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La Consentida
Settlement, Subsistence, and Social Organization in an Early Formative Mesoamerican Community
Guy David Hepp
University Press of Colorado, 2019

La Consentida explores Early Formative period transitions in residential mobility, subsistence, and social organization at the site of La Consentida in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico. Examining how this site transformed during one of the most fundamental moments of socioeconomic change in the ancient Americas, the book provides a new way of thinking about the social dynamics of Mesoamerican communities of the period.

Guy David Hepp summarizes the results of several seasons of fieldwork and laboratory analysis under the aegis of the La Consentida Archaeological Project, drawing on various forms of evidence—ground stone tools, earthen architecture, faunal remains, human dental pathologies, isotopic indicators, ceramics, and more— to reveal how transitions in settlement, subsistence, and social organization at La Consentida were intimately linked. While Mesoamerica is too diverse for research at a single site to lay to rest ongoing debates about the Early Formative period, evidence from La Consentida should inform those debates because of the site’s unique ecological setting, its relative lack of disturbance by later occupations, and because it represents the only well-documented Early Formative period village in a 300-mile stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast.

One of the only studies to closely document multiple lines of evidence of the transition toward a sedentary, agricultural society at an individual settlement in Mesoamerica, La Consentida is a key resource for understanding the transition to settled life and social complexity in Mesoamerican societies.

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La Harpe's Post
Tales of French-Wichita Contact on the Eastern Plains
George H. Odell
University of Alabama Press, 2002

This major contribution to contact period studies points to the Lasley Vore site in modern Oklahoma as the most likely first meeting place of Plains Indians and Europeans more than 300 years ago.

In 1718, Jean-Baptiste Bénard, Sieur de la Harpe, departed St. Malo in Brittany for the New World. La Harpe, a member of the French bourgeoisie, arrived at Dauphin Island on the Gulf coast to take up the entrepreneurial concession provided by the director of the French colony, Jean Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville. La Harpe's charge was to open a trading post on the Red River just above a Caddoan village not far from present-day Texarkana. Following the establishment of this post, La Harpe ventured farther north to extend his trade market into the region occupied by the Wichita Indians. Here he encountered a Tawakoni village with an estimated 6,000 inhabitants, a number that swelled to 7,000 during the ten-day visit.

Despite years of ethnohistoric and archaeological research, no scholar had successfully established where this important meeting took place. Then in 1988, George Odell and his crew surveyed and excavated an area 13 miles south of Tulsa, along the Arkansas River, that revealed undeniable association of Native American habitation refuse with 18th-century European trade goods.

Odell here presents a full account of the presumed location of the Tawakoni village as revealed through the analysis of excavated materials from nine specialist collaborators. In a strikingly well-written narrative report, employing careful study and innovative analysis supported by appendixes containing the excavation data, Odell combines documentary history and archaeological evidence to pinpoint the probable site of the first European contact with North American Plains Indians.

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Lamar Archaeology
Mississippian Chiefdoms in the Deep South
Edited by Mark Williams and Gary Shapiro
University of Alabama Press, 1990

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication


Lamar Archaeology provides a comprehensive and detailed review of our knowledge of the late prehistoric Indian societies in the Southern Appalachian area and its peripheries. These Lamar societies were chiefdom-level groups who built most of the mounds in this large region and were ancestors of later tribes, including the Creeks and Cherokees. This book begins with a history of the last 50 years of archaeological and historical research and brings together for the first time all the available data on this early culture. It also provides an invaluable model for books about Southeastern Indian societies by combining purely descriptive information with innovative analyses, advancing our knowledge of the past while remaining firmly grounded in the archaeological evidence as fact.


Contributors include:

Frankie Snow, Chad O. Braley, James B. Langford Jr., Marvin T. Smith, Daniel T. Elliott, Richard R. Polhemus, C. Roger Nance, Gary Shapiro, Mark Williams, John F. Scarry, David G. Anderson, andCharles M. Hudson

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Land of the Tejas
Native American Identity and Interaction in Texas, A.D. 1300 to 1700
By John Wesley Arnn III
University of Texas Press, 2012

Combining archaeological, historical, ethnographic, and environmental data, Land of the Tejas represents a sweeping, interdisciplinary look at Texas during the late prehistoric and early historic periods. Through this revolutionary approach, John Wesley Arnn reconstructs Native identity and social structures among both mobile foragers and sedentary agriculturalists. Providing a new methodology for studying such populations, Arnn describes a complex, vast, exotic region marked by sociocultural and geographical complexity, tracing numerous distinct peoples over multiple centuries.

Drawing heavily on a detailed analysis of Toyah (a Late Prehistoric II material culture), as well as early European documentary records, an investigation of the regional environment, and comparisons of these data with similar regions around the world, Land of the Tejas examines a full scope of previously overlooked details. From the enigmatic Jumano Indian leader Juan Sabata to Spanish friar Casanas's 1691 account of the vast Native American Tejas alliance, Arnn's study shines new light on Texas's poorly understood past and debunks long-held misconceptions of prehistory and history while proposing a provocative new approach to the process by which we attempt to reconstruct the history of humanity.

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Land of Water, City of the Dead
Religion and Cahokia's Emergence
Sarah E. Baires
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Explores the embodiment of religion in the Cahokia land and how places create, make meaningful, and transform practices and beliefs

Cahokia, the largest city of the Mississippian mound cultures, lies outside present-day East St. Louis. Land of Water, City of the Dead reconceptualizes Cahokia’s emergence and expansion (ca. 1050–1200), focusing on understanding a newly imagined religion and complexity through a non-Western lens. Sarah E. Baires argues that this system of beliefs was a dynamic, lived component, based on a broader ontology, with roots in other mound societies. This religion was realized through novel mortuary practices and burial mounds as well as through the careful planning and development of this early city’s urban landscape.

Baires analyzes the organization and alignment of the precinct of downtown Cahokia with a specific focus on the newly discovered and excavated Rattlesnake Causeway and the ridge-top mortuary mounds located along the site axes. Land of Water, City of the Dead also presents new data from the 1954 excavations of the ridge-top mortuary Wilson Mound and a complete analysis of the associated human remains. Through this skeletal analysis, Baires discusses the ways that Cahokians processed and buried their ancestors, identifying unique mortuary practices that include the intentional dismemberment of human bodies and burial with marine shell beads and other materials.
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Landscape and Interaction. The Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project, Cyprus. Volume 1. Methodology, Analysis and Interpretation
Michael Given
Council for British Research in the Levant, 2013
The Troodos Mountain range in central Cyprus is a region of great physical and cultural diversity. The landscapes range from fertile, cultivated plains to narrow, dry valleys and forested mountain regions and this physical topography is overlain by a rich human cultural landscape of farming, mining, industry, settlement, burial and ritual behaviour. Over six field seasons, a team of specialists and fieldwalkers from the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project (TAESP) investigated the northern edge of this region and explored the complex and dynamic relationship between landscape and people over 12,000 years. The results of their integrated and interpretative approach are presented here, in the first of two volumes. Beginning with a considered overview of the context, research aims and methodology of the project, Volume 1 provides detailed accounts of the archaeology, material culture, geography and environmental record of the entire survey area. This wealth of information is then bought together to produce a series of chronological and thematic analyses of the interaction between people and landscape in this region of Cyprus from the Prehistoric through to the Modern period.
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Landscape and Land Use in First Millennium BC Southeast Italy
Planting the Seeds of Change
Daphne Lentjes
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
This book offers a comprehensive overview of landscape and land use in southeast Italy in the first millennium BCE. Using the most up-to-date techniques, it combines archaeobotanical and archaeozoological data with information from excavations, field surveys, and ancient written texts to place the relationship between people and landscapes in a broad geographical and chronological framework. It also confronts questions of food habits, the scale and organisation of agricultural production, the influx of Greek and Roman colonists, and the effects of globalisation on local and regional land use.
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Landscape of the Spirits
Hohokam Rock Art at South Mountain Park
Text by Todd W. Bostwick; Photographs by Peter Krocek; Illustrations by Todd W. Bostwick and Peter Krocek
University of Arizona Press, 2002
High above the noise and traffic of metropolitan Phoenix, Native American rock art offers mute testimony that another civilization once thrived in the Arizona desert. In the city's South Mountains, prehispanic peoples pecked thousands of images into the mountains' boulders and outcroppings—images that today's hikers can encounter with every bend in the trail.

Todd Bostwick, an archaeologist who has studied the Hohokam for more than twenty years, and Peter Krocek, a professional photographer with a passion for archaeology, have combed the South Mountains to locate nearly all of the ancient petroglyphs found in the canyons and ridges. Their years of learning the landscape and investigating the ancient designs have resulted in a book that explores this wealth of prehistoric rock art within its natural and cultural contexts, revealing what these carvings might mean, how they got there, and when they were made.

Landscape of the Spirits is the first book to cover these ancient images and is one of the most comprehensive treatments of a rock art location ever published. It conveys the range of different rock art elements and compositions found in the South Mountains—animals, humans, and geometric shapes, as well as celestial and calendrical markings at key sites—through accurate descriptions, drawings, and photographs. Interpretations of the petroglyphs are based on Native American ethnographic accounts and consider the most recent theories concerning shamanism and archaeoastronomy.

Written in a simple and accessible style, Landscape of the Spirits is an indispensable volume for anyone exploring the South Mountains, and for rock art enthusiasts everywhere who wish to broaden their understanding of the prehistoric world. It is both an authoritative overview of these ancient wonders and an unprecedented benchmark in southwestern rock art research at a single geographic location.
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Landscapes in Transition
B. Finlayson
Council for British Research in the Levant, 2010
This volume presents a collection of papers focusing on archaeological approaches to landscape in the context of the adoption of agriculture in Southwest Asia and Northwest Europe. Case studies are presented from these contrasting regions, one where the transition to farming is indigenous, and the other where the transformation is initiated externally. This allows us to consider to what extent hunter-gatherer and farmer landscapes may be different, or the degree to which apparent differences have been constructed by our expectations and traditions of interpretation. While the concept 'landscape' enjoys considerable popularity in archaeological interpretation, it is somewhat ill-defined and inconsistently used. Some have suggested that this fluidity allows landscape to be a 'usefully ambiguous concept' but at times there is a danger that this very ambiguity affords imprecision in our narratives. This is particularly important where differing traditions of archaeological interpretation meet, as, for example, in the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. The transition has been understood as a major division in archaeological practice and attitudes to 'landscape' across the transition reflect this dichotomy. The results of these debates are illuminating, and raise questions beyond the immediate geographical scope of the volume. The contrast between the two regions provides valuable comparisons between traditions of archaeological theory and interpretation and the bodies of evidence.
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Landscapes of Social Transformation in the Salinas Province and the Eastern Pueblo World
Edited by Katherine A. Spielmann
University of Arizona Press, 2017
In the 1100s most Pueblo peoples lived in small, dispersed settlements and moved frequently, but by the mid-1400s they had aggregated into large villages. The majority of these villages were still occupied at Spanish contact and conquest, by which time most Pueblo peoples had completely transformed their perception and experience of village life. Other changes were taking place on a broader regional scale, and the migrations from the Colorado Plateau and the transformation of Chaco initiated myriad changes in ritual organization and practice.

Landscapes of Social Transformation in the Salinas Province and the Eastern Pueblo World investigates relationships between diverse regional and local changes in the Rio Grande and Salinas areas from 1100 to 1500 C.E. The contributing authors draw on the results of sixteen seasons of archaeological survey and excavation in the Salinas Province of central New Mexico. The chapters offer cross-scale analyses to compare broad perspectives in well-researched southwestern culture changes to the finer details of stability and transformation in Salinas. This stability—which was unusual in the Pueblo Southwest—from the 1100s until its abandonment in the 1670s provides an interesting contrast to migration-based transformations studied elsewhere in the Rio Grande region.

CONTRIBUTORS

Patricia Capone
Matthew Chamberlin
Tiffany C. Clark
William M. Graves
Cynthia L. Herhahn
Deborah Huntley
Keith Kintigh
Ann Kinzig
Jeannette L. Mobley-Tanaka
Alison E. Rautman
Jonathan Sandor
Grant Snitker
Julie Solometo
Katherine A. Spielmann
Colleen Strawhacker
Maryann Wasiolek
 
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Las Varas
Ritual and Ethnicity in the Ancient Andes
Howard Tsai
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Archaeological data from Las Varas, Peru, that establish the importance of ritual in constructing ethnic boundaries

Recent popular discourse on nationalism and ethnicity assumes that humans by nature prefer “tribalism,” as if people cannot help but divide themselves along lines of social and ethnic difference. Research from anthropology, history, and archaeology, however, shows that individuals actively construct cultural and social ideologies to fabricate the stereotypes, myths, and beliefs that separate “us” from “them.” Archaeologist Howard Tsai and his team uncovered a thousand-year-old village in northern Peru where rituals were performed to recognize and reinforce ethnic identities.

This site—Las Varas—is located near the coast of Peru in a valley leading into the Andes. Excavations revealed a western entrance to Las Varas for those arriving from the coast and an eastern entryway for those coming from the highlands. Rituals were performed at both of these entrances, indicating that the community was open to exchange and interaction, yet at the same time controlled the flow of people and goods through ceremonial protocols. Using these checkpoints and associated rituals, the villagers of Las Varas were able to maintain ethnic differences between themselves and visitors from foreign lands.

Las Varas: Ritual and Ethnicity in the Ancient Andes reveals a rare case of finding ethnicity relying solely on archaeological remains. In this monograph, data from the excavation of Las Varas are analyzed within a theoretical framework based on current understandings of ethnicity. Tsai’s method, approach, and inference demonstrate the potential for archaeologists to discover how ethnic identities were constructed in the past, ultimately making us question the supposed naturalness of tribal divisions in human antiquity.

 
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The Last Century in the History of Judah
The Seventh Century BCE in Archaeological, Historical, and Biblical Perspectives
Filip Čapek
SBL Press, 2019

An incomparable interdisciplinary study of the history of Judah

Experts from a variety of disciplines examine the history of Judah during the seventh century BCE, the last century of the kingdom’s existence. This important era is well defined historically and archaeologically beginning with the destruction layers left behind by Sennacherib’s Assyrian campaign (701 BCE) and ending with levels of destruction resulting from Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian campaign (588-586 BCE). Eleven essays develop the current ongoing discussion about Judah during this period and extend the debate to include further important insights in the fields of archaeology, history, cult, and the interpretation of Old Testament texts.

Features

  • A new chronological frame for the Iron Age IIB-IIC
  • Close examinations of archaeology, texts, and traditions related to the reigns of Hezekiah, Manasseh, and Josiah
  • An evaluation of the religious, cultic, and political landscape
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The Last House at Bridge River
The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Household in British Columbia during the Fur Trade Period
Anna M. Prentiss
University of Utah Press, 2017

The Last House at Bridge River offers a comprehensive archaeological study of a single-house floor and roof deposit dated to approximately 1835–1858 C.E. Although the Fur Trade period of the nineteenth century was a time of significant change for aboriginal peoples in the Pacific Northwest, it is a period that is poorly understood. These studies of Housepit 54 at the Bridge River site offer new insights, revealing that ancestors of today’s St’át’imc people were actively engaged in maintaining traditional lifestyles and making the best of new opportunities for trade and intergroup interaction.

Among its major contributions, the book includes a first-ever historical ecology of the Middle Fraser Canyon that places aboriginal and Euro-Canadian history in ecological context. It demonstrates that an integrated multidisciplinary approach to archaeological research can achieve insights well beyond what is known from the ethnographic and historical records. Because the project derives from a long-term partnership between the University of Montana and the Bridge River Indian Band, it illustrates the value of collaborations between archaeologists and First Nations. Together, contributors present a Fur Trade period aboriginal society at a level of intimacy unparalleled elsewhere. 

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The Last Pescadores of Chimalhuacán, Mexico
An Archaeological Ethnography
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Based on his study of the nearly vanished aquatic economy of Chimalhuacán in the Valley of Mexico, Parsons describes the surviving vestiges of aquatic insect collection and fishing and considers their developmental and archaeological implications within a broad context of historical, ethnographic, biological, ecological, and archaeological information from Mexico, North and South America, the Near East, and Africa. Activities, implements, artifacts, and landscapes are richly illustrated, in many cases with the author’s own photos and a number of vintage photographs. The study concludes that aquatic resources were fully complementary with agricultural products during prehispanic times in Mesoamerica where a pastoral economy was absent.
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front cover of The Last Saltmakers of Nexquipayac, Mexico
The Last Saltmakers of Nexquipayac, Mexico
An Archaeological Ethnography
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 2001
In the 1980s, a few traditional saltmakers were still manufacturing several kinds of salt in the eastern Valley of Mexico. This in-depth study of the methodology of this dying craft includes a comparative study of pre-industrial saltmaking around the world and considers the implications of this knowledge for future archaeological research.
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The Late Archaic across the Borderlands
From Foraging to Farming
Edited by Bradley J. Vierra
University of Texas Press, 2005

Why and when human societies shifted from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture engages the interest of scholars around the world. One of the most fruitful areas in which to study this issue is the North American Southwest, where Late Archaic inhabitants of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts of Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico turned to farming while their counterparts in Trans-Pecos and South Texas continued to forage. By investigating the environmental, biological, and cultural factors that led to these differing patterns of development, we can identify some of the necessary conditions for the rise of agriculture and the corresponding evolution of village life.

The twelve papers in this volume synthesize previous and ongoing research and offer new theoretical models to provide the most up-to-date picture of life during the Late Archaic (from 3,000 to 1,500 years ago) across the entire North American Borderlands. Some of the papers focus on specific research topics such as stone tool technology and mobility patterns. Others study the development of agriculture across whole regions within the Borderlands. The two concluding papers trace pan-regional patterns in the adoption of farming and also link them to the growth of agriculture in other parts of the world.

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Late Holocene Research on Foragers and Farmers in the Desert West
Barbara J. Roth and Maxine E. McBrinn
University of Utah Press, 2015
This book brings together the work of archaeologists investigating prehistoric hunter-gatherers (foragers) and early farmers in both the Southwest and the Great Basin. Most previous work on this topic has been regionally specific, with researchers from each area favoring a different theoretical approach and little shared dialogue. Here the studies of archaeologists working in both the Southwest and the Great Basin are presented side by side to illustrate the similarities in environmental challenges and cultural practices of the prehistoric peoples who lived in these areas and to explore common research questions addressed by both regions.
     Three main themes link these papers: the role of the environment in shaping prehistoric behavior, flexibility in foraging and farming adaptations, and diversity in settlement strategies. Contributors cover a range of topics including the varied ways hunter-gatherers adapted to arid environments, the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and the reasons for it, the variation in early farmers across the Southwest and Great Basin, and the differing paths followed as they developed settled villages. 
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Late Intermediate Occupation at Cerro Azul, Perú, A Preliminary Report
Joyce Marcus
University of Michigan Press, 1987
Cerro Azul was a late prehistoric fishing community on the south-central coast of Peru. It was one of several communities that belonged to the region of Huarco before falling to the Inca. This volume is the preliminary report of an interdisciplinary project carried out at the site from 1982 to 1986. The remains of many buildings exist on the site. During this project, crews excavated four of these, as well as middens and burials.
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Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers of the Jornada Mogollon
Thomas R. Rocek
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Often seen as geographically marginal and of limited research interest to archaeologists, the Jornada Mogollon region of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico deserves broader attention. Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers of the Jornada Mogollon presents the major issues being addressed in Jornada research and reveals the complex, dynamic nature of Jornada prehistory.
 
The Jornada branch of the Mogollon culture and its inhabitants played a significant economic, political, and social role at multiple scales. This volume draws together results from recent large-scale CRM work that has amassed among the largest data sets in the Southwest with up-to-date chronological, architectural, faunal, ceramic, obsidian sourcing, and other specialized studies. Chapters by some of the most active researchers in the area address topics that reach beyond the American Southwest, such as mobility, forager adaptations, the transition to farming, responses to environmental challenges, and patterns of social interaction.
 
Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers of the Jornada Mogollon is an up-to-date summary of the major developments in the region and their implications for Southwest archaeology in particular and anthropological archaeological research more generally.
 
The publication of this book is supported in part by the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society and the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware.
 
Contributors: Rafael Cruz Antillón, Douglas H. M. Boggess, Peter C. Condon, Linda Scott Cummings, Moira Ernst, Tim Graves, David V. Hill, Nancy A. Kenmotsu, Shaun M. Lynch, Arthur C. MacWilliams, Mary Malainey, Timothy D. Maxwell, Myles R. Miller, John Montgomery, Jim A. Railey, Thomas R. Rocek, Matt Swanson, Christopher A. Turnbow, Javier Vasquez, Regge N. Wiseman, Chad L. Yost
 
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Later Prehistory of Badia
Excavation and Surverys in Eastern Jordan, Volume 2
A. Betts
Council for British Research in the Levant, 2013

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Latin American Horizons
Don Stephen Rice
Harvard University Press, 1993

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Latin American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence
Edited by Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza
University of Arizona Press, 2007
This groundbreaking multidisciplinary book presents significant essays on historical indigenous violence in Latin America from Tierra del Fuego to central Mexico. The collection explores those uniquely human motivations and environmental variables that have led to the native peoples of Latin America engaging in warfare and ritual violence since antiquity. Based on an American Anthropological Association symposium, this book collects twelve contributions from sixteen authors, all of whom are scholars at the forefront of their fields of study.

All of the chapters advance our knowledge of the causes, extent, and consequences of indigenous violence—including ritualized violence—in Latin America. Each major historical/cultural group in Latin America is addressed by at least one contributor. Incorporating the results of dozens of years of research, this volume documents evidence of warfare, violent conflict, and human sacrifice from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, including incidents that occurred before European contact. Together the chapters present a convincing argument that warfare and ritual violence have been woven into the fabric of life in Latin America since remote antiquity.

For the first time, expert subject-area work on indigenous violence—archaeological, osteological, ethnographic, historical, and forensic—has been assembled in one volume. Much of this work has heretofore been dispersed across various countries and languages. With its collection into one English-language volume, all future writers—regardless of their discipline or point of view—will have a source to consult for further research.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza

1.  Status Rivalry and Warfare in the Development and Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization
Matt O’Mansky and Arthur A. Demarest

2.  Aztec Militarism and Blood Sacrifice: The Archaeology and Ideology of Ritual Violence
Rubén G. Mendoza

3.  Territorial Expansion and Primary State Formation in Oaxaca, Mexico
Charles S. Spencer

4.  Images of Violence in Mesoamerican Mural Art
Donald McVicker

5.  Circum-Caribbean Chiefly Warfare
Elsa M. Redmond

6.  Conflict and Conquest in Pre-Hispanic Andean South America: Archaeological Evidence from Northern Coastal Peru
John W. Verano

7.  The Inti Raymi Festival among the Cotacachi and Otavalo of Highland Ecuador: Blood for the Earth
Richard J. Chacon, Yamilette Chacon, and Angel Guandinango

8.  Upper Amazonian Warfare
Stephen Beckerman and James Yost

9.  Complexity and Causality in Tupinambá Warfare
William Balée

10.  Hunter-Gatherers’ Aboriginal Warfare in Western Chaco
Marcela Mendoza

11.  The Struggle for Social Life in Fuego-Patagonia
Alfredo Prieto and Rodrigo Cárdenas

12.  Ethical Considerations and Conclusions Regarding Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence in Latin America
Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza

References
About the Contributors
Index
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Latin Inscriptions in the Kelsey Museum
The Dennison and De Criscio Collections
Steven L. Tuck
University of Michigan Press, 2006
The Latin inscriptions in the Kelsey Museum are among the best primary sources we have for documenting the lives of the lower classes in the Roman world. They provide unique evidence of the details of Roman daily life, including beliefs, occupations, families, and attitudes toward death.

The 400 entries in this volume include all of the Latin inscriptions on stone or metal in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan; they represent the largest, and arguably the most important, collection of Latin inscriptions in the Western Hemisphere. The collection is notable not just for its size but for the fact that almost all the inscriptions were acquired by purchase for their scholarly and educational value to the members of the university community. Because of this, the collection is also an important testimony to a seminal phase in the development of the study of Classics at the University of Michigan. For the first time ever, this project makes the Latin inscriptions of the Kelsey available in one volume and has provided an opportunity to reexamine some texts that have not been edited in over a century. The commentaries for this edition have benefited from a wealth of recent scholarship resulting in some amended readings and reidentification of texts.

Steven L. Tuck is Assistant Professor of Classics at Miami University of Ohio.

The Kelsey Museum Studies series, edited by University of Michigan professors Elaine Gazda, Margaret Cool Root, and John Pedley, is designed to publish unusual material in the Museum's collections, together with reports of current and past archaeological expeditions sponsored by the University of Michigan.
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The Leavitt Site
A Parkhill Phase Paleo-Indian Occupation in Central Michigan
Michael J. Shott, with a foreword by Henry T. Wright
University of Michigan Press, 1993
This illustrated monograph is an innovative analysis of forager archaeology in general and Paleo-Indian studies in particular. This is a companion volume to Thedford II: A Paleo-Indian Site in the Ausable River Watershed of Southwestern Ontario (Memoir 24).
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The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico
Carlos E. Cordova
University Press of Colorado, 2023
This volume celebrates the continuing impact of the most notable contributions from The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization by William T. Sanders, Jeffrey R. Parsons, and Robert S. Santley. In 1979, this influential work synthesized the results of the Basin of Mexico survey projects and follow-up excavations at several sites, while providing theoretical and methodological lines of research in central Mexico and generally in Mesoamerica.
 
More than four decades after that book’s publication, the fourteen contributions in this volume review and analyze its theoretical and methodological influence in light of recent research across disciplines. Among a spectrum of authors representing several generations are those who participated directly in the Basin of Mexico surveys—including the late Jeffrey R. Parsons—as well as those who have been actively working on recent projects in the basin and neighboring regions.
 
Providing a broad and multidisciplinary perspective of the present and future state of research in the area, The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico will be of interest to Mesoamerican and Latin American archaeologists as well as geographers, geologists, historians, and specialists in the study of past environments.
 
Contributors: Guillermo Acosta Ochoa, Aleksander Borejsza, Destiny Crider, Charles Frederick, Raúl García-Chávez, Larry Gorenflo, Angela Huster, Georgina Ibarra Arzave, Charles Kolb, Frank Lehmkuhl, Abigail Meza Peñaloza, Emily McClung de Tapia, John K. Millhauser, Deborah Nichols, Jeffrey R. Parsons, Serafin Sánchez Pérez, Philipp Schulte, Sergey Sedov, Elizabeth Solleiro Rebolledo, Daisy Valera Fenández, Federico Zertuche
 
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The Legacy of Fort William Henry
Resurrecting the Past
David R. Starbuck
University Press of New England, 2014
Fort William Henry, America’s early frontier fort at the southern end of Lake George, New York, was a flashpoint for conflict between the British and French empires in America. The fort is perhaps best known as the site of a massacre of British soldiers by Native Americans allied with the French that took place in 1757. Over the past decade, new and exciting archeological findings, in tandem with modern forensic methods, have changed our view of life at the fort prior to the massacre, by providing physical evidence of the role that Native Americans played on both sides of the conflict. Intertwining recent revelations with those of the past, Starbuck creates a lively narrative beginning with the earliest Native American settlement on Lake George. He pays special attention to the fort itself: its reconstruction in the 1950s, the major discoveries of the 1990s, and the archeological disclosures of the past few years. He further discusses the importance of forensic anthropology in uncovering the secrets of the past, reviews key artifacts discovered at the fort, and considers the relevance of Fort William Henry and its history in the twenty-first century. Three appendixes treat exhibits since the 1950s; foodways; and General Daniel Webb’s surrender letter of August 17, 1757.
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Letters from Wupatki
Courtney Reeder Jones; Edited by Lisa Rappoport
University of Arizona Press, 1995
When David and Courtney Reeder Jones moved into two rooms reached by ladder in a northern Arizona Indian ruin, they had been married only two weeks. Except for the ruin's cement floors, which were originally hardened mud, and skylights instead of smokeholes, the rooms were exactly as they had been 800 years before.

The year was 1938, and the newlyweds had come to Wupatki National Monument as full-time National Park Service caretakers for the ruin. Remote in time and place, their story as described in Courtney's letters will take readers into a dramatic landscape of red rocks, purple volcanoes, and endless blue sky. Here, some 60 years ago, two young people came to terms with their new life together and with their nearly total reliance upon each other and their Navajo neighbors.

"They helped us in any way that a neighbor would, and we helped them as we could," wrote Courtney in her memoirs years later. Vivid and engaging, her letters home spill over with descriptions of their friendship with local Navajo families, their sings and celebrations, and her good luck in being able to be a part of it all.

Letters from Wupatki captures a more innocent era in southwestern archaeology and the history of the National Park Service before the post-war years brought paved roads, expanded park facilities, and ever-increasing crowds of visitors. Courtney's letters to her family and friends reflect all the charm of the earlier time as they convey the sense of rapid transition that came after the war.

Tracking those changes in the development of Wupatki National Monument and the National Park Service, the letters also—and perhaps more important—reveal changes in the Joneses themselves. Of particular interest to anthropologists and historians, their story also gives the general reader captivating glimpses of a partnership between two people who only grew stronger for the struggles they shared together.
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Life And Death At Paloma
Practices In Peruvian Village
Jeffrey Quilter
University of Iowa Press, 1989
Gold, pomp, and circumstances surrounded the mummies of Inca emperors, but the elaborate funerary rites at the end of prehistory were only part of a tradition that began thousands of years earlier. Life and Death at Paloma, the first in-depth treatment of burials from a preagricultural South American village, analyzes the life of its people during a revolutionary time in prehistory: the transition from a hunting-gathering-fishing way of life to a more sedentary horticultural society.
Drawing upon the data that he collected as part of the University of Missouri's excavations at Paloma, Jeffrey Quilter gives us the first study of preceramic Peruvian life through his analysis of this site's graves and contents. His extensively illustrated book is also the first attempt to infer social organization from such data for this period—circa 5000 to 2500 B.C.—in Peru. In addition, he presents the only available summary and discussion of the known preceramic interments from western South America.
Coastal Peru is one of the few New World regions where the early development of complex societies can be studied. Life and Death at Paloma will greatly assist such research by specialists in mortuary studies, in Andean prehistory, and in hunter-gatherer societies.
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Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands
The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society
Curtis E. Larsen
University of Chicago Press, 1983
According to archeological and historical records, the Bahrain Islands of the Arabian Gulf were the home of a flourishing civilization four thousant years ago. Then, as now, these islands served as an important locus of maritime trade, but they were also characterized as a land of copious artesian springs and fertile fields. Modern Bahrain, in contrast, is beset by environmental and demographic problems: the depletion of the artesian water supply, abandonment of rural agricultural lands, and rapid population growth. In this exemplary interdisciplinary study, Curtis E. Larsen combines archeological, geological, historical, and anthropological methods to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental and socioeconomic context that links Bahrain's present to its past.
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Life and Politics at the Royal Court of Aguateca
Artifacts, Analytical Data, and Synthesis
Takeshi Inomata
University of Utah Press, 2014
Aguateca is a Classic Mayan site located in the Petexbatun region of Guatemala. In this volume, Takeshi Inomata, Daniela Triadan, and their team examine the life of the Mayan royal family, nobles, and their retainers through the analysis of numerous complete and reconstructible artifacts left in this site’s elite residential area. Aguateca was unexpectedly attacked around AD 810, its central part was burned and its residents fled or were taken captive.
 
Because of the surprise nature of the attack, most artifacts were left in their original locations, providing unprecedented views of the daily life of the Classic Maya. Detailed analyses of these objects and their distribution has shown that Mayan elites stored some of their food in their residences and that they also conducted various administrative duties there. The presence of numerous precious ornaments indicates that many of the Maya elite were also skilled craft producers.
 
Life and Politics at the Royal Court of Aguateca is the third and final volume of the monograph series on Aguateca.  It presents the analyses of items not covered in the first two volumes, including figurines, ceramic laminates and masks, spindle whorls, ground stone, and bone artifacts, as well as hieroglyphic texts and plant and animal remains. It discusses the broad implications of this remarkable data set and provides a summation of the project.
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The Life and Writings of Julio C. Tello
America's First Indigenous Archaeologist
Richard L. Burger
University of Iowa Press, 2009
The father of Peruvian archaeology, Julio Tello was the most distinguished Native American scholar ever to focus on archaeology. A Quechua speaker born in a small highland village in 1880, Tello did the impossible: he received a medical degree and convinced the Peruvian government to send him to Harvard and European universities to master archaeology and anthropology. He then returned home to shape modern Peruvian archaeology and the institutions through which it was carried out. 

Tello’s vision remains unique, and his work has taken on additional interest as contemporary scholars have turned their attention to the relationship among nationalism, ethnicity, and archaeology. Unfortunately, many of his most important works were published in small journals or newspapers in Peru and have not been available even to those with a reading knowledge of Spanish. This volume thus makes available for the first time a broad sampling of Tello’s writings as well as complementary essays that relate these writings to his life and contributions.

Essays about Tello set the stage for the subsequent translations. Editor Richard Burger assesses his intellectual legacy, Richard Daggett outlines his remarkable life and career, and John Murra places him in both national and international contexts. Tello’s writings focus on such major discoveries as the Paracas mummies, the trepanation of skulls from Huarochirí, Andean iconography and cosmology, the relation between archaeology and nationhood, archaeological policy and preservation, and the role of science and museums in archaeology. Finally, the bibliography gives the most complete and accurate listing of Tello’s work ever compiled.

With its abundance of coups, wars, political dramas, class struggle, racial discrimination, looters, skulls, mummies, landslides, earthquakes, accusations, and counteraccusations, The Life and Writings of Julio C. Tello will become an indispensable reference for Andeanists.
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Life, Death, and Archaeology at Fort Blue Mounds
A Settlers’ Fortification of the Black Hawk War
Robert A. Birmingham
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2012

Life, Death, and Archaeology at Fort Blue Mounds is an archaeological detective story illuminating the lives of white settlers in the lead-mining region during the tragic events of the historically important conflict known as the Black Hawk War.

Focusing on the strategically located Fort Blue Mounds in southwestern Wisconsin, Robert A. Birmingham summarizes the 1832 conflict and details the history of the fort, which played a major role not only in U.S. military and militia operations but also in the lives of the white settlers who sought refuge there. Birmingham then transports us to the site decades later, when he and fellow Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologists and dedicated volunteers began their search for the fort. The artifacts they unearthed provide fascinating—and sometimes surprising—insights into the life, material culture, and even the food of the frontier.

Recommended for readers interested in the Black Hawk War, frontier life, Native American history, military history, and archaeology, Life, Death, and Archaeology at Fort Blue Mounds is grounded by a sense of place and the discovery of what a careful examination of our surroundings can tell us about the past.

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Life in a Mississippian Warscape
Common Field, Cahokia, and the Effects of Warfare
Meghan E. Buchanan
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Analyzes Mississippian daily life at Cahokia’s environs during wartime
 
In Life in a Mississippian Warscape: Common Field, Cahokia, and the Effects of Warfare Meghan E. Buchanan posits that to understand the big histories of warfare, political fragmentation, and resilience in the past archaeologists must also analyze and interpret the microscale actions of the past. These are the daily activities of people before, during, and after historical events. Within warscapes, battles take place in peoples’ front yards, family members die, and the impacts of violence in near and distant places are experienced on a daily basis. This book explores the microscale of daily lives of people living at Common Field, a large, palisaded mound center, during the period of Cahokia’s abandonment and the spread of violence and warfare throughout the Southeast.

Linking together ethnographic, historic, and archaeological sources, Buchanan discusses the evidence that the people of Common Field engaged in novel and hybrid practices in these dangerous times. At the microscale, they adopted new ceramic tempering techniques, produced large numbers of serving vessels decorated with warfare-related imagery, adapted their food practices, and erected a substantial palisade with specially prepared deposits. The overall picture that emerges at Common Field is of a people who engaged in risk-averse practices that minimized their exposure to outside of the palisade and attempted to seek intercession from otherworldly realms through public ceremonies involving warfare-related iconography.
 
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front cover of Life on the Periphery
Life on the Periphery
Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico
Edited by John D. Speth
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Dramatic economic changes transformed an isolated 13th-century village of farmer-hunters in the arid grasslands of southeastern New Mexico into a community heavily engaged in long-distance bison hunting and intense exchange with the Puebloan world to the west.
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Lifeways in the Northern Maya Lowlands
New Approaches to Archaeology in the Yucatán Peninsula
Edited by Jennifer P. Mathews and Bethany A. Morrison
University of Arizona Press, 2006
The flat, dry reaches of the northern Yucatán Peninsula have been largely ignored by archaeologists drawn to the more illustrious sites of the south. This book is the first volume to focus entirely on the northern Maya lowlands, presenting a broad cross-section of current research projects in the region by both established and up-and-coming scholars. To address the heretofore unrecognized importance of the northern lowlands in Maya prehistory, the contributors cover key topics relevant to Maya studies: the environmental and historical significance of the region, the archaeology of both large and small sites, the development of agriculture, resource management, ancient politics, and long-distance interaction among sites. As a volume in the series Native Peoples of the Americas, it adds a human dimension to archaeological findings by incorporating modern ethnographic data.

By exploring various social and political levels of Maya society through a broad expanse of time, Lifeways in the Northern Maya Lowlands not only reconstructs a little-known past, it also suggests the broad implications of archaeology for related studies of tourism, household economies, and ethnoarchaeology. It is a benchmark work that pointedly demonstrates the need for researchers in both north and south to ignore modern geographic boundaries in their search for new ideas to further their understanding of the ancient Maya.
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Light on the Path
The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians
Thomas J. Pluckhahn
University of Alabama Press, 2006
Social history of the native peoples of the American South, bridging prehistory and history
 
The past 20 years have witnessed a change in the study of the prehistory and history of the native peoples of the American South. This paradigm shift is the bridging of prehistory and history to fashion a seamless social history that includes not only the 16th-century Late Mississippian period and the 18th-century colonial period but also the largely forgotten--and critically important--century in between.  The shift is in part methodological, for it involves combining methods from anthropology, history, and archaeology. It is also conceptual and theoretical, employing historical and archaeological data to reconstruct broad patterns of history--not just political history with Native  Americans as a backdrop, nor simply an archaeology with added historical specificity, but a true social history of the Southeastern Indians, spanning their entire existence in the American South.

The scholarship underlying this shift comes from many directions, but much of the groundwork can be attributed to Charles Hudson. The papers in this volume were contributed by Hudson’s colleagues and former students (many now leading scholars themselves) in his honor.  The assumption links these papers is that of a historical transformation between Mississippian societies and the Indian societies of the historic era that requires explanation and critical analysis.

In all of the chapters, the legacy of Hudson’s work is evident. Anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians are storming the bridge that connects prehistory and history in a manner unimaginable 20 years ago.  While there remains much work to do on the path toward understanding this transformation and constructing a complete social history of the Southeastern Indians, the work of Charles Hudson and his colleagues have shown the way.
 
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Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents
The Public Sculpture of El Tajín
By Rex Koontz
University of Texas Press, 2009

El Tajín, an ancient Mesoamerican capital in Veracruz, Mexico, has long been admired for its stunning pyramids and ballcourts decorated with extensive sculptural programs. Yet the city's singularity as the only center in the region with such a wealth of sculpture and fine architecture has hindered attempts to place it more firmly in the context of Mesoamerican history. In Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents, Rex Koontz undertakes the first extensive treatment of El Tajín's iconography in over thirty years, allowing us to view its imagery in the broader Mesoamerican context of rising capitals and new elites during a period of fundamental historical transformations.

Koontz focuses on three major architectural features—the Pyramid of the Niches/Central Plaza ensemble, the South Ballcourt, and the Mound of the Building Columns complex—and investigates the meanings of their sculpture and how these meanings would have been experienced by specific audiences. Koontz finds that the iconography of El Tajín reveals much about how motifs and elite rites growing out of the Classic period were transmitted to later Mesoamerican peoples as the cultures centered on Teotihuacan and the Maya became the myriad city-states of the Early Postclassic period.

By reexamining the iconography of sculptures long in the record, as well as introducing important new monuments and contexts, Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents clearly demonstrates El Tajín's numerous iconographic connections with other areas of Mesoamerica, while also exploring its roots in an indigenous Gulf lowlands culture whose outlines are only now emerging. At the same time, it begins to uncover a largely ignored regional artistic culture of which Tajín is the crowning achievement.

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Lightning Warrior
Maya Art and Kingship at Quirigua
By Matthew G. Looper
University of Texas Press, 2003
The ancient Maya city of Quirigua occupied a crossroads between Copan in the southeastern Maya highlands and the major centers of the Peten heartland. Though always a relatively small city, Quirigua stands out because of its public monuments, which were some of the greatest achievements of Classic Maya civilization. Impressive not only for their colossal size, high sculptural quality, and eloquent hieroglyphic texts, the sculptures of Quirigua are also one of the few complete, in situ series of Maya monuments anywhere, which makes them a crucial source of information about ancient Maya spirituality and political practice within a specific historical context. Using epigraphic, iconographic, and stylistic analyses, this study explores the integrated political-religious meanings of Quirigua’s monumental sculptures during the eighth-century A.D. reign of the city’s most famous ruler, K’ak’ Tiliw. In particular, Matthew Looper focuses on the role of stelae and other sculpture in representing the persona of the ruler not only as a political authority but also as a manifestation of various supernatural entities with whom he was associated through ritual performance. By tracing this sculptural program from its Early Classic beginnings through the reigns of K’ak’ Tiliw and his successors, and also by linking it to practices at Copan, Looper offers important new insights into the politico-religious history of Quirigua and its ties to other Classic Maya centers, the role of kingship in Maya society, and the development of Maya art.
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Lithic Technologies in Sedentary Societies
Rachel A. Horowitz
University Press of Colorado, 2019
Lithic Technologies in SedentarySocieties examines lithic technology from ancient societies in Mesoamerica, the Near East, South Asia, and North America, showcasing the important contributions in-depth lithic analysis can make to the study of sedentary societies around the world. Using cutting-edge analytical techniques these case studies address difficult anthropological questions concerning economic, social, and political issues, as well as global trends in lithic production.
 
Lithic analysis focused on sedentary societies, especially in places like Mesoamerica, has previously been neglected mostly because of the high frequency of informal tools, but such bias limits the ways in which both lithic production and economic organization are investigated. Bringing the importance of studying such technologies to the fore and emphasizing the vital anthropological questions that lithics can answer, Lithic Technologies in Sedentary Societies is a valuable resource for scholars and students of lithic technology and sedentary, complex societies.
 
 Contributors: Fumi Arakawa, Mary A. Davis, James Enloe, Dan Healan, Francesca Manclossi, Theodore Marks, Jayur Madhusudan Mehta, Jason S. R. Paling, Steve Rosen, John Whittaker
 
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Livestock for Sale
Animal Husbandry in a Roman Frontier Zone
Maaike Groot
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
The civitas Batavorum was a settlement on the north-western frontier of the Roman Empire, and it is now the site of numerous archaeological excavations. This book offers the most up-to-date look yet at what has been discovered, using the newest archaeological techniques, about the town and its economy, its military importance, and the religious and domestic buildings it held. It will be essential reading for anyone studying the economy of the Roman provincial countryside or the details of food supply for the Roman army and town.
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Living and Dying on the Periphery
The Archaeology and Human Remains from Two 13th-15th Century AD Villages in Southeastern New Mexico
Jamie L. Clark and John D. Speth
University of Utah Press, 2022
The phrase "southwestern US/northwestern Mexico archaeology" tends to evoke images of multistoried villages and cliff dwellings. But on the eastern periphery of the Southwest, where mesas and mountains give way to vast grasslands, other types of villages once thrived. In this volume, archaeologists Jamie Clark and John Speth document the lives and lifeways of the people who inhabited two of these villages: Henderson and Bloom Mound. The villagers hunted bison on the plains and exchanged meat and hides with Puebloan peoples for pottery, turquoise, marine shells, and other goods. The origins of these close social and economic ties between bison hunters and village farmers, often referred to as “Plains-Pueblo interaction,” have intrigued anthropologists for generations. The excavations at Henderson and Bloom Mound provide fascinating new insights into when, how, and why these relationships came about.

Summarizing results from eight seasons of research, Clark and Speth document human burials and associated grave offerings from the two sites. They discuss evidence for pathologies and trauma, raising questions about the nature and causes of violence that led to the demise of Henderson and Bloom Mound, and the abandonment of many other farming-hunting communities in the surrounding region.
 
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Living and Leaving
A Social History of Regional Depopulation in Thirteenth-Century Mesa Verde
Donna M. Glowacki
University of Arizona Press, 2015
The Mesa Verde migrations in the thirteenth century were an integral part of a transformative period that forever changed the course of Pueblo history. For more than seven hundred years, Pueblo people lived in the Northern San Juan region of the U.S. Southwest. Yet by the end of the 1200s, tens of thousands of Pueblo people had left the region. Understanding how it happened and where they went are enduring questions central to Southwestern archaeology.

Much of the focus on this topic has been directed at understanding the role of climate change, drought, violence, and population pressure. The role of social factors, particularly religious change and sociopolitical organization, are less well understood. Bringing together multiple lines of evidence, including settlement patterns, pottery exchange networks, and changes in ceremonial and civic architecture, this book takes a historical perspective that naturally forefronts the social factors underlying the depopulation of Mesa Verde.

Author Donna M. Glowacki shows how “living and leaving” were experienced across the region and what role differing stressors and enablers had in causing emigration. The author’s analysis explains how different histories and contingencies—which were shaped by deeply rooted eastern and western identities, a broad-reaching Aztec-Chaco ideology, and the McElmo Intensification—converged, prompting everyone to leave the region. This book will be of interest to southwestern specialists and anyone interested in societal collapse, transformation, and resilience.
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Living on the Boott
Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses of Lowell, Massachusetts
Stephen A. Mrozowski
University of Massachusetts Press, 1996
We are currently updating our website and have not yet posted complete information for this title. Many of our books are in the Google preview program, which allows readers to view up to 20% of the book. If this title is active in the program, you will find the Google Preview button in the sidebar below.
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Living Ruins
Native Engagements with Past Materialities in Contemporary Mesoamerica, Amazonia, and the Andes
Philippe Erikson
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Ruins and remnants of the past are endowed with life, rather than mere relics handed down from previous generations. Living Ruins explores some of the ways Indigenous people relate to the material remains of human activity and provides an informed and critical stance that nuances and contests institutionalized patrimonialization discourse on vestiges of the past in present landscapes.
 
Ten case studies from the Maya region, Amazonia, and the Andes detail and contextualize narratives, rituals, and a range of practices and attitudes toward different kinds of vestiges. The chapters engage with recently debated issues such as regimes of historicity and knowledge, cultural landscapes, conceptions of personhood and ancestrality, artifacts, and materiality. They focus on Indigenous perspectives rather than mainstream narratives such as those mediated by UNESCO, Hollywood, travel agents, and sometimes even academics. The contributions provide critical analyses alongside a multifaceted account of how people relate to the place/time nexus, expanding our understanding of different ontological conceptualizations of the past and their significance in the present.
 
Living Ruins adds to the lively body of work on the invention of tradition, Indigenous claims on their lands and history, “retrospective ethnogenesis,” and neo-Indianism in a world where tourism, NGOs, and Western essentialism are changing Indigenous attitudes and representations. This book is significant to anyone interested in cultural heritage studies, Amerindian spirituality, and Indigenous engagement with archaeological sites in Latin America.
 
Contributors: Cedric Becquey, Laurence Charlier Zeineddine, Marie Chosson, Pablo Cruz, Philippe Erikson, Antoinette Molinié, Fernando Santos-Granero, Emilie Stoll, Valentina Vapnarsky, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen
 
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Living with the Dead in the Andes
Edited by Izumi Shimada and James L. Fitzsimmons
University of Arizona Press, 2015
The Andean idea of death differs markedly from the Western view. In the Central Andes, particularly the highlands, death is not conceptually separated from life, nor is it viewed as a permanent state. People, animals, and plants simply transition from a soft, juicy, dynamic life to drier, more lasting states, like dry corn husks or mummified ancestors. Death is seen as an extension of vitality.

Living with the Dead in the Andes considers recent research by archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, ethnographers, and ethnohistorians whose work reveals the diversity and complexity of the dead-living interaction. The book’s contributors reap the salient results of this new research to illuminate various conceptions and treatments of the dead: “bad” and “good” dead, mummified and preserved, the body represented by art or effigies, and personhood in material and symbolic terms.

Death does not end or erase the emotional bonds established in life, and a comprehensive understanding of death requires consideration of the corpse, the soul, and the mourners. Lingering sentiment and memory of the departed seems as universal as death itself, yet often it is economic, social, and political agendas that influence the interactions between the dead and the living.

Nine chapters written by scholars from diverse countries and fields offer data-rich case studies and innovative methodologies and approaches. Chapters include discussions on the archaeology of memory, archaeothanatology (analysis of the transformation of the entire corpse and associated remains), a historical analysis of postmortem ritual activities, and ethnosemantic-iconographic analysis of the living-dead relationship. This insightful book focuses on the broader concerns of life and death.
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Living with the Dead
Mortuary Ritual in Mesoamerica
Edited by James L. Fitzsimmons and Izumi Shimada
University of Arizona Press, 2011
Scholars have recently achieved new insights into the many ways in which the dead and the living interacted from the Late Preclassic to the Conquest in Mesoamerica. The eight essays in this useful volume were written by well-known scholars who offer cross-disciplinary and synergistic insights into the varied articulations between the dead and those who survived them. From physically opening the tomb of their ancestors and carrying out ancestral heirlooms to periodic feasts, sacrifices, and other lavish ceremonies, heirs revisited death on a regular basis. The activities attributable to the dead, moreover, range from passively defining territorial boundaries to more active exploits, such as “dancing” at weddings and “witnessing” royal accessions. The dead were—and continued to be—a vital part of everyday life in Mesoamerican cultures.

This book results from a symposium organized by the editors for an annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contributors employ historical sources, comparative art history, anthropology, and sociology, as well as archaeology and anthropology, to uncover surprising commonalities across cultures, including the manner in which the dead were politicized, the perceptions of reciprocity between the dead and the living, and the ways that the dead were used by the living to create, define, and renew social as well as family ties. In exploring larger issues of a “good death” and the transition from death to ancestry, the contributors demonstrate that across Mesoamerica death was almost never accompanied by the extinction of a persona; it was more often the beginning of a social process than a conclusion.
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Local Identities
Landscape and Community in the Late Prehistoric Meuse-Demer-Scheldt region
Fokke Gerritsen
Amsterdam University Press, 2003
Gerritsen's study investigates how small groups of people—households, or local communities—constitute and represent their social identity by shaping the landscape around them. Examining things like house building and habitation, cremation and burial, and farming and ritual practice, Gerritsen develops a new theoretical and empirical perspective on the practices that create collective senses of identity and belonging. An explicitly diachronic approach reveals processes of cultural and social change that have previously gone unnoticed, providing a basis for a much more dynamic history of the late prehistoric inhabitants of this region.
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Looking Beneath the Surface
The Story of Archaeology in New Jersey
Mounier, R. Alan
Rutgers University Press, 2002

For more than ten thousand years, humans have lived in New Jersey. From Summit to Cape May, from Trenton to the Jersey Shore, the state is a treasure trove of archaeological artifacts, revealing much about those who occupied the region prior to European settlement. As a rule, only the most durable of human creations¾items of stone and pottery¾survive the ravages of time. To complicate matters, the onslaught of our own culture and the indiscriminate looting of sites by greedy collectors have further diminished the cultural materials left behind. The task of the archaeologist is to gather and interpret these scraps for the benefit of science and the public. But digging up relics is a trivial pursuit if the only outcome is a collection of artifacts, however attractive or valuable they may be. Understanding what those relics mean in human terms is crucial.

In Looking beneath the Surface, R. Alan Mounier looks at the human past of New Jersey. With particular focus on the ancient past and native cultures, the author tells the story of archaeology in the state as it has unfolded, and as it continues to unfold. New investigations and discoveries continually change our views and interpretations of the past. In jargon-free language, Mounier provides an in-depth introduction offering information to understand general archaeological practices as well as research in New Jersey. Subsequent chapters describe artifact types, archaeological settlements, and burial practices in detail. He concludes with vignettes of twenty-one archaeological investigations throughout the state to illustrate the variability of sites and the accomplishments of dedicated archaeologists, both professional and amateur.

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The Lords of Lambityeco
Political Evolution in the Valley of Oaxaca during the Xoo Phase
Michael Lind
University Press of Colorado, 2010
The Valley of Oaxaca was unified under the rule of Monte Albán until its collapse around AD 800. Using findings from John Paddock’s long-term excavations at Lambityeco from 1961 to 1976, Michael Lind and Javier Urcid examine the political and social organization of the ancient community during the Xoo Phase (Late Classic period).Focusing on change within this single archaeological period rather than between time periods, The Lords of Lambityeco traces the changing political relationships between Lambityeco and Monte Albán that led to the fall of the Zapotec state. Using detailed analysis of elite and common houses, tombs, and associated artifacts, the authors demonstrate increased political control by Monte Albán over Lambityeco prior to the abandonment of both settlements. Lambityeco is the most thoroughly researched Classic period site in the valley after Monte Albán, but only a small number of summary articles have been published about this important locale. This, in combination with Lambityeco’s status as a secondary center—one that allows for greater understanding of core and periphery dynamics in the Monte Albán state—makes The Lords of Lambityeco a welcome and significant contribution to the literature on ancient Mesoamerica.
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Los Primeros Mexicanos
Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene People of Sonora
Guadalupe Sánchez
University of Arizona Press, 2016
In 1927, near the town of Folsom, New Mexico, a spectacular discovery altered our understanding of early humans on the American continent. Scientists excavating a bison from the late Pleistocene age discovered a fluted projectile point wedged between the animal’s ribs—forceful evidence that humans existed during the Ice Age together with now-extinct animals. Subsequent discoveries at nearby Clovis introduced scientists to the first large-scale occupation of the Americas—Clovis culture—with a time span of 13,250 to 12,500 years ago.

Los Primeros Mexicanos explores the Clovis occupation of Mexico’s northwest region of Sonora. Using extensive primary data concerning specific artifacts, assemblages, and Paleoindian archaeology, Mexican archaeologist Guadalupe Sánchez presents a synopsis and critical review of current data and a unique summary of information about the First People of México that is difficult to find in Spanish and until now not available in English.

Sánchez’s essential framework for early Sonora prehistory includes the Sonoran landscape, the biotic communities, a history of investigations, the regional cultural-historical chronology of Sonora, and the Clovis record in the surrounding area. The Sonoran settlement pattern, she asserts, indicates that Clovis groups were hunter-gatherers who exploited a wide range of environments, locating their settlements near lithic sources for tool-making, water sources, large-prey animals, and a variety of edible plants and small animals.

In 1592, a Jesuit priest, José de Acosta, chronicled his puzzlement over when man first arrived in the New World. Four hundred years later, the peopling of the American continent is still intensely interesting to scientists and researchers. Los Primeros Mexicanos offers an exhaustive synthesis of available archaeological evidence to shed light on Clovis occupation in Sonora, Mexico.
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Lost Laborers in Colonial California
Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma
Stephen W. Silliman
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Native Americans who populated the various ranchos of Mexican California as laborers are people frequently lost to history. The “rancho period” was a critical time for California Indians, as many were drawn into labor pools for the flourishing ranchos following the 1834 dismantlement of the mission system, but they are practically absent from the documentary record and from popular histories.
 
This study focuses on Rancho Petaluma north of San Francisco Bay, a large livestock, agricultural, and manufacturing operation on which several hundred—perhaps as many as two thousand—Native Americans worked as field hands, cowboys, artisans, cooks, and servants. One of the largest ranchos in the region, it was owned from 1834 to 1857 by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, one of the most prominent political figures of Mexican California. While historians have studied Vallejo, few have considered the Native Americans he controlled, so we know little of what their lives were like or how they adjusted to the colonial labor regime.
 
Because Vallejo’s Petaluma Adobe is now a state historic park and one of the most well-protected rancho sites in California, this site offers unparalleled opportunities to investigate nineteenth-century rancho life via archaeology. Using the Vallejo rancho as a case study, Stephen W. Silliman examines this California rancho with a particular eye toward Native American participation. Through the archaeological record—tools and implements, containers, beads, bone and shell artifacts, food remains—he reconstructs the daily practices of Native peoples at Rancho Petaluma and the labor relations that structured indigenous participation in and experience of rancho life. This research enables him to expose the multi-ethnic nature of colonialism, counterbalancing popular misconceptions of Native Americans as either non-participants in the ranchos or passive workers with little to contribute to history.
 
Lost Laborers in Colonial California draws on archaeological data, material studies, and archival research, and meshes them with theoretical issues of labor, gender, and social practice to examine not only how colonial worlds controlled indigenous peoples and practices but also how Native Americans lived through and often resisted those impositions. The book fills a gap in the regional archaeological and historical literature as it makes a unique contribution to colonial and contact-period studies in the Spanish/Mexican borderlands and beyond.
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The Louisiana and Arkansas Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore
Clarence Bloomfield Moore
University of Alabama Press, 2004

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

The ninth and final volume in the C.B. Moore reprint series that covers archaeological discoveries along North American Waterways.

Clarence B. Moore (1852-1936), a wealthy Philadelphia socialite, paper company heir, and photographer, made the archaeology of the Southeast his passion. Beginning in the 1870s, Moore systematically explored prehistoric sites along the major waterways of the region, from the Ohio River south to Florida and as far west as Texas, publishing his findings, at his own expense, with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

This volume, the final in a series of nine, includes Moore’s investigations along waterways of Arkansas and Louisiana—the Ouachita, Red, Saline, Black, Tensas, and Atchafalaya Rivers—in three complete field sessions ending in 1909, 1912, and 1913. He located and mapped more than 185 mounds and cemeteries. Artifacts recovered in this territory, such as ceramic effigy pots, earthenware pipes, arrowheads, celts, and projectile points, include some of the most important ones discovered by Moore in his 47 years of excavating. Included in this volume is a CD containing the 69 color illustrations from all the original expedition volumes.

The elaborate earthwork of Poverty Point, located in West Carroll Parish, Louisiana, is perhaps the most remarkable archaeological site presented in the volume. In some cases, Moore documented sites along the tributaries that have since been destroyed by river action or looters. In other cases, the National Register of Historic Sites and concerned landowners in Arkansas and Louisiana have preserved the record of aboriginal peoples and their life ways that was first illuminated by Moore's sophisticated study.

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Love for Lydia
A Sardis Anniversary Volume Presented to Crawford H. Greenewalt, Jr.
Nicholas D. Cahill
Harvard University Press, 2008
This generously illustrated volume, honoring Crawford H. Greenewalt, Jr., field director of the Sardis Expedition for over thirty years, and commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Harvard–Cornell archaeological excavation, presents new studies by scholars closely involved with Professor Greenewalt’s excavations at this site in western Turkey. The essays span the Archaic to the Late Antique periods, focusing primarily on Sardis itself but also touching on other archaeological sites in the eastern Mediterranean. Three papers publish for the first time an Archaic painted tomb near Sardis with lavish interior furnishings. Papers on Sardis in late antiquity focus on domestic wall paintings, spolia used in the late Roman Synagogue, and late fifth-century coin hoards. Other Sardis papers examine the layout of the city from the Lydian to the Roman periods, the transformation of Sardis from an imperial capital to a Hellenistic polis, the reuse of pottery in the Lydian period, and the history and achievements of the conservation program at the site. Studies of an Archaic seal from Gordion, queenly patronage of Hellenistic rotundas, and ancient and modern approaches to architectural ornament round out the volume.
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front cover of The Lower Mississippi Valley Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore
The Lower Mississippi Valley Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore
Clarence Bloomfield Moore
University of Alabama Press, 1998

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

C. B. Moore's investigations of the Lower Mississippi Valley are here collected in a one-volume facsimile edition.

Like many other natural scientists from the Victorian era, Clarence Bloomfield Moore (1852-1917) lived several lives—adventurer, paper company executive, archaeologist; however, Moore is chiefly remembered for the twenty-five years he spent investigating and documenting archaeological sites along every navigable waterway in the southeastern United States.

Moore's surveys were and are impressive, and he earned lasting respect from archaeological researchers in the South by publishing, mostly at his own expense, all of the data he recovered. This volume includes works that describe data from Moore's expeditions that were key to the early recognition and preservation of major archaeological sites—Toltec, Parkin, Mound City, and Wicklife, among them—in the lower Mississippi River Valley. This and companion volumes stand today as the defining database for every area in which he worked.

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front cover of The Lowland Maya Postclassic
The Lowland Maya Postclassic
Edited by Arlen F. Chase and Prudence M. Rice
University of Texas Press, 1985

This collection represents a major step forward in understanding the era from the end of Classic Maya civilization to the Spanish conquest.

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Lulu Linear Punctated
Essays in Honor of George Irving Quimby
Edited by Robert C. Dunnell, Donald K. Grayson, and Walter N. Koelz
University of Michigan Press, 1983
Many archaeologists and anthropologists of note contributed chapters to this collection, which pays tribute to archaeologist George Irving Quimby on his 1983 retirement from the University of Washington. James Griffin, Albert Spaulding, Lewis Binford, David Brose, and many more write here about archaeology in the Midwest and other areas of North America. Griffin contributes the first chapter: “George Irving Quimby: The Formative Years.”
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Lydian Houses and Architectural Terracottas
Andrew Ramage
Harvard University Press, 1978


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