Gene Jacobsen was a nineteen-year-old Idaho ranch kid when he decided to join the Army Air Corps in September 1940. By December 1941 he was supply sergeant for the Twentieth Pursuit Squadron at Clark Field in the Philippines. Five months later he was a captive of the Imperial Japanese Army, enduring the Bataan death march and subsequent horrors in the Philippines and Japan. Of the 207 officers and men who made up Jacobsen’s squadron at the beginning of the war, sixty-five survived to return to the United States. We Refused to Die recounts Jacobsen’s struggle, against all odds, to remain one of those sixty-five men.

In engaging, direct prose, Jacobsen’s three-and-a-half year experience as a prisoner of war takes the reader on a brutal and harrowing march through hatred and forgiveness, fortitude and freedom. We Refused to Die is an honest memoir that shines light on one of history’s darkest moments.

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.

This descriptive report on the 1975 archaeological excavations at Cowboy Cave, an Archaic site located in Wayne County, Utah, provides relevant comparative and interpretive comments by a number of authors. 

In 1956, Congress passed legislation that provided authorization and funds for emergency research to be conducted in Glen Canyon in response to the threat of losses posted by the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona. For eight years, scientists worked against the clock to record the archaeology, geology, history, and paleontology of the region before the waters of Lake Powell covered the area.

In this highly interpretive summary, Jesse Jennings preserves the achievements of the salvage team and explains how the finds affected previous conclusions. Maps and photographs capture archaeological artifacts as well as the landscape of the area. This book also highlights the larger consequences of the massive salvage project — among them the stimulation of additional Southwest research, the applications of techniques made in response to emergency situations, and a valuable perspective on the Pueblo culture. Because this area is becoming increasingly controversial, with a raging debate over whether Lake Powell should be drained, Glen Canyon: An Archaeological Summary stands as more than a model of salvage archaeology. It is also a record and testament of the rich history of Glen Canyon.

Sudden Shelter was a prehistoric site located in Sevier County, central Utah. The University of Utah conducted a salvage investigation of this site, as it was in the right-of-way during the construction of I-70. This descriptive report summarizes the excavation and findings. 

World famous concert pianist Grant Johannesen completed this memoir shortly before his sudden death in 2005. Born in Salt Lake City, Johannesen gives an account of his childhood and education in Utah, his early career and study in Europe and New York, his growing reputation as a pianist, and his worldwide performances. He writes also of his early marriage to Helen Taylor, who died suddenly in an auto accident, his later marriage to the renowned cellist Zara Nelsova, his activity as a teacher and as a judge in piano competitions, and his octogenarian thoughts for the benefit of younger generations of musicians.

Journey of an American Pianist presents an extensive examination of Johannesen’s artistic commitment and the importance of certain kinds of training and experience, framed in large part as advice to the young pianist seeking a concert career. At the same time, it has plenty of everyday-living experience, showing what pianists do and think about when they are not actually playing or performing.

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.

In 1969, Tom Wesaw was an 83-year-old Shoshone doctor and religious leader on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. He could no longer drive, which posed problems in making house calls. The arrival of young anthropologist Tom Johnson changed that. Johnson would drive Wesaw, and cook, pump water, and build fires for sweat lodges. In exchange, the elder Tom would show the younger Tom his work. The two were together so often that the people of Wind River began to refer to them affectionately by one name: Two Toms. By the light of the lamp Wesaw gave him, Johnson would write down what he learned. The Shoshone doctor wanted his student to share everything he saw and heard. Now, in Two Toms: Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor, he has.

A chronicle of the renaissance in kinship studies, these seventeen articles pay tribute to Per Hage, one of the founding fathers of the movement and long-time faculty member of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah. With mathematician Frank Harary, Hage pioneered the use of graph theoretical models in anthropology, a systematic analysis of diverse cognitive, social, and cultural components that provides a common technical vocabulary for the entire field. Anthropological studies have benefited from quantitative evaluation, particularly kinship, which is newly appreciated for its application to all social sciences. The chapters of this book, some original works by the contributors and some unpublished Hage material, attest to the importance of the continual study of kinship.

Anthropologist Kevin Jones takes the reader on a journey into the world of the Aché, hunter-gatherers of the deep jungles of Paraguay. The Aché were among the last tribal peoples to come into peaceful contact with the outside world, with some bands leaving the forest only in the late 1970s. Jones was fortunate to live among them while conducting ethnoarchaeological fieldwork as part of his graduate studies. Their stories were so compelling and the insights into their lives so profound that he wove them into this fictional account, seeking to share the uniqueness of the culture while illustrating the universal nature of the Achés’ concerns.

The Shrinking Jungle tells the story of a fictional Aché band forced to deal with the tribulations of living in a forest gradually diminished by the encroachments of loggers and farmers. It follows the lives of one family and their band as they grapple for existence in a world of waning resources. The unfolding narrative captures the human struggle to live, love, care for family, fend off danger, and dream and hope for a bright future.

A compassionate look at the lives of people affected by the expansion of modern industrial society, The Shrinking Jungle gives a face to the human cost of tropical forest habitat loss. It also provides a realistic glimpse into the lifeways that were common to all human beings for much of our history.
 

In western culture, rock art has traditionally been viewed as “primitive” and properly belonging in the purview of anthropologists rather than art scholars and critics. This volume, featuring previously unpublished photographs of Utah’s magnificent rock art by long-time rock art researcher Layne Miller and essays by former Utah state archaeologist Kevin Jones, views rock art through a different lens.

Miller’s photographs include many rare and relatively unknown panels and represent a lifetime of work by someone intimately familiar with the Colorado Plateau. The photos highlight the astonishing variety of rock art as well as the variability within traditions and time periods. Jones’s essays furnish general information about previous Colorado Plateau cultures and shine a light on rock art as art. The book emphasizes the exqui­site artistry of these ancient works and their capacity to reach through the ages to envelop and inspire viewers.

Sondra Jones traces the metamorphosis of the Ute people from a society of small, interrelated bands of mobile hunter-gatherers to sovereign, dependent nations—modern tribes who run extensive business enterprises and government services. Weaving together the history of all Ute groups—in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico—the narrative describes their traditional culture, including the many facets that have continued to define them as a people. Jones emphasizes how the Utes adapted over four centuries and details events, conflicts, trade, and social interactions with non-Utes and non-Indians. Being and Becoming Ute examines the effects of boarding—and public—school education; colonial wars and commerce with Hispanic and American settlers; modern world wars and other international conflicts; battles over federally instigated termination, tribal identity, and membership; and the development of economic enterprises and political power. The book also explores the concerns of the modern Ute world, including social and medical issues, transformed religion, and the fight to maintain Ute identity in the twenty-first century.
 
Neither a portrait of a people frozen in a past time and place nor a tragedy in which vanishing Indians sank into oppressed oblivion, the history of the Ute people is dynamic and evolving. While it includes misfortune, injustice, and struggle, it reveals the adaptability and resilience of an American Indian people.

The California coastline has long been of interest to archaeologists. This book directs attention to the largely ignored Pecho Coast, a rugged, isolated, 20 km long peninsula between modern-day Morro Bay and Pismo Beach. Archaeological work along this stretch was last synthesized in 1972. Jones and Codding now bring together the extensive contract work and field school studies of the intervening years, shedding new light on the region’s early inhabitants.
 
The first people of the Pecho Coast were part-time residents who exploited shellfish, fish, and marine birds, including the flightless duck, Chendytes lawi, which sustained hunting drove to extinction ca. 2800 cal BP. This marked the only unequivocal case of prehistoric, human-caused extinction in western North America. Cold, productive seas allowed inhabitants to weather droughts of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (950–600 cal BP), after which shell beads became increasingly abundant, representing either the initial appearance of Chumash-speaking peoples or attempts by Chumash leaders to consolidate power through gifting, reciprocal exchange, or forced conquest. During the mission era, fishing sustained the Native community as, for the first time, individuals became fully sedentary, foraging within a limited radius to avoid contact with the Spanish.
 
This record reveals a unique story of local adaptation, anthropogenic habitat change, social differentiation, and, ultimately, resistance to colonial invasion.

Morro Bay is one of more than thirty major estuaries where prehistoric people thrived along the California coast, yet for much of the twentieth century these systems were deemed insignificant within the broader outline of New World prehistory. Recent research, however, has shown that estuaries were magnets for human occupation as early as 10,000 years ago. This book combines archaeological data from large-scale excavations completed between 2003 and 2014 with other studies from Morro Bay to reveal a heretofore overlooked yet remarkable history of cultural change and adaptation. Over the last 8,000 years, as the bay evolved toward its current configuration, inhabitants endured earthquake and drought, regularly adjusting their settlement practices but continuing to fish and collect shellfish. Their populations slowly grew against a backdrop of extreme resource diversity and diachronic habitat variation, ultimately leaving behind evidence of a unique human-estuary ecological saga.

The curanderos of northern Peru, traditional healing specialists who invoke Jesus Christ and the saints with a mescaline sacrament and a shamanic rattle, are not vestigial curiosities nor are their patients rural illiterates without access to "modern medicine." Instead, many of these shamans have thriving urban practices with clients from all levels of society.

Sorcery and Shamanism documents the lives and rituals of twelve curanderos, offering a perspective on their curing role and shared knowledge. Authors Donald Joralemon and Douglas Sharon also consider the therapeutic experiences of over one hundred patients, including case histories and follow-ups. They offer a broad view of the shamans’ work in modern Peruvian society, particularly in connection with gender-based conflicts.

The significant work goes a long way toward dispelling the stereotype of shamans as enigmatic and wise, showing them to be pragmatic curers confronting the health effects of everyday aggressions and betrayals.

Originally published in 1968, this classic work by renowned archaeologist Neil M. Judd is a compilation of recollections and memories of his extensive career in archaeology. The stories told are truly those of “Men Met Along the Trail,” of the archaeologists, Mormons, Indians, prospectors, ranchers, and settlers that Judd encountered in his lifelong travels and work throughout the southwestern United States and beyond. There are meetings with leading American archaeologists such as “Dean” Byron Cummings, W. H. Holmes, and Charles D. Wallace, and famous Southwestern figures including Cass Hite, Dave Rust, and John Wetherill. Throughout are tales of early field work and typical camp life, from flooded canyons, run-ins with rattlesnakes, cumbersome pack trains, and early Model T Fords, to camp pranks, food shortages, and Zuñi dance celebrations.

Written at the request of young associates who felt Judd’s lifetime of experiences in the field could be both instructive and amusing, Men Met Along the Trail provides a glimpse of archaeology when it was an emerging field of study, evolving from simple curio collecting to technologically advanced radiocarbon dating and pollen analysis. Featuring more than thirty original photographs and a new foreword by Don D. Fowler, this book is entertaining and informative, offering readers a vibrant and colorful picture of the adventures to be found in early Southwestern archaeology.

Archeological Observations North of the Rio Colorado was originally published in 1926 as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology (Bulletin 82). It contains the report of six seasons of fieldwork undertaken by Neil M. Judd for the Bureau between 1915 and 1920 in western Utah and northwestern Arizona. The original investigation set out to examine alleged prehistoric sites near Beaver, Utah—specifically sites related to the “Pueblo ruins” found elsewhere in the Southwest. This in turn led to a much larger project, as there were more sites than expected recognized as having a cultural affinity with other prehistoric Puebloan sites. During these six years, Judd’s team covered a region from the Grand Canyon to the northern shore of the Great Salt Lake, east to the Green River and west into the deserts of Nevada.

This book is part of the University of Utah Press’s ongoing effort to reprint selected out-of-print volumes that apply directly to Utah archaeology, in an attempt to allow current students easier access and use of historic information. Owing to continued development, increased artifact collection, and on-going degradation, Utah archaeology is far different today than it was a century ago. The scientific works of these early archaeologists provide a glimpse of the variability that existed within sites and geographic areas in the early 1900s and gives a picture of Utah archaeology in an earlier era.