The ancient Romans' story down to 264 B.C. can be made credible by stripping away their later myths and inventions to show how their national character shaped their destiny.
After many generations of scholarly study, consensus is clear: the account in writers like Livy is not to be trusted because their aims were different from ours in history-writing. They wanted their work to be both improving and diverting. It should grow out of the real past, yes, but if that reality couldn't be recovered, or was uncertain, their art did not forbid invention. It more than tolerated dramatic incidents, passions, heroes, heroines, and villains. If, however, all this resulting ancient fiction and adornment are pruned away, a national character can be seen in the remaining bits and pieces of credible information, to explain the familiar story at least in its outlines.
To doubt the written sources has long been acceptable, but this or that detail or narrative section must always be left for salvage by special pleading. To press home the logic of doubt is new. To reach beyond the written sources for a better support in excavated evidence is no novelty; but it is a novelty, to find in archeology the principal substance of the narrative—which is the choice in this book. To use this in turn for the discovery of an ethnic personality, a Roman national character, is key and also novel.
What is repeatedly illustrated and emphasized here is the distance traveled by the art or craft of understanding the past—"history" in that sense—over the course of the last couple of centuries. The art cannot be learned, because it cannot be found, through studying Livy and Company. Readers who care about either of the two disciplines contrasted, Classics and History, may find this argument of interest.
Early Pithouse period villagers played a generative role in the cultural and historical sequence of the Mogollon region, which is best known for the stunning black-on-white pottery of the Classic Mimbres culture. This volume presents a complete report on the archaeology of two important Early Pithouse settlements located along the Rio Mimbres, including detailed accounts of the excavation units, depositional contexts, architectural details, radiocarbon dates, miscellaneous artifacts, and ceramic frequency distributions.
The Thomson and McAnally sites contain architecture, artifacts, and other remains of the earliest relatively sedentary horticulturalists to occupy this part of the Southwest. The authors synthesize the data about charges over time in the villagers’ lifestyle to develop a new chronology for the occupation of the region.
A synthesis of research on earthenware technologies of the Late Archaic Period in the southeastern U.S.
Information on social groups and boundaries, and on interaction between groups, burgeons when pottery appears on the social landscape of the Southeast in the Late Archaic period (ca. 5000-3000 years ago). This volume provides a broad, comparative review of current data from "first potteries" of the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and in the lower Mississippi River Valley, and it presents research that expands our understanding of how pottery functioned in its earliest manifestations in this region.
Included are discussions of Orange pottery in peninsular Florida, Stallings pottery in Georgia, Elliot's Point fiber-tempered pottery in the Florida panhandle, and the various pottery types found in excavations over the years at the Poverty Point site in northeastern Louisiana. The data and discussions demonstrate that there was much more interaction, and at an earlier date, than is often credited to Late Archaic societies. Indeed, extensive trade in pottery throughout the region occurs as early as 1500 B.C.
These and other findings make this book indispensable to those involved in research into the origin and development of pottery in general and its unique history in the Southeast in particular.
For over 10,000 years, earth ovens (semi-subterranean, layered arrangements of heated rocks, packing material, and food stuffs capped by earth) have played important economic and social roles for Indigenous peoples living across the arid landscapes of western North America. From hunter-gatherers to formative horticulturalists, sedentary farmers, and contemporary Indigenous groups, earth ovens have been used to convert inedible plants into digestible food, fiber, and beverages.
The remains of earth ovens range from tight, circular clusters of burned rocks, generally labeled “hearths” by archaeologists, to the massive accumulations of fire-cracked rock referred to as earth oven facilities, roasting pits, or burned rock middens. Remnants of these oven forms are common across the arid and semi-arid landscapes that stretch from Texas to California and south into Mexico. Despite the ubiquity of earth ovens from late Paleoindian times until today, and their broad spatial and cultural distribution, these features remain an under-studied aspect of Indigenous lifeways.
This edited volume explores the longevity and diversity of earth oven baking and examines the subsistence strategies, technological paradigms, and social contexts within which earth ovens functioned. It is the first study to cover such a broad geographic area, reflecting an array of promising research that highlights ongoing efforts to understand the archaeological record of earth ovens.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
This comprehensive compilation of Moore's archaeological publications on eastern Florida will prove an invaluable primary resource for Florida archaeologists.
Clarence B. Moore (1852-1936), a wealthy Philadelphia socialite, paper company heir, and photographer made the archaeology of the Southeast his passion beginning in the 1870s. This volume collects 17 of Moore's publications on East Florida, originally published between 1892 and 1903. These invaluable and copiously illustrated works document the results of Moore's numerous archaeological expeditions along Florida's eastern coastline from the Georgia border to Lake Okeechobee and focus primarily on sites along the St. Johns River and its tributaries. Moore's archaeological work in East Florida was arguably his best and most thorough research from a modern perspective.
Jeffrey Mitchem's introduction to this volume describes and analyzes Moore's work in East Florida, summarizes what we know about the sites Moore investigated, and surveys subsequent archaeological work conducted in this area since Moore's expeditions. Mitchem's introduction highlights the significance of Moore's work on the shell heaps along the St. Johns River. It led to the earliest recorded instance of a researcher noting the changes in pottery styles in the region, a major key to establishing chronologies.In 1894, Moore wrote of his hope "that the archaeology of Florida may be redeemed from the obscurity that has hitherto characterized it." Over a century later, this Press has aimed to fulfill Moore's wish by reprinting this and other collections of his archaeological publications.
During the 1880s a massive scientific effort was launched by the Smithsonian Institution to discover who had built the prehistoric burial mounds found throughout the United States. Arkansaw Mounds tells the story of this exploration and of Edward Palmer, one of the nineteenth century’s greatest natural historians and archaeologists, who was recruited to lead the research project. Arkansas was unusually rich in prehistoric remains, especially mounds, and became a major focus of the study. Palmer and his team of researchers discovered that the mounds had been built by the ancestors of the historic North American Indians, shattering the then-popular theory that a lost non-Indian race had built them.
THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION..
Thirty centuries ago most of the mummified bodies now lying linen-wrapped in the British Museum were alive in ancient Egypt. Why did the Egyptians try to preserve their dead for eternity? How did they achieve it? Carol Andrews answers these questions in a fully illustrated survey of the techniques of mummification, the religious beliefs which lay behind the practice, the ornate coffins and elaborate tombs which housed the bodies and the grave goods which accompanied them. She explains how animals also came to be embalmed and relates the curious role assumed by Egyptian mummies in European culture and mythology.
Fascination with ancient Egypt is a recurring theme in Western culture, and here Brian Curran uncovers its deep roots in the Italian Renaissance, which embraced not only classical art and literature but also a variety of other cultures that modern readers don’t tend to associate with early modern Italy. Patrons, artists, and spectators of the period were particularly drawn, Curran shows, to Egyptian antiquity and its artifacts, many of which found their way to Italy in Roman times and exerted an influence every bit as powerful as that of their more familiar Greek and Roman counterparts.
Curran vividly recreates this first wave of European Egyptomania with insightful interpretations of the period’s artistic and literary works. In doing so, he paints a colorful picture of a time in which early moderns made the first efforts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, and popes and princes erected pyramids and other Egyptianate marvels to commemorate their own authority. Demonstrating that the emergence of ancient Egypt as a distinct category of historical knowledge was one of Renaissance humanism’s great accomplishments, Curran’s peerless study will be required reading for Renaissance scholars and anyone interested in the treasures and legacy of ancient Egypt.
Native American societies, often viewed as unchanging, in fact experienced a rich process of cultural innovation in the millennia prior to recorded history. Societies of the Hocking River Valley in southeastern Ohio, part of the Ohio River Valley, created a tribal organization beginning about 2000 bc.
Edited by Elliot M. Abrams and AnnCorinne Freter, The Emergence of the Moundbuilders: The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio presents the process of tribal formation and change in the region based on analyses of all available archaeological data from the Hocking River Valley. Drawing on the work of scholars in archaeology, anthropology, geography, geology, and botany, the collection addresses tribal society formation through such topics as the first pottery made in the valley, aggregate feasting by nomadic groups, the social context for burying their dead in earthen mounds, the formation of religious ceremonial centers, and the earliest adoption of corn.
Providing the most current research on indigenous societies in the Hocking Valley, The Emergence of the Moundbuilders is distinguished by its broad, comparative overview of tribal life.
“A welcome publication, this book will nicely supplement the other books that are now appearing in the field of African American archaeology.”
—Charles E. Orser Jr., Illinois State University
Over the last decade, the field of American historical archaeology has seen enormous growth in the study of people of African descent. This edited volume is the first dedicated solely to archaeology and the construction of gender in an African American context. The common thread running through this collection is not a shared definition of gender or an agreed-upon feminist approach, but rather a regional thread, a commitment to understanding ethnicity and gender within the social, political, and ideological structures of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American South.
Taken together, these essays represent a departure in historical archaeology, an important foray into the study of the construction of gender within various African American communities that is based in the archaeological record. Those interested in historical archaeology, history, women’s studies and African American studies will find this a valuable addition to the literature. Topics range from gendered residential and consumption patterns in colonial Virginia and the construction of identity in Middle Tennessee to midwifery practices in postbellum Louisiana. Contributors to this volume include Melanie Cabak, Marie Danforth, Garrett Fesler, Jillian Galle, Barbara Heath, Larry McKee, Patricia Samford, Elizabeth Scott, Brian Thomas, Larissa Thomas, Laura Wilkie, Kristin Wilson, and Amy Young.
Jillian E. Galle is project manager of the Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake Slavery at Monticello. Amy L. Young is assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.
A unique study of an Andean community’s water rituals and the extraordinary document describing how they should be performed
In the dry season in the Andes, water from springs, lakes, reservoirs, and melting glaciers feeds irrigation canals that have sustained communities for thousands of years. Managing and maintaining these water infrastructures is essential, and in 1921, in the village of San Pedro de Casta, Peru, local authorities recorded their ritual canal-cleaning duties in a Spanish-language document called the Entablo. It is only the second book (along with the Huarochirí Manuscript) ever seen by scholars in which an Andean community explains its customs and ritual laws in its own words.
Sarah Bennison offers a critical introduction to the Entablo, a Spanish transcription of the document, and an English translation. Among its other revelations, the Entablo delves into the use of khipu boards, devices that meld the traditional knotted strings known as khipus with a written alphabet. Only in the Entablo do we learn that there were multiple khipu boards associated with a single canal-cleaning ritual, or that there were separate khipu records for men and women. The Entablo manuscript furnishes unparalleled insights into Andean rituals, religion, and community history at a historical moment when rural highland communities were changing rapidly.
Where did the first Americans come from and when did they get here? That basic question of American archaeology, long thought to have been solved, is re-emerging as a critical issue as the number of well-excavated sites dating to pre-Clovis times increases. It now seems possible that small populations of human foragers entered the Americas prior to the creation of the continental glacial barrier. While the archaeological and paleoecological aspects of a post-glacial entry have been well studied, there is little work available on the possibility of a pre-glacial entry.
Entering America seeks to fill that void by providing the most up-to-date information on the nature of environmental and cultural conditions in northeast Asia and Beringia (the Bering land bridge) immediately prior to the Last Glacial Maximum. Because the peopling of the New World is a question of international archaeological interest, this volume will be important to specialists and nonspecialists alike.
This volume brings together studies of Ephesos—a major city in the Greco-Roman period and a primary center for the spread of Christianity into the Western world—by an international array of scholars from the fields of classics, fine arts, history of religion, New Testament, ancient Christianity, and archaeology. The studies were presented at a spring 1994 Harvard Divinity School symposium on Ephesos, focusing on the results of one hundred years of archaeological work at Ephesos by members of the Austrian Archaeological Institute.
The contributors to this volume discuss some of the most interesting and controversial results of recent investigations: the Processional Way of Artemis, the Hadrianic Olympieion and the Church of Mary, the so-called Temple of Domitian, and the heroes Androkolos and Arsinoe.
Since very little about the Austrian excavations at Ephesos has been published in English, this volume should prove useful in introducing the archaeology of this metropolis to a wider readership.
San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2009
In the early part of the eighteenth century, the Spanish colonial mission Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga was relocated from far south Texas to a site along the Guadalupe River in Mission Valley, Victoria County. This mission, along with a handful of others in south Texas, was established by the Spaniards in an effort to Christianize and civilize the local Native American tribes in the hopes that they would become loyal Spanish citizens who would protect this new frontier from foreign incursions.
With written historical records scarce for Espíritu Santo, Tamra Walter relies heavily on material culture recovered at this site through a series of recent archaeological investigations to present a compelling portrait of the Franciscan mission system. By examining findings from the entire mission site, including the compound, irrigation system, quarry, and kiln, she focuses on questions that are rarely, if ever, answered through historical records alone: What was daily life at the mission like? What effect did the mission routine have on the traditional lifeways of the mission Indians? How were both the Indians and the colonizers changed by their frontier experiences, and what does this say about the missionization process?
Walter goes beyond simple descriptions of artifacts and mission architecture to address the role these elements played in the lives of the mission residents, demonstrating how archaeology is able to address issues that are not typically addressed by historians. In doing so, she presents an accurate portrait of life in South Texas at this time. This study of Mission Espíritu Santo will serve as a model for research at similar early colonial sites in Texas and elsewhere.
In that spirit of plurality, contributors to this volume identify an important theoretical or methodological problem and present an argument regarding its solution. They also provide a critical evaluation of the current state of archaeological method and theory, illustrating that such recurrent issues as the role of agency and the importance of social considerations in the formation of archaeological research dominate current theoretical development.
By presenting both the range of important questions and a variety of answers, this volume contributes to the 'essential tension' that will further the growth of archaeological theory.
Hornborg and Hill argue that the tendency to link language, culture, and biology--essentialist notions of ethnic identities--is a Eurocentric bias that has characterized largely inaccurate explanations of the distribution of ethnic groups and languages in Amazonia. The evidence, however, suggests a much more fluid relationship among geography, language use, ethnic identity, and genetics. In Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia, leading linguists, ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists interpret their research from a unique nonessentialist perspective to form a more accurate picture of the ethnolinguistic diversity in this area.
Revealing how ethnic identity construction is constantly in flux, contributors show how such processes can be traced through different ethnic markers such as pottery styles and languages. Scholars and students studying lowland South America will be especially interested, as will anthropologists intrigued by its cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach.
The first detailed analysis of Native metalworking in the Protohistoric/Contact Period
From the time of their earliest encounters with European explorers and missionaries, Native peoples of eastern North America acquired metal trinkets and utilitarian items and traded them to other aboriginal communities. As Native consumption of European products increased, their material culture repertoires shifted from ones made up exclusively of items produced from their own craft industries to ones substantially reconstituted by active appropriation, manipulation, and use of foreign goods. These material transformations took place during the same time that escalating historical, political, economic, and demographic influences (such as epidemics, new types of living arrangements, intergroup hostilities, new political alliances, missionization and conversion, changes in subsistence modes, etc.) disrupted Native systems.
Ehrhardt's research addresses the early technological responses of one particular group, the Late Protohistoric Illinois Indians, to the availability of European-introduced metal objects. To do so, she applied a complementary suite of archaeometric methods to a sample of 806 copper-based metal artifacts excavated from securely dated domestic contexts at the Illiniwek Village Historic Site in Clark County, Missouri.
Ehrhardt's scientific findings are integrated with observations from historical, archaeological, and archival research to place metal use by this group in a broad social context and to critique the acculturation perspective at other Contact Period sites. In revealing actual Native practice, from material selection and procurement to ultimate discard, the author challenges technocentric explanations for Native material and cultural change at contact.
The application of Darwinian theory to archaeological phenomena has always been a difficult concept. In its most modern form, this approach has only gained currency since the 1980s. Perhaps the greatest hurdle to incorporating scientific evolutionism into archaeology is the necessary development of more than a rudimentary understanding of Darwinian evolution itself. Failure to recognize the conflict of anthropological terms such as "adaptation" and "fitness" with standard biological usage is fatal to any attempt to apply scientific evolutionism to the material record. Even more problematic are the outdated notions that human culture has allowed us to escape the effects of selection, that culture evolves, and that it does so in a progressive manner.
This volume assembles what might be considered the benchmark articles in evolutionary archaeology — articles that show how to apply scientific evolutionism to the study of variation in the archaeological record. It delineates an approach to the past in which artifacts are viewed as parts of human phenotypes and thus are subject to selection in the same manner as any somatic feature.
Evolutionary Archaeology: Theory and Application is aimed at archaeologists who want to understand the basics of evolutionary archaeology and who wish to do so from the beginning.
Seibal is a major ruin of the southern Maya lowlands, its vast ceremonial center covering several high hills on the banks of the Pasión River in the Guatemalan Department of Petén. In five volumes published over a 15-year period, the archaeological team headed by Gordon R. Willey presents a comprehensive review of their fieldwork from 1964 to 1968 and the results of many years of subsequent data analysis.
The volumes also report on explorations in the peripheral settlements outside of the Seibal center and provide a regional view of the evolution of lowland Maya culture from the Middle and Late Preclassic through the Late Classic periods.
Seibal is a major ruin of the southern Maya lowlands, its vast ceremonial center covering several high hills on the banks of the Pasión River in the Guatemalan Department of Petén. In five volumes published over a 15-year period, the archaeological team headed by Gordon R. Willey presents a comprehensive review of their fieldwork from 1964 to 1968 and the results of many years of subsequent data analysis.
The volumes also report on explorations in the peripheral settlements outside of the Seibal center and provide a regional view of the evolution of lowland Maya culture from the Middle and Late Preclassic through the Late Classic periods.
Seibal is a major ruin of the southern Maya lowlands, its vast ceremonial center covering several high hills on the banks of the Pasión River in the Guatemalan Department of Petén. In five volumes published over a 15-year period, the archaeological team headed by Gordon R. Willey presents a comprehensive review of their fieldwork from 1964 to 1968 and the results of many years of subsequent data analysis.
The volumes also report on explorations in the peripheral settlements outside of the Seibal center and provide a regional view of the evolution of lowland Maya culture from the Middle and Late Preclassic through the Late Classic periods.
Seibal is a major ruin of the southern Maya lowlands, its vast ceremonial center covering several high hills on the banks of the Pasión River in the Guatemalan Department of Petén. In five volumes published over a 15-year period, the archaeological team headed by Gordon R. Willey presents a comprehensive review of their fieldwork from 1964 to 1968 and the results of many years of subsequent data analysis.
The volumes also report on explorations in the peripheral settlements outside of the Seibal center and provide a regional view of the evolution of lowland Maya culture from the Middle and Late Preclassic through the Late Classic periods.
Excavations at Tel Michal, Israel was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The archaeological site known today as Tel Michal lies north of Tel Aviv on Israel's coastal plain, high on a barren windswept cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. Lacking the arable soil that might have encouraged permanent settlement - most of the region is covered with sand dunes - Tel Michael was probably a maritime station for military or commercial use during its period of occupation, which extended intermittently from the Canaanite Period (Middle Bronze Age II, about 2000 B.C.) through the Early Arab Period (ninth century A.D.). The site's archaeological remains are not confined to a single ancient tel or mound but are dispersed over five hills, where, despite severe erosion, seventeen strata have been excavated, yielding particularly rich and extensive finds in the Persian period.
The excavations at Tel Michal were conducted over a period of four summers, from 1977 through 1980, by a consortium that included Tel Aviv University and the University of Minnesota. As the first phase in a much broader regional project, Tel Michal drew together a multinational group of scholars and students in a cooperative, interdisciplinary effort like that pioneered in Greek archaeology by the Minnesota Messenia Expedition. Experts in traditional archaeological fields—pottery, architecture, numismatics—were joined by geologists, metallurgists, botanists, zoologists, and materials scientists; 43 of these participants have contributed to this full report of the excavations.
The book first traces the historical geography and settlement patterns of Tel Michal and its environs, then covers the stratigraphy and architecture of its settlements during the Bronze and Iron ages and the Persian, Hellenistic, and Arab periods. Included in this historical section are chapters on pottery and on special finds like the Iran Age winepresses, the Persian cemetery, and the Roman fortress. Subsequent chapters deal with the region's geology and its botanical and skeletal remains; with computerized, petrographic, and chemical modes of analysis; and with metal and flint objects, numismatics, and small finds like seals, glass artifacts, beads and pendants. Illustrated throughout with line drawings and tables, by photographs of the excavation site and many of the artifacts found there.
Tepe Yahya provides a stratigraphic sequence that stretches some 6,000 years, from the Neolithic period to the early centuries AD. As a result, the site is critical for understanding cultural processes in southeastern Iran.
In this volume of results of the excavations at Tepe Yahya, Peter Magee presents evidence from the Iron Age occupation of the site. Looking beyond the epigraphic and historical data and examining the insights provided by the artifactual record, Magee describes how a small settlement, located some distance from the main centers of power, came into being and was affected by the emergence of the Achaemenid imperial system, which stretched from Pakistan to Libya.
Situated roughly midway between the great cities of the Indus Valley and those of the Mesopotamian plains, Tepe Yahya occupies a special place in our conceptions of relations between these distant territories during the early Bronze Age. Its third-millennium levels, dating from 3000 to 2100 BC, are particularly important.
In this definitive study, D. T. Potts describes the stratigraphy, architecture, ceramics, and chronology of the site and presents a full inventory of the small finds. Holly Pittman contributes comprehensive illustrations and a discussion of the seals and sealings, and Philip Kohl provides an analysis of the carved chlorite industry. In a foreword and afterword, project director C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky tells the story of the archaeological expedition and reflects on the contributions of the Tepe Yahya project.
This comprehensive study of the Proto-Elamite language (ca. 3000 BC) is based on a small archive recovered from the site of Tepe Yahya in southeastern Iran. The authors, two of the leading specialists on the most ancient written texts of the Near East, illuminate the structure of the texts, the numerical sign systems used, and the relation of Proto-Elamite to other protocuneiform writing systems. A computer-generated sign list compares the written archive from Tepe Yahya with those of other archaeological sites from which Proto-Elamite texts have been recovered.
The volume offers a new understanding of the language and culture of the Proto-Elamites as well as important insights into the economic structure of the earliest literate civilizations. With a new preface by the authors.
Wesler provides an impressive and definitive compilation of more than 70 years of archaeological excavations at one of the most important archaeological sites in Kentucky.
The Wickliffe Mounds site is located on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in Ballard County, Kentucky, about three miles south of the mouth of the Ohio River. Around A.D. 1100, Mississippian people--farmers and traders with a culture closely related to the historic cultures of the Southeast (Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and others)—created a settlement there on which they lived for approximately 250 years before moving on.
In 1930 road construction cut a channel through the site, revealing archaeological deposits and bringing the area to the attention of Fain King, a local lumberman and entrepreneur. King bought the site in hopes of turning it into an attraction for the education and entertainment of the public, and not incidentally for his own profit. For more than 50 years the area was subjected to excavations ranging from looting to professional research efforts. In 1983, the site was finally turned over to Murray State University to be developed into an academic facility dedicated to research, student training, public education, and preservation of the site and its collections. Fortunately, the Wickliffe collections include all the early excavation records as well as more than 85,000 artifacts, 90% of which had been catalogued. Between 1984 and 1996 excavations were conducted specifically to affirm questionable data and/or fill in gaps in the Wickliffe archaeological record.
In this volume, Wesler and his colleagues have compiled data from almost seven decades of excavations at Wickliffe Mounds, providing the first comprehensive study of this important site. The paperback version of the book is accompanied by a CD-ROM that contains contributions from a wide range of archaeological specialists and includes archaeological data, site maps, database files, plats of excavations, artifact descriptions, and photographs, compiling in one place the entire archaeological record for this very important eastern North American site.
Expanding Archaeology is the first attempt to define behavioral archaeology comprehensively and to establish its place among competing theoretical frameworks. Among other objectives, this volume demonstrates that a behavioral approach—the study of material objects regardless of time or space to describe and explain human behavior—provides a means whereby religion, gender, and other seemingly unknowable elements of prehistory can be inferred through systematic, empirical analysis.
Expanding Archaeology begins with three retrospective analyses by J. Jefferson Reid, William Rathje, and Michael Schiffer, followed by seven case studies exploring various avenues offered by this approach. A third section contains five critiques that serve as a counterpoint to the behavioral approach. Although the editors do not suggest that behavioral archaeology should be the universal archaeology, they do suggest that this approach permits pre-historians to expand into new areas of investigation.
Back by popular demand and new in paperback, this spirited collection of nearly twenty papers celebrates the 450th anniversary of Hernando de Soto’s epic expedition across the Southeast and West.
Originally presented at two symposia conducted by the University Museum at the University of Arkansas, the collection offers an array of viewpoints and diverse approaches to de Soto scholarship. Archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, museum curators, and folklorists all contribute to this lively debate on the Spanish explorer and his travels.
The book focuses on research that challenges traditional interpretation of de Soto’s entrada and travel route, particularly after the expedition crossed the Mississippi River. David H. Dye hypothesizes a route across the river and the alluvial plain by linking the narrative accounts with geography and archaeological knowledge. Phyllis A. Morse asserts that the Parkin site is the location of the capital of Casqui, one of the polities visited by de Soto. Charles M. Hudson repostulates his version of the expedition route, which in 1988 severely challenged the De Soto Commission theory of 1939. Ann M. Early redraws the trail in the uplands of the Ouachita Mountains And Frank E. Schambach tests the possibility that the expedition wandered through Caddoan territory in east Texas after de Soto’s death.
Several chapters examine the Native Americans whom de Soto and his expedition encountered in their journey; other contributions provide a fresh look at the chronicles of the expedition that have survived. What emerges is a redrawn map of de Soto’s exploration—and a deeper understanding of the impact of European contact on the New World.
Behavioral archaeology, defined as the study of people-object interactions in all times and places, emerged in the 1970s, in large part because of the innovative work of Michael Schiffer and colleagues. This volume provides an overview of how behavioral archaeology has evolved and how it has affected the field of archaeology at large.
The contributors to this volume are Schiffer’s former students, from his first doctoral student to his most recent. This generational span has allowed for chapters that reflect Schiffer’s research from the 1970s to 2012. They are iconoclastic and creative and approach behavioral archaeology from varied perspectives, including archaeological inference and chronology, site formation processes, prehistoric cultures and migration, modern material culture variability, the study of technology, object agency, and art and cultural resources. Broader questions addressed include models of inference and definitions of behavior, study of technology and the causal performances of artifacts, and the implications of artifact causality in human communication and the flow of behavioral history.
Few sources before have dealt with the archaeology of African American settlements outside the Atlantic seaboard and the southern states. This book describes in detail the archaeological investigations conducted at the town site of Buxton, Iowa, a coal mining community inhabited by a significantly large population of blacks between 1900 and 1925.
David Gradwohl and Nancy Osborn present the archaeology of Buxton from “the group up” to articulate the material remains with the data acquired from archival studies and oral history interviews. They also examine the broader significance of the Buxton experience in terms of those who lived there and their children and grandchildren who have heard about Buxton all their lives.
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