A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY44 start with I start with I
Unlike many previous studies, the authors of this volume place emphasis on how differences within and between societies came about rather than why dissimilar structures arose, elevating the place of both agency and history in understanding the past. Identity, Feasting, and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest will be of interest to all doing archaeological research in the Southwestern United States and those conducting research on social identity, cultural affiliation, and commensal politics. Contributors include Karen R. Adams, Jeffrey J. Clark, Patricia L. Crown, T. J. Ferguson, Catherine S. Fowler, Robert J. Hard, Jane H. Hill, Jane H. Kelley, Frances Levine, Micah Loma'omvaya, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, A. C. MacWilliams, Paul E. Minnis, Scott G. Ortman, David Phillips Jr., James M. Potter, John R. Roney, Lynne Sebastian, Katherine A. Spielmann, Joe D. Stewart, Scott Van Keuren, Laurie D. Webster, Michael E. Whalen, and W. H. Wills
2022 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize, Bard Graduate Center
A landmark study of ancient Peruvian Moche mural art.
Moche murals of northern Peru represent one of the great, yet still largely unknown, artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Created in an era without written scripts, these murals are key to understandings of Moche history, society, and culture. In this first comprehensive study on the subject, Lisa Trever develops an interdisciplinary methodology of “archaeo art history” to examine how ancient histories of art can be written without texts, boldly inverting the typical relationship of art to archaeology.
Trever argues that early coastal artistic traditions cannot be reduced uncritically to interpretations based in much later Inca histories of the Andean highlands. Instead, the author seeks the origins of Moche mural art, and its emphasis on figuration, in the deep past of the Pacific coast of South America. Image Encounters shows how formal transformations in Moche mural art, before and after the seventh century, were part of broader changes to the work that images were made to perform at Huacas de Moche, El Brujo, Pañamarca, and elsewhere in an increasingly complex social and political world. In doing so, this book reveals alternative evidentiary foundations for histories of art and visual experience.
In 1979, a Kekchi Maya Indian accidentally discovered the entrance to Naj Tunich, a deep cave in the Maya Mountains of El Peten, Guatemala. One of the world's few deep caves that contain rock art, Naj Tunich features figural images and hieroglyphic inscriptions that have helped to revolutionize our understanding of ancient Maya art and ritual.
In this book, Andrea Stone takes a comprehensive look at Maya cave painting from Preconquest times to the Colonial period. After surveying Mesoamerican cave and rock painting sites and discussing all twenty-five known painted caves in the Maya area, she focuses extensively on Naj Tunich. Her text analyzes the images and inscriptions, while photographs and line drawings provide a complete visual catalog of the cave art, some of which has been subsequently destroyed by vandals.
This important new body of images and texts enlarges our understanding of the Maya view of sacred landscape and the role of caves in ritual. It will be important reading for all students of the Maya, as well as for others interested in cave art and in human relationships with the natural environment.
An international team of archaeologists and historians draws upon both new and existing evidence from excavations, surveys, texts, and material culture to highlight the strategies that the Neo-Assyrian Empire applied to manage its diverse and widespread empire as well as the mixed reception of those strategies by subjects close to and far from the center. Case studies from around the ancient Near East illustrate a remarkable variety of responses to Assyrian aggression, economic policies, and cultural influences. As a whole, the volume demonstrates both the destructive and constructive roles of empire, including unintended effects of imperialism on socioeconomic and cultural change.
Imperial Peripheries in the Neo-Assyrian Period aligns with the recent movement in imperial studies to replace global, top-down materialist models with theories of contingency, local agency, and bottom-up processes. Such approaches bring to the foreground the reality that the development and lifecycles of empires in general, and the Neo-Assyrian Empire in particular, cannot be completely explained by the activities of the core. The book will be welcomed by archaeologists of the Ancient Near East, Assyriologists, and scholars concerned with empires and imperial power in history.
Contributors: Stephanie H. Brown, Anna Cannavò, Megan Cifarelli, Erin Darby, Bleda S. Düring, Avraham Faust, Guido Guarducci, Bradley J. Parker
Rehak closely examines the artistic imagery on these monuments, providing numerous illustrations, tables, and charts. In an analysis firmly contextualized by a thorough discussion of the earlier models and motifs that inspired these Augustan monuments, Rehak shows how the princeps used these on such an unprecedented scale as to truly elevate himself above the common citizen.
Drawing together all the evidence and arguments for Near Eastern immigrants in Crete, Hoffman demonstrates there are basic problems with the accepted interpretations. Evidence of continued technical expertise casts doubt on the necessity of reintroduction, while careful scrutiny of the evidence supporting immigrant craftsmen reveals many inadequacies in the currently accepted analyses.
Imports and Immigrants identifies the need for reassessing all dimensions of the question of artistic relationships between ancient Greece and other regions of the Aegean basin and suggests new avenues of inquiry in this important debate. The volume also reassesses arguments made for the presence of Near Eastern immigrants in Crete. This book includes a catalogue indispensable for future work on these issues and illustrations of most of the known imports to Crete.
Gail L. Hoffman is Associate Professor of Greek Art and Archaeology, Department of Classics, Yale University.
In Oceania documents and analyzes the "rhetorical artifacts" of explorers, missionaries, fiction and travel writers, and the people of the Pacific themselves to illustrate how Oceanic identities have been represented over time. Not content with conventional methods of anthropology or history, Thomas draws on postcolonial theory and literary analysis in extraordinarily wide-ranging analyses of texts, visual images, and historical processes. He demonstrates how cultures of the Pacific Islands have dealt with colonialist ventures, modernity, and the debate about the recuperation of histories and traditions. The picture Thomas paints of Oceania, however, is not one of a group of societies stripped of meaning, but one that shows how the interactions between indigenous cultures and European influences have created entirely new identities.
This research explores the social changes that took place in the Safford and Aravaipa valleys during the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries A.D. as a result of an influx of migrants from the Kayenta and Tusayan regions of northeastern Arizona. Focusing on domestic architecture and ceramics, the author evaluates how migration affects the expression of identity of both migrant and indigenous populations in the Safford and Aravaipa valleys and provides a model for research in other areas where migration played an important role.
Archaeologists interested in the Greater Southwest will find a wealth of information on these little-known valleys that provides contextualization for this important and intriguing time period, and those interested in migration in the ancient past will find a useful case study that goes beyond identifying incidents of migration to understanding its long-lasting implications for both migrants and the local people they impacted.
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.
As portals to the supernatural realm that creates and animates the universe, caves have always been held sacred by the peoples of Mesoamerica. From ancient times to the present, Mesoamericans have made pilgrimages to caves for ceremonies ranging from rituals of passage to petitions for rain and a plentiful harvest. So important were caves to the pre-Hispanic peoples that they are mentioned in Maya hieroglyphic writing and portrayed in the Central Mexican and Oaxacan pictorial codices. Many ancient settlements were located in proximity to caves.
This volume gathers papers from twenty prominent Mesoamerican archaeologists, linguists, and ethnographers to present a state-of-the-art survey of ritual cave use in Mesoamerica from Pre-Columbian times to the present. Organized geographically, the book examines cave use in Central Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Maya region. Some reports present detailed site studies, while others offer new theoretical understandings of cave rituals. As a whole, the collection validates cave study as the cutting edge of scientific investigation of indigenous ritual and belief. It confirms that the indigenous religious system of Mesoamerica was and still is much more terrestrially focused that has been generally appreciated.
Around 1542, descendants of the Aztec rulers of Mexico created accounts of the pre-Hispanic history of the city of Tetzcoco, Mexico, one of the imperial capitals of the Aztec Empire. Painted in iconic script ("picture writing"), the Codex Xolotl, the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map appear to retain and emphasize both pre-Hispanic content and also pre-Hispanic form, despite being produced almost a generation after the Aztecs surrendered to Hernán Cortés in 1521. Yet, as this pioneering study makes plain, the reality is far more complex.
Eduardo de J. Douglas offers a detailed critical analysis and historical contextualization of the manuscripts to argue that colonial economic, political, and social concerns affected both the content of the three Tetzcocan pictorial histories and their archaizing pictorial form. As documents composed by indigenous people to assert their standing as legitimate heirs of the Aztec rulers as well as loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown and good Catholics, the Tetzcocan manuscripts qualify as subtle yet shrewd negotiations between indigenous and Spanish systems of signification and between indigenous and Spanish concepts of real property and political rights. By reading the Tetzcocan manuscripts as calculated responses to the changes and challenges posed by Spanish colonization and Christian evangelization, Douglas's study significantly contributes to and expands upon the scholarship on central Mexican manuscript painting and recent critical investigations of art and political ideology in colonial Latin America.
In the Realm of Nachan Kan opens a window on Postclassic Maya patterns of cultural development and organization through a close examination of the small rural island of Laguna de On, a location that was distant from the governing political centers of the day. Using diachronic analysis of regional settlement patterns, ceramic traditions, household and ritual features, and artifacts from the site, Masson tracks developmental changes throughout the Postclassic period. These data suggest that affluent patterns of economic production and local and long-distance exchange were established within northern Belize by the eleventh century, and continued to develop, virtually uninterrupted, until the time of Spanish arrival.
In addition, Masson analyzes contemporary political and religious artistic traditions at the temples of Mayapan, Tulum, and Santa Rita to provide a regional context for the changes in community patterns at Laguna de On. These cultural changes, she maintains, are closely correlated with the rise of Mayapan to power and participation of sites like Laguna de On in a pan-lowland economic and ritual interaction sphere. Offering a thoroughly new interpretation of Postclassic Mayan civilization. In the Realm of Nachan Kan is a must for scholars of Mesoamerican history and culture.
Smith and colleagues present their work in a way that allows readers to understand not only how people adapted to local change but also how North Warner Valley fits into the complex mosaic of precontact history in the American West. This research is the most comprehensive work conducted in the northern Great Basin in more than two decades. Its multidisciplinary nature should interest students of natural and cultural history, archaeology, and Indigenous lifeways.
In this classic work, Nigel Davies offers a clear view into Inca political history, economy, governance, religion, art, architecture, and daily life. The Incas has become a classic in its many years in print; readers and scholars interested in ancient American cultures will relish this paperback edition.
In Incidence of Travel, archaeologist Jerry Moore draws on his personal experiences and historical and archaeological studies throughout South America to explore and understand the ways traditional peoples created cultural landscapes in the region. Using new narrative structures, Moore introduces readers to numerous archaeological sites and remains, describing what it is like to be in the field and sparking further reflection on what these places might have been like in the past.
From the snow-capped mountains of Colombia to the arid deserts of Peru and Chile, ancient peoples of South America built cities, formed earthen mounds, created rock art, and measured the cosmos—literally inscribing their presence and passage throughout the continent. Including experiences ranging from the terrifying to the amusing, Moore’s travels intersect with the material traces of traditional cultures. He refers to this intersection as "the incidence of travel." Braiding the tales of his own journeys with explanations of the places he visits through archaeological, anthropological, and historical contexts, Moore conveys the marvelous and intriguing complexities of prehistoric and historic peoples of South America and the ways they marked their presence on the land.
Combining travel narrative and archaeology in a series of essays—accounts of discoveries, mishaps of travel, and encounters with modern people living in ancient places—Incidence of Travel will engage any general reader, student, or scholar with interest in archaeology, anthropology, Latin American history, or storytelling.
In this volume, contributors address the challenges faced by smaller polities on the peripheries of powerful kingdoms and ask how subordination was experienced and independent policy asserted. Leading experts provide cutting-edge analysis in varied topics and detailed discussion of the development of this major site and the region more broadly. The first half of the volume contains a historical narrative of the cultural sequence of El Zotz, tracing the changes in occupation and landscape use across time; the second half provides deep technical analyses of material evidence, including soils, ceramics, stone tools, and bone.
The ever-changing, inconstant landscapes of peripheral kingdoms like El Zotz reveal much about their more dominant—and better known—neighbors. An Inconstant Landscape offers a comprehensive, multidisciplinary view of this important but under-studied site, an essential context for the study of the Classic Maya in Guatemala, and a premier reference on the subject of peripheral kingdoms at the height of Maya civilization.
Contributors: Timothy Beach, Nicholas Carter, Ewa Czapiewska-Halliday, Alyce de Carteret, William Delgado, Colin Doyle, James Doyle, Laura Gámez, Jose Luis Garrido López, Yeny Myshell Gutiérrez Castillo, Zachary Hruby, Melanie Kingsley, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Cassandra Mesick Braun, Sarah Newman, Rony Piedrasanta, Edwin Román, and Andrew K. Scherer
Citing evidence from past excavations, ethnography, the traditions of present-day Native Americans in the Midwest, ground-penetrating radar and LIDAR imaging, and recent findings of other archaeologists, Robert A. Birmingham and Amy L. Rosebrough argue that effigy mound groups are cosmological maps that model belief systems and relations with the spirit world. The authors advocate for their preservation and emphasize that Native peoples consider the mounds sacred places.
This edition also includes an expanded list of public parks and preserves where mounds can be respectfully viewed, such as the Kingsley Bend mounds near Wisconsin Dells, an outstanding effigy group maintained by the Ho-Chunk Nation, and the Man Mound Park near Baraboo, the only extant human-shaped effigy mound in the world.
This expanded edition of Indians and Archaeology of Missouri gives an excellent introduction to the cultural development of Missouri’s Indians during the past twelve thousand years. Providing a new chapter on the Hunter Foragers of the Dalton period and substantial revision of other chapters to incorporate recent discoveries, the Chapmans present knowledge based upon decades of experience with archaeological excavations in an understandable and fascinating form.
The first edition of Indians and Archaeology of Missouri has been recognized in Missouri and nationally as one of the best books of its kind. The Missouri Historical Review called it “simply indispensable.” The Plains Anthropologist added similar praise: “Clearly written and exceptionally well illustrated…it is the answer to the amateur’s prayers.” Archaeology described it as “a boon to Missouri’s many amateur archaeologists, a useful source of information for professionals and interesting reading for the layman.”
Foster begins with a history of Lewis and Clark’s travels along the Missouri River adjacent to western Iowa. Next, he focuses on the tribes most connected to Iowa from prehistoric times to the present day: the Ioway, Meskwaki, Sauk, Omaha and Ponca, Otoe and Missouria, Pawnee and Arikara, Potawatomi, Illinois Confederacy, Santee and Yankton Sioux, and Winnebago. In between each tribal account, “closer look” essays provide details on Indian women in Iowa, traditional ways of life, Indian history and spirituality, languages and place-names, archaeology, arts and crafts, and houses and landscapes. Finally, Foster brings readers into the present with chapters called “Going to a Powwow,” “Do You Have Indian Blood?” and “Indians in Iowa Today.” The book ends with information about visiting Native American museums, historic sites, and communities in Iowa as well as tribal contacts and a selection of published and online resources.
The story of the Indians of Iowa is long and complicated. Illustrated with maps and stunning original art, Lance Foster’s absorbing, accessible overview of Iowa’s Indian tribes celebrates the rich native legacy of the Hawkeye State. It is essential reading for students, teachers, and everyone who calls Iowa home.
Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines highlights how collaborative archaeology and knowledge co-production among the Ifugao, an Indigenous group in the Philippines, contested (and continue to contest) enduring colonial tropes. Stephen B. Acabado and Marlon M. Martin explain how the Ifugao made decisions that benefited them, including formulating strategies by which they took part in the colonial enterprise, exploiting the colonial economic opportunities to strengthen their sociopolitical organization, and co-opting the new economic system. The archaeological record shows that the Ifugao successfully resisted the Spanish conquest and later accommodated American empire building.
This book illustrates how descendant communities can take control of their history and heritage through active collaboration with archaeologists. Drawing on the Philippine Cordilleran experiences, the authors demonstrate how changing historical narratives help empower peoples who are traditionally ignored in national histories.
Behind the ancient artifacts exhibited in our museums lies a secret past—of travel, desire, the quest for knowledge, and even theft. Such is the case with the objects of Mesoamerican culture so avidly collected, cataloged, and displayed by the British in the nineteenth century. Informal Empire recaptures the history of those artifacts from Mexico and Central America that stirred Victorian interest—a history that reveals how such objects and the cultures they embodied were incorporated into British museum collections, panoramas, freak shows, adventure novels, and records of imperial administrators.
Robert D. Aguirre draws on a wealth of previously untapped historical information to show how the British colonial experience in Africa and the Near East gave rise to an “informal imperialism” in Mexico and Central America. Aguirre’s work helps us to understand what motivated the British to beg, borrow, buy, and steal from peripheral cultures they did not govern. With its original insights, Informal Empire points to a new way of thinking about British imperialism and, more generally, about the styles and forms of imperialism itself.
In Inheriting the Past, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh examines Parker’s winding career path and asks why it has taken generations for Native peoples to follow in his footsteps. Closely tracing Parker’s life through extensive archival research, Colwell-Chanthaphonh explores how Parker crafted a professional identity and negotiated dilemmas arising from questions of privilege, ownership, authorship, and public participation. How Parker, as well as the discipline more broadly, chose to address the conflict between Native American rights and the pursuit of scientific discovery ultimately helped form archaeology’s moral community.
Parker’s rise in archaeology just as the field was taking shape demonstrates that Native Americans could have found a place in the scholarly pursuit of the past years ago and altered its trajectory. Instead, it has taken more than a century to articulate the promise of an Indigenous archaeology—an archaeological practice carried out by, for, and with Native peoples. As the current generation of researchers explores new possibilities of inclusiveness, Parker’s struggles and successes serve as a singular reference point to reflect on archaeology’s history and its future.
Before the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century A.D., the Inka Empire stretched along the Pacific side of South America, all the way from Ecuador to northwest Argentina. Though today many Inka researchers focus on the imperial capital of Cuzco, Peru, and surrounding areas, ruins of Inka settlements abound throughout the vast territory of the former empire and offer many clues about how the empire was organized, managed, and defended. These outlying settlements, as well as those in the Cuzco area, form the basis for John Hyslop's detailed study Inka Settlement Planning.
Using extensive aerial photography and detailed site maps, Hyslop studies the design of several dozen settlements spread throughout the empire. In addition to describing their architecture and physical infrastructure, he gives special emphasis to the symbolic aspects of each site's design. Hyslop speculates that the settlement plans incorporate much iconography expressive of Inka ideas about the state, the cosmos, and relationships to non-Inka peoples—iconography perhaps only partially related to the activities that took place within the sites. And he argues that Inka planning concepts applied not only to buildings but also to natural features (stone outcrops, water sources, and horizons) and specialized landscaping (terracing).
Of interest to a wide readership in archaeology, architecture, urbanization, empire building, and Andean travel, Inka Settlement Planning charts one of Native America's greatest achievements.
The book observes social interactions’ role in the diffusion of ideas and material culture; the way different social units, especially households, interacted within and between communities; and the importance of interaction and interconnectivity in understanding the archaeology of the Southwest’s northern periphery. Chapters demonstrate a movement away from strictly economic-driven models of social connectivity and interaction and illustrate that members of social groups lived in dynamic situations that did not always have clear-cut and unwavering boundaries. Social connectivity and interaction were often fluid, changing over time.
Interaction and Connectivity in the Greater Southwest is an impressive collection of established and up-and-coming Southwestern archaeologists collaborating to strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of the discipline. It will be of interest to professional and academic archaeologists, as well as researchers with interests in diffusion, identity, cultural transmission, borders, large-scale interaction, or social organization.
Contributors:
Richard V. N. Ahlstrom, James R. Allison, Jean H. Ballagh, Catherine M. Cameron, Richard Ciolek-Torello, John G. Douglass, Suzanne L. Eckert, Hayward H. Franklin, Patricia A. Gilman, Dennis A. Gilpin, William M. Graves, Kelley A. Hays-Gilpin, Lindsay D. Johansson, Eric Eugene Klucas, Phillip O. Leckman, Myles R. Miller, Barbara J. Mills, Matthew A. Peeples, David A. Phillips Jr., Katie Richards, Heidi Roberts, Thomas R. Rocek, Tammy Stone, Richard K. Talbot, Marc Thompson, David T. Unruh, John A. Ware, Kristina C. Wyckoff
This is the first volume to consider how individuals subordinate to imperial rulers helped to shape specific forms of state and imperial organization. Taking a broader scope than previous studies, it is one of the few works to systematically address these issues in both Mesoamerica and the Central Andes. It considers how these individuals influenced the long-term development of the largest civilizations of the ancient Americas, opening a new window on the role of intermediate elites in the rise and fall of ancient states and empires worldwide.
The authors demonstrate how such evidence as settlement patterns, architecture, decorative items, and burial patterns reflect the roles of intermediate elites in their respective societies, arguing that they were influential actors whose interests were highly significant in shaping the specific forms of state and imperial organization. Their emphasis on provincial elites particularly shifts examination of early states away from royal capitals and imperial courts, explaining how local elites and royal bureaucrats had significant impact on the development and organization of premodern states.
Together, these papers demonstrate that intricate networks of intermediate elites bound these ancient societies together—and that competition between individuals and groups contributed to their decline and eventual collapse. By addressing current theoretical concerns with agency, resistance to state domination, and the co-option of local leadership by imperial administrators, it offers valuable new insight into the utility of studying intermediate elites.
Archaeologists have long recognized the crucial role of interregional interaction in the development and cultural dynamics of ancient societies, particularly in terms of the evolution of sociocultural complexity and economic systems. Recent research has further expanded the archaeological, art historical, ethnographic, and epigraphic records in Mesoamerica, permitting a critical reassessment of the complex relationship between interaction and cultural dynamics. This volume builds on and amplifies earlier research to examine sociocultural phenomena—including movement, migration, symbolic exchange, and material interaction—in their role as catalysts for variability in cultural systems.
Interregional cultural exchange in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica played a key role in the creation of systems of shared ideologies, the production of regional or “international” artistic and architectural styles, shifting sociopolitical patterns, and changes in cultural practices and meanings. Interregional Interaction in Ancient Mesoamerica highlights, engages with, and provokes questions pertinent to understanding the complex relationship between interaction, sociocultural processes, and cultural innovation and change in the ancient societies and cultural histories of Mesoamerica and will be of interest to archaeologists, linguists, and art historians.
Contributors: Philip J. Arnold III, Lourdes Budar, José Luis Punzo Diaz, Gary Feinman, David Freidel, Elizabeth Jiménez Garcia, Guy David Hepp, Kerry M. Hull, Timothy J. Knab, Charles L. F. Knight, Blanca E. Maldonado, Joyce Marcus, Jesper Nielsen, John M. D. Pohl, Iván Rivera, D. Bryan Schaeffer, Niklas Schulze
“In short, this is a reference work of the best kind. For the beginner, it is indispensable. And for those who already know something about its subject matter, the book is in many ways useful, informative, and interesting. We all owe a debt to [the author] for undertaking this significant project, and for completing it so well.”
—Michael Peachin, Classical World
“. . . provides invaluable road maps for non-epigraphers faced with passages of inscribed Greek.”
—Graham Shipley, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Greek inscriptions form a valuable resource for the study of all aspects of the Greco-Roman world. They are primary witnesses to society's laws and institutions, religious habits, and language. This volume provides students with the tools to take advantage of the historical value of these treasures. It examines letter forms, ancient names, and ancient calendars, knowledge of which is essential in reading inscriptions of all kinds.
B. H. McLean discusses the classification of inscriptions into their various categories and analyzes particular types of inscriptions, including decrees, honorary inscriptions, dedications, funerary inscriptions, and manumissions. Finally, McLean includes special topics that bear upon the interpretation of specific features of inscriptions, such as Greek and Roman administrative titles and functions.
Inventing Africa is a critical account of narratives which have selectively interpreted and misinterpreted the continent's deep past.
Writers have created alluring images of lost cities, vast prehistoric migrations and golden ages of past civilisations. Debates continue on the African origins of humankind, the contributions of ancient Egypt to the world and Africa's importance to global history.
Images of 'Africa', simplifying a complex and diverse continent, have existed from ancient Mediterranean worlds, slave trading nations and colonial powers to today's political elites, ecotourists and aid-givers. Robin Derricourt draws on his background as publisher and practitioner in archaeology and history to explore the limits and the dangers of simplifications, arguing - as with Said's concept of 'Orientalism' - that ambitious ideas can delude or oppress as well as inform.
Defending Africa against some of the grand narratives that have been imposed upon its peoples, Inventing Africa will spark new debates in the history of Africa and of archaeology.
The core of this book—which includes many historic photographs and maps as well as numerous new maps and drawings and a generous selection of color photos—explores in detail what archaeologists have learned from studying the state's material remains and their contexts. Examining the projectile points, potsherds, and patterns that make up the archaeological record, Alex describes the nature of the earliest settlements in Iowa, the development of farming cultures, the role of the environment and environmental change, geomorphology and the burial of sites, interaction among native societies, tribal affiliation of early historic groups, and the arrival and impact of Euro-Americans. In a final chapter, she examines the question of stewardship and the protection of Iowa's many archaeological resources.
This comprehensive study of the historical archaeology of the Caribbean provides sociopolitical context for the ongoing development of national identities.
Long before the founding of Jamestown in 1607, there were Spanish forts, bustling towns, sugar plantations, and sea trade flourishing in the Caribbean. While richer nations, particularly the United States, may view the Caribbean today as merely a place for sun and fun, the island colonies were at one time far more important and lucrative to their European empire countries than their North American counterparts. From the 15th to the 19th centuries, as competing colonial powers vied with each other for military and economic advantage in the Western Hemisphere, events in the Caribbean directly influenced the American mainland.
This is one rationale for the close study of historical archaeology in the Caribbean. Another is the growing recognition of how archaeological research can support the defining of national identities for the islands, many of them young independent states struggling to establish themselves economically and politically. By looking at cases in the French West Indies, specifically on Guadeloupe, in the Dutch Antilles and Aruba, in the British Bahamas, on Montserrat and St. Eustatius, on Barbados, and the within the U.S. Virgin Islands, the contributors to Island Lives have produced a broad overview of Caribbean historical archaeology.
Island Lives makes clear that historical archaeology in the Caribbean will continue to grow and diversify due to the interest Caribbean peoples have in recording, preserving, and promoting their culture and heritage; the value it adds to their "heritage tourism"; and the connection it has to African American history and archaeology. In addition, the contributors point to the future by suggesting different trajectories that historical archaeology and its practitioners may take in the Caribbean arena. In so doing, they elucidate the problems and issues faced worldwide by researchers working in colonial and post-colonial societies.
Paul Farnsworth is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Louisiana State University.
Located off the west coast of the Mexican state of Baja California, Isla Cedros—Island of Fogs—is site to some of the most extensive and remarkable archeological discoveries on the continent. Two sites dated to before 12,000 cal BP have been excavated, as well as portions of two large village sites dated to the last one thousand years. Among the artifacts discovered are the earliest fishhooks found on the continent.
Drawing on ten years of his own historical, ethnographic, and archaeological research, Matthew Des Lauriers uses Isla Cedros to form hypotheses regarding the ecological, economic, and social nature of island societies. Des Lauriers uses a comparative framework in order to examine both the development and evolution of social structures among Pacific coast maritime hunter-gatherers as well as to track patterns of change.
Because it examines the issue of whether human populations can intensively harvest natural resources without causing ecological collapse, Island of Fogs provides a relevant historical counterpart to modern discussions of ecological change and alternative models for sustainable development.
Winner of the Society for American Archaeology Book Award.
Scattered throughout the Great Plains are many isolated areas of varying size and ecology, quite distinct from the surrounding grasslands. Such spaces can be uplands like the Black Hills, low hills like the Nebraska Sand Hills, or linear areas such as shallow river valleys and deeply incised canyons. While the notion of “islands” is not a new one among ecologists, its application in Plains archaeology is.
The contributors to this volume seek to illustrate the different ways that the spatial, structural, and temporal nature of islands conditioned the behavior and adaptation of past Plains peoples. This as a first step toward a more detailed analysis of habitat variation and its effects on Plains cultural dynamics and evolution. Although the emphasis is on ecology, several chapters also address social and ideological islands in the form of sacred sites and special hunting grounds.
David Pettegrew’s book offers a new history of the Isthmus of Corinth from the Romans’ initial presence in Greece during the Hellenistic era to the epic transformations of the Empire in late antiquity. A new interpretation of the extensive literary evidence outlines how the Isthmus became the most famous land bridge of the ancient world, central to maritime interests of Corinth, and a medium for Rome’s conquest, annexation, and administration in the Greek east. A fresh synthesis of archaeological evidence and the results of a recent intensive survey on the Isthmus describe the physical development of fortifications, settlements, harbors, roads, and sanctuaries in the region. The author includes chapters on the classical background of the concept isthmos, the sacking of Corinth and the defeat of the Achaean League, colonization in the Late Roman Republic, the Emperor Nero’s canal project and its failure, the growth of Roman settlement in the territory, and the end of athletic contests at Isthmia. The Isthmus of Corinth offers a powerful case study in the ways that shifting Mediterranean worlds transformed a culturally significant landscape over the course of a millennium.
Biondo Flavio (1392–1463), humanist and historian, was a pioneering figure in the Renaissance discovery of antiquity; famously, he was the author who popularized the term “Middle Age” to describe the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of antiquity in his own time. While serving a number of Renaissance popes, he inaugurated an extraordinary program of research into the history, cultural life, and physical remains of the ancient world.
Italy Illuminated (1453), of which this is the second and final volume, is a topographical work describing Italy region by region. Its aim is to explore the Roman roots of modern Italy. As such, it is the quintessential work of Renaissance antiquarianism.
Thirteen-year-old Booker leads a sheltered life in Vermont—until a spellbinding relic throws him skidding into a world of magic and myths come to life. Anna is an Unangax̂ teenager looking for answers after her long-absent mother reappears in her life. When a mysterious bookmark brings them together on the Aleutian Islands, they’re sent on a dangerous quest to return a magical amulet to Anna’s Unangan ancestors. As they adventure across islands that glow like moonstones, they cross paths with nineteenth-century chiefs, the mysterious Woman of the Volcano, and the sinister Real Raven. While their journey is tinged with the fantastic, it’s based in real depictions of Unangan culture and history—the first historical novel set in Unangan folklore. It’s a coming-of-age-story that will resonate with young adult readers on their own journeys to discover their personal and cultural identities.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press