front cover of Aboriginal Relationships between Culture and Plant Life in the Upper Great Lakes Region
Aboriginal Relationships between Culture and Plant Life in the Upper Great Lakes Region
Richard Asa Yarnell
University of Michigan Press, 1964
Using the ethnobotanical laboratory at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, as well as ethnographic and archaeological data, Richard Asa Yarnell reported on the prehistoric use of native plants at archaeological sites in the Midwest, including Feeheley and Juntunen. Includes eight appendices on tribal plant use.
[more]

front cover of The Aborigines of Puerto Rico and Neighboring Islands
The Aborigines of Puerto Rico and Neighboring Islands
Jesse Walter Fewkes
University of Alabama Press, 2009
A valuable recounting of the first formal archaeological excavations in Puerto Rico

Originally published as the Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1907, this book was praised in an article in American Anthropologist as doing “more than any other to give a comprehensive idea of the archaeology of the West Indies.”

Until that time, for mainly political reasons, little scientific research had been conducted by Americans on any of the Caribbean islands. Dr. Fewkes' unique skills of observation and experience served him well in the quest to understand Caribbean prehistory and culture. This volume, the result of his careful fieldwork in Puerto Rico in 1902-04, is magnificently illustrated by 93 plates and 43 line drawings of specimens from both public and private collections of the islands.

A 1907 article in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland described the volume as “a most valuable contribution to ethnographical science.”


 
[more]

front cover of About Antiquities
About Antiquities
Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire
By Zeynep Çelik
University of Texas Press, 2016

Antiquities have been pawns in empire-building and global rivalries; power struggles; assertions of national and cultural identities; and cross-cultural exchanges, cooperation, abuses, and misunderstandings—all with the underlying element of financial gain. Indeed, “who owns antiquity?” is a contentious question in many of today’s international conflicts.

About Antiquities offers an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between archaeology and empire-building around the turn of the twentieth century. Starting at Istanbul and focusing on antiquities from the Ottoman territories, Zeynep Çelik examines the popular discourse surrounding claims to the past in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. She compares and contrasts the experiences of two museums—Istanbul’s Imperial Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—that aspired to emulate European collections and gain the prestige and power of owning the material fragments of ancient history. Going beyond institutions, Çelik also unravels the complicated interactions among individuals—Westerners, Ottoman decision makers and officials, and local laborers—and their competing stakes in antiquities from such legendary sites as Ephesus, Pergamon, and Babylon.

Recovering perspectives that have been lost in histories of archaeology, particularly those of the excavation laborers whose voices have never been heard, About Antiquities provides important historical context for current controversies surrounding nation-building and the ownership of the past.

[more]

front cover of Abundance
Abundance
The Archaeology of Plenitude
Monica L. Smith
University Press of Colorado, 2020

Using case studies from around the globe—including Mesoamerica, North and South America, Africa, China, and the Greco-Roman world—and across multiple time periods, the authors in this volume make the case that abundance provides an essential explanatory perspective on ancient peoples’ choices and activities. Economists frequently focus on scarcity as a driving principle in the development of social and economic hierarchies, yet focusing on plenitude enables the understanding of a range of cohesive behaviors that were equally important for the development of social complexity.

Our earliest human ancestors were highly mobile hunter-gatherers who sought out places that provided ample food, water, and raw materials. Over time, humans accumulated and displayed an increasing quantity and variety of goods. In households, shrines, tombs, caches, and dumps, archaeologists have discovered large masses of materials that were deliberately gathered, curated, distributed, and discarded by ancient peoples. The volume’s authors draw upon new economic theories to consider the social, ideological, and political implications of human engagement with abundant quantities of resources and physical objects and consider how individual and household engagements with material culture were conditioned by the quest for abundance.

Abundance shows that the human propensity for mass consumption is not just the result of modern production capacities but fulfills a longstanding focus on plenitude as both the assurance of well-being and a buffer against uncertainty. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students in economics, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Contributors: Traci Ardren, Amy Bogaard, Elizabeth Klarich, Abigail Levine, Christopher R. Moore, Tito E. Naranjo, Stacey Pierson, James M. Potter, François G. Richard, Christopher W. Schmidt, Carol Schultze, Payson Sheets, Monica L. Smith, Katheryn C. Twiss, Mark D. Varien, Justin St. P. Walsh, María Nieves Zedeño

[more]

front cover of The Accokeek Creek Site
The Accokeek Creek Site
A Middle Atlantic Seaboard Culture Sequence
Robert L. Stephenson, Alice L. L. Ferguson and Henry G. Ferguson
University of Michigan Press, 1963
The Accokeek Creek site, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, sits at the spot where the Piscataway Creek enters the Potomac, across the river from Mt. Vernon. The owner of the property, Alice Ferguson, excavated the site and wrote notes on her work, which became the basis for this volume. The site, which was also known as Moyaone, contained evidence for occupation from the Archaic to the historic period. Excavation revealed remains of a village, burials, and many classes of artifacts, including pottery, pipes, chipped stone tools, and items made from shell, antlers, and bone.
[more]

front cover of Acorns and Bitter Roots
Acorns and Bitter Roots
Starch Grain Research in the Prehistoric Eastern Woodlands
Timothy C. Messner
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Starch grain analysis in the temperate climates of eastern North America using the Delaware River Watershed as a case study for furthering scholarly understanding of the relationship between native people and their biophysical environment in the Woodland Period
 
People regularly use plants for a wide range of utilitarian, spiritual, pharmacological, and dietary purposes throughout the world. Scholarly understanding of the nature of these uses in prehistory is particularly limited by the poor preservation of plant resources in the archaeological record. In the last two decades, researchers in the South Pacific and in Central and South America have developed microscopic starch grain analysis, a technique for overcoming the limitations of poorly preserved plant material.
 
Messner’s analysis is based on extensive reviews of the literature on early historic, prehistoric native plant use, and the collation of all available archaeobotanical data, a review of which also guided the author in selecting contemporary botanical specimens to identify and in interpreting starch residues recovered from ancient plant-processing technologies. The evidence presented here sheds light on many local ecological and cultural developments as ancient people shifted their subsistence focus from estuarine to riverine settings. These archaeobotanical datasets, Messner argues, illuminate both the conscious and unintentional translocal movement of ideas and ecologies throughout the Eastern Woodlands.
 
[more]

front cover of Across a Great Divide
Across a Great Divide
Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900
Edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Archaeological research is uniquely positioned to show how native history and native culture affected the course of colonial interaction, but to do so it must transcend colonialist ideas about Native American technological and social change. This book applies that insight to five hundred years of native history. Using data from a wide variety of geographical, temporal, and cultural settings, the contributors examine economic, social, and political stability and transformation in indigenous societies before and after the advent of Europeans and document the diversity of native colonial experiences. The book’s case studies range widely, from sixteenth-century Florida, to the Great Plains, to nineteenth-century coastal Alaska.

The contributors address a series of interlocking themes. Several consider the role of indigenous agency in the processes of colonial interaction, paying particular attention to gender and status. Others examine the ways long-standing native political economies affected, and were in turn affected by, colonial interaction. A third group explores colonial-period ethnogenesis, emphasizing the emergence of new native social identities and relations after 1500. The book also highlights tensions between the detailed study of local cases and the search for global processes, a recurrent theme in postcolonial research.

If archaeologists are to bridge the artificial divide separating history from prehistory, they must overturn a whole range of colonial ideas about American Indians and their history. This book shows that empirical archaeological research can help replace long-standing models of indigenous culture change rooted in colonialist narratives with more nuanced, multilinear models of change—and play a major role in decolonizing knowledge about native peoples.
[more]

front cover of Across Space and Time
Across Space and Time
Papers from the 41st Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Perth, 25-28 March 2013
Edited by Arianna Traviglia
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
This volume presents a selection of the best papers presented at the forty-first annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. The theme for the conference was “Across Space and Time” and the papers explore a multitude of topics related to that concept, including databases, the semantic Web, geographical information systems, data collection and management, and more.
[more]

front cover of Actium and Augustus
Actium and Augustus
The Politics and Emotions of Civil War
Robert Alan Gurval
University of Michigan Press, 1998
On 2 September 31 B.C.E., the heir of Julius Caesar defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra in a naval engagement at Actium. Despite the varied judgments this battle received in antiquity, common opinion held that Actium marked the start of a new era, a turning point in Roman history and, indeed, in Western civilization.
Actium and Augustus marks a turning point as well. Robert Alan Gurval's unusual approach is to examine contemporary views of the battle and its immediate political and social consequences. He starts with a consideration of the official celebration and public commemoration of the Actian victory and then moves on to other questions. What were the "Actian" monuments that Octavian erected on the battle site and later in Rome? What role did the Actian victory play in the political formation of the Principate and its public ideology? What was the response of contemporary poetry? Throughout, this volume concentrates on contemporary views of Actium and its results.
Written to include the general reader, Actium and Augustus presents a thoughtful examination of a complex period. All Greek and Latin quotations are translated, and extensive illustrations present graphic evidence about the issues Romans faced.
Robert Alan Gurval is Associate Professor of Classics, University of California, Los Angeles, and has been a recipient of the Rome Prize awarded by the American Academy in Rome.
[more]

front cover of Adena People
Adena People
Foreword By James B. Griffin
William S. Webb
University of Tennessee Press, 1974

front cover of The Administration of Rural Production in an Early Mesopotamian Town
The Administration of Rural Production in an Early Mesopotamian Town
Henry T. Wright
University of Michigan Press, 1969
Henry T. Wright offers a study of economy and production at two Mesopotamian sites dating to the Early Dynastic: Ur, a large town, and Sakheri Sughir, a small rural community. Includes appendices on artifacts, faunal remains, and two burials. Contributions by Sandor Bökönyi, Kent V. Flannery, and John Mayhall.
[more]

front cover of The Adorned Body
The Adorned Body
Mapping Ancient Maya Dress
Edited by Nicholas Carter, Stephen D. Houston, and Franco D. Rossi
University of Texas Press, 2020

How we dress our bodies—through clothing, footwear, headgear, jewelry, haircuts, and more—is key to the expression of status and identity. This idea was as true for ancient Maya civilization as it is today, yet few studies have centered on what ancient Maya peoples wore and why. In The Adorned Body, Nicholas Carter, Stephen Houston, and Franco Rossi bring together contributions from a wide range of scholars, leading to the first in-depth study of Maya dress in pre-Columbian times.

Incorporating artistic, hieroglyphic, and archaeological sources, this book explores the clothing and ornaments of ancient Maya peoples, systematically examining who wore what, deducing the varied purposes and meanings of dress items and larger ensembles, and determining the methods and materials with which such items were created. Each essay investigates a category of dress—including headgear, pendants and necklaces, body painting, footwear, and facial ornaments—and considers the variations within each of these categories, as well as popular styles and trends through time. The final chapters reveal broader views and comparisons about costume ensembles and their social roles. Shedding new light on the art and archaeology of the ancient Americas, The Adorned Body offers a thorough map of Maya dress that will be of interest to scholars and fashion enthusiasts alike.

[more]

front cover of Advances in Titicaca Basin Archaeology–III
Advances in Titicaca Basin Archaeology–III
Edited by Alexei Vranich, Elizabeth A. Klarich and Charles Stanish
University of Michigan Press, 2012
The focus of this volume is the northern Titicaca Basin, an area once belonging to the quarter of the Inka Empire called Collasuyu. The original settlers around the lake had to adapt to living at more than 12,000 feet, but as this volume shows so well, this high-altitude environment supported a very long developmental sequence.
[more]

front cover of Africa & Africans in Antiquity
Africa & Africans in Antiquity
Edwin M. Yamauchi
Michigan State University Press, 2001

Africa and Africans in Antiquity assesses recent historical research and archaeology under way in Egypt, North Africa, the Sudan, and the Horn of Africa. Whereas many European and American scholars of earlier generations believed that Egyptian contacts with Africa to the south were not culturally significant, research contained in this important collection rejects such notions. At the same time, the volume takes issue with Afrocentric scholars who argue that most Egyptians were 'black' and that blacks are the rightful heirs to Egypt's past grandeur. These ten thought-provoking essays demonstrate that this large region was an ethnic and cultural mosaic in antiquity, a place where Phoenicians, Berbers, Greeks, as well as Egyptians and Nubians interacted.

[more]

front cover of After Collapse
After Collapse
The Regeneration of Complex Societies
Edited by Glenn M. Schwartz and John J. Nichols
University of Arizona Press, 2006
From the Euphrates Valley to the southern Peruvian Andes, early complex societies have risen and fallen, but in some cases they have also been reborn. Prior archaeological investigation of these societies has focused primarily on emergence and collapse. This is the first book-length work to examine the question of how and why early complex urban societies have reappeared after periods of decentralization and collapse.

Ranging widely across the Near East, the Aegean, East Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, these cross-cultural studies expand our understanding of social evolution by examining how societies were transformed during the period of radical change now termed “collapse.” They seek to discover how societal complexity reemerged, how second-generation states formed, and how these re-emergent states resembled or differed from the complex societies that preceded them.

The contributors draw on material culture as well as textual and ethnohistoric data to consider such factors as preexistent institutions, structures, and ideologies that are influential in regeneration; economic and political resilience; the role of social mobility, marginal groups, and peripheries; and ethnic change. In addition to presenting a number of theoretical viewpoints, the contributors also propose reasons why regeneration sometimes does not occur after collapse. A concluding contribution by Norman Yoffee provides a critical exegesis of “collapse” and highlights important patterns found in the case histories related to peripheral regions and secondary elites, and to the ideology of statecraft.

After Collapse blazes new research trails in both archaeology and the study of social change, demonstrating that the archaeological record often offers more clues to the “dark ages” that precede regeneration than do text-based studies. It opens up a new window on the past by shifting the focus away from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to their often more telling fall and rise.

CONTRIBUTORS

Bennet Bronson
Arlen F. Chase
Diane Z. Chase
Christina A. Conlee
Lisa Cooper
Timothy S. Hare
Alan L. Kolata
Marilyn A. Masson
Gordon F. McEwan
Ellen Morris
Ian Morris
Carlos Peraza Lope
Kenny Sims
Miriam T. Stark
Jill A. Weber
Norman Yoffee
[more]

front cover of After Dark
After Dark
The Nocturnal Urban Landscape and Lightscape of Ancient Cities
Nancy Gonlin
University Press of Colorado, 2022
After Dark explores the experience of nighttime within ancient urban settings. Contributors present material evidence related to how ancient people manipulated and confronted darkness and night in urban landscapes, advancing our knowledge of the archaeology of cities, the archaeology of darkness and night, and lychnology (the study of ancient lighting devices).
 
Sensory archaeology focuses on the sensual experience of the nocturnal environment—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feel of an ancient city—and the multi-faceted stimuli that diverse urban populations experienced in the dark. Contributors investigate night work—for example, standing guard or pursuing nocturnal trades—and nightlife, such as gambling at Chaco Canyon. They also examine how urban architecture, infrastructure, and the corresponding lighting were inextricably involved in enabling nighttime pursuits and signaling social status.
 
The subjects of the night, darkness, and illumination taken together form a comprehensive framework for analyzing city life. After Dark embraces night as a conceptual lens through which to view the material and visual cultures of the ancient world and, in doing so, demonstrates a wealth of activities, behaviors, and beliefs that took place between dusk and dawn. This perspective greatly enriches the understanding of urban life and its evolution and has much to offer archaeologists in deepening an examination of complexity and inequality. This volume will be of interest to any scholar or student of the past who is interested in urban activities and the significance of the night in urban settings.
 
Contributors: Susan M. Alt, J. Antonio Ochatoma Cabrera, Martha Cabrera Romero, Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, Kirby Farrah, Nancy Gonlin, Anna Guengerich, Christopher Hernandez, John Janusek, Kristin V. Landau, Maggie L. Popkin, Monica L. Smith, Meghan E. Strong, Susan Toby Evans, Robert S. Weiner
 
[more]

front cover of After Monte Albán
After Monte Albán
Transformation and Negotiation in Oaxaca, Mexico
Jeffrey P. Blomster
University Press of Colorado, 2016
After Monte Albán reveals the richness and interregional relevance of Postclassic transformations in the area now known as Oaxaca, which lies between Central Mexico and the Maya area and, as contributors to this volume demonstrate, achieved cultural centrality in pan-Mesoamerican networks. Large nucleated states throughout Oaxaca collapsed after 700 C.E., including the great Zapotec state centered in the Valley of Oaxaca, Monte Albán. Elite culture changed in fundamental ways as small city-states proliferated in Oaxaca, each with a new ruling dynasty required to devise novel strategies of legitimization. The vast majority of the population, though, sustained continuity in lifestyle, religion, and cosmology.

Contributors synthesize these regional transformations and continuities in the lower Rio Verde Valley, the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Mixteca Alta. They provide data from material culture, architecture, codices, ethnohistoric documents, and ceramics, including a revised ceramic chronology from the Late Classic to the end of the Postclassic that will be crucial to future investigations. After Monte Albán establishes Postclassic Oaxaca's central place in the study of Mesoamerican antiquity.

Contributors include Jeffrey P. Blomster, Bruce E. Byland, Gerardo Gutierrez, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, Arthur A. Joyce, Stacie M. King, Michael D. Lind, Robert Markens, Cira Martínez López, Michel R. Oudijk, and Marcus Winter.

[more]

front cover of After the Ice
After the Ice
A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC
Steven Mithen
Harvard University Press, 2004

20,000 BC, the peak of the last ice age—the atmosphere is heavy with dust, deserts, and glaciers span vast regions, and people, if they survive at all, exist in small, mobile groups, facing the threat of extinction.

But these people live on the brink of seismic change—10,000 years of climate shifts culminating in abrupt global warming that will usher in a fundamentally changed human world. After the Ice is the story of this momentous period—one in which a seemingly minor alteration in temperature could presage anything from the spread of lush woodland to the coming of apocalyptic floods—and one in which we find the origins of civilization itself.

Drawing on the latest research in archaeology, human genetics, and environmental science, After the Ice takes the reader on a sweeping tour of 15,000 years of human history. Steven Mithen brings this world to life through the eyes of an imaginary modern traveler—John Lubbock, namesake of the great Victorian polymath and author of Prehistoric Times. With Lubbock, readers visit and observe communities and landscapes, experiencing prehistoric life—from aboriginal hunting parties in Tasmania, to the corralling of wild sheep in the central Sahara, to the efforts of the Guila Naquitz people in Oaxaca to combat drought with agricultural innovations.

Part history, part science, part time travel, After the Ice offers an evocative and uniquely compelling portrayal of diverse cultures, lives, and landscapes that laid the foundations of the modern world.

[more]

front cover of The Age of Everything
The Age of Everything
How Science Explores the Past
Matthew Hedman
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Taking advantage of recent advances throughout the sciences, Matthew Hedman brings the distant past closer to us than it has ever been. Here, he shows how scientists have determined the age of everything from the colonization of the New World over 13,000 years ago to the origin of the universe nearly fourteen billion years ago.

Hedman details, for example, how interdisciplinary studies of the Great Pyramids of Egypt can determine exactly when and how these incredible structures were built. He shows how the remains of humble trees can illuminate how the surface of the sun has changed over the past ten millennia. And he also explores how the origins of the earth, solar system, and universe are being discerned with help from rocks that fall from the sky, the light from distant stars, and even the static seen on television sets.

Covering a wide range of time scales, from the Big Bang to human history, The Age of Everything is a provocative and far-ranging look at how science has determined the age of everything from modern mammals to the oldest stars, and will be indispensable for all armchair time travelers.
 
“We are used to being told confidently of an enormous, measurable past: that some collection of dusty bones is tens of thousands of years old, or that astronomical bodies have an age of some billions. But how exactly do scientists come to know these things? That is the subject of this quite fascinating book. . . . As told by Hedman, an astronomer, each story is a marvel of compressed exegesis that takes into account some of the most modern and intriguing hypotheses.”—Steven Poole, Guardian
 
“Hedman is worth reading because he is careful to present both the power and peril of trying to extract precise chronological data. These are all very active areas of study, and as you read Hedman you begin to see how researchers have to be both very careful and incredibly audacious, and how much of our understanding of ourselves—through history, through paleontology, through astronomy—depends on determining the age of everything.”—Anthony Doerr, Boston Globe 
[more]

front cover of Agency in Ancient Writing
Agency in Ancient Writing
Joshua Englehardt
University Press of Colorado, 2012

Individual agents are frequently evident in early writing and notational systems, yet these systems have rarely been subjected to the concept of agency as it is traceable in archeology. Agency in Ancient Writing addresses this oversight, allowing archeologists to identify and discuss real, observable actors and actions in the archaeological record.

 

Embracing myriad ways in which agency can be interpreted, ancient writing systems from Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, China, and Greece are examined from a textual perspective as both archaeological objects and nascent historical documents. This allows for distinction among intentions, consequences, meanings, and motivations, increasing understanding and aiding interpretation of the subjectivity of social actors. Chapters focusing on acts of writing and public recitation overlap with those addressing the materiality of texts, interweaving archaeology, epigraphy, and the study of visual symbol systems.

 

Agency in Ancient Writing leads to a more thorough and meaningful discussion of agency as an archaeological concept and will be of interest to anyone interested in ancient texts, including archaeologists, historians, linguists, epigraphers, and art historians, as well as scholars studying agency and structuration theory.


[more]

front cover of Aggregate Analysis in Chipped Stone
Aggregate Analysis in Chipped Stone
Christopher T Hall
University of Utah Press, 2004

Less than two decades ago, archaeologists considered lithic debitage, the flakes and debris left from the manufacture of stone tools, little more than uninformative waste. Since then, fieldworkers have increasingly recognized that stone flakes can provide information both singly and in aggregate.

Many methods are now available for analyzing lithic debitage, yet no single method is entirely reliable as a vehicle to meaningful interpretation of past behavior. Part of the problem lies in the disparity between tightly controlled experimental conditions and the difficulty of sorting individual sequences out of the masses of stone found in many archaeological sites. Contributors to this volume seek to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the more widespread and competing analytical forms while arguing for the use of multiple lines of evidence. As the title indicates, their primary focus is on mass analysis of aggregates rather than individual flakes. Thus several chapters also address problems of subdividing aggregates to better deal with the “mixed assemblages” generated by multiple factors over time.

[more]

front cover of Agricultural Intensification and Prehistoric Health in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico
Agricultural Intensification and Prehistoric Health in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico
Denise C. Hodges
University of Michigan Press, 1989
Author Denise C. Hodges examines the osteological remains from 14 archaeological sites in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, in an attempt to address the relationship between the intensification of agriculture and the health status of the prehistoric population. Volume 9 of the subseries Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca.
[more]

front cover of The Ait Ayash of the High Moulouya Plain
The Ait Ayash of the High Moulouya Plain
Rural Social Organization in Morocco
John Chiapuris
University of Michigan Press, 1979
Author John Chiapuris lived in Morocco for sixteen months while doing fieldwork with the Ait Ayash, a Berber-speaking community of irrigation agriculturalists occupying the Ansegmir Valley in the High Moulouya plain. In the first part of this study, Chiapuris explains the ethnohistorial background and sociopolitical organization of the Ait Ayash. In the second section, he focuses on the regional setting and the changes initiated by the French Protectorate in 1912. In the third, he analyzes domestic production, household organization, and marriage patterns in the contemporary period.
[more]

front cover of The Ait Ndhir of Morocco
The Ait Ndhir of Morocco
A Study of the Social Transformation of a Berber Tribe
Amal Rassam Vinogradov
University of Michigan Press, 1974
This work is an enquiry into the nature of tribalism in Morocco and its historical relationship to the central government. Employing the Air Ndhir as an example, this study attempts to establish a model for the traditional sociopolitical organization of a semi-nomadic Berber tribe of the Middle Atlas and examine the dynamics of the makhzan-tribal symbiosis during the latter half of the 19th century.
[more]

front cover of Akragas
Akragas
Current Issues in the Archaeology of a Sicilian Polis
Edited by Natascha Sojc
Leiden University Press, 2017
Over the past few years, the archaeological and architectural investigation of ancient Akragas, an ostentatiously wealthy city-state on the site of modern-day Agrigento in Sicily, has gathered new momentum. This book brings together various researchers who investigate the city’s Greek period remains. The issues discussed range from methodological approaches and the interpretation of fresh field-data to concerns of site maintenance and the reconstruction of monuments. The contributors to this volume offer perspectives for further research on the monuments, finds, and contexts from ancient Akragas. These extend beyond strictly archaeological concerns, and as manifested by Agrigento’s status as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
[more]

front cover of Alabama and the Borderlands
Alabama and the Borderlands
From Prehistory To Statehood
Edited by R. Reid Badger and Lawrence A. Clayton
University of Alabama Press, 1985

Brings together the nation's leading scholars on the prehistory and early history of Alabama and the southeastern US

This fascinating collection was born of a concern with Alabama's past and the need to explore and explain that legacy, so often hidden by the veils of time, ignorance, or misunderstanding. In 1981 The University of Alabama celebrated its 150th anniversary, and each College contributed to the celebration by sponsoring a special sym­posium. The College of Arts and Sciences brought together the nation's leading scholars on the prehistory and early history of Alabama and the Southeastern United States, and for two memora­ble days in September 1981 several hundred interested listeners heard those scholars present their interpretations of Alabama's remarkable past.

The organizers of the symposium deliberately chose to focus on Alabama's history before statehood. Alabama as a constituent state of the Old South is well known. Alabama as a home of Indian cultures and civilizations of a high order, as an object of desire, exploration, and conquest in the sixteenth century, and as a border­land disputed by rival European nationalities for almost 300 years is less well known. The resulting essays in this collection prove as interesting, enlightening, and provocative to the casual reader as to the profes­sional scholar, for they are intended to bring to the general reader artifacts and documents that reveal the reali­ties and romance of that older Alabama.

Topics in the collection range from the Mississippian Period in archaeology and the de Soto expedition (and other early European explorations and settlements of Alabama) to the 1780 Siege of Mobile.

[more]

front cover of All the King’s Horses
All the King’s Horses
Essays on the Impact of Looting and the Illicit Antiquities Trade on Our Knowledge of the Past
Paula K. Lazrus
University Press of Colorado, 2012
This volume from the SAA Press examines the impact of looting and the use of artifacts of unknown provenance in the humanities and social sciences, ranging from the impact of amnesty laws for reporting stolen cultural property to the use of Google Earth to assess the scale of illicit excavations, and from the impact of poorly sourced artifacts on early Mycenaean and Minoan studies to the structure of the growing commercial trade in ancient coins.
[more]

front cover of Alliance and Landscape on Perry Mesa in the Fourteenth Century
Alliance and Landscape on Perry Mesa in the Fourteenth Century
David R. Abbott
University of Utah Press, 2014
About forty miles north of Phoenix, Arizona, Perry Mesa is today part of Agua Fria National Monument, but during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, this windswept arid landscape became the site of numerous farming communities. This book explores why people moved to Perry Mesa at that time. Analyses of Perry Mesa contrast with those of the iconic large-scale migrations in the prehistoric Southwest such as the Kayenta diaspora and the gathering of the clans at Hopi. Unlike those long-distance movements into occupied regions, the Perry Mesa case is one of relatively localized aggregation on a largely vacant landscape. But, as was discovered with the iconic migrations, ethnogenesis (the creation of new identities) took hold on Perry Mesa, making it an extremely interesting counterpoint to the better-known migrations of the period.
     Contributors to this volume examine the migration process under two explanatory frameworks: alliance and landscape. These frameworks are used to explore competing hypotheses, positing either a rapid colonization associated with an alliance organized for warfare at a regional scale, or a more protracted migration as this landscape became comparatively more attractive for migrating farmers in the late thirteenth century.
     As the first major publication on the archaeology of Perry Mesa, this volume contributes to theoretical perspectives on migration and ethnogenesis, the study of warfare in the prehistoric Southwest, the study of intensive agricultural practices in a marginal environment, and the cultural history of a little studied and largely unknown portion of the ancient Southwest. It not only documents the migration but also the ensuing birth of a new ethnic identity that arose from the coalescence of diverse groups atop Perry Mesa.
[more]

front cover of Alluvium and Empire
Alluvium and Empire
The Archaeology of Colonial Resettlement and Indigenous Persistence on Peru’s North Coast
Parker VanValkenburgh
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Alluvium and Empire uncovers the stories of Indigenous people who were subject to one of the largest waves of forced resettlement in human history, the Reducción General. In 1569, Spanish administrators attempted to move at least 1.4 million Indigenous people into a series of planned towns called reducciones, with the goal of reshaping their households, communities, and religious practices. However, in northern Peru’s Zaña Valley, this process failed to go as the Spanish had planned. In Alluvium and Empire, Parker VanValkenburgh explores both the short-term processes and long-term legacies of Indigenous resettlement in this region, drawing particular attention to the formation of complex relationships between Indigenous communities, imperial institutions, and the dynamic environments of Peru’s north coast.

The volume draws on nearly ten years of field and archival research to craft a nuanced account of the Reducción General and its aftermath. Written at the intersections of history and archaeology, Alluvium and Empire at once bears witness to the violence of Spanish colonization and highlights Indigenous resilience in the aftermath of resettlement. In the process, VanValkenburgh critiques previous approaches to the study of empire and models a genealogical approach that attends to the open-ended—and often unpredictable—ways in which empires take shape.
 
[more]

front cover of Alternative Leadership Strategies in the Prehispanic Southwest
Alternative Leadership Strategies in the Prehispanic Southwest
Edited by Barbara J. Mills
University of Arizona Press, 2000

In considerations of societal change, the application of classic evolutionary schemes to prehistoric southwestern peoples has always been problematic for scholars. Because recent theoretical developments point toward more variation in the scale, hierarchy, and degree of centralization of complex societies, this book takes a fresh look at southwestern prehistory with these new ideas in mind.

This is the first book-length work to apply new theories of social organization and leadership strategies to the prehispanic Southwest. It examines leadership strategies in a number of archaeological contexts—from Chaco Canyon to Casas Grandes, from Hohokam to Zuni—to show striking differences in the way that leadership was constructed across the region.

These case studies provide ample evidence for alternative models of leadership in middle-range societies. By illustrating complementary approaches in the study of political organization, they offer new insight into power and inequality. They also provide important models of how today's archaeologists are linking data to theory, providing a basis for comparative analysis with other regions.

CONTENTS
Alternative Models, Alternative Strategies: Leadership in the Prehispanic Southwest / Barbara J. Mills
Political Leadership and the Construction of Chacoan Great Houses, A.D. 1020-1140 / W. H. Wills
Leadership, Long-Distance Exchange, and Feasting in the Protohistoric Rio Grande / William M. Graves and Katherine A. Spielmann
Ritual as a Power Resource in the American Southwest / James M. Potter and Elizabeth M. Perry
Ceramic Decoration as Power: Late Prehistoric Design Change in East-Central Arizona / Scott Van Keuren
Leadership Strategies in Protohistoric Zuni Towns / Keith W. Kintigh
Organizational Variability in Platform Mound-Building Groups of the American Southwest / Mark D. Elson and David R. Abbott
Leadership Strategies among the Classic Period Hohokam: A Case Study / Karen G. Harry and James M. Bayman
The Institutional Contexts of Hohokam Complexity and Inequality / Suzanne K. Fish and Paul R. Fish
Leadership at Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico / Michael E. Whalen and Paul E. Minnis
Reciprocity and Its Limits: Considerations for a Study of the Prehispanic Pueblo World / Timothy A. Kohler, Matthew W. Van Pelt, and Lorene Y. L. Yap
Dual-Processual Theory and Social Formations in the Southwest / Gary M. Feinman
[more]

front cover of Alternative Pathways to Complexity
Alternative Pathways to Complexity
A Collection of Essays on Architecture, Economics, Power, and Cross-Cultural Analysis
Lane F. Fargher
University Press of Colorado, 2016
Alternative Pathways to Complexity focuses on the themes of architecture, economics, and power in the evolution of complex societies. Case studies from Mesoamerica, Asia, Africa, and Europe examine the relationship between political structures and economic configurations of ancient chiefdoms and states through a framework of comparative archaeology.
 
A group of highly distinguished scholars takes up important issues, theories, and methods stemming from the nascent body of research on comparative archaeology to showcase and apply important theories of households, power, and how the development of complex societies can be extended and refined. Drawing on the archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic records, the chapters in this volume contain critical investigations on the role of collective action, economics, and corporate cognitive codes in structuring complex societies.
 
Alternative Pathways to Complexity is an important addition to theoretical development and empirical research on Mesoamerica, the Old World, and cross-cultural studies. The theoretical implications addressed in the chapters will have broad appeal for scholars grappling with alternative pathways to complexity in other regions as well as those addressing diverse cross-cultural research.
 
Contributors: Sarah B. Barber, Cynthia L. Bedell, Christopher S. Beekman, Frances F. Berdan, Tim Earle, Carol R. Ember, Gary M. Feinman, Arthur A. Joyce, Stephen A. Kowalewski, Lisa J. LeCount, Linda M. Nicholas, Peter N. Peregrine, Peter Robertshaw, Barbara L. Stark, T. L. Thurston, Deborah Winslow, Rita Wright
[more]

front cover of The Alutiit/Sugpiat
The Alutiit/Sugpiat
A Catalog of the Collections of the Kunstkamera
Edited by Yuri E. Berezkin
University of Alaska Press, 2012

This beautifully photographed book catalogs the collection of nearly five hundred Alutiiq cultural items held by the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, or the Kunstkamera, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Gathered between 1780 and 1867, many of the artifacts are composed of fur, feathers, gut, hair, and other delicate materials, which prevent their transport for display or study.

To document these artifacts for the public, the Kunstkamera collaborated with the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska. Together, anthropologists and members of the Alutiiq community combined the collection records with cultural knowledge and high-resolution digital imagery and worked to name objects, describe their uses, and detail the materials used in their construction. As a result, this book will provide the Alutiit, Alaskans, Russians, and the global community with lasting access to one of the oldest, most extensive ethnographic collections from the central Gulf of Alaska.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
American Beginnings
The Prehistory and Palaeoecology of Beringia
Edited by Frederick Hadleigh West
University of Chicago Press, 1996
During the last Ice Age, a thousand-mile-wide land bridge connected Siberia and Alaska, creating the region known as Beringia. Over twelve thousand years ago, a procession of large mammals and the humans who hunted them crossed this bridge to America. Much of the Russian evidence for this migration has until now remained largely inaccessible to American scholars. American Beginnings brings together for the first time in one volume the most up-to-date archaeological and palaeoecological evidence on Beringia from both Russia and America.

"An invaluable resource. . . . It will no doubt remain the key reference book for Beringia for many years to come."—Steven Mithen, Journal of Human Evolution

"Extraordinary. The fifty-six contributors . . . represent the most prominent American and Russian researchers in the region."—Choice

"Publication of this well-illustrated compendium is a great service to early American and especially Siberian Upper Paleolithic archaeology."—Nicholas Saunders, New Scientist

"This is a great book . . . perhaps the greatest contribution to the archaeology of Beringia that has yet been published. . . . This is the kind of book to which archaeology should aspire."—Herbert D.G. Maschner, Antiquity
[more]

front cover of American Egyptologist
American Egyptologist
The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute
Jeffrey Abt
University of Chicago Press, 2011

James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) had a career that epitomizes our popular image of the archaeologist. Daring, handsome, and charismatic, he traveled on expeditions to remote and politically unstable corners of the Middle East, helped identify the tomb of King Tut, and was on the cover of Time magazine. But Breasted was more than an Indiana Jones—he was an accomplished scholar, academic entrepreneur, and talented author who brought ancient history to life not just for students but for such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud.

In American Egyptologist, Jeffrey Abt weaves together the disparate strands of Breasted’s life, from his small-town origins following the Civil War to his evolution into the father of American Egyptology and the founder of the Oriental Institute in the early years of the University of Chicago. Abt explores the scholarly, philanthropic, diplomatic, and religious contexts of his ideas and projects, providing insight into the origins of America’s most prominent center for Near Eastern archaeology.
 
An illuminating portrait of the nearly forgotten man who demystified ancient Egypt for the general public, American Egyptologist restores James Henry Breasted to the world and puts forward a brilliant case for his place as one of the most important scholars of modern times.
[more]

front cover of American Home Life 1880-1930
American Home Life 1880-1930
Social History Spaces Services
Jessica H. Foy
University of Tennessee Press, 1994
In the pivotal decades around the turn of the century, American domestic life underwent dramatic alteration. From backstairs to front stairs, spaces and the activities within them were radically affected by shifts in the larger social and material environments. This volume, while taking account of architecture and decoration, moves us beyond the study of buildings to the study of behaviors, particularly the behaviors of those who peopled the middle-class, single-family, detached American home between 1880 and 1930. The book's contributors study transformations in services (such as home utilities of power, heat, light, water, and waste removal) in servicing (for example, the impact of home appliances such as gas and electric ranges, washing machines, and refrigerators), and in serving (changes in domestic servants' duties, hours of work, racial and ethnic backgrounds). In blending intellectual and home history, these essays both examine and exemplify the perennial American enthusiasm for, as well as anxiety about, the meaning of modernity.
[more]

front cover of American Indians and the Market Economy, 1775-1850
American Indians and the Market Economy, 1775-1850
Edited by Lance Greene and Mark R. Plane,with a foreword by Timothy K. Perttula
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Provides a clear view of the realities of the economic and social interactions between Native groups and the expanding Euro-American population
 
The last quarter of the 18th century was a period of extensive political, economic, and social change in North America, as the continent-wide struggle between European superpowers waned. Native groups found themselves enmeshed in the market economy and new state forms of control, among other new threats to their cultural survival. Native populations throughout North America actively engaged the expanding marketplace in a variety of economic and social forms. These actions, often driven by and expressed through changes in material culture, were supported by a desire to maintain distinctive ethnic identities.
 
Illustrating the diversity of Native adaptations in an increasingly hostile and marginalized world, this volume is continental in scope—ranging from Connecticut to the Carolinas, and westward through Texas and Colorado. Calling on various theoretical perspectives, the authors provide nuanced perspectives on material culture use as a manipulation of the market economy. A thorough examination of artifacts used by Native Americans, whether of Euro-American or Native origin, this volume provides a clear view of the realities of the economic and social interactions between Native groups and the expanding Euro-American population and the engagement of these Native groups in determining their own fate.
 
[more]

front cover of American Journal of Archaeology, volume 126 number 1 (January 2022)
American Journal of Archaeology, volume 126 number 1 (January 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 126 issue 1 of American Journal of Archaeology. The American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, was founded in 1885 and is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed peer-reviewed archaeological journals. The AJA reaches more than 40 countries and approximately 700 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. The AJA publishes original research on the diverse peoples and material cultures of the Mediterranean and related areas, including North Africa (with Egypt and Sudan), Western Asia (with the Caucasus), and Europe, from prehistory through late antiquity.
[more]

front cover of American Journal of Archaeology, volume 126 number 2 (April 2022)
American Journal of Archaeology, volume 126 number 2 (April 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 126 issue 2 of American Journal of Archaeology. The American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, was founded in 1885 and is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed peer-reviewed archaeological journals. The AJA reaches more than 40 countries and approximately 700 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. The AJA publishes original research on the diverse peoples and material cultures of the Mediterranean and related areas, including North Africa (with Egypt and Sudan), Western Asia (with the Caucasus), and Europe, from prehistory through late antiquity.
[more]

front cover of American Journal of Archaeology, volume 126 number 3 (July 2022)
American Journal of Archaeology, volume 126 number 3 (July 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 126 issue 3 of American Journal of Archaeology. The American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, was founded in 1885 and is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed peer-reviewed archaeological journals. The AJA reaches more than 40 countries and approximately 700 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. The AJA publishes original research on the diverse peoples and material cultures of the Mediterranean and related areas, including North Africa (with Egypt and Sudan), Western Asia (with the Caucasus), and Europe, from prehistory through late antiquity.
[more]

front cover of American Journal of Archaeology, volume 126 number 4 (October 2022)
American Journal of Archaeology, volume 126 number 4 (October 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 126 issue 4 of American Journal of Archaeology. The American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, was founded in 1885 and is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed peer-reviewed archaeological journals. The AJA reaches more than 40 countries and approximately 700 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. The AJA publishes original research on the diverse peoples and material cultures of the Mediterranean and related areas, including North Africa (with Egypt and Sudan), Western Asia (with the Caucasus), and Europe, from prehistory through late antiquity.
[more]

front cover of American Journal of Archaeology, volume 127 number 1 (January 2023)
American Journal of Archaeology, volume 127 number 1 (January 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 127 issue 1 of American Journal of Archaeology. The American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, was founded in 1885 and is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed peer-reviewed archaeological journals. The AJA reaches more than 40 countries and approximately 700 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. The AJA publishes original research on the diverse peoples and material cultures of the Mediterranean and related areas, including North Africa (with Egypt and Sudan), Western Asia (with the Caucasus), and Europe, from prehistory through late antiquity.
[more]

front cover of American Journal of Archaeology, volume 127 number 2 (April 2023)
American Journal of Archaeology, volume 127 number 2 (April 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 127 issue 2 of American Journal of Archaeology. The American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, was founded in 1885 and is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed peer-reviewed archaeological journals. The AJA reaches more than 40 countries and approximately 700 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. The AJA publishes original research on the diverse peoples and material cultures of the Mediterranean and related areas, including North Africa (with Egypt and Sudan), Western Asia (with the Caucasus), and Europe, from prehistory through late antiquity.
[more]

front cover of American Journal of Archaeology, volume 127 number 3 (July 2023)
American Journal of Archaeology, volume 127 number 3 (July 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 127 issue 3 of American Journal of Archaeology. The American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, was founded in 1885 and is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed peer-reviewed archaeological journals. The AJA reaches more than 40 countries and approximately 700 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. The AJA publishes original research on the diverse peoples and material cultures of the Mediterranean and related areas, including North Africa (with Egypt and Sudan), Western Asia (with the Caucasus), and Europe, from prehistory through late antiquity.
[more]

front cover of American Journal of Archaeology, volume 127 number 4 (October 2023)
American Journal of Archaeology, volume 127 number 4 (October 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 127 issue 4 of American Journal of Archaeology. The American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, was founded in 1885 and is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed peer-reviewed archaeological journals. The AJA reaches more than 40 countries and approximately 700 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. The AJA publishes original research on the diverse peoples and material cultures of the Mediterranean and related areas, including North Africa (with Egypt and Sudan), Western Asia (with the Caucasus), and Europe, from prehistory through late antiquity.
[more]

front cover of American Journal of Archaeology, volume 128 number 1 (January 2024)
American Journal of Archaeology, volume 128 number 1 (January 2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
This is volume 128 issue 1 of American Journal of Archaeology. The American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, was founded in 1885 and is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed peer-reviewed archaeological journals. The AJA reaches more than 40 countries and approximately 700 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. The AJA publishes original research on the diverse peoples and material cultures of the Mediterranean and related areas, including North Africa (with Egypt and Sudan), Western Asia (with the Caucasus), and Europe, from prehistory through late antiquity.
[more]

front cover of American Journal of Archaeology, volume 128 number 2 (April 2024)
American Journal of Archaeology, volume 128 number 2 (April 2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
This is volume 128 issue 2 of American Journal of Archaeology. The American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, was founded in 1885 and is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed peer-reviewed archaeological journals. The AJA reaches more than 40 countries and approximately 700 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. The AJA publishes original research on the diverse peoples and material cultures of the Mediterranean and related areas, including North Africa (with Egypt and Sudan), Western Asia (with the Caucasus), and Europe, from prehistory through late antiquity.
[more]

front cover of The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age
The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age
Edited by D. Shane Miller, Ashley M. Smallwood, and Jesse W. Tune
University of Alabama Press, 2022
The definitive book on what is known about the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene archaeological record in the Southeast
 
The 1996 benchmark volume The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast, edited by David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman, was the first study to summarize what was known of the peoples who lived in the Southeast when ice sheets covered the northern part of the continent and mammals such as mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and ground sloths roamed the landscape.

The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age provides an updated, definitive synthesis of current archaeological research gleaned from an array of experts in the region. It is organized in three parts: state records, the regional perspective, and reflections and future directions. Chapters survey a diversity of topics including the distribution of the earliest archaeological sites in the region, chipped-stone tool technology, the expanding role of submerged archaeology, hunter-gatherer lifeways, past climate changes and the extinction of megafauna on the transitional landscape, and evidence of demographic changes at the end of the Ice Age. Discussion of the ethical responsibilities regarding the use of private collections and the relationship of archaeologists and the avocational community, insight from outside the Southeast, and considerations for future research round out the volume.
 
[more]

front cover of Amulets, Effigies, Fetishes, and Charms
Amulets, Effigies, Fetishes, and Charms
Native American Artifacts and Spirit Stones from the Northeast
Edward J. Lenik
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Rounds out Edward J. Lenik’s comprehensive and expert study of the rock art of northeastern Native Americans
 
Decorated stone artifacts are a significant part of archaeological studies of Native Americans in the Northeast. The artifacts illuminated in Amulets, Effigies, Fetishes, and Charms: Native American Artifacts and Spirit Stones from the Northeast include pecked, sculpted, or incised figures, images, or symbols. These are rendered on pebbles, plaques, pendants, axes, pestles, and atlatl weights, and are of varying sizes, shapes, and designs. Lenik draws from Indian myths and legends and incorporates data from ethnohistoric and archaeological sources together with local environmental settings in an attempt to interpret the iconography of these fascinating relics. For the Algonquian and Iroquois peoples, they reflect identity, status, and social relationships with other Indians as well as beings in the spirit world.
 
Lenik begins with background on the Indian cultures of the Northeast and includes a discussion of the dating system developed by anthropologists to describe prehistory. The heart of the content comprises more than eighty examples of portable rock art, grouped by recurring design motifs. This organization allows for in-depth analysis of each motif. The motifs examined range from people, animals, fish, and insects to geometric and abstract designs. Information for each object is presented in succinct prose, with a description, illustration, possible interpretation, the story of its discovery, and the location where it is now housed. Lenik also offers insight into the culture and lifestyle of the Native American groups represented. An appendix listing places to see and learn more about the artifacts and a glossary are included.
 
The material in this book, used in conjunction with Lenik’s previous research, offers a reference for virtually every known example of northeastern rock art. Archaeologists, students, and connoisseurs of Indian artistic expression will find this an invaluable work.
[more]

front cover of The Analysis of Animal Bones from Archeological Sites
The Analysis of Animal Bones from Archeological Sites
Richard G. Klein and Kathryn Cruz-Uribe
University of Chicago Press, 1984
In growing numbers, archeologists are specializing in the analysis of excavated animal bones as clues to the environment and behavior of ancient peoples. This pathbreaking work provides a detailed discussion of the outstanding issues and methods of bone studies that will interest zooarcheologists as well as paleontologists who focus on reconstructing ecologies from bones. Because large samples of bones from archeological sites require tedious and time-consuming analysis, the authors also offer a set of computer programs that will greatly simplify the bone specialist's job.

After setting forth the interpretive framework that governs their use of numbers in faunal analysis, Richard G. Klein and Kathryn Cruz-Uribe survey various measures of taxonomic abundance, review methods for estimating the sex and age composition of a fossil species sample, and then give examples to show how these measures and sex/age profiles can provide useful information about the past. In the second part of their book, the authors present the computer programs used to calculate and analyze each numerical measure or count discussed in the earlier chapters. These elegant and original programs, written in BASIC, can easily be used by anyone with a microcomputer or with access to large mainframe computers.
[more]

front cover of An Analysis of Effigy Mound Complexes in Wisconsin
An Analysis of Effigy Mound Complexes in Wisconsin
William M. Hurley
University of Michigan Press, 1975
The Effigy Mound tradition of Wisconsin dates to between roughly AD 100 and AD 1400. Its center is in central and southern Wisconsin, with a handful of sites also found in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Michigan. During excavation at two major Effigy Mound sites—the Bigelow site and the Sanders site—William M. Hurley and his crew recorded 56 mounds, 91 features, 3 houses, and 10 prehistoric burials, and uncovered more than 55,000 artifacts.
[more]

front cover of Ancestral Hopi Migrations
Ancestral Hopi Migrations
Patrick D. Lyons
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Southwestern archaeologists have long speculated about the scale and impact of ancient population movements. In Ancestral Hopi Migrations, Patrick Lyons infers the movement of large numbers of people from the Kayenta and Tusayan regions of northern Arizona to every major river valley in Arizona, parts of New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Building upon earlier studies, Lyons uses chemical sourcing of ceramics and analyses of painted pottery designs to distinguish among traces of exchange, emulation, and migration. He demonstrates strong similarities among the pottery traditions of the Kayenta region, the Hopi Mesas, and the Homol'ovi villages, near Winslow, Arizona. Architectural evidence marshaled by Lyons corroborates his conclusion that the inhabitants of Homol'ovi were immigrants from the north. Placing the Homol'ovi case study in a larger context, Lyons synthesizes evidence of northern immigrants recovered from sites dating between A.D. 1250 and 1450. His data support Patricia Crown's contention that the movement of these groups is linked to the origin of the Salado polychromes and further indicate that these immigrants and their descendants were responsible for the production of Roosevelt Red Ware throughout much of the Greater Southwest. Offering an innovative juxtaposition of anthropological data bearing on Hopi migrations and oral accounts of the tribe's origin and history, Lyons highlights the many points of agreement between these two bodies of knowledge. Lyons argues that appreciating the scale of population movement that characterized the late prehistoric period is prerequisite to understanding regional phenomena such as Salado and to illuminating the connections between tribal peoples of the Southwest and their ancestors.
[more]

front cover of Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World
Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World
James E. Snead
University of Arizona Press, 2008
The eastern Pueblo heartland, located in the northern Rio Grande country of New Mexico, has fascinated archaeologists since the 1870s. In Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World, James Snead uses an exciting new approach— landscape archaeology—to understand ancestral Pueblo communities and the way the people consciously or unconsciously shaped the land around them. Snead provides detailed insight into ancestral Puebloan cultures and societies using an approach he calls “contextual experience,” employing deep mapping and community-scale analysis. This strategy goes far beyond the standard archaeological approaches, using historical ethnography and contemporary Puebloan perspectives to better understand how past and present Pueblo worldviews and meanings are imbedded in the land. Snead focuses on five communities in the Pueblo heartland—Burnt Corn, T’obimpaenge, Tsikwaiye, Los Aguajes, and Tsankawi—using the results of intensive archaeological surveys to discuss the changes that occurred in these communities between AD 1250 and 1500. He examines the history of each area, comparing and contrasting them via the themes of “provision,” “identity,” and “movement,” before turning to questions regarding social, political, and economic organization. This revolutionary study thus makes an important contribution to landscape archaeology and explains how the Precolumbian Pueblo landscape was formed.
[more]

front cover of Ancestral Zuni Glaze-Decorated Pottery
Ancestral Zuni Glaze-Decorated Pottery
Viewing Pueblo IV Regional Organization through Ceramic Production and Exchange
Deborah L. Huntley
University of Arizona Press, 2008
The Pueblo IV period (AD 1275–1600) witnessed dramatic changes in regional settlement patterns and social configurations across the ancestral Pueblo Southwest. Early in this interval, Pueblo potters began making distinctive polychrome vessels, often decorated with technologically innovative glaze paints. Archaeologists have linked these ceramic innovations with the introduction of new ideologies and religious practices to the area. This research explores interaction networks among residents of settlement clusters in the Zuni region of westcentral New Mexico during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD. Using multiple analytical techniques, this research provides a case study for documenting multiple scales of interaction in prehistory. Ceramicists will find a wealth of technological and contextual data on glaze-decorated pottery, and archaeologists interested in power and leadership in ancestral Pueblo societies will be intrigued by the implication that strategies like the manipulation of interpueblo alliances or control over long-distance resources may have been used to concentrate social power.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Andean Political Economy
Ancient Andean Political Economy
By Charles Stanish
University of Texas Press, 1992

For more than two millennia prior to the Spanish conquest, the southern region of the central Andes was home to dozens of societies, ranging from modest chiefdoms to imperial states. Attempts to understand the political and economic dynamics of this complex region have included at least two major theories in Andean anthropology. In this pathfinding study, Charles Stanish shows that they are not exclusive and competing models, but rather can be understood as variations within a larger theoretical framework.

Stanish builds his arguments around a case study from the Moquequa region of Peru, augmented with data from Puno. He uses the "archaeological household" as his basic unit of analysis. This approach allows him to reconcile the now-classic model of zonal complementarity proposed by John Murra with the model of craft specialization and exchange offered by Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco. These models of political economy are analyzed with the concepts of economic anthropology in the tradition of Karl Polanyi.

For students of archaeology, Andean studies, anthropology, and economic history, Ancient Andean Political Economy will be important reading.

[more]

front cover of The Ancient Andean Village
The Ancient Andean Village
Marcaya in Prehispanic Nasca
By Kevin J. Vaughn
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Although ancient civilizations in the Andes are rich in history—with expansive empires, skilled artisans, and vast temple centers—the history of the Andean foothills on the south coast of present-day Peru is only now being unveiled. Nasca, a prehispanic society that flourished there from AD 1 to 750, is best known for its polychrome pottery, its enigmatic geoglyphs (the "Nasca Lines"), and its ceremonial center, Cahuachi, which was the seat of power in early Nasca. However, despite the fact that archaeologists have studied Nasca civilization for more than a century, until now they have not pieced together the daily lives of Nasca residents. With this book, Kevin Vaughn offers the first portrait of village life in this ancient Andean society.
 
Vaughn is interested in how societies develop and change, in particular their subsistence and political economies, interactions between elites and commoners, and the ritual activities of everyday life. By focusing on one village, Marcaya, he not only illuminates the lives and relationships of its people but he also contributes to an understanding of the more general roles played by villages in the growth of increasingly complex societies in the Andes. By examining agency in local affairs, he is able for the first time to explore the nature of power in Nasca and how it may have changed over time. By studying village and household activities, Vaughn argues, we can begin to appreciate from the ground up such essential activities as production, consumption, and the ideologies revealed by rituals—and thereby gain fresh insights into ancient civilizations.
[more]

logo for University of Michigan Press
The Ancient Art of Emulation
Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity
Elaine K. Gazda, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2002
This volume of essays examines the question of copying and other forms of artistic imitation and emulation in relation to Greek and Roman art, focusing particularly on sculpture and painting in the Roman period. It goes beyond recent studies of the subject in bringing to bear the views of early modern, modern, and contemporary artists on matters of copying and imitation as well as an exceptionally wide array of traditional and current critical perspectives--historiographic, literary, technical, stylistic, iconographic, and museological, among others.
Long regarded as copies of lost Greek masterpieces, a great many Roman works are now seen as neoclassical images worthy of analysis within their own Roman contexts. This book identifies and takes account of Roman criteria in rethinking the function and aesthetic appeal of these works in the eyes of their Roman owners and audiences. Collectively, the essays argue that many traditional assumptions about the status of works of classical art as originals or copies, and much of the evidence that has been used to sustain these assumptions, must be thoroughly rethought.
Among the authors are classical archaeologists, art historians (whose areas of expertise range from antiquity to the nineteenth century), and a contemporary artist and critic.
Elaine K. Gazda is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, University of Michigan.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Borinquen
Ancient Borinquen
Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Native Puerto Rico
Edited by Peter E. Siegel
University of Alabama Press, 2008
A comprehensive overview of recent thinking, new data, syntheses, and insights into current Puerto Rican archaeology
 
Ancient Borinquen is a re-examination of the archaeology of Puerto Rico, drawing data from beyond the boundaries of the island itself because in prehistoric times the waters between islands would not have been viewed as a boundary in the contemporary sense of the term. The last few decades have witnessed a growth of intense archaeological research on the island, from material culture in the form of lithics, ceramics, and rock art; to nutritional, architecture, and environmental studies; to rituals and social patterns; to the aftermath of Conquest.

It is unlikely that prehistoric occupants recognized the same boundaries and responded to the same political forces that operated in the formation of current nations, states, or cities. Yet, archaeologists traditionally have produced such volumes and they generally represent anchors for ongoing research in a specific region, in this case the island of Puerto Rico, its immediate neighbors, and the wider Caribbean basin.
 
Ancient Borinquen provides a comprehensive overview of recent thinking, new data, syntheses, and insights into current Puerto Rican archaeology, and it reflects and illuminates similar concerns elsewhere in the West Indies, lowland South America, and Central America.
 
[more]

front cover of Ancient Burial Patterns of the Moche Valley, Peru
Ancient Burial Patterns of the Moche Valley, Peru
By Christopher B. Donnan and Carol J. Mackey
University of Texas Press, 1978

Archaeologists working in the Moche Valley of Peru have uncovered a number of tombs representing various cultures that flourished there prior to European contact. This book provides a full description of 103 such burials, spanning a period of more than 3,500 years. Each burial is documented with an accurate illustration of every artifact found, as well as details on the location, matrix, and construction of the graves, the individuals in the graves, and the placement of all the associated goods. This information constitutes an important resource for solving problems of ceramic chronology and style change. Age and sex data given for the burials will also enable scholars to establish status differences that existed in the pre-Columbian past. Finally, the authors have compared their sample with all the north coast burials previously reported, showing how their findings may be used to ascertain similarities and differences throughout the highland Andean region.

Ancient Burial Patterns of the Moche Valley, Peru is the first diachronic study of burial practices for any Andean region. It not only demonstrates changes in funerary practices in the area but also provides insight into the nature of local cultural development. It will be useful to specialists in Andean and New World archaeology as well as to collectors of pre-Columbian art.

[more]

front cover of Ancient Caves of the Great Salt Lake Region
Ancient Caves of the Great Salt Lake Region
Julian H Steward
University of Utah Press, 2009
From 1930 to 1931, the University of Utah and the Smithsonian Institute’s Bureau of American Ethnology sponsored archaeological field work in the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake. Particular attention was paid to caves that had once been submerged by Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric lake that was some 1,000 feet above the level of the remnant Great Salt Lake. Previous studies had demonstrated that such caves, as the lake subsided, were soon inhabited by ancient peoples and the archaeological explorations were aimed at discovering ancient cultures that could be dated by reference to the chronology of the lake. The field work included thorough excavations of two large caves on the western shore of Promontory Point and one large cave on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake, as well as reconnaissance of a number of smaller caves on Promontory Point and the northern shore of Bear River Bay. The work was led by Julian Steward, who prepared this report.

First published in 1937 by the Bureau of American Ethnology, this edition of Ancient Caves of the Great Salt Lake Region features a new foreword by Joel Janetski.  
[more]

front cover of Ancient Communities in the Mimbres Valley
Ancient Communities in the Mimbres Valley
Continuity and Change from AD 750 to 1350
Roger Anyon and Steven A. LeBlanc
University of Arizona Press, 2024
In the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico, archaeologists have been working for decades to meticulously excavate archaeological sites.

Expanding beyond studies that focus on a single pueblo, this volume represents the final report on the excavations of the Mimbres Foundation. It brings together data from a range of pithouse and pueblo sites of different sizes and histories in diverse locations—to refine the current understandings of Mimbres region archaeology in the context of the Greater Southwest.

From the end of the Late Pithouse period through the Black Mountain phase, the book provides excellent documentation of the artifacts and data recovered from the sites, addresses models of Mimbres community, and tracks change and continuity in the valley over centuries. In addition, the authors consider the nature of the relationship between the Classic Mimbres period population of the valley and the people of the succeeding Black Mountain phase, as well as relationships among the Black Mountain phase people and those of neighboring parts of the region, including the Casas Grandes world and the Jornada Mogollon area.

In Ancient Communities in the Mimbres Valley two leading archaeologists bring together a trove of unpublished investigations, expanding understandings and setting a course for the future.
 
[more]

front cover of The Ancient Culture of the Fremont River in Utah
The Ancient Culture of the Fremont River in Utah
Report on the Explorations under the Claflin-Emerson Fund, 1928-1929
Noel Morss
University of Utah Press, 2009
Until 1927, the wild area of Utah near the Colorado River and below the mouth of the Escalante River was almost unknown archaeologically. The Claflin-Emerson Fund of Harvard’s Peabody Museum was created to provide support for an extended survey of southeastern Utah west of the Colorado River.

One such survey was conducted by author Noel Morss during the summer of 1928, resulting in an unexpected revelation: the Fremont (Dirty Devil) River drainage area being surveyed proved to be host to a prehistoric culture different from all other established Southwestern cultures. Excavations completed the following field season confirmed Morss’s findings. This distinct culture was defined by unique unpainted black or gray pottery, sole use of a primitive moccasin type, elaborate clay figurines, and abundant distinctive pictographs. Though too definite and well developed to be confined to a single drainage, Morss concluded that the Fremont were nonetheless a periphery culture and not an integral part of the mainstream of Southwestern development.

Originally published in 1931 and now featuring a new foreword by Duncan Metcalfe, The Ancient Culture of the Fremont River in Utah has become a classic in Southwestern archaeology, furthering a conversation about the early peoples of southern Utah that continues even today.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Cuzco
Ancient Cuzco
Heartland of the Inca
By Brian S. Bauer
University of Texas Press, 2004

The Cuzco Valley of Peru was both the sacred and the political center of the largest state in the prehistoric Americas—the Inca Empire. From the city of Cuzco, the Incas ruled at least eight million people in a realm that stretched from modern-day Colombia to Chile. Yet, despite its great importance in the cultural development of the Americas, the Cuzco Valley has only recently received the same kind of systematic archaeological survey long since conducted at other New World centers of civilization.

Drawing on the results of the Cuzco Valley Archaeological Project that Brian Bauer directed from 1994 to 2000, this landmark book undertakes the first general overview of the prehistory of the Cuzco region from the arrival of the first hunter-gatherers (ca. 7000 B.C.) to the fall of the Inca Empire in A.D. 1532. Combining archaeological survey and excavation data with historical records, the book addresses both the specific patterns of settlement in the Cuzco Valley and the larger processes of cultural development. With its wealth of new information, this book will become the baseline for research on the Inca and the Cuzco Valley for years to come.

[more]

front cover of The Ancient Future of the Itza
The Ancient Future of the Itza
The book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin
Translated and annotated by Munro S. Edmonson
University of Texas Press, 1982

The title of Edmonson's work refers to the Mayan custom of first predicting their history and then living it, and it may be that no other peoples have ever gone so far in this direction. The Book of Chilam Balam was a sacred text prepared by generations of Mayan priests to record the past and to predict the future. The official prophet of each twenty-year rule was the Chilam Balam, or Spokesman of the Jaguar—the Jaguar being the supreme authority charged with converting the prophet's words into fact.

This is a literal but poetic translation of one of fourteen known manuscripts in Yucatecan Maya on ritual and history. It pictures a world of all but incredible numerological order, slowly yielding to Christianity and Spanish political pressure but never surrendering. In fact, it demonstrates the surprising truth of a secret Mayan government during the Spanish rule, which continued to collect tribute in the names of the ruined Classic cities and preserved the essence of the Mayan calendar as a legacy for the tradition's modern inheritors.

The history of the Yucatecan Maya from the seventh to the nineteenth century is revealed. And this is history as the Maya saw it—of a people concerned with lords and priests, with the cosmology which justified their rule, and with the civil war which they perceived as the real dimension of the colonial period.

A work of both history and literature, the Tizimin presents a great deal of Mayan thought, some of which has been suspected but not previously documented. Edmonson's skillful reordering of the text not only makes perfect historical sense but also resolves the long-standing problem of correlating the two colonial Mayan calendars. The book includes both interpretative and literal translations, as well as the Maya parallel couplets and extensive annotations on each page. The beauty of the sacred text is illuminated by the literal translation, while both versions unveil the magnificent historical, philosophical, and social traditions of the most sophisticated native culture in the New World.

The prophetic history of the Tizimin creates a portrait of the continuity and vitality, of the ancient past and the foreordained future of the Maya.

[more]

front cover of Ancient Households of the Americas
Ancient Households of the Americas
Conceptualizing What Households Do
John G. Douglass
University Press of Colorado, 2012
In Ancient Households of the Americas archaeologists investigate the fundamental role of household production in ancient, colonial, and contemporary households.

Several different cultures-Iroquois, Coosa, Anasazi, Hohokam, San Agustín, Wankarani, Formative Gulf Coast Mexico, and Formative, Classic, Colonial, and contemporary Maya-are analyzed through the lens of household archaeology in concrete, data-driven case studies. The text is divided into three sections: Section I examines the spatial and social organization and context of household production; Section II looks at the role and results of households as primary producers; and Section III investigates the role of, and interplay among, households in their greater political and socioeconomic communities.

In the past few decades, household archaeology has made substantial contributions to our understanding and explanation of the past through the documentation of the household as a social unit-whether small or large, rural or urban, commoner or elite. These case studies from a broad swath of the Americas make Ancient Households of the Americas extremely valuable for continuing the comparative interdisciplinary study of households.

[more]

front cover of Ancient Households on the North Coast of Peru
Ancient Households on the North Coast of Peru
Ilana Johnson
University Press of Colorado, 2020
Ancient Households on the North Coast of Peru provides insight into the organization of complex, urban, and state-level society in the region from a household perspective, using observations from diverse North Coast households to generate new understandings of broader social processes in and beyond Andean prehistory.
 
Many volumes on this region are limited to one time period or civilization, often the Moche. While Ancient Households on the North Coast of Peru does examine the Moche, it offers a wider thematic approach to a broader swath of prehistory. Chapters on various time periods use a comparable scale of analysis to examine long-term continuity and change and draw on a large corpus of prior research on states, rulership, and cosmology to offer new insight into the intersection of household, community, and state. Contributors address social reproduction, construction and reinforcement of gender identities and social hierarchy, household permanence and resilience, and expression of identity through cuisine.
 
This volume challenges common concepts of the “household” in archaeology by demonstrating the complexity and heterogeneity of household-level dynamics as they intersect with institutions at broader social scales and takes a comparative perspective on daily life within one region of the Andes. It will be of interest to both students and scholars of South American archaeology and household archaeology.
 
Contributors: Brian R. Billman, David Chicoine, Guy S. Duke, Hugo Ikehara, Giles Spence-Morrow, Jessica Ortiz, Edward Swenson, Kari A. Zobler
 
[more]

front cover of Ancient Knowledge Networks
Ancient Knowledge Networks
A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia
Eleanor Robson
University College London, 2019
With Ancient Knowledge Networks, Eleanor Robson investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to adapt and endure over the course of five world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC. Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments, and scholarship in the ancient Middle East, Robson focuses on two regions where cuneiform script was the predominant writing medium: Assyria, north of modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia, south of modern-day Baghdad. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Lamps in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Ancient Lamps in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Jean Bussière
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2017
In the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum are more than six hundred ancient lamps that span the sixth century BCE to the seventh century CE, most from the Roman Imperial period and largely created in Asia Minor or North Africa. These lamps have much to reveal about life, religion, pottery, and trade in the ancient Graeco-Roman world. Most of the Museum’s lamps have never before been published, and this extensive typological catalogue will thus be an invaluable scholarly resource for art historians, archaeologists, and those interested in the ancient world.
 
The free online edition of this open-access catalogue, available at www.getty.edu/publications/ancientlamps/ includes zoomable high-resolution photography, multiple object views, and an interactive map. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBi downloads of the book, CSV and JSON downloads of the object data from the catalogue, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Ancient Literary Sources on Sardis
John Griffiths Pedley
Harvard University Press, 1972
The second monograph from the archaeological exploration of Sardis in western Turkey is a compilation of references to early Sardis (to A.D. 284) in the writings of ancient authors ranging from Homer to Tzetses. John Griffiths Pedley has organized the references into four chronological chapters covering successive periods in the history of the city; a fifth chapter is devoted to topography and monuments, and an appendix presents Eastern sources. Each entry includes the Greek or Latin text, an English translation, and a commentary with bibliographical references. More than three hundred major sources are quoted; references of lesser importance are cited in the notes.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Maya Commerce
Ancient Maya Commerce
Multidisciplinary Research at Chunchucmil
Scott R. Hutson
University Press of Colorado, 2017

Ancient Maya Commerce presents nearly two decades of multidisciplinary research at Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico—a thriving Classic period Maya center organized around commercial exchange rather than agriculture. An urban center without a king and unable to sustain agrarian independence, Chunchucmil is a rare example of a Maya city in which economics, not political rituals, served as the engine of growth. Trade was the raison d’être of the city itself.

Using a variety of evidence—archaeological, botanical, geomorphological, and soil-based—contributors show how the city was a major center for both short- and long-distance trade, integrating the Guatemalan highlands, the Gulf of Mexico, and the interior of the northern Maya lowlands. By placing Chunchucmil into the broader context of emerging research at other Maya cities, the book reorients the understanding of ancient Maya economies. The book is accompanied by a highly detailed digital map that reveals the dense population of the city and the hundreds of streets its inhabitants constructed to make the city navigable, shifting the knowledge of urbanism among the ancient Maya.

Ancient Maya Commerce is a pioneering, thoroughly documented case study of a premodern market center and makes a strong case for the importance of early market economies in the Maya region. It will be a valuable addition to the literature for Mayanists, Mesoamericanists, economic anthropologists, and environmental archaeologists.

Contributors: Anthony P. Andrews, Traci Ardren, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Timothy Beach, Chelsea Blackmore, Tara Bond-Freeman, Bruce H. Dahlin, Patrice Farrell, David Hixson, Socorro Jimenez, Justin Lowry, Aline Magnoni, Eugenia Mansell, Daniel E. Mazeau, Travis Stanton, Ryan V. Sweetwood, Richard E. Terry

[more]

front cover of Ancient Maya Life in the Far West Bajo
Ancient Maya Life in the Far West Bajo
Social and Environmental Change in the Wetlands of Belize
Julie L. Kunen
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Human activity during centuries of occupation significantly altered the landscape inhabited by the ancient Maya of northwestern Belize. In response, the Maya developed new techniques to harvest the natural resources of their surroundings, investing increased labor and raw materials into maintaining and even improving their ways of life.

In this lively story of life in the wetlands on the outskirts of the major site of La Milpa, Julie Kunen documents a hitherto unrecognized form of intensive agriculture in the Maya lowlands—one that relied on the construction of terraces and berms to trap soil and moisture around the margins of low-lying depressions called bajos. She traces the intertwined histories of residential settlements on nearby hills and ridges and agricultural terraces and other farming-related features around the margins of the bajo as they developed from the Late Preclassic perios (400 BC-AD 250) until the area's abandonment in the Terminal Classic period (about AD 850).

Kunen examines the organization of three bajo communities with respect to the use and management of resources critical to agricultural production. She argues that differences in access to spatially variable natural resources resulted in highly patterned settlement remains and that community founders and their descendents who had acquired the best quality and most diverse set of resources maintained an elevated status in the society.

The thorough integration of three lines of evidence—the settlement system, the agricultural system, and the ancient environment—breaks new ground in landscape research and in the study of Maya non-elite domestic organization. Kunen reports on the history of settlement and farming in a small corner of the Maya world but demonstrates that for any study of human-environment interactions, landscape history consists equally of ecological and cultural strands of influence.
[more]

front cover of The Ancient Maya Marketplace
The Ancient Maya Marketplace
The Archaeology of Transient Space
Edited by Eleanor M. King
University of Arizona Press, 2015
Trading was the favorite occupation of the Maya, according to early Spanish observers such as Fray Diego de Landa (1566). Yet scholars of the Maya have long dismissed trade—specifically, market exchange—as unimportant. They argue that the Maya subsisted primarily on agriculture, with long-distance trade playing a minor role in a largely non-commercialized economy.

The Ancient Maya Marketplace reviews the debate on Maya markets and offers compelling new evidence for the existence and identification of ancient marketplaces in the Maya Lowlands. Its authors rethink the prevailing views about Maya economic organization and offer new perspectives. They attribute the dearth of Maya market research to two factors: persistent assumptions that Maya society and its rainforest environment lacked complexity, and an absence of physical evidence for marketplaces—a problem that plagues market research around the world.

Many Mayanists now agree that no site was self-sufficient, and that from the earliest times robust local and regional exchange existed alongside long-distance trade. Contributors to this volume suggest that marketplaces, the physical spaces signifying the presence of a market economy, did not exist for purely economic reasons but served to exchange information and create social ties as well.

The Ancient Maya Marketplace offers concrete links between Maya archaeology, ethnohistory, and contemporary cultures. Its in-depth review of current research will help future investigators to recognize and document marketplaces as a long-standing Maya cultural practice. The volume also provides detailed comparative data for premodern societies elsewhere in the world.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Maya Teeth
Ancient Maya Teeth
Dental Modification, Cosmology, and Social Identity in Mesoamerica
Vera Tiesler
University of Texas Press, 2024

A study of Maya dental modification from archaeological sites spanning three millennia.

Dental modification was common across ancient societies, but perhaps none were more avid practitioners than the Maya. They filed their teeth flat or pointy, polished and drilled them, and crafted decorative inlays of jade and pyrite. Unusually, Maya of all social classes, ages, and professions engaged in dental modification. What did it mean to them?

Ancient Maya Teeth is the most comprehensive study of Maya dental modification ever published, based on thousands of teeth recovered from 130 sites spanning three millennia. Esteemed archaeologist Vera Tiesler sifts the evidence, much of it gathered with her own hands and illustrated here with more than a hundred photographs. Exploring the underlying theory and practice of dental modification, Tiesler raises key questions. How did modifications vary across the individual’s lifespan? What tools were used? How did the Maya deal with pain—and malpractice? How did they keep their dentitions healthy, functioning, and beautiful? What were the relationships among gender, social identity, and particular dental-modification choices? Addressing these and other issues, Ancient Maya Teeth reveals how dental-modification customs shifted over the centuries, indexing other significant developments in Mayan cultural history.

[more]

front cover of Ancient Maya Traders of Ambergris Caye
Ancient Maya Traders of Ambergris Caye
Thomas H. Guderjan
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Focuses on the maritime trade network sites on Ambergris Caye, Belize, where excavations have revealed remnants of very small villages, or camps, along the Caribbean coastline
 
[more]

front cover of Ancient Mesoamerican Population History
Ancient Mesoamerican Population History
Urbanism, Social Complexity, and Change
Adrian S. Z. Chase, Arlen F. Chase, and Diane Z. Chase
University of Arizona Press, 2024

Establishing ancient population numbers and determining how they were distributed across a landscape over time constitute two of the most pressing problems in archaeology. Accurate population data is crucial for modeling, interpreting, and understanding the past. Now, advances in both archaeology and technology have changed the way that such approximations can be achieved.

Including research from both highland central Mexico and the tropical lowlands of the Maya and Olmec areas, this book reexamines the demography in ancient Mesoamerica. Contributors present methods for determining population estimates, field methods for settlement pattern studies to obtain demographic data, and new technologies such as LiDAR (light detecting and ranging) that have expanded views of the ground in forested areas. Contributions to this book provide a view of ancient landscape use and modification that was not possible in the twentieth century. This important new work provides new understandings of Mesoamerican urbanism, development, and changes over time.

Contributors

Traci Ardren

M. Charlotte Arnauld

Bárbara Arroyo

Luke Auld-Thomas

Marcello A. Canuto

Adrian S. Z. Chase

Arlen F. Chase

Diane Z. Chase

Elyse D. Z. Chase

Javier Estrada

Gary M. Feinman

L. J. Gorenflo

Julien Hiquet

Scott R. Hutson

Gerardo Jiménez Delgado

Eva Lemonnier

Rodrigo Liendo Stuardo

José Lobo

Javier López Mejía

Michael L. Loughlin

Deborah L. Nichols

Christopher A. Pool

Ian G. Robertson

Jeremy A. Sabloff

Travis W. Stanton

[more]

front cover of Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization
Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization
The Evolution of an Urban Landscape
Guillermo Algaze
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Mesopotamia are widely known as the “cradle of civilization,” owing to the scale of the processes of urbanization that took place in the area by the second half of the fourth millennium BCE.
            In Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, Guillermo Algaze draws on the work of modern economic geographers to explore how the unique river-based ecology and geography of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium affected the development of urban civilization in southern Mesopotamia. He argues that these natural conditions granted southern polities significant competitive advantages over their landlocked rivals elsewhere in Southwest Asia, most importantly the ability to easily transport commodities. In due course, this resulted in increased trade and economic activity and higher population densities in the south than were possible elsewhere. As southern polities grew in scale and complexity throughout the fourth millennium, revolutionary new forms of labor organization and record keeping were created, and it is these socially created innovations, Algaze argues, that ultimately account for why fully developed city-states emerged earlier in southern Mesopotamia than elsewhere in Southwest Asia or the world.

[more]

front cover of Ancient Mesopotamia
Ancient Mesopotamia
Portrait of a Dead Civilization
A. Leo Oppenheim
University of Chicago Press, 1977
"This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."—Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Review

Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East.

Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun.

"To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written."—Leonard Cottrell, Book Week

"Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research."—Samuel Noah Kramer, Archaeology

A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Muses
Ancient Muses
Archaeology and the Arts
Edited by John H. Jameson Jr., John E. Ehrenhard, and Christine A. Finn
University of Alabama Press, 2003
Examines how information derived from archaeological investigations can be presented artistically to educate the general public
 
Known widely in Europe as “interpretive narrative archaeology,” the practice of using creative methods to interpret and present current knowledge of the past is gaining popularity in North America. This book is the first compilation of international case studies of the various artistic methods used in this new form of education—one that makes archaeology “come alive” for the nonprofessional. Plays, opera, visual art, stories, poetry, performance dance, music, sculpture, digital imagery—all can effectively communicate archaeological processes and cultural values to public audiences.

The contributors to this volume are a diverse group of archaeologists, educators, and artisans who have direct experience in schools, museums, and at archaeological sites. Citing specific examples, such as the film The English Patient, science fiction mysteries, and hypertext environments, they explain how creative imagination and the power of visual and audio media can personalize, contextualize, and demystify the research process. A 16-page color section illuminates their examples, and an accompanying CD includes relevant videos, music, web sites, and additional color images.
*
[more]

front cover of Ancient Nasca Settlement
Ancient Nasca Settlement
Helaine Silverman
University of Iowa Press, 2002

Nasca society arose on the south coast of Peru two thousand years ago and evolved over the course of the next seven hundred years. Helaine Silverman's long-term, multistage work on the south coast of Peru has established her as one of the world's preeminent authorities on this brilliant and enigmatic civilization. Ancient Nasca Settlement and Society is the first extended treatment of the range of sites occupied by the people responsible for some of the most exquisite art, largest ground drawings, most intense hunting of human heads as trophies, and most ingenious hydraulic engineering of the pre-Columbian world.

Ancient Nasca Settlement and Society is based on Silverman's comprehensive survey of the Ingenio Valley, a water-rich tributary of the Río Grande de Nazca drainage; it also includes a critical synthesis of the settlement pattern data from the other river valleys of the system maps and tables, Silverman allows comparisons among the various phases of change in Nasca society. A companion CD-ROM provides a great deal of graphic material and allows users to manipulate the data in alternative scenarios.

Silverman situates the various classes of Nasca material culture within the spatial, social, economic, political, and ideological realities that can be adduced from the archaeological record. A work of archaeo-logical ethnography focused on a once-living society, this convincing and highly original book illuminates the ancient Nasca people's social construction of space and cultural meaning through their manipulation of their natural setting and their creation of particular kinds of built environments.

[more]

front cover of Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms
Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms
Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography
Edited by F. Kent Reilly, III, and James F. Garber
University of Texas Press, 2006

Between AD 900-1600, the native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States conceived and executed one of the greatest artistic traditions of the Precolumbian Americas. Created in the media of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood, and incised or carved with a complex set of symbols and motifs, this seven-hundred-year-old artistic tradition functioned within a multiethnic landscape centered on communities dominated by earthen mounds and plazas. Previous researchers have referred to this material as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC).

This groundbreaking volume brings together ten essays by leading anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians, who analyze the iconography of Mississippian art in order to reconstruct the ritual activities, cosmological vision, and ideology of these ancient precursors to several groups of contemporary Native Americans. Significantly, the authors correlate archaeological, ethnographic, and art historical data that illustrate the stylistic differences within Mississippian art as well as the numerous changes that occur through time. The research also demonstrates the inadequacy of the SECC label, since Mississippian art is not limited to the Southeast and reflects stylistic changes over time among several linked but distinct religious traditions. The term Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS) more adequately describes the corpus of this Mississippian art. Most important, the authors illustrate the overarching nature of the ancient Native American religious system, as a creation unique to the native American cultures of the eastern United States.

[more]

front cover of Ancient Paquimé and the Casas Grandes World
Ancient Paquimé and the Casas Grandes World
Edited by Paul E. Minnis and Michael E. Whalen
University of Arizona Press, 2015
Paquimé, the great multistoried pre-Hispanic settlement also known as Casas Grandes, was the center of an ancient region with hundreds of related neighbors. It also participated in massive networks that stretched their fingers through northwestern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. Paquimé is widely considered one of the most important and influential communities in ancient northern Mexico and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ancient Paquimé and the Casas Grandes World, edited by Paul E. Minnis and Michael E. Whalen, summarizes the four decades of research since the Amerind Foundation and Charles Di Peso published the results of the Joint Casas Grandes Expeditions in 1974.
 
The Joint Casas Grandes Expedition revealed the extraordinary nature of this site: monumental architecture, massive ball courts, ritual mounds, over a ton of shell artifacts, hundreds of skeletons of multicolored macaws and their pens, copper from west Mexico, and rich political and religious life with Mesoamerican-related images and rituals. Paquimé was not one sole community but was surrounded by hundreds of outlying villages in the region, indicating a zone that sustained thousands of inhabitants and influenced groups much farther afield.
 
In celebration of the Amerind Foundation’s seventieth anniversary, sixteen scholars with direct and substantial experience in Casas Grandes archaeology present nine chapters covering its economy, chronology, history, religion, regional organization, and importance. The two final chapters examine Paquimé in broader geographic perspectives. This volume sheds new light on Casas Grandes/Paquimé, a great town well-adapted to its physical and economic environment that disappeared just before Spanish contact.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Ancient Persia
John Curtis
Harvard University Press, 1990
The many splendid achievements of the early inhabitants of Iran range from the imaginatively painted pottery of the prehistoric period to the magnificent silver vessels of Sasanian times, and include the Luristan bronzes and the spectacular sculptures of Persepolis. Civilization began early in Persia, in common with other parts of the Middle East, and John Curtis traces the history, archaeology and art from the growth of settled communities in about 6000 B.C. through to the beginning of the Islamic period in the seventh century A.D. The author illustrates this concise introduction to ancient Persia with examples drawn from the rich collection of Iranian antiquities in the British Museum.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Plants and People
Ancient Plants and People
Contemporary Trends in Archaeobotany
Edited by Marco Madella, Carla Lancelotti, and Manon Savard
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Mangroves and rice, six-row brittle barley and einkorn wheat. Ancient crops for prehistoric people. What do they have in common? All tell us about the lives and cultures of long ago, as humans cultivated or collected these plants for food. Exploring these and other important plants used for millennia by humans, Ancient Plants and People presents a wide-angle view of the current state of archaeobotanical research, methods, and theories.

Food has both a public and a private role, and it permeates the life of all people in a society. Food choice, production, and distribution probably represent the most complex indicators of social life, and thus a study of foods consumed by ancient peoples reveals many clues about their lifestyles. But in addition to yielding information about food production, distribution, preparation, and consumption, plant remains recovered from archaeological sites offer precious insights on past landscapes, human adaptation to climate change, and the relationship between human groups and their environment. Revealing important aspects of past human societies, these plant-driven insights widen the spectrum of information available to archaeologists as we seek to understand our history as a biological and cultural species.

Often answers raise more questions. As a result, archaeobotanists are constantly pushed to reflect on the methodological and theoretical aspects of their discipline. The contributors discuss timely methodological issues and engage in debates on a wide range of topics from plant utilization by hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, to uses of ancient DNA. Ancient Plants and People provides a global perspective on archaeobotanical research, particularly on the sophisticated interplay between the use of plants and their social or environmental context.
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Ancient Records of Egypt
Vol. 3: The Nineteenth Dynasty
Translated and Edited by James Henry Breasted
University of Illinois Press, 2001
Volume 3 of Ancient Records of Egypt opens on the chaotic aftermath of King Akhenaten's religious revolution. Breasted chronicles the precarious reigns of Akhenaten's successors and the political and legal reforms of King Horemheb, who succeeded to the throne after the passing of the last members of the royal family. This volume contains the important edict of Horemheb, intended to prevent the oppressive abuses connected with the collection of taxes from the common people, and the inscriptions of Roy, high priest of Amon, showing the first transmission from father to son of the office of the high priest.
 
In the context of a long history of mutilating and altering reliefs for political purposes, Breasted discusses the insertion into a relief of the figure of Ramesses II in order to reinforce his claim to the throne. This volume also includes the treaty of alliance that sealed peace with the Hittites under Ramesses II; a series of documents that record the invasion of Libyans and Mediterranean Sea people during the reign of Merneptah; and the Great Temple of Abu Simbel, the most remarkable of the rock-cut temples of Egypt.
 
This first complete paperback edition of Breasted's five-volume Ancient Records of Egypt makes available to a new audience a milestone in Egyptology and in the compilation of documentary histories. Clearly annotated for the lay reader, the documents provide copious evidence of trade relations, construction activities, diplomatic envoys, foreign expeditions, and other aspects of a vigorous, highly organized, and centrally controlled society. Breasted's commentary is both rigorously documented and accessible, suffused with a contagious fascination for the events, the personalities, the cultural practices, and the sophistication these records indicate
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Ancient Records of Egypt
Vol. 5: Supplementary Bibliographies and Indices
Translated and Edited by James Henry Breasted: Supplementary Bibliographies by Peter A. Piccione
University of Illinois Press, 2001

An indispensable companion to any of the other volumes of Ancient Records of Egypt, the Supplementary Bibliographies and Indices facilitates direct access to specific information on the people, places, and inscriptions catalogued by James Henry Breasted. Exhaustively compiled and intelligently arranged, these indices include the kings and queens, temples and geographical locations, divine names, and titles and ranks encompassed by three thousand years of Egyptian history. Also provided are indices of all Egyptian, Hebrew, and Arabic terms mentioned in the texts, as well as a complete listing of the records with their location in Lepsius's Denkmäler.

This first paperback edition of Ancient Records of Egypt features the important addition of bibliographies by Peter A. Piccione, together with an introduction that puts Breasted's historical commentaries into modern perspective. These bibliographies offer valuable guidance on new translations and modern treatments of the inscriptions included in Ancient Records of Egypt. Professor Piccione points the reader toward recent studies of Egyptian chronology and modern scholarship on Egyptian and Nubian history. He also provides information on anthologies of Egyptian texts in translation and topographical bibliographies that suggest further reading on specific ancient Egyptian monuments, texts, and reliefs.

 

[more]

front cover of Ancient Southwestern Mortuary Practices
Ancient Southwestern Mortuary Practices
James T. Watson
University Press of Colorado, 2020

Ancient Southwestern Mortuary Practices chronicles the modal patterns, diversity, and change of ancient mortuary practices from across the US Southwest and northwest Mexico over four thousand years of Prehispanic occupation. The volume summarizes new methodological approaches and theoretical issues concerning the meaning and importance of burial practices to different peoples at different times throughout the ancient Greater Southwest.

Chapters focus on normative mortuary patterns, the range of variability of mortuary patterns, how the contexts of burials reflect temporal shifts in ideology, and the ways in which mortuary rituals, behaviors, and funerary treatments fulfill specific societal needs and reflect societal beliefs. Contributors analyze extensive datasets—archived and accessible on the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR)—from various subregions, structurally standardized and integrated with respect to biological and cultural data.

Ancient Southwestern Mortuary Practices, together with the full datasets preserved in tDAR, is a rich resource for comparative research on mortuary ritual for indigenous descendant groups, cultural resource managers, and archaeologists and bioarchaeologists in the Greater Southwest and other regions.
 
Contributors: Nancy J. Akins, Jessica I. Cerezo-Román, Mona C. Charles, Patricia A. Gilman, Lynne Goldstein, Alison K. Livesay, Dawn Mulhern, Ann Stodder, M. Scott Thompson, Sharon Wester, Catrina Banks Whitley

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Ancient State of Puyŏ in Northeast Asia
Archaeology and Historical Memory
Mark E. Byington
Harvard University Press, 2016
Mark E. Byington explores the formation, history, and legacy of the ancient state of Puyŏ, which existed in central Manchuria from the third century BCE until the late fifth century CE. As the earliest archaeologically attested state to arise in northeastern Asia, Puyŏ occupies an important place in the history of that region. Nevertheless, until now its history and culture have been rarely touched upon in scholarly works in any language. The present volume, utilizing recently discovered archaeological materials from Northeast China as well as a wide variety of historical records, explores the social and political processes associated with the formation and development of the Puyŏ state, and discusses how the historical legacy of Puyŏ—its historical memory—contributed to modes of statecraft of later northeast Asian states and provided a basis for a developing historiographical tradition on the Korean peninsula. Byington focuses on two major aspects of state formation: as a social process leading to the formation of a state-level polity called Puyŏ, and as a political process associated with a variety of devices intended to assure the stability and perpetuation of the inegalitarian social structures of several early states in the Korea-Manchuria region.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Terracottas from South Italy and Sicily in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Ancient Terracottas from South Italy and Sicily in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Maria Lucia Ferruzza
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2016
In the ancient world, terracotta sculpture was ubiquitous. Readily available and economical—unlike stone suitable for carving—clay allowed artisans to craft figures of remarkable variety and expressiveness. Terracottas from South Italy and Sicily attest to the prolific coroplastic workshops that supplied sacred and decorative images for sanctuaries, settlements, and cemeteries. Sixty terracottas are investigated here by noted scholar Maria Lucia Ferruzza, comprising a selection of significant types from the Getty’s larger collection—life-size sculptures, statuettes, heads and busts, altars, and decorative appliqués. In addition to the comprehensive catalogue entries, the publication includes a guide to the full collection of over one thousand other figurines and molds from the region by Getty curator of antiquities Claire L. Lyons.

The free online edition of this open-access catalogue, available at www.getty.edu/publications/terracottas/ includes zoomable high-resolution photography and a select number of 360° rotations; the ability to filter the catalogue by location, typology, and date; and an interactive map drawn from the Ancient World Mapping Center and linked to the Getty's Thesaurus of Geographic Names and Pleiades. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book; CSV and JSON downloads of the object data from the catalogue and the accompanying Guide to the Collection; and JPG and PPT downloads of the main catalogue images.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Tollan
Ancient Tollan
Tula and the Toltec Heartland
Alba Guadalupe Mastache
University Press of Colorado, 2002
A work of both consensus and innovation based upon extensive archaeological research, Ancient Tollan: Tula and the Toltec Heartland studies Mesoamerica's problem city—Tula, or Tollan, seat of the Toltec state. Along with Teotihuancan and Tenochtitlán, Tula was one of the most important prehispanic urban centers in Highland Central Mexico, reaching the height of its influence during the early Postclassic period between A.D. 900-1200.

Chapters of the book are dedicated to topics ranging from the Teotihuancan occupation in the area, architectural and iconographic analysis of Tula's Sacred Precinct, the urban domestic architecture, settlement patterns, and irrigation systems. Using a wealth of data and focusing on the developmental processes of the city's functions on a regional level, Mastche, Cobean, and Healan offer a fresh view and a new understanding of this cultural center, its urban structure, and its rural environment.
[more]

front cover of Ancient Zapotec Religion
Ancient Zapotec Religion
An Ethnohistorical and Archaeological Perspective
Michael Lind
University Press of Colorado, 2015

Ancient Zapotec Religion is the first comprehensive study of Zapotec religion as it existed in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on the eve of the Spanish Conquest. Author Michael Lind brings a new perspective, focusing not on underlying theological principles but on the material and spatial expressions of religious practice.

Using sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish colonial documents and archaeological findings related to the time period leading up to the Spanish Conquest, he presents new information on deities, ancestor worship and sacred bundles, the Zapotec cosmos, the priesthood, religious ceremonies and rituals, the nature of temples, the distinctive features of the sacred and solar calendars, and the religious significance of the murals of Mitla—the most sacred and holy center. He also shows how Zapotec religion served to integrate Zapotec city-state structure throughout the valley of Oaxaca, neighboring mountain regions, and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Ancient Zapotec Religion is the first in-depth and interdisciplinary book on the Zapotecs and their religious practices and will be of great interest to archaeologists, epigraphers, historians, and specialists in Native American, Latin American, and religious studies. 

[more]

front cover of Andean Expressions
Andean Expressions
Art and Archaeology of the Recuay Culture
George F. Lau
University of Iowa Press, 2011
Flourishing from A.D. 1 to 700, the Recuay inhabited lands in northern Peru just below the imposing glaciers of the highest mountain chain in the tropics. Thriving on an economy of high-altitude crops and camelid herding, they left behind finely made artworks and grand palatial buildings with an unprecedented aesthetic and a high degree of technical sophistication. In this first in-depth study of these peoples, George Lau situates the Recuay within the great diversification of cultural styles associated with the Early Intermediate Period, provides new and significant evidence to evaluate models of social complexity, and offers fresh theories about life, settlement, art, and cosmology in the high Andes.
 
Lau crafts a nuanced social and historical model in order to evaluate the record of Recuay developments as part of a wider Andean prehistory. He analyzes the rise and decline of Recuay groups as well as their special interactions with the Andean landscape. Their  coherence was expressed as shared culture, community, and corporate identity, but Lau also reveals its diversity through time and space in order to challenge the monolithic characterizations of Recuay society pervasive in the literature today.
 
Many of the innovations in Recuay culture, revealed for the first time in this landmark volume, left a lasting impact on Andean history and continue to have relevance today. The author highlights the ways that material things intervened in ancient social and political life, rather than being merely passive reflections of historical change, to show that Recuay public art, exchange, technological innovations, warfare, and religion offer key insights into the emergence of social hierarchy and chiefly leadership and the formation, interaction, and later dissolution of large discrete polities. By presenting Recuay artifacts as fundamentally social in the sense of creating and negotiating relations among persons, places, and things, he recognizes in the complexities of the past an enduring order and intelligence that shape the contours of history.
[more]

logo for Bard Graduate Center
André Leroi-Gourhan on Technology
A Selection of Writings from the 1930s to the 1960s
André Leroi-Gourhan
Bard Graduate Center, 2023
A selection of Leroi-Gourhan’s most important texts—many translated into English for the first time.

André Leroi-Gourhan is undoubtedly one of the most acclaimed figures of twentieth-century anthropology and archaeology. In France, his intellectual importance rivals that of the Claude Lévi-Strauss, yet Leroi-Gourhan’s major contributions are almost entirely unknown in the Anglophone world. This collection seeks to change that. This selection highlights some of his chief influences, such as elaborating a theory of technology, which argues that material culture focuses on the object in use and how use is a dynamic feature that has specific consequences for human evolution and human society. With serious ramifications for our understanding of material culture, putting Leroi-Gourhan’s thinking about technology into English will have an immediate and transformative impact on material culture studies.
[more]

front cover of Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World
Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World
Benjamin S. Arbuckle
University Press of Colorado, 2014
Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World explores the current trends in the social archaeology of human-animal relationships, focusing on the ways in which animals are used to structure, create, support, and even deconstruct social inequalities.

The authors provide a global range of case studies from both New and Old World archaeology—a royal Aztec dog burial, the monumental horse tombs of Central Asia, and the ceremonial macaw cages of ancient Mexico among them. They explore the complex relationships between people and animals in social, economic, political, and ritual contexts, incorporating animal remains from archaeological sites with artifacts, texts, and iconography to develop their interpretations.

Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World presents new data and interpretations that reveal the role of animals, their products, and their symbolism in structuring social inequalities in the ancient world. The volume will be of interest to archaeologists, especially zooarchaeologists, and classical scholars of pre-modern civilizations and societies.

[more]

front cover of Another's Country
Another's Country
Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies
Edited by J.W. Joseph and Martha Zierden
University of Alabama Press, 2001
An engaging look at the rise and fall of cultural diversity in the colonial South and its role in shaping a distinct southern identity
 
The 18th-century South was a true melting pot, bringing together colonists from England, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, and other locations, in addition to African slaves—all of whom shared in the experiences of adapting to a new environment and interacting with American Indians. The shared process of immigration, adaptation, and creolization resulted in a rich and diverse historic mosaic of cultures.
 
The cultural encounters of these groups of settlers would ultimately define the meaning of life in the nineteenth-century South. The much-studied plantation society of that era and the Confederacy that sprang from it have become the enduring identities of the South. A full understanding of southern history is not possible, however, without first understanding the intermingling and interactions of the region’s eighteenth-century settlers. In the essays collected here, some of the South’s leading historical archaeologists examine various aspects of the colonial experience, attempting to understand how cultural identity was expressed, why cultural diversity was eventually replaced by a common identity, and how the various cultures intermeshed.
 
Written in accessible language, this book will be valuable to archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike. Cultural, architectural, and military historians, cultural anthropologists, geographers, genealogists, and others interested in the cultural legacy of the South will find much of value in this book.
[more]

front cover of Anthropology of Landscape
Anthropology of Landscape
The Extraordinary in the Ordinary
Christopher Tilley and Kate Cameron-Daum
University College London, 2017
An Anthropology of Landscape tells the fascinating story of a heathland landscape in south-west England and the way different individuals and groups engage with it. Based on a long-term anthropological study, the book emphasises four individual themes: embodied identities, the landscape as a sensuous material form that is acted upon and in turn acts on people, the landscape as contested, and its relation to emotion. The landscape is discussed in relation to these themes as both ‘taskscape’ and ‘leisurescape’, and from the perspective of different user groups. First, those who manage the landscape and use it for work: conservationists, environmentalists, archaeologists, the Royal Marines, and quarrying interests. Second, those who use it in their leisure time: cyclists and horse riders, model aircraft flyers, walkers, people who fish there, and artists who are inspired by it. The book makes an innovative contribution to landscape studies and will appeal to all those interested in nature conservation, historic preservation, the politics of nature, the politics of identity, and an anthropology of Britain.
[more]

front cover of Anthropology without Informants
Anthropology without Informants
Collected Works in Paleoanthropology by L.G. Freeman
L. G. Freeman
University Press of Colorado, 2009
L.G. Freeman is a major scholar of Old World Paleolithic prehistory and a self-described “behavioral paleoanthropologist.” Anthropology without Informants is a collection of previously published papers by this preeminent archaeologist, representing a cross section of his contributions to Old Work Paleolithic prehistory and archaeological theory.

A socio-cultural anthropologist who became a behavioral paleoanthropologist late in his career, Freeman took a unique approach, employing statistical or mathematical techniques in his analysis of archaeological data. All the papers in this collection blend theoretical statements with the archeological facts they are intended to help the reader understand.

Although he taught at the University of Chicago for the span of his 40-year career, Freeman is not well-known among Anglophone scholars, because his primary fieldwork and publishing occurred in Cantabrian, Spain. However, he has been a major player in Paleolithic prehistory, and this volume will introduce his work to more American Archaeologists.

This collection brings the work of an expert scholar, to a broad audience, and will be of interest to archaeologists, their students, and lay readers interested in the Paleolithic era.

[more]

front cover of Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands
Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands
Gods, Ancestors, and Human Beings
Brigitte Faugère
University Press of Colorado, 2019
In Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands, Latin American, North American, and European researchers explore the meanings and functions of two- and three-dimensional human representations in the Precolumbian communities of the Mexican highlands. Reading these anthropomorphic representations from an ontological perspective, the contributors demonstrate the rich potential of anthropomorphic imagery to elucidate personhood, conceptions of the body, and the relationship of human beings to other entities, nature, and the cosmos.
 
Using case studies covering a broad span of highlands prehistory—Classic Teotihuacan divine iconography, ceramic figures in Late Formative West Mexico, Epiclassic Puebla-Tlaxcala costumed figurines, earth sculptures in Prehispanic Oaxaca, Early Postclassic Tula symbolic burials, Late Postclassic representations of Aztec Kings, and more—contributors examine both Mesoamerican representations of the body in changing social, political, and economic conditions and the multivalent emic meanings of these representations. They explore the technology of artifact production, the body’s place in social structures and rituals, the language of the body as expressed in postures and gestures, hybrid and transformative combinations of human and animal bodies, bodily representations of social categories, body modification, and the significance of portable and fixed representations.
 
Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands provides a wide range of insights into Mesoamerican concepts of personhood and identity, the constitution of the human body, and human relationships with gods and ancestors. It will be of great value to students and scholars of the archaeology and art history of Mexico.
 
Contributors: Claire Billard, Danièle Dehouve, Cynthia Kristan-Graham, Melissa Logan, Sylvie Peperstraete, Patricia Plunket, Mari Carmen Serra Puche, Juliette Testard, Andrew Turner, Gabriela Uruñuela, Marcus Winter
[more]

front cover of Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos
Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos
Middle Preclassic Lowland Maya Figurines, Ritual, and Time
Prudence M. Rice
University Press of Colorado, 2019
Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos explores the sociocultural significance of more than three hundred Middle Preclassic Maya figurines uncovered at the site of Nixtun-Ch'ich' on Lake Petén Itzá in northern Guatemala. In this careful, holistic, and detailed analysis of the Petén lakes figurines—hand-modeled, terracotta anthropomorphic fragments, animal figures, and musical instruments such as whistles and ocarinas—Prudence M. Rice engages with a broad swath of theory and comparative data on Maya ritual practice.
 
Presenting original data, Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos offers insight into the synchronous appearance of fired-clay figurines with the emergence of societal complexity in and beyond Mesoamerica. Rice situates these Preclassic Maya figurines in the broader context of Mesoamerican human figural representation, identifies possible connections between anthropomorphic figurine heads and the origins of calendrics and other writing in Mesoamerica, and examines the role of anthropomorphic figurines and zoomorphic musical instruments in Preclassic Maya ritual. The volume shows how community rituals involving the figurines helped to mitigate the uncertainties of societal transitions, including the beginnings of settled agricultural life, the emergence of social differentiation and inequalities, and the centralization of political power and decision-making in the Petén lowlands.
 
Literature on Maya ritual, cosmology, and specialized artifacts has traditionally focused on the Classic period, with little research centering on the very beginnings of Maya sociopolitical organization and ideological beliefs in the Middle Preclassic. Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos is a welcome contribution to the understanding of the earliest Maya and will be significant to Mayanists and Mesoamericanists as well as nonspecialists with interest in these early figurines
[more]

front cover of The Antiquities Act
The Antiquities Act
A Century of American Archaeology, Historic Preservation, and Nature Conservation
Edited by David Harmon, Frances P. McManamon, and Dwight T. Pitcaithley
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Winner of the State of New Mexico’s Heritage Preservation Award in the category of Heritage Publication

Enacted in 1906, the Antiquities Act is one of the most important pieces of conservation legislation in American history and has had a far-reaching influence on the preservation of our nation’s cultural and natural heritage. Thanks to the foresight of thirteen presidents, parks as diverse as Acadia, Grand Canyon, and Olympic National Park, along with historic and archaeological sites such as Thomas Edison’s Laboratory and the Gila Cliff Dwellings, have been preserved for posterity.

A century after its passage, this book presents a definitive assessment of the Antiquities Act and its legacy, addressing the importance and breadth of the act—as well as the controversy it has engendered. Authored by professionals intimately involved with safeguarding the nation’s archaeological, historic, and natural heritage, it describes the applications of the act and assesses its place in our country’s future. With a scope as far-reaching as the resources the act embraces, this book offers an unparalleled opportunity for today’s stewards to reflect on the act’s historic accomplishments, to remind fellow professionals and the general public of its continuing importance, and to look ahead to its continuing implementation in the twenty-first century.

The Antiquities Act invites all who love America’s natural and cultural treasures not only to learn about the act’s rich legacy but also to envision its next hundred years.
[more]

front cover of Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes
Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes
Charles C. Jones, edited and with an introduction by Frank T. Schnell
University of Alabama Press, 1999

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

This reissue of Charles Jones’s classic investigations of the Mound Builders will be an invaluable resource for archaeologists today
 
Long a classic of southeastern archaeology, Charles Jones’s Antiquities of the Southern Indians was a groundbreaking work that linked historic tribes with prehistoric “antiquities.” Published in 1873, it predated the work of Cyrus Thomas and Clarence Moore and remains a rich resource for modern scholars.
 
Jones was a pioneer of archaeology who not only excavated important sites but also related his findings to other sites, to contemporary Indians, and to artifacts from other areas. His work covers all of the southeastern states, from Virginia to Louisiana, and is noted for its insights into the De Soto expedition and the history of the Creek Indians.
 
Best known for refuting the popular myth of the Mound Builders, Jones proposed a connection between living Native Americans of the 1800s and the prehistoric peoples who had created the Southeast’s large earthen mounds. His early research and culture comparisons led to the eventual demise of the Mound Builder myth.
 
For this reissue of Jones’s book, a new introduction by Frank Schnell places Jones’s work in the context of his times and relates it to current research in the Southeast. An engagingly written work enhanced by numerous maps and engravings, Antiquities of the Southern Indians will serve today’s scholars and fascinate all readers interested in the region’s prehistory.
 

[more]

front cover of Apalachicola Valley Archaeology, Volume 1
Apalachicola Valley Archaeology, Volume 1
Prehistory through the Middle Woodland Period
Nancy Marie White
University of Alabama Press, 2024

The definitive archaeological record and what is known or speculated about the ancient Apalachicola and lower Chattahoochee Valley region of northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, and southwest Georgia

In this meticulously researched volume, Nancy Marie White provides a major holistic synthesis of the archaeological record and what is known or surmised about the peoples of the Apalachicola and lower Chattahoochee Valley region of northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, and southwest Georgia. White transforms a neglected research area into a lively saga that spans the time of the first human settlement, around 14,000 years ago, through the Middle Woodland period, ending about AD 700.

White reveals that Paleoindian habitation was more extensive than once surmised. Archaic sites were widespread, and those societies persisted when the Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago. Pottery appeared in the Late Archaic period (before 4000 BP), and Early Woodland–period burial mounds demonstrate a flowering of religious and ritual systems. Middle Woodland societies expanded this mortuary ceremony, and the complex pottery of the Swift Creek and the early Weeden Island ceramic series show an increased fascination with the ornate and unusual. Yet, basic Native American lifeways continued with gathering-fishing-hunting subsistence traditions similar to those of their ancestors.

This volume and its companion form the definitive work on the Apalachicola–lower Chattahoochee Valley region for both scholars and general readers interested in Native Americans of the Southeast.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter