and historical data on its peoples, and unmatched reconstructions of multiple environmental variables across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales.
 
This volume contains a varied and instructive set of studies of human behavioral adaptation to environmental change in the ancient Southwest. It makes significant contributions to southwestern prehistory, settlement pattern studies, agriculture, behavioral ecology, paleo-environmental reconstruction, and statistical and computer-aided modeling. The mix of case studies and syntheses covers the Colorado Plateau, Sonoran Desert, Mogollon Highlands, and Rio Grande Valley and summarizes the work of some of the leading researchers in the region.
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Exploring Cause and Explanation
Historical Ecology, Demography, and Movement in the American Southwest
Cynthia L. Herhahn
University Press of Colorado, 2016
This 13th biennial volume of the Southwest Symposium highlights three distinct archaeological themes—historical ecology, demography, and movement—tied together through the consideration of the knowledge tools of cause and explanation. These tools focus discussion on how and why questions, facilitate assessing past and current knowledge of the Pueblo Southwest, and provide unexpected bridges across the three themes. For instance, people are ultimately the source of the movement of artifacts, but that statement is inadequate for explaining how artifact movement occurred or even why, at a regional scale, different kinds of movement are implicated at different times. Answering such questions can easily incorporate questions about changes in climate or in population density or size.
 
Each thematic section is introduced by an established author who sets the framework for the chapters that follow. Some contributors adopt regional perspectives in which both classical regions (the central San Juan or lower Chama basins) and peripheral zones (the Alamosa basin or the upper San Juan) are represented. Chapters are also broad temporally, ranging from the Younger Dryas Climatic interval (the Clovis-Folsom transition) to the Protohistoric Pueblo world and the eighteenth-century ethnogenesis of a unique Hispanic identity in northern New Mexico. Others consider methodological issues, including the burden of chronic health afflictions at the level of the community and advances in estimating absolute population size. Whether emphasizing time, space, or methodology, the authors address the processes, steps, and interactions that affect current understanding of change or stability of cultural traditions.
 
Exploring Cause and Explanation considers themes of perennial interest but demonstrates that archaeological knowledge in the Southwest continues to expand in directions that could not have been predicted fifty years ago.

Contributors: Kirk C. Anderson, Jesse A. M. Ballenger, Jeffery Clark, J. Andrew Darling, B. Sunday Eiselt, Mark D. Elson, Mostafa Fayek, Jeffrey R. Ferguson, Severin Fowles, Cynthia Herhahn, Vance T. Holliday, Sharon Hull, Deborah L. Huntley, Emily Lena Jones, Kathryn Kamp, Jeremy Kulisheck, Karl W. Laumbach, Toni S. Laumbach, Stephen H. Lekson, Virginia T. McLemore, Frances Joan Mathien, Michael H. Ort, Scott G. Ortman, Mary Ownby, Mary M. Prasciunas, Ann F. Ramenofsky, Erik Simpson, Ann L. W. Stodder, Ronald H. Towner
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front cover of The First Rocky Mountaineers
The First Rocky Mountaineers
Coloradans before Colorado
Marcel Kornfeld
University of Utah Press, 2013
Based on archaeological research in Colorado’s Middle Park—a high mountain basin initially encountered by Europeans in the early 1800s and occupied for centuries by the Ute people—The First Rocky Mountaineers is a prehistory of the earliest people of the region at the conclusion of the Ice Age. The Utes and their predecessors lived and thrived for 12,000 years in this high mountain setting, an environment that demanded unique adaptive strategies because of cold stress and hypoxic conditions. People of Middle Park coped with some of the most extreme conditions of any prehistoric population in North America, dealing with the stressors of high elevations and low temperatures by intensifying food acquisition, constructing shelters, and tailoring sophisticated warm clothing. The archaeological record of these early Coloradans, while still meager, provides a wealth of information about lifeways in the Rocky Mountain high country.
 
The first inhabitants of Rocky Mountain high country left a rich record of shelters, tools, and projectile points as well as food residues in the form of bison bone, all dating between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago. This record provides a robust database for interpreting their lifeways and unique adaptations. Kornfeld offers the first treatment of the original Middle Park and Rocky Mountain human populations from a biocultural perspective. This approach suggests that both biological and cultural processes frame the outcome of a successful human adaptation. While such a process may be resisted by some anthropologists investigating low-elevation groups, it is essential when trying to understand the dynamics of those living in the high country.

Chosen by Foreword as the 2014 bronze winner in science. 
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front cover of The Fisher Site
The Fisher Site
Archaeological, Geological and Paleobotanical Studies at an Early Paleo-Indian Site in Southern Ontario, Canada
Peter L. Storck
University of Michigan Press, 1997
A detailed, multidisciplinary report on a large Early Paleoindian site in the Georgian Bay region.
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front cover of Foraging in the Tennessee River Valley
Foraging in the Tennessee River Valley
12,500 to 8,000 Years Ago
Kandace D. Hollenbach
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Plants are inarguably a significant component of the diets of foraging peoples in non-arctic environments. As such, the decisions and activities associated with the gathering and exploitation of plants are important to foragers’ subsistence pursuits. Plant remains are particularly important for understanding gathering activities. Inasmuch as plant foods comprised a considerable portion of early foragers’ diets, and the gathering and processing of these plant resources occupied a significant proportion of the population, namely women, children, and the elderly, an understanding of gathering activities and how they relate to use of the landscape is critical. Organic remains are poorly preserved in the acidic soils of the Southeast and are often limited or absent from open-air sites, but archaeological deposits protected within rockshelters provide an exception. Organic remains are consistently well preserved in their rain-protected deposits, and rockshelters are locations that groups repeatedly visited. Because of this repeated use and remarkable preservation, significant quantities of well-preserved faunal and botanical remains can be recovered from rockshelter deposits. 
 
In Foraging, Hollenbach analyzes and compares botanical remains from archaeological excavations in four rockshelters in the Middle Tennessee River Valley. The artifact assemblages of rockshelter and open-air sites are similar, so it is reasonable to assume that faunal and botanical assemblages would be similar, if open-air sites had comparable preservation of organic remains. The rich organic data recovered from rockshelters therefore may be considered representative of general subsistence and settlement strategies, and can significantly inform our views of lifeways of Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic peoples. The data produced from this analysis provides a valuable baseline of plant food use by early foragers in the region, and establishes a model of Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic lifeways in the Southeast.
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front cover of From Colonization to Domestication
From Colonization to Domestication
Population, Environment, and the Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America
D. Shane Miller
University of Utah Press, 2018
Winner of the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize.

Eastern North America is one of only a handful of places in the world where people first discovered how to domesticate plants. In this book, anthropologist Shane Miller uses two common, although unconventional, sources of archaeological data—stone tools and the distribution of archaeological sites—to trace subsistence decisions from the initial colonization of the American Southeast at the end of the last Ice Age to the appearance of indigenous domesticated plants roughly 5,000 years ago.

Miller argues that the origins of plant domestication lie within the context of a boom/bust cycle that culminated in the mid-Holocene, when hunter-gatherers were able to intensively exploit shellfish, deer, oak, and hickory. After this resource “boom” ended, some groups shifted to other plants in place of oak and hickory, which included the suite of plants that were later domesticated. Accompanying these subsistence trends is evidence for increasing population pressure and declining returns from hunting. Miller contends, however, that the appearance of domesticated plants in eastern North America, rather than simply being an example of necessity as the mother of invention, is the result of individuals adjusting to periods of both abundance and shortfall driven by climate change. 
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front cover of Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeology
Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeology
From the Dent Site to the Rocky Mountains
Robert H. Brunswig
University Press of Colorado, 2007
As the Ice Age waned, Clovis hunter-gatherers began to explore and colonize the area now known as Colorado. Their descendents and later Paleoindian migrants spread throughout Colorado's plains and mountains, adapting to diverse landforms and the changing climate. In this new volume, Robert H. Brunswig and Bonnie L. Pitblado assemble experts in archaeology, paleoecology-climatology, and paleofaunal analysis to share new discoveries about these ancient people of Colorado.

The editors introduce the research with scientific context. A review of seventy-five years of Paleoindian archaeology in Colorado highlights the foundation on which new work builds, and a survey of Colorado's ancient climates and ecologies helps readers understand Paleoindian settlement patterns.

Eight essays discuss archaeological evidence from Plains to high Rocky Mountain sites. The book offers the most thorough analysis to date of Dent--the first Clovis site discovered. Essays on mountain sites show how advances in methodology and technology have allowed scholars to reconstruct settlement patterns and changing lifeways in this challenging environment.

Colorado has been home to key moments in human settlement and in the scientific study of our ancient past. Readers interested in the peopling of the New World as well as those passionate about the methods and history of archaeology will find new material and satisfying overviews in this book. Contributors include Rosa Maria Albert, Robert H. Brunswig, Reid A. Bryson, Linda Scott Cummings, James Doerner, Daniel C. Fisher, David L. Fox, Bonnie L. Pitblado, Jeffrey L. Saunders, Todd A. Surovell, R. A. Varney, and Nicole M. Waguespack.


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front cover of Hardaway Revisited
Hardaway Revisited
Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast
I. Randolph Daniel
University of Alabama Press, 1998

A provocative reanalysis of one of the most famous Early Archaic archaeological sites in the southeastern United States

Since the early 1970s, southeastern archaeologists have focused their attention on identifying the function of prehistoric sites and settlement practices during the Early Archaic period (ca. 9,000-10,500 B.P.). The Hardaway site in the North Carolina Piedmont, one of the most importantarchaeological sites in eastern North America, has not yet figured notably in this research. Daniel's reanalysis of the Hardaway artifacts provides a broad range of evidence—including stone tool morphology, intrasite distributions of artifacts, and regional distributions of stoneraw material types—that suggests that Hardaway played a unique role in Early Archaic settlement.

The Hardaway site functioned as a base camp where hunting and gathering groups lived for extended periods. From this camp they exploited nearby stone outcrops in the Uwharrie Mountains to replenish expended toolkits. Based on the  results of this study, Daniel's new model proposes that settlement was conditioned less by the availability of food resources than by the limited distribution of high-quality knappable stone in the region. These results challenge the prevalent view of Early Archaic settlement that group movement was largely confined by the availability of food resources within major southeastern river valleys.

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front cover of Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Lower Ohio River Valley
Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Lower Ohio River Valley
Richard Jefferies
University of Alabama Press, 2009
By the Early Holocene (10,000 to 8,000 B.P.), small wandering bands of Archaic hunter-gatherers began to annually follow the same hunting trails, basing their temporary camps on seasonal conditions and the presence of food. The Pleistocene glaciers had receded by this time, making food more plentiful in some areas and living conditions less hazardous. Although these Archaic peoples have long been known from their primary activities as hunters and gatherers of wild food resources, recent evidence has been found that indicates they also began rudimentary cultivation sometime during the Middle Holocene.
Richard Jefferies—an Archaic specialist—comprehensively addresses the approximately 7,000 years of the prehistory of eastern North America, termed the Archaic Period by archaeologists. Jefferies centers his research on a 380-mile section of the Lower Ohio River Valley, an area rife with both temporary and long-term Archaic sites. He covers the duration of the Holocene and provides a compendium of knowledge of the era, including innovative research strategies and results. Presenting these data from a cultural-ecological perspective emphasizing the relationships between hunter-gatherers and the environments in which they lived, Jefferies integrates current research strategies with emerging theories that are beginning to look at culture history in creative ways
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front cover of Ice Age Hunters of the Rockies
Ice Age Hunters of the Rockies
Dennis J. Stanford
University Press of Colorado, 1992
Ice Age Hunters of the Rockies explores the many questions that still surround the Pleistocene cultures of 12,000 years ago and the adaptations of these early civilizations to the last great ice age, covering issues such as the time of arrival of the first Americans, adaptation to various environments, and the use by early people of high-altitude sites.
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Ice Age Peoples of North America
Robonson Bonnichsen
Oregon State University Press, 1999

front cover of In the Eastern Fluted Point Tradition
In the Eastern Fluted Point Tradition
Joseph A. M. Gingerich
University of Utah Press, 2013

Eastern North America has one of the largest inventories of Paleoindian sites anywhere in the Americas. Despite this rich record of early human settlement during the late Pleistocene, there are few widely published reports or summaries of Paleoindian research in the region. The contributors to this volume present more than four decades of Early Paleoindian research in eastern North America, including previously unpublished site reports and updates on recent research. Their work helps create a more cohesive picture of the early human occupation of North America.

This data-rich volume provides specific information on artifacts and basic site descriptions which will allow for more thorough comparisons of eastern fluted point sites. Divided into four sections—chronology and environment, reinvestigations of classic sites, new sites and perspectives, and synthesis and conclusions—the volume will encourage further consideration of the sites included and their role in shaping our understanding of huntergatherer lifeways during the late Pleistocene. In the Eastern Fluted Point Tradition is a must read for scholars of Paleoindian archaeology and those generally interested in the prehistory of North America.

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In the Eastern Fluted Point Tradition
Volume II
Edited by Joseph A. M. Gingerich
University of Utah Press, 2017
This volume highlights the importance of eastern Paleoindian research in understanding some of the first inhabitants of North America. Although diverse in manufacture and style, fluted point production represents the first widespread cultural phenomenon in North America. Volume II of In the Eastern Fluted Point Tradition continues the work begun in Volume I, expanding the Paleoindian literature with up-to-date summaries of late Pleistocene research in the eastern United States. Twenty-one chapters provide data from additional site reports, regional surveys and syntheses, and artifact studies from areas not previously included. Much of the information in this volume comes from sites that were discovered or excavated only in the last decade. These artifact and site-specific studies serve as examples of the detailed analyses required on Paleoindian assemblages and provide an opportunity to better understand changes in population, technology, and settlement over time. Together, the two volumes advance Paleoindian studies in eastern North America, offering new data, interpretations, and hypotheses to create a baseline for future research. 
 
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front cover of The Leavitt Site
The Leavitt Site
A Parkhill Phase Paleo-Indian Occupation in Central Michigan
Michael J. Shott, with a foreword by Henry T. Wright
University of Michigan Press, 1993
This illustrated monograph is an innovative analysis of forager archaeology in general and Paleo-Indian studies in particular. This is a companion volume to Thedford II: A Paleo-Indian Site in the Ausable River Watershed of Southwestern Ontario (Memoir 24).
[more]

front cover of Lithic Analysis and Cultural Inference
Lithic Analysis and Cultural Inference
A Paleo-Indian Case
Edwin N. Wilmsen
University of Arizona Press, 1970
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
[more]

front cover of Los Primeros Mexicanos
Los Primeros Mexicanos
Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene People of Sonora
Guadalupe Sánchez
University of Arizona Press, 2016
In 1927, near the town of Folsom, New Mexico, a spectacular discovery altered our understanding of early humans on the American continent. Scientists excavating a bison from the late Pleistocene age discovered a fluted projectile point wedged between the animal’s ribs—forceful evidence that humans existed during the Ice Age together with now-extinct animals. Subsequent discoveries at nearby Clovis introduced scientists to the first large-scale occupation of the Americas—Clovis culture—with a time span of 13,250 to 12,500 years ago.

Los Primeros Mexicanos explores the Clovis occupation of Mexico’s northwest region of Sonora. Using extensive primary data concerning specific artifacts, assemblages, and Paleoindian archaeology, Mexican archaeologist Guadalupe Sánchez presents a synopsis and critical review of current data and a unique summary of information about the First People of México that is difficult to find in Spanish and until now not available in English.

Sánchez’s essential framework for early Sonora prehistory includes the Sonoran landscape, the biotic communities, a history of investigations, the regional cultural-historical chronology of Sonora, and the Clovis record in the surrounding area. The Sonoran settlement pattern, she asserts, indicates that Clovis groups were hunter-gatherers who exploited a wide range of environments, locating their settlements near lithic sources for tool-making, water sources, large-prey animals, and a variety of edible plants and small animals.

In 1592, a Jesuit priest, José de Acosta, chronicled his puzzlement over when man first arrived in the New World. Four hundred years later, the peopling of the American continent is still intensely interesting to scientists and researchers. Los Primeros Mexicanos offers an exhaustive synthesis of available archaeological evidence to shed light on Clovis occupation in Sonora, Mexico.
[more]

front cover of Medicine Creek
Medicine Creek
Seventy Years of Archaeological Investigations
Edited by Donna C. Roper
University of Alabama Press, 2002

This valuable book is an excellent overview of long-term archaeological investigations in the valley that remains at the forefront of studies on the First Americans.


 

In southwest Nebraska, a stretch of Medicine Creek approximately 20 kilometers long holds a remarkable concentration of both late Paleoindian and late prehistoric sites. Unlike several nearby similar and parallel streams that drain the divide between the Platte and Republican Rivers, Medicine Creek has undergone 70 years of archaeological excavations that reveal a long occupation by North America's earliest inhabitants.


 

Donna Roper has collected the written research in this volume that originated in a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1947 River Basin Survey. In addition to 12 chapters reviewing the long history of archaeological investigations at Medicine Creek, the volume contains recent analyses of and new perspectives on old sites and old data. Two of the sites discussed are considered for pre-Clovis status because they show evidence of human modification of mammoth faunal remains in the late Pleistocene Age. Studies of later occupation of Upper Republican phase sites yield information on the lifeways of Plains village people.

 

Presented by major investigators at Medicine Creek, the contributions are a balanced blend of the historical research and the current state-of-the-art work and analysis. Roper's comprehensive look at the archaeology, paleontology, and geomorphology at Medicine Creek gives scientists and amateurs a full assessment of a site that has taught us much about the North American continent and its early people.


 


 

[more]

front cover of Meetings at the Margins
Meetings at the Margins
Prehistoric Cultural Interactions in the Intermountain West
David Rhode
University of Utah Press, 2012

Environmental conditions clearly influenced the cultural development of societies in the Intermountain West, but how did interactions with neighbors living along the region’s borders affect a society’s growth and advancement, its cultural integrity, and its long-term survival? Relationships among different societies are, of course, crucial to the spread of information, innovation, and belief systems; to the maintenance of exchange and mating networks; and to the forging of ethnic identity. In these ways and others, intergroup relationships can be as strong a force in shaping a society’s identity and future as are local social and economic dynamics.

Meetings at the Margins focuses on the ways in which different ­societies in the Intermountain West profoundly influenced each other’s histories throughout the more than fourteen millennia of prehistoric occupation. Historically, inhabitants of this region frequently interacted with more than forty different groups—neighbors who spoke some two dozen different languages and maintained diverse economies. The contributors to this volume demonstrate that in the prehistoric Intermountain West, as elsewhere throughout the world, intergroup interactions were pivotal for the dynamic processes of cultural cohesion, differentiation, and change, and they affirm the value of a long-term, large-scale view of prehistory.
 

[more]

front cover of Method and Theory in American Archaeology
Method and Theory in American Archaeology
Gordon R. Willey
University of Alabama Press, 2001

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

This invaluable classic provides the framework for the development of American archaeology during the last half of the 20th century.

In 1958 Gordon R. Willey and Philip Phillips first published Method and Theory in American Archaeology—a volume that went through five printings, the last in 1967 at the height of what became known as the new, or processual, archaeology. The advent of processual archaeology, according to Willey and Phillips, represented a "theoretical debate . . . a question of whether archaeology should be the study of cultural history or the study of cultural process."

Willey and Phillips suggested that little interpretation had taken place in American archaeology, and their book offered an analytical perspective; the methods they described and the structural framework they used for synthesizing American prehistory were all geared toward interpretation. Method and Theory served as the catalyst and primary reader on the topic for over a decade.

This facsimile reprint edition of the original University of Chicago Press volume includes a new foreword by Gordon R. Willey, which outlines the state of American archaeology at the time of the original publication, and a new introduction by the editors to place the book in historical context. The bibliography is exhaustive. Academic libraries, students, professionals, and knowledgeable amateurs will welcome this new edition of a standard-maker among texts on American archaeology.


 

 


[more]

front cover of Migration and Ethnicity in Middle Range Societies
Migration and Ethnicity in Middle Range Societies
A View from the Southwest
Tammy Stone
University of Utah Press, 2015

Author Tammy Stone focuses on a number of general deliberations on the archaeology of middle-range society and the prehistory of the American Southwest. This includes the complex dynamics of migration, identity, ethnic interaction, and the ability of archaeologists to identify these patterns in the archaeological record. The integration and ultimate expulsion of a group of Kayenta Anasazi at Point of Pines Pueblo in the Mogollon Highlands of east-central Arizona provides a case study and location where these themes played out. Stone uses a detailed architectural analysis of the pueblo to attain a nuanced and dynamic understanding of migration from the perspective of both the Kayenta migrants and their Mogollon hosts. By examining the choices that individuals, families, and small groups made about identity and alliance from the perspective of both the migrants and host community—the latter being an aspect often missing from analyses of migration—this volume provides never-before-published data on Point of Pines Pueblo and contributes considerably to the study of community dynamics at large. 

[more]

front cover of Northwest Coast
Northwest Coast
Archaeology as Deep History
Madonna L. Moss
University Press of Colorado, 2011
From the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series, this concise overview of the archeology of the Northwest Coast of North America challenges stereotypes about complex hunter-gatherers. Madonna Moss argues that these ancient societies were first and foremost fishers and food producers and merit study outside socio-evolutionary frameworks. Moss approaches the archaeological record on its own terms, recognizing that changes through time often reflect sampling and visibility of the record itself. The book synthesizes current research and is accessible to students and professionals alike.
[more]

front cover of The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast
The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast
Edited by David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman
University of Alabama Press, 1996

The southeastern United States has one of the richest records of early human settlement of any area of North America. This book provides the first state-by-state summary of Paleoindian and Early Archaic research from the region, together with an appraisal of models developed to interpret the data. It summarizes what we know of the peoples who lived in the Southeast more than 8,000 years ago—when giant ice sheets covered the northern part of the continent, and such mammals as elephants, saber-toothed tigers, and ground sloths roamed the landscape. Extensively illustrated, this benchmark collection of essays on the state of Paleoindian and Early Archaic research in the Southeast will guide future studies on the subject of the region's first inhabitants for years to come.

Divided in three parts, the volume includes:

Part I: Modeling Paleoindian and Early Archaic Lifeways in the Southeast

Environmental and Chronological Considerations, David G. Anderson, Lisa D. O'Steen, and Kenneth E. Sassaman
Modeling Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast: A Historical Perspective, David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman

Models of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement in the Lower Southeast, David G. Anderson
Early Archaic Settlement in the South Carolina Coastal Plain, Kenneth E. Sassaman
Raw Material Availability and Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast, I. Randolph Daniel Jr.
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement along the Oconee Drainage, Lisa D. O'Steen
Haw River Revisited: Implications for Modeling Terminal Late Glacial and Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems in the Southeast, John S. Cable
Early Archiac Settlement and Technology: Lessons from Tellico, Larry R. Kimball
Paleoindians Near the Edge: A Virginia Perspective, Michael F. Johnson

Part II: The Regional Record

The Need for a Regional Perspective, Kenneth E. Sassaman and David G. Anderson
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in the South Carolina Area, David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman
The Taylor Site: An Early Occupation in Central South Carolina, James L. Michie
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in Tennessee, John B. Boster and Mark R. Norton
A Synopsis of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in Alabama, Eugene M. Futato
Statified Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Deposits at Dust Cave, Northwestern Alabama, Boyce N. Driskell
Bone and Ivory Tools from Submerged Paleoindian Sites in Florida, James S. Dunbar and S. David Webb
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Data from Mississippi, Samuel O. McGahey
Early and Middle Paleoindian Sites in the Northeastern Arkansas Region, J. Christopher Gillam

Part III: Commentary

A Framework for the Paleoindian/Early Archaic Transition, Joel Gunn
Modeling Communities and Other Thankless Tasks, Dena F. Dincauze
An Arkansas View, Dan F. Morse
Comments, Henry T. Wright

[more]

front cover of Paleoindian Geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains
Paleoindian Geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains
By Vance T. Holliday
University of Texas Press, 1997

The Southern High Plains of northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico are rich in Paleoindian archaeological sites, including such well-known ones as Clovis, Lubbock Lake, Plainview, and Midland. These sites have been extensively researched over decades, not only by archaeologists but also by geoscientists, whose studies of soils and stratigraphy have yielded important information about cultural chronology and paleoenvironments across the region.

In this book, Vance T. Holliday synthesizes the data from these earlier studies with his own recent research to offer the most current and comprehensive overview of the geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains during the earliest human occupation. He delves into twenty sites in depth, integrating new and old data on site geomorphology, stratigraphy, soils, geochronology, and paleoenvironments. He also compares the Southern High Plains sites with other sites across the Great Plains, for a broader chronological and paleoenvironmental perspective.

With over ninety photographs, maps, cross sections, diagrams, and artifact drawings, this book will be essential reading for geoarchaeologists, archaeologists, and Quaternary geoscientists, as well as avocational archaeologists who take part in Paleoindian site study throughout the American West.

[more]

front cover of Paleoindian Lifeways of the Cody Complex
Paleoindian Lifeways of the Cody Complex
Edward J. Knell
University of Utah Press, 2013

Paleoindian Lifeways of the Cody Complex represents the first synthesis in the more than fifty year history of one of the most important Paleoindian cultural traditions in North America. Research on the Cody complex (~10,000–8,000 radiocarbon yrs B.P.) began in the 1940s; however, until now publications have focused almost exclusively on specific sites, issues of projectile point technology and typology, and bison hunting. This volume provides fresh perspectives and cutting-edge research that significantly increases our understanding of the Cody complex by focusing more squarely on the human behaviors that created the archaeological record, rather than on more strictly technical aspects of the artifacts and faunal remains.

Because the Cody complex extends from the central Canadian plains to the Gulf of Mexico and from Nevada to the eastern Great Lakes—making it second only to Clovis in geographical expanse—this volume will appeal to a wide range of North American archaeologists. Across this broad geographic distribution, the contributors address hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies from diverse ecosystems at the onset of the Holocene, which will also make it of interest to human ecologists and paleoenvironmental  researchers. Paleoindian Lifeways of the Cody Complex provides an innovative synthesis of a well-known but little-studied cultural tradition that opens the door for a new generation of exciting research.

[more]

front cover of Paleoindian or Paleoarchaic?
Paleoindian or Paleoarchaic?
Great Basin Human Ecology at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition
Kelly E Graf
University of Utah Press, 2008
Were the earliest inhabitants of the Great Basin 'Paleoindians' in the traditional sense? Were they highly mobile foragers? Did they hunt large, now extinct animals like mammoth, horse, and camel?
 
Great Basin archaeologists have argued that the earliest inhabitants possessed an organization strategy of mixed 'Paleoindian' and 'Archaic' lifeways, referring to them as 'Paleoarchaic.'
 
Recent excavations of rock shelters and caves, coupled with innovative studies of the surface archaeological record have increased our understanding of human organization in the Great Basin during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. When did humans first inhabit the Great Basin? How do we interpret projectile point variability from late Pleistocene and early Holocene contexts? What land-use and foraging strategies characterized the early inhabitants? Did these hunter-gatherers possess a Paleoindian or Paleoarchaic lifeway?
 
This volume offers an updated perspective of human ecology and organization during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Great Basin, 13,000–8,000 years ago.
[more]

front cover of Patagonian Prehistory
Patagonian Prehistory
Human Ecology and Cultural Evolution in the Land of Giants
Raven Garvey
University of Utah Press, 2021
Generally portrayed as a windswept wasteland of marginal use for human habitation, Patagonia is an unmatched testing ground for some of the world’s most important questions about human ecology and cultural change. In this volume, archaeologist Raven Garvey presents a critical synthesis of Patagonian prehistory, bringing an evolutionary perspective and unconventional evidence to bear on enduringly contentious issues in New World archaeology, including initial human colonization of the Americas, widespread depopulation between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago, and the transition from foraging to farming.
 
Garvey’s novel hypotheses question common assumptions regarding Patagonia’s suitability for prehistoric hunter-gatherers. She makes four primary arguments: (1) the surprising lack of clothing in parts of prehistoric Patagonia supports a relatively slow initial colonization of the Americas; (2) the sparse record of human habitation during the middle Holocene may be due to prehistoric behavioral changes and archaeological sampling methods rather than population decline; (3) farming never took root in Patagonia because risks associated with farming likely outweighed potential benefits; and, finally, (4) the broad trajectory of cultural change in Patagonia owes as much to feedback between population size and technology as to conditions in the rugged Patagonian outback itself.
[more]

front cover of People and Culture in Ice Age Americas
People and Culture in Ice Age Americas
New Dimensions in Paleoamerican Archaeology
Rafael Suarez and Ciprian F. Ardelean
University of Utah Press, 2018
This edited volume, which emerged from a symposium organized at the 2014 SAA meeting in Austin, Texas, covers recent Paleoamerican research and site excavations from Patagonia to Canada. Contributors discuss the peopling of the Americas, early American assemblages, lifeways, and regional differences. Many scholars present current data previously unavailable in English. Chapters are organized south to north in an attempt to shake the usual north-centric focus of Pleistocene–Early Holocene archaeological studies and to bring to the forefront the many fascinating discoveries being made in southern latitudes. The diversity of approaches over a large geographic expanse generates discussion that prompts a re-evaluation of predominant paradigms about how the expansion of Homo sapiens in the Western Hemisphere took place. Those who work in Paleoamerican studies will embrace this book for its new data and for its comparative look at the Americas.
[more]

front cover of People in a Sea of Grass
People in a Sea of Grass
Archaeology's Changing Perspective on Indigenous Plains Communities
Edited by Matthew E. Hill and Lauren W. Ritterbush
University of Utah Press, 2021
Ninety years ago Great Plains archaeologists such as Waldo Wedel and William Duncan Strong made foundational contributions to American archaeology, enabling new discoveries, insights, and interpretations. This volume explores how twenty-first-century archaeologists have built upon, remodeled, and sometimes rejected the inferences of these earlier scholars with updated overviews and analyses.

Contributors highlight how Indigenous Plains groups participated in large-scale social networks in which ideas, symbols, artifacts, and people moved across North America over the last 2,000 years. They also discuss cultural transformation, focusing on key demographic, economic, social, and ceremonial factors associated with change, including colonization and integration into the social and political economies of transatlantic societies. Cultural traditions covered include Woodland-era Kansas City Hopewell, late prehistoric Central Plains tradition, and ancestral and early historic Wichita, Pawnee and Arikara, Kanza, Plains Apache, and Puebloan migrants. As the first review of Plains archaeology in more than a decade, this book brings studies of early Indigenous
peoples of the central and southern Plains into a new era.
[more]

front cover of Plainview
Plainview
The Enigmatic Paleoindian Artifact Style of the Great Plains
Edited by Vance T. Holliday, Eileen Johnson, and Ruthann Knudson
University of Utah Press, 2017
The Plainview Paleoindian artifact style was first recognized in 1947, after numerous projectile points were found during excavations of a bison kill site near Plainview, Texas. In the decades that followed, however, Plainview became something of a catch-all category with artifacts from across the continent being lumped together based merely on gross similarities. This volume unravels the meaning of Plainview, detailing what is known about this particular technology and time period. Contributing authors from the United States and Mexico present new data gleaned from the reinvestigation of past excavations, notes, maps, and materials from the original Plainview site as well as reports from other Plainview Paleoindian sites across the Great Plains, northern Mexico, and the southwestern United States. 
[more]

front cover of A Prehistory of South America
A Prehistory of South America
Ancient Cultural Diversity on the Least Known Continent
Jerry D. Moore
University Press of Colorado, 2014
A Prehistory of South America is an overview of the ancient and historic native cultures of the entire continent of South America based on the most recent archaeological investigations. This accessible, clearly written text is designed to engage undergraduate and beginning graduate students in anthropology.
 
For more than 12,000 years, South American cultures ranged from mobile hunters and gatherers to rulers and residents of colossal cities. In the process, native South American societies made advancements in agriculture and economic systems and created great works of art—in pottery, textiles, precious metals, and stone—that still awe the modern eye. Organized in broad chronological periods, A Prehistory of South America explores these diverse human achievements, emphasizing the many adaptations of peoples from a continent-wide perspective. Moore examines the archaeologies of societies across South America, from the arid deserts of the Pacific coast and the frigid Andean highlands to the humid lowlands of the Amazon Basin and the fjords of Patagonia and beyond.
 
Illustrated in full color and suitable for an educated general reader interested in the Precolumbian peoples of South America, A Prehistory of South America is a long overdue addition to the literature on South American archaeology. 
[more]

front cover of Recent Developments in Southeastern Archaeology
Recent Developments in Southeastern Archaeology
From Colonization to Complexity
David G. Anderson
University Press of Colorado, 2012
This book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series represents a period-by-period synthesis of southeastern prehistory designed for high school and college students, avocational archaeologists, and interested members of the general public. It also serves as a basic reference for professional archaeologists worldwide on the record of a remarkable region.
[more]

front cover of Rivers of Change
Rivers of Change
Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America
Bruce D. Smith
University of Alabama Press, 2007

Organized into four sections, the twelve chapters of Rivers of Change are concerned with prehistoric Native American societies in eastern North America and their transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to a reliance on food production. Written at different times over a decade, the chapters vary both in length and topical focus. They are joined together, however, by a number of shared “rivers of change.”

[more]

front cover of The Sandy Ridge and Halstead Paleo-Indian Sites
The Sandy Ridge and Halstead Paleo-Indian Sites
Unifacial Tool Use and Gainey Phase Definition in South-Central Ontario
Lawrence J. Jackson with a foreword by Henry T. Wright and phytolith analysis by Anita Buehrle
University of Michigan Press, 1998
This study fills in some missing links in the Michigan-Ontario Paleo-Indian record. Jackson focuses on the Gainey phase.
[more]

front cover of The Settlement of the American Continents
The Settlement of the American Continents
A Multidisciplinary Approach to Human Biogeography
Edited by C. Michael Barton, Geoffrey A. Clark, David R. Yesner, and Georges A. Pearson
University of Arizona Press, 2004
When many scholars are asked about early human settlement in the Americas, they might point to a handful of archaeological sites as evidence. Yet the process was not a simple one, and today there is no consistent argument favoring a particular scenario for the peopling of the New World.

This book approaches the human settlement of the Americas from a biogeographical perspective in order to provide a better understanding of the mechanisms and consequences of this unique event. It considers many of the questions that continue to surround the peopling of the Western Hemisphere, focusing not on sites, dates, and artifacts but rather on theories and models that attempt to explain how the colonization occurred.

Unlike other studies, this book draws on a wide range of disciplines—archaeology, human genetics and osteology, linguistics, ethnology, and ecology—to present the big picture of this migration. Its wide-ranging content considers who the Pleistocene settlers were and where they came from, their likely routes of migration, and the ecological role of these pioneers and the consequences of colonization. Comprehensive in both geographic and topical coverage, the contributions include an explanation of how the first inhabitants could have spread across North America within several centuries, the most comprehensive review of new mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome data relating to the colonization, and a critique of recent linguistic theories.

Although the authors lean toward a conservative rather than an extreme chronology, this volume goes beyond the simplistic emphasis on dating that has dominated the debate so far to a concern with late Pleistocene forager adaptations and how foragers may have coped with a wide range of environmental and ecological factors. It offers researchers in this exciting field the most complete summary of current knowledge and provides non-specialists and general readers with new answers to the questions surrounding the origins of the first Americans.
[more]

front cover of Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief
Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief
Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America
Edited by Stephen B. Carmody and Casey R. Barrier
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Archaeological case studies consider material evidence of religion and ritual in the pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands

Archaeologists today are interpreting Native American religion and ritual in the distant past in more sophisticated ways, considering new understandings of the ways that Native Americans themselves experienced them. Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America broadly considers Native American religion and ritual in eastern North America and focuses on practices that altered and used a vast array of material items as well as how physical spaces were shaped by religious practices.

Unbound to a single theoretical perspective of religion, contributors approach ritual and religion in diverse ways. Importantly, they focus on how people in the past practiced religion by altering and using a vast array of material items, from smoking pipes, ceremonial vessels, carved figurines, and iconographic images, to sacred bundles, hallucinogenic plants, revered animals, and ritual architecture. Contributors also show how physical spaces were shaped by religious practice, and how rock art, monuments, soils and special substances, and even land- and cityscapes were part of the active material worlds of religious agents.

Case studies, arranged chronologically, cover time periods ranging from the Paleoindian period (13,000–7900 BC) to the late Mississippian and into the protohistoric/contact periods. The geographical scope is much of the greater southeastern and southern Midwestern culture areas of the Eastern Woodlands, from the Central and Lower Mississippi River Valleys to the Ohio Hopewell region, and from the greater Ohio River Valley down through the Deep South and across to the Carolinas.

Contributors
Sarah E. Baires / Melissa R. Baltus / Casey R. Barrier / James F. Bates / Sierra M. Bow / James A. Brown / Stephen B. Carmody / Meagan E. Dennison / Aaron Deter-Wolf / David H. Dye / Bretton T. Giles / Cameron Gokee / Kandace D. Hollenbach / Thomas A. Jennings / Megan C. Kassabaum / John E. Kelly / Ashley A. Peles / Tanya M. Peres / Charlotte D. Pevny / Connie M. Randall / Jan F. Simek / Ashley M. Smallwood / Renee B. Walker / Alice P. Wright

 
[more]

front cover of Sloan
Sloan
A Paleoindian Dalton Cemetery in Arkansas
Dan Morse
University of Arkansas Press, 1997

New in Paper!

Excavated in 1974, the Sloan site in northeast Arkansas is the earliest recognized cemetery in the New World, containing the graves of a small group of Native Americans who died over ten thousand years ago. Although no skeletons were found in the acidic soil, the number, size, and quality of its artifacts attest to the presence of a far more complicated and sophisticated culture than had previously been thought to exist during the Dalton period.

Bringing together the work of thirteen eminent scholars, Dan F. Morse describes and assesses the assemblage of points, adzes, scrapers, abraders, and other stone artifacts as an indicator of the territorial stability of late Pleistocene peoples. The tools show that hunter-gatherer-fisher populations lived in small, semipermanent villages, hunted and butchered white-tailed deer, processed and ate vegetables, and made dugout canoes. And they buried their dead in cemeteries, a practice previously associated only with the rise of horticultural societies. Many of the tools are unused, suggesting ritual interments and a well-developed system of trade with groups in rockier areas.

Including an overview of the Dalton period in the southeastern United States and a discussion of the region’s geologic and vegetal prehistory—and newly supported by extensive high-quality image galleries now available at the website of the Arkansas Archeological Survey (see inside cover)—this comprehensive study of the Sloan artifacts provides a multifaceted assessment of a site rich in information about the technology of a single prehistoric society.

[more]

front cover of Stones, Bones, and Profiles
Stones, Bones, and Profiles
Exploring Archaeological Context, Early American Hunter-Gatherers, and Bison
Marcel Kornfeld
University Press of Colorado, 2016

Stones, Bones, and Profiles addresses key and cutting-edge research of three pillars of hunter-gatherer archaeology. Stones and bones—flaked stone tools and the bones of the prey animals—are the objects most commonly recovered from hunter-gatherer archaeological sites, and profiles represent the geologic context of the archeological record. Together they constitute the foundations of much of early archaeology, from the appearance of the earliest humans to the advent of the Neolithic.

The volume is divided into three sections: Peopling of North America and Paleoindians, Geoarchaeology, and Bison Bone Bed Studies. The first section dissects established theories about the Paleoindians, including the possibility that human populations were in North America before Clovis and the timing of the opening of the Alberta Corridor. The second section provides new perspectives on the age and contexts of several well-known New World localities such as the Lindenmeier Folsom and the UP Mammoth sites, as well as a synthesis of the geoarchaeology of the Rocky Mountains' Bighorn region that addresses significant new data and summarizes decades of investigation. The final section, Bison Bone Bed Studies, consists of groundbreaking zooarchaeological studies offering new perspectives on bison taxonomy and procurement.

Stones, Bones, and Profiles presents new data on Paleoindian archaeology and reconsiders previous sites and perspectives, culminating in a thought-provoking and challenging contribution to the ongoing study of Paleoindians around the world.

Contributors: Leland Bement, Jack W. Brink, John Carpenter, Brian Carter, Thomas J. Connolly, Linda Scott Cummings, Loren G. Davis, Allen Denoyer, Stuart J. Fiedel, Judson Byrd Finley, Andrea Freeman, C. Vance Haynes Jr., Bryan Hockett, Vance T. Holliday, Dennis L. Jenkins, Thomas A. Jennings, Eileen Johnson, George T. Jones, Oleksandra Krotova, Patrick J. Lewis, Vitaliy Logvynenko, Ian Luthe, Katelyn McDonough, Lance McNees, Fred L. Nials, Patrick W. O’Grady, Mary M. Prasciunas, Karl J. Reinhard, Michael Rondeau, Guadalupe Sanchez, William E. Scoggin, Ashley M. Smallwood, Iryna Snizhko, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., Mark E. Swisher, Frances White, Eske Willerslev, Robert M. Yohe II, Chad Yost

[more]

front cover of Thedford II
Thedford II
A Paleo-Indian Site in the Ausable River Watershed of Southwestern Ontario
D. Brian Deller and Christopher J. Ellis with a foreword by Henry T. Wright
University of Michigan Press, 1992
A detailed and profusely illustrated analysis of material recovered from this Early Paleo-Indian Parkhill site.
[more]

front cover of Toward a Behavioral Ecology of Lithic Technology
Toward a Behavioral Ecology of Lithic Technology
Cases from Paleoindian Archaeology
Todd A. Surovell
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Modern humans and their hominid ancestors relied on chipped-stone technology for well over two million years and colonized more than 99 percent of the Earth's habitable landmass in doing so. Yet there currently exist only a handful of informal models derived from ethnographic observation, experiments, engineering, and "common sense" to explain variability in archaeological lithic assemblages.

Because the fundamental processes of making, using, and discarding stone tools are, at root, exercises in problem solving, Todd Surovell asks what conditions favor certain technological solutions. Whether asking if a biface should be made thick or thin or if a flake should be saved or discarded, Surovell seeks answers that extend beyond a case-by-case analysis. One avenue for addressing these questions theoretically is formal mathematical modeling.

Here Surovell constructs a series of models designed to link environmental variability to human decision making as it pertains to lithic technology. To test the models, Surovell uses data from the analysis of more than 40,000 artifacts from five Rocky Mountain and Northern Plains Folsom and Goshen complex archaeological sites dating to the Younger Dryas stadial (ca. 12,600-11,500 years BP). The primary result is the production of powerful new analytical tools useful to the interpretation of archaeological assemblages.

Surovell's goal is to promote modeling and explore the general issues governing technological decisions. In this light, his models can be applied to any context in which stone tools are made and used.
[more]

front cover of Transitions
Transitions
Archaic and Early Woodland Research in the Ohio Country
Martha P. Otto
Ohio University Press, 2008

The late archaic and early woodland peoples lived in the Ohio region between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. This was a time of transition, when hunters and gatherers began to grow native seed crops, establish more permanent settlements, and develop complex forms of ritual and ceremonialism, sometimes involving burial mound construction.

The focused archaeological studies described in Transitions: Archaic and Early Woodland Research in the Ohio Country shed light on this important episode in human cultural development. The authors describe important archaeological sites such as the rich Late Archaic settlements of southwestern Ohio and the early Adena Dominion Land Company enclosure in Franklin County. They present detailed accounts of Native American behavior, such as the use of smoking pipes by Adena societies and a reconstruction of mound use and ritual.

Transitions is the result of a comprehensive, long-term study focusing on particular areas of Ohio with the most up-to-date and detailed treatment of Ohio’s native cultures during this important time of change. This book will be of great value to students and other readers who wish to go beyond the general and often dated treatments of Ohio archaeology currently available.

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