Brass tinklers and pendants. Owl effigies, copper kettles, crucifixes with blue glass stones. What do they have in common? The answer spans thousands of years and a multitude of peoples and places, and reveals how people made sense of their world as they collected and used the objects they encountered.

Foreign Objects demonstrates the breadth and vibrancy of contemporary archaeology. Taking a broad set of archaeological cases from across the Americas, editor Craig N. Cipolla and the volume contributors explore how indigenous communities have socialized foreign objects over time. The book critiques the artificial divide between prehistory and history, studying instead the long-term indigenous histories of consumption, a term typically associated with capitalism and modern-world colonialism.

The case studies range from “exotic” stone tools used millennia ago to nineteenth-century patent medicines made and marketed by an Indian doctress. Foreign Objects focuses on how indigenous groups and foreign objects became entangled with one another in myriad ways. The book explores how the framework of consumption can shed new light on trade, exchange, materiality, and cultural production.

Contributors place foreign objects in the spotlight and offer a comparison of how this general class of material played a part in indigenous and colonial worlds. Each chapter illustrates how notions of consumption fit into their place in time and also delves into how foreign objects related to ideas of the body and personhood, how people used them to participate in political and spiritual worlds, and how they presented new ways of enduring or resisting European colonialism and capitalism. Foreign Objects is a critical look at consumption through the lens of indigenous knowledge and archaeological theory.

Contributors:

Matthew A. Beaudoin
Lewis Borck
Kathleen J. Bragdon
Craig N. Cipolla
Charles R. Cobb
John L. Creese
Diana DiPaolo Loren
Martin Gallivan
Meghan C. L. Howey
Barbara J. Mills
Maxine Oland
Lee M. Panich
Patricia E. Rubertone
Christopher Shephard
Keith D. Stephenson

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.