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Kainua (Marzabotto)
Edited by Elisabetta Govi
University of Texas Press, 2023

This volume brings together leading scholars of Etruria to provide up-to-date findings from the key archaeological site of Kainua. Located in what is now the Italian town of Marzabotto, Kainua is the only Etruscan site whose complete urban layout has been preserved, making it possible to trace houses, roads, drainage systems, cemeteries, craft workshops, and an acropolis.

Under excavation since the 1850s, Kainua offers a trove of insights into Etruscan culture and society. The volume’s editor, Elisabetta Govi, and her fellow experts examine the material evidence underlying our understanding of the history, economy, religion, and social structures of Kainua, including trade routes that linked the city with the wider Mediterranean. Particularly exciting are recent discoveries of sanctuaries dedicated to Tinia and Uni, analogous to the Greek Zeus and Hera, which provide new information about Etruscan cults. Kainua (Marzabotto) also draws on the latest research to reconstruct the city’s foundation rites, a sacred charter, and urban plan. Finally, the authors explore the site’s archaeological history, discussing new knowledge made possible since the introduction of modern techniques of remote sensing and 3D modeling.

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Kebara Cave, Mt. Carmel, Israel
Liliane Meignen
Harvard University Press, 2007

The remains from Skhul, Qafzeh, Amud, and Kebara caves in Israel provide evidence for the possible contemporaneity and eventual replacement of several distinct hominin populations over time: early Archaic-Modern humans by Neanderthals, and Neanderthals by Modern humans. Kebara Cave, which dates to 65,000 to 48,000 years ago, is well known for its Neanderthal remains and marvelously preserved archaeological record. Dense concentrations of fireplaces and ash lenses and rich assemblages of stone tools, animal bones, and charred plant remains testify to repeated and intensive use of the cave by late Middle Paleolithic foragers.

This second and final volume of the Kebara Cave site report presents findings from nine years of excavation and analysis of the archaeology, paleontology, human remains, and lithic industries from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods. Its full documentation of the daily activities of the cave’s Neanderthal inhabitants clearly indicates behavioral patterns generally attributed only to Modern humans. The two volumes on Kebara Cave provide a cornerstone for the story of humankind in a critical geographic region: the continental crossroads between Africa and Eurasia in the Levant.

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Kebara Cave, Mt. Carmel, Israel
Ofer Bar-Yosef
Harvard University Press, 2007

The Levantine corridor sits at the continental crossroads of Africa and Eurasia, making it a focal point for scientific inquiry into the emergence of modern humans and their relations with Neanderthals. The recent excavations at Kebara Cave in Israel, undertaken by an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers, has provided data crucial for understanding the cognitive and behavioral differences between archaic and modern humans.

In this first of two volumes, the authors discuss site formation processes, subsistence strategies, land-use patterns, and intrasite organization. Hearths and faunal remains reveal a dynamic and changing settlement system during the late Mousterian period, when Kebara Cave served as a major encampment. The research at Kebara Cave allows archaeologists to document the variability observed in settlement, subsistence, and technological strategies of the Late Middle and early Upper Paleolithic periods in the Levant.

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Killarney Bay
The Archaeology of an Early Middle Woodland Aggregation Site in the Northern Great Lakes
David Brose, Patrick Julig, and John O’Shea
University of Michigan Press, 2021
The archaeological site at Killarney Bay, on the northeast side of Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada, has attracted and mystified archaeologists for decades. The quantities of copper artifacts, exotic cherts, and long-distance trade goods all highlight the importance of the site during its time of occupation. Yet researchers have struggled to date the site or assign it to a particular cultural tradition, since the artifacts and mortuary components do not precisely match those of other sites and assemblages in the Upper Great Lakes. The history of archaeological investigation at Killarney Bay stretches across parts of three centuries and involves field schools from universities in two countries (Laurentian University in Canada and the University of Michigan in the United States). This volume pulls together the results from all prior research at the site and represents the first comprehensive report ever published on the excavations and finds at Killarney Bay. Heavily illustrated.
 
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King
The Social Archaeology of a Late Mississippian Town in Northwestern Georgia
David Hally
University of Alabama Press, 2008

At the time of Spanish contact in A.D. 1540, the Mississippian inhabitants of the great valley in northwestern Georgia and adjacent portions of Alabama and Tennessee were organized into a number of chiefdoms distributed along the Coosa and Tennessee rivers and their major tributaries.  The administrative centers of these polities were large settlements with one or more platforms mounds and a plaza.  Each had a large resident population, but most polity members lived in a half dozen or so towns located within a day’s walk of the center. This book is about one such town, located on the Coosa River in Georgia and known to archaeologists as the King site.

Excavations of two-thirds of the 5.1 acre King site reveal a detailed picture of the town’s domestic and public architecture and overall settlement plan. Intensive analysis of architectural features, especially of domestic structures, enables a better understanding of the variation in structure size, compass orientation, construction stages, and symbolic cosmological associations; the identification of multi-family households; and the position of individual structures within the town’s occupation sequence or life history.  Comparison of domestic architecture and burials reveals considerable variation between households in house size, shell bead wealth, and prominence of adult members. One household is preeminent in all these characteristics and may represent the household of the town chief or his matrilineal extended family. Analysis of public architectural features has revealed the existence of a large meeting house with likely historical connections to 18th-century Creek town houses; a probable cosmological basis for the town’s physical layout; and an impressive stockade-and-ditch defensive perimeter.

The King site represents a nearly ideal opportunity to identify the kinds of status positions that were held by individual inhabitants; analyze individual households and investigate the roles they played in King site society; reconstruct the community that existed at King, including size, life history, symbolic associations, and integrative mechanisms; and place King in the larger regional political system. With excavations dating back to 1973, and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Geographic Society, this is social archaeology at its best.

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Kiva Mural Decorations at Awatovi and Kawaika-a
With a Survey of Other Wall Paintings in the Pueblo Southwest
Watson Smith
Harvard University Press, 2005

From 1935 to 1939, the Peabody Museum sponsored an archaeological expedition at the ancient Pueblo and early Spanish colonial site of Awatovi on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. The multidisciplinary project attracted professional and avocational scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Former lawyer Watson Smith was, at the time, an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist. He joined the expedition as a volunteer during the 1936 season and became one of its most productive researchers, as well as one of the Southwest's foremost archaeological scholars.

In this classic volume of the Peabody Museum Papers series, first published in 1952, Smith reported on the remarkable painted murals found at Awatovi and other Puebloan sites in the underground ceremonial chambers known as kivas. Now reissued in a stunning facsimile edition, the volume includes color reproductions of the original serigraphs by Louie Ewing. Smith's groundbreaking work first brought to public and scholarly attention the sacred wall-painting tradition of the aboriginal American Southwest. The aesthetic power and symbolic imagery of this artistic tradition still fascinates today. Archaeologists, art historians, collectors, and artists alike will welcome the return of this long out-of-print classic.

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Knowing the Day, Knowing the World
Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology
Lesley Green and David R. Green
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Based on more than a decade of research in Palikur lands known as Arukwa in the state of Amapá, Brazil, Knowing the Day, Knowing the World reconsiders the dialogue between formal scholarship and Amerindian ways of knowing. Beginning and ending with a public archaeology project in the region, the book engages head-on with Amerindian ways of thinking about space, time, and personhood. Demonstrating that Palikur knowledges are based on movement and a careful theorization of what it means to be present in a place, the book makes a sustained case for engaging with different ways of knowing. It shows how this kind of research can generate rich dialogues about nature, reality, and the ethical production of knowledge.
 
The structure of the book reflects a gradual comprehension of Palikur ways of knowing during the course of field research. The text enters into the ethnographic material from the perspective of familiar disciplines—history, geography, astronomy, geometry, and philosophy—and explores the junctures in which conventional disciplinary frameworks cannot adequately convey Palikur understandings. Beginning with reflections on questions of personhood, ethics, and ethnicity, the authors rethink assumptions about history and geography. They learn and recount an alternative way of thinking about astronomy from the Palikur astronomical narratives, and they show how topological concepts embedded in everyday Palikur speech extend to different ways of conceptualizing landscape. In conclusion, they reflect on the challenges of comprehending alternative cosmologies and consider the insights that come from allowing ethnographic material to pose questions of modernist frameworks.
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Korean Treasures
Rare Books, Manuscripts and Artefacts in the Bodleian Libraries and Museums of Oxford University
Minh Chung
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011
The Bodleian Library and the museums of the University of Oxford are home to many historically significant and valuable manuscripts, rare books, and artifacts related to Korean history and culture. Despite their importance, many of these items have been overlooked within the libraries’ collections and largely neglected by scholars. Korean Treasures seeks to change this by highlighting the many noteworthy and unusual archaeological relics and artworks in the collections and presenting them together in a single volume for the first time. 
 
Notable items included here are the court painting scroll of the funeral procession of King Yongjo (1694–1776); a presentation edition of a book given by King Yongjo to his son-in-law; a group of documents issued by Emperor Kojong (1852–1919) between 1885–86 to confer various titles to his civil and military officials; a sundial made by the famous maker Kang Yun (1830–1898) for Emperor Kojong; a ceramic dish made and signed by Princess Yi Pangja (1901–1989) as well as a rare example of a suit of armor, an ornate helmet of the early sixteenth century, and a general’s quiver and arrows. In addition to the numerous color images of items from the collection, Korean Treasures provides a thorough overview of the extent of the Korean book collections in Oxford and a guide to the locations where some of these treasures can be found.
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Kourion
Excavations in the Episcopal Precinct
A. H. S. Megaw
Harvard University Press, 2007
More than fifty years after the earthquake of 365 destroyed Kourion, the seat of the Roman administration of Cyprus, a Christian basilica was built upon the remains of its pagan predecessor. This basilica became the center of a large complex that included a baptistery, atrium, and numerous other structures and buildings. Replete with mosaics and revetment, the Christian basilica was the center of the ecclesiastical administration of Cyprus until its destruction in the late seventh century. In this long-awaited report, A. H. S. Megaw and colleagues present in full the results of excavations from the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s. In addition to the stratigraphic history of the complex, there are reports on the mosaics, revetment, sculpture, coins, inscriptions, glass, pottery, lamps, and small finds.
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The Kowoj
Identity, Migration, and Geopolitics in Late Postclassic Petén, Guatemala
Prudence M. Rice
University Press of Colorado, 2009
Neighbors of the better-known Itza in the central Petén lakes region of Guatemala, the Kowoj Maya have been studied for little more than a decade. The Kowoj: Identity, Migration, and Geopolitics in Late Postclassic Petén, Guatemala summarizes the results of recent research into this ethno-political group conducted by Prudence Rice, Don Rice, and their colleagues.

Chapters in The Kowoj address the question "Who are the Kowoj?" from varied viewpoints: archaeological, archival, linguistic, ethnographic, and bioarchaeological. Using data drawn primarily from the peninsular site of Zacpetén, the authors illuminate Kowoj history, ritual components of their self-expressed identity, and their archaeological identification. These data support the Kowoj claim of migration from Mayapán in Yucatán, where they were probably affiliated with the Xiw, in opposition to the Itza. These enmities extended into Petén, culminating in civil warfare by the time of final Spanish conquest in 1697.

The first volume to consider Postclassic Petén from broadly integrative anthropological, archaeological, and historical perspectives, The Kowoj is an important addition to the literature on late Maya culture and history in the southern lowlands. It will be of particular interest to archaeologists, historians, ethnohistorians, art historians, and epigraphers.

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Kukulcan's Realm
Urban Life at Ancient Mayapán
Marilyn Masson
University Press of Colorado, 2014
Kukulcan's Realm chronicles the fabric of socioeconomic relationships and religious practice that bound the Postclassic Maya city of Mayapán's urban residents together for nearly three centuries. Presenting results of ten years of household archaeology at the city, including field research and laboratory analysis, the book discusses the social, political, economic, and ideological makeup of this complex urban center.

Masson and Peraza Lope's detailed overview provides evidence of a vibrant market economy that played a critical role in the city's political and economic success. They offer new perspectives from the homes of governing elites, secondary administrators, affluent artisans, and poorer members of the service industries. Household occupational specialists depended on regional trade for basic provisions that were essential to crafting industries, sustenance, and quality of life. Settlement patterns reveal intricate relationships of households with neighbors, garden plots, cultivable fields, thoroughfares, and resources. Urban planning endeavored to unite the cityscape and to integrate a pluralistic populace that derived from hometowns across the Yucatán peninsula.

New data from Mayapán, the pinnacle of Postclassic Maya society, contribute to a paradigm change regarding the evolution and organization of Maya society in general and make Kukulcan's Realm a must-read for students and scholars of the ancient Maya and Mesoamerica.


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