BiblioVault - Books about Clay, Rudolf Berle

Histories of Southeastern Archaeology

Edited by Shannon Tushingham, Jane Hill, and Charles H. McNutt

University of Alabama Press, 2002

This volume provides a comprehensive, broad-based overview, including first-person accounts, of the development and conduct of archaeology in the Southeast over the past three decades.

Histories of Southeastern Archaeology originated as a symposium at the 1999 Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) organized in honor of the retirement of Charles H. McNutt following 30 years of teaching anthropology. Written for the most part by members of the first post-depression generation of southeastern archaeologists, this volume offers a window not only into the archaeological past of the United States but also into the hopes and despairs of archaeologists who worked to write that unrecorded history or to test scientific theories concerning culture.

The contributors take different approaches, each guided by experience, personality, and location, as well as by the legislation that shaped the practical conduct of archaeology in their area. Despite the state-by-state approach, there are certain common themes, such as the effect (or lack thereof) of changing theory in Americanist archaeology, the explosion of contract archaeology and its relationship to academic archaeology, goals achieved or not achieved, and the common ground of SEAC.

This book tells us how we learned what we now know about the Southeast's unwritten past. Of obvious interest to professionals and students of the field, this volume will also be sought after by historians, political scientists, amateurs, and anyone interested in the South.

Additional reviews:

"A unique publication that presents numerous historical, topical, and personal perspectives on the archaeological heritage of the Southeast."—Southeastern Archaeology

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Woodland Period Systematics in the Middle Ohio Valley

Edited by Darlene Applegate and Robert C. Mainfort Jr.

University of Alabama Press, 2005

This collection provides a comprehensive vocabulary for defining the cultural manifestation of the term “Woodland”

The Middle Ohio Valley is an archaeologically rich region that stretches from southeastern Indiana, across southern Ohio and northeastern Kentucky, and into northwestern West Virginia. In this area are some of the most spectacular and diverse Woodland Period archaeological sites in North America, but these sites and their rich cultural remains do not fit easily into the traditional Southeastern classification system. This volume, with contributions by most of the senior researchers in the field, represents an important step toward establishing terminology and taxa that are more appropriate to interpreting cultural diversity in the region.

The important questions are diverse. What criteria are useful in defining periods and cultural types, and over what spatial and temporal boundaries do those criteria hold? How can we accommodate regional variation in the development and expression of traits used to delineate periods and cultural types? How does the concept of tradition relate to periods and cultural types? Is it prudent to equate culture types with periods? Is it prudent to equate archaeological cultures with ethnographic cultures? How does the available taxonomy hinder research? Contributing authors address these issues and others in the context of their Middle Ohio Valley Woodland Period research

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The Woodland Southeast

Edited by David G. Anderson and Robert C. Mainfort

University of Alabama Press, 2002

This collection presents, for the first time, a much-needed synthesis of the major research themes and findings that characterize the Woodland Period in the southeastern United States.

The Woodland Period (ca. 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1000) has been the subject of a great deal of archaeological research over the past 25 years. Researchers have learned that in this approximately 2000-year era the peoples of the Southeast experienced increasing sedentism, population growth, and organizational complexity. At the beginning of the period, people are assumed to have been living in small groups, loosely bound by collective burial rituals. But by the first millennium A.D., some parts of the region had densely packed civic ceremonial centers ruled by hereditary elites. Maize was now the primary food crop. Perhaps most importantly, the ancient animal-focused and hunting-based religion and cosmology were being replaced by solar and warfare iconography, consistent with societies dependent on agriculture, and whose elites were increasingly in competition with one another. This volume synthesizes the research on what happened during this era and how these changes came about while analyzing the period's archaeological record.

In gathering the latest research available on the Woodland Period, the editors have included contributions from the full range of specialists working in the field, highlighted major themes, and directed readers to the proper primary sources. Of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, both professional and amateur, this will be a valuable reference work essential to understanding the Woodland Period in the Southeast.

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