The most common relics of the 12,000-year occupancy of the Upper Mississippi River Valley may be the chipped stone projectile points that Native Americans fastened to the ends of their spears, darts, and arrow shafts. This useful guide provides a key to identifying the various styles of points found along the Upper Mississippi River in the Driftless region stretching roughly from Dubuque, Iowa, to Red Wing, Minnesota, but framed within a somewhat larger area extending from the Rock Island Rapids at the modern Moline-Rock Island area to the Falls of St. Anthony at Minneapolis-St. Paul.
Logging tens of thousands of miles and visiting private collectors from all walks of life since 1982, Robert Boszhardt has documented thousands of projectile points found in this region. In addition to drawings of each style, he provides other accepted names as well as names of related points, age, distribution, a description (including length and width), material, and references for each type. The guide is meant for the many avocational archaeologists who collect projectile points in the Upper Midwest and will be a useful reference tool for professional field archaeologists as well.
Emphasizing the preservation of sites as well as a mutual exchange of information between professional and avocational archaeologists, this guide will reveal projectile points as clues to the past, time markers which embody crucial information about the cultures of the Mississippi River Valley's early inhabitants.
A searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect.
In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objects—crafts, clothing, images, song recordings—by the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the “vanishing Indian” and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology.
The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptions—a vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectors’ methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the public’s confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by “scientific” racism.
Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance.
Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine introduces readers to the panoply of public entertainment that flourished in Palestine from the first century BCE to the sixth century CE. Drawing on a trove of original archaeological and textual evidence, Zeev Weiss reconstructs an ancient world where Romans, Jews, and Christians intermixed amid a heady brew of shouts, roars, and applause to watch a variety of typically pagan spectacles.
Ancient Roman society reveled in many such spectacles—dramatic performances, chariot races, athletic competitions, and gladiatorial combats—that required elaborate public venues, often maintained at great expense. Wishing to ingratiate himself with Rome, Herod the Great built theaters, amphitheaters, and hippodromes to bring these forms of entertainment to Palestine. Weiss explores how the indigenous Jewish and Christian populations responded, as both spectators and performers, to these cultural imports. Perhaps predictably, the reactions of rabbinic and clerical elites did not differ greatly. But their dire warnings to shun pagan entertainment did little to dampen the popularity of these events.
Herod’s ambitious building projects left a lasting imprint on the region. His dream of transforming Palestine into a Roman enclave succeeded far beyond his rule, with games and spectacles continuing into the fifth century CE. By then, however, public entertainment in Palestine had become a cultural institution in decline, ultimately disappearing during Justinian’s reign in the sixth century.
Among Mesoamericanists, the agricultural basis of the ancient Maya civilization of the Yucatan Peninsula has been an important topic of research—and controversy. Interest in the agricultural system of the Maya greatly increased as new discoveries showed that the lowland Maya were not limited to slash-and-burn technology, as had been previously believed, but used a variety of more sophisticated agricultural techniques and practices, including terracing, raised fields, and, perhaps, irrigation. Because of the nature of the data and because this form of agricultural technology had been key to explanations of state formation elsewhere in Mesoamerica, raised-field agriculture became a particular focus of investigation.
Pulltrouser Swamp conclusively demonstrates the existence of hydraulic, raised-field agriculture in the Maya lowlands between 150 B.C. and A.D. 850. It presents the findings of the University of Oklahoma's Pulltrouser SwampProject, an NSF-supported interdisciplinary study that combined the talents of archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, paleobotanists, biologists, and zoologists to investigate the remains of the Maya agricultural system in the swampy region of northern Belize.
By examining soils, fossil pollen and other plant remains, gastropods, relic settlements, ceramics, lithics, and other important evidence, the Pulltrouser Swamp team has clearly demonstrated that the features under investigation are relics of Maya-made raised and channelized fields and associated canals. Other data suggest the nature of the swamps in which the fields were constructed, the tools used for construction and cultivation, the possible crops cultivated, and at least one type of settlement near the fields, with its chronology. This verification of raised fields provides dramatic evidence of a large and probably organized workforce engaged in sophisticated and complex agricultural technology. As record of this evidence, Pulltrouser Swamp is a work of seminal importance for all students and scholars of New World prehistory.
Elizabeth Warder Crozer Campbell and her husband, William Campbell, found themselves forced to move to the Mojave Desert in 1924, its dry climate proving to be the best for William’s frail lungs burned by mustard gas in World War I. They camped at Twentynine Palm Oasis in what is now Joshua Tree National Park, homesteaded nearby, and became a central part of that early community. Life in the remote, stark landscape contrasted sharply with Elizabeth’s early years of wealth and privilege in Pennsylvania. Her resilient spirit made the best of what at first seemed like a bleak situation: she became an amateur archaeologist and explored the desert. A keen observer and independent thinker, she soon hypothesized that prehistoric people had lived in the California deserts along the shores of late Pleistocene lakes and waterways much earlier than was then believed. She devised a means for testing her hypothesis and found evidence to support it. Her interpretations, however, conflicted with the archaeological paradigm of the day and she was dismissed by formally trained archaeologists. Even so, she and her husband continued their work, convinced of the accuracy of her findings. Four decades later the archaeological establishment validated and accepted her ideas. Campbell’s research ultimately revolutionized archaeological thought, forming the basis of today’s landscape archaeology.
Comprises two valuable, original, and difficult-to-find pieces on Choctaw history and culture that originally appeared in the 1904 and 1906 volumes of Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society
This important book comprises two articles that appeared in the 1904 and 1906 volumes of Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. In “Life of Apushimataha,” Gideon Lincecum tells the story of Choctaw chief Pushmataha, who was born in Mississippi in 1764. A fearless warrior, his name literally means “one whose tomahawk is fatal in war or hunting.” As a charismatic leader, his foresight in making an alliance with General Andrew Jackson brought the Choctaws into war with the Creek Nation and into the War of 1812 but served to their benefit for many years with the United States government. In 1824, Pushmataha traveled to Washington, DC, to negotiate the Treaty of Doak’s Stand as pressure grew for Choctaw removal to Oklahoma Territory, but he fell ill and died there. He was buried with full military honors in the Congressional Cemetery at Arlington.
In “Choctaw Traditions about Their Settlement in Mississippi and the Origin of Their Mounds,” Lincecum translates a portion of the Skukhaanumpula—the traditional history of the tribe, which was related to him verbally by Chata Immataha, “the oldest man in the world, a man that knew everything.” It explains how and why the sacred Nanih Waya mound was erected and how the Choctaws formed new towns, and it describes the structure of leadership roles in their society.
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