Like their regal counterparts in societies around the globe, ancient Maya rulers departed this world with elaborate burial ceremonies and lavish grave goods, which often included ceramics, red pigments, earflares, stingray spines, jades, pearls, obsidian blades, and mosaics. Archaeological investigation of these burials, as well as the decipherment of inscriptions that record Maya rulers' funerary rites, have opened a fascinating window on how the ancient Maya envisaged the ruler's passage from the world of the living to the realm of the ancestors.

Focusing on the Classic Period (AD 250-900), James Fitzsimmons examines and compares textual and archaeological evidence for rites of death and burial in the Maya lowlands, from which he creates models of royal Maya funerary behavior. Exploring ancient Maya attitudes toward death expressed at well-known sites such as Tikal, Guatemala, and Copan, Honduras, as well as less-explored archaeological locations, Fitzsimmons reconstructs royal mortuary rites and expands our understanding of key Maya concepts including the afterlife and ancestor veneration.

Winner of the University of Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation 2022 Book Prize, the 2023 James Deetz Book Award, and the Joan Gero Book Award

An archaeologically grounded history of six legendary places in Detroit
 
The city of Detroit has endured periods of unprecedented industrial growth, decline, and revitalization between the late nineteenth century and the present. In Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary Places, Krysta Ryzewski presents six archaeological case studies of legendary Detroit institutions—Little Harry speakeasy, the Ransom Gillis house, the Blue Bird Inn, Gordon Park, the Grande Ballroom, and the Halleck Street log cabin—that trace the contours of the city’s underrepresented communities and their relationship to local currents of capitalism and social justice. Through a combination of rigorous historical archaeological research and narrative storytelling, Ryzewski deftly contextualizes the cases within the city’s current struggles, including recovery from bankruptcy, and future-oriented recovery efforts.
 
This is the first historical archaeology book focused on Detroit and one of the few to foreground the archaeology of the Great Migration era (ca. 1915–1970). The archaeological scholarship is rooted in collaborative, community-involved, and public-facing initiatives. The case studies examine how power is and has been exercised in Detroit’s communities over the past century: how it was stripped from the city’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century residents, but also how they acquired alternative sources of agency by establishing creative and illicit economies, most of which still operated within the city’s capitalist framework.
 
Throughout this book, connections run deep between archaeology, heritage, politics, historic preservation, and storytelling. Detroit Remains demonstrates how the city’s past, present, and future lie not in ruins but in the tangible archaeological traces of the everyday lives of Detroiters and their legacies.
 

The Inca empire was the largest state in the Americas at the time of the Spanish invasion in 1532. From its political center in the Cuzco Valley, it controlled much of the area included in the modern nations of Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia. But how the Inca state became a major pan-Andean power is less certain. In this innovative work, Brian S. Bauer challenges traditional views of Inca state development and offers a new interpretation supported by archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence.

Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attributed the rapid rise of Inca power to a decisive military victory over the Chanca, their traditional rivals, by Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. By contrast, Bauer questions the usefulness of literal interpretations of the Spanish chronicles and provides instead a regional perspective on the question of state development. He suggests that incipient state growth in the Cuzco region was marked by the gradual consolidation and centralization of political authority in Cuzco, rather than resulting from a single military victory. Synthesizing regional surveys with excavation, historic, and ethnographic data, and investigating broad categories of social and economic organization, he shifts the focus away from legendary accounts and analyzes more general processes of political, economic, and social change.

This volume also provides an independent assessment of the results of other Petexbatun region subprojects and a comparative evaluation of recent studies by other projects of Late and Terminal Classic culture change. For bioarchaeologists, this work sets a new standard in breadth and depth of osteological study. For Pre-Columbian scholars in general, it provides new insights into the environmental and biological issues involved in the debate on the end of the Classic period of Maya civilization.

VIMA Series #2

The Olmecs are renowned for their massive carved stone heads and other sculptures, the first stone monuments produced in Mesoamerica. Seven decades of archaeological research have given us many insights into the lifeways of the Olmecs, who inhabited parts of the modern Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco from around 1150 to 400 BC, and there are several good books that summarize the current interpretations of Olmec prehistory. But these formal studies don’t describe the field experiences of the archaeologists who made the discoveries. What was it like to endure the Olmec region’s heat, humidity, mosquitoes, and ticks to bring that ancient society to light? How did unforeseen events and luck alter carefully planned research programs and the conclusions drawn from them? And, importantly, how did local communities and individuals react to the research projects and discoveries in their territories?

In this engaging book, a leading expert on the Olmecs tells those stories from his own experiences and those of his predecessors, colleagues, and students. Beginning with the first modern explorations in the 1920s, David Grove recounts how generations of archaeologists and local residents have uncovered the Olmec past and pieced together a portrait of this ancient civilization that left no written records. The stories are full of fortuitous discoveries and frustrating disappointments, helpful collaborations and deceitful shenanigans. What emerges is an unconventional history of Olmec archaeology, a lively introduction to archaeological fieldwork, and an exceptional overview of all that we currently know about the Olmecs.

J. Lesley Fitton traces this exciting tale of scholarly discovery and weaves it into an engaging, in-depth portrait of Greek Bronze Age civilizations, from their dawning on the Cycladic Isles in the third millennium B.C. to their later flowering in Minoan Crete and then in the Mycenaean centers and finally to their mysterious disappearance in the twelfth century B.C. The result is an elegant assimilation of vast historical detail and a well-illustrated tour of the art and artifacts, the grand palaces and tombs, the mythical heroes and Trojan treasures that form at least one cradle of our own civilization.

Fitton begins with the early finds of travelers, advances in geology, and research into Homer's identity. She vividly recreates the heroic age of the first archaeological excavations, particularly Heinrich Schliemann's fascinating work at Troy and Mycenae, and Arthur Evans's pioneering excavation and restoration of the Palace of Minos on Crete. The persistent search for signs of writing among Bronze Age Greeks culminates in Fitton's description of the 1952 deciphering of the earliest script used to write Greek. And as her account extends into the present, it encompasses the important contributions of the archaeologists Alan Wace and Carl Blegen, the War's impact on research, and a concise summation of current scholarly trends.