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How humans adapt to life in an area prone to natural disasters is an intriguing study for the social sciences. In this volume, experts from several disciplines explore the adaptation process of prehistoric societies in the volcanic Arenal region of Costa Rica from about 2000 BC to the Spanish Conquest at about AD 1500.

The data in this volume come from a survey of the region conducted with the latest remote sensing technology. Sheets and his coauthors have compiled a detailed record of human settlements in the area, including dozens of archaeological sites and a network of prehistoric footpaths that reveals patterns of travel and communication across the region. The Arenal peoples prospered in their precarious environment apparently by taking advantage of food and lithic resources, keeping population levels low, and avoiding environmental degradation. These findings will interest a wide interdisciplinary audience in anthropology and archaeology, earth sciences, technology, geography, and human ecology.

Scientists have long speculated on the impact of extreme natural catastrophes on human societies. Archeology and Volcanism in Central America provides dramatic evidence of the effects of several volcanic disasters on a major civilization of the Western Hemisphere, that of the Maya.

During the past 2,000 years, four volcanic eruptions have taken place in the Zapotitán Valley of southern El Salvador. One, the devastating eruption of Ilopango around A.D. 300, forced a major migration, pushing the Mayan people north to the Yucatán Peninsula. Although later eruptions did not have long-range implications for cultural change, one of the subsequent eruptions preserved the Cerén site—a Mesoamerican Pompeii where the bodies of the villagers, the palm-thatched roofs of their houses, the pots of food in their pantries, even the corn plants in their fields were preserved with remarkable fidelity.

Throughout 1978, a multidisciplinary team of anthropologists, archeologists, geologists, biologists, and others sponsored by the University of Colorado's Protoclassic Project researched and excavated the results of volcanism in the Zapotitan Valley—a key Mesoamerican site that contemporary political strife has since rendered inaccessible.

The result is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the impact of volcanic eruptions on early Mayan civilization. These investigations clearly demonstrate that the Maya inhabited this volcanically hazardous valley in order to reap the short-term benefits that the volcanic ash produced—fertile soil, fine clays, and obsidian deposits.

A comprehensive examination of the history and excavation of the Etruscan city of Arretium.

Beneath the Italian city of Arezzo lie the remains of Etruscan Arretium. This volume, the first comprehensive treatment of excavations at Arretium, gathers the most up-to-date scholarship on the city and delves into key archaeological discoveries and the stories they tell about life in the Etruscan world.

Chapters explore local history—including the city’s complex political exchanges with Rome—Etruscan religion, Arretium’s role as a center of the arts, and the challenges of excavation amid the bustle of European urban modernity. Editors Ingrid Edlund-Berry and Cristiana Zaccagnino have gathered chapters by expert contributors that detail Arretium’s material culture, including the city’s famed pottery, Arretine ware, which was known across the Mediterranean; terracotta pieces depicting gods and other supernatural beings; and exquisite bronze-work, most notably the piece now known as the Chimaera of Arezzo. One of the few Etruscan cities that continued flourishing after the Roman takeover, Arretium proves to be a trove of archaeological riches and of the historical insights they reveal.

Challuabamba (chī-wa-bamba)—now a developing suburb of Cuenca, the principal city in the southern highlands of Ecuador—has been known for a century as an ancient site that produced exceptionally fine pottery in great quantities. Suspecting that Challuabamban ceramics might provide a link between earlier, preceramic culture and later, highly developed Formative period art, Terence Grieder led an archaeological investigation of the site between 1995 and 2001. In this book, he and the team of art historians and archaeologists who excavated at Challuabamba present their findings, which establish the community's importance as a center in a network of trade and artistic influence that extended to the Amazon River basin and the Pacific Coast.

Art and Archaeology of Challuabamba, Ecuador presents an extensive analysis of ceramics dating to 2100-1100 BC, along with descriptions of stamps and seals, stone and shell artifacts, burials and their offerings, human remains, and zooarchaeology. Grieder and his coauthors demonstrate that the pottery of Challuabamba fills a gap between early and late Formative styles and also has a definite connection with later highland styles in Peru. They draw on all the material remains to reconstruct the first clear picture of Challuabamba's prehistory, including agriculture and health, interregional contacts and exchange, red-banded incised ware and ceramic production, and shamanism and cosmology.

Because southern Ecuador has received relatively little archaeological study, Art and Archaeology of Challuabamba, Ecuador offers important baseline data for what promises to be a key sector of the prehistoric Andean region.

An exploration of war, violence, and sacrifice in precolonial Maya culture and its importance in religious practices.

As the Gods Kill delivers new insights into warfare, weaponry, violence, and human sacrifice among the ancient Maya. While attending to the particularity of a singular historical context, anthropologist and archaeologist Andrew Scherer also suggests that Maya practices have something to tell us about human propensities toward violence more broadly.

Focusing on moral frameworks surrounding deliberate injury and killing, Scherer examines Maya justifications of violence—in particular the obligations to one another, to ancestors, and to the gods that made violence not only permissible but necessary. The analysis isolates key themes underpinning the morality of violence—including justice, vengeance, payment, and costumbre (ritual)—and explores the ethics of violent agents, including warriors, ritual specialists, and the gods. Finally, Scherer addresses motivations for warfare, including the acquisition of spoils, tribute, captives, and slaves. An interdisciplinary case study of morality in an ancient society, As the Gods Kill synthesizes scholarship on an important dimension of precolonial American culture while taking stock of its implications for the social sciences at large.

Assyria’s Plunder offers a new history of ancient Assyria and its interactions with its client states of Israel and Judah. Considering the entanglement of modern imperialism with the historiography of ancient empire, Jessie DeGrado reassesses the conventional understanding of the Neo-Assyrian Empire using textual analysis, art history, and archaeology.

Engaging texts from Israel and Judah, DeGrado refuses the usual framings of Biblical resistance to Assyrian despotism and asks instead why subject populations may have capitulated to Assyrian rule. Paired chapters consider specific Assyrian imperial practices and biblical texts that engage them. As the study moves from the awe-filled spectacle of Assyrian throne rooms to the Assyrian policy of deporting divine statues, Assyria’s Plunder centers the embodied experiences of those subjected to Assyrian hegemony. DeGrado also explores how the empire’s violence still holds sway in the popular imagination while Euro-American imperialism goes largely unacknowledged.

Drawing on decolonial studies alongside epigraphic and textual analysis, Assyria’s Plunder shows how critical historiography and theory can enrich historical analysis and provide a fuller portrait of Assyrian interaction with its client states.

By examining the stunning stone buildings and dynamic spaces of the royal estate of Chinchero, Nair brings to light the rich complexity of Inca architecture. This investigation ranges from the paradigms of Inca scholarship and a summary of Inca cultural practices to the key events of Topa Inca’s reign and the many individual elements of Chinchero’s extraordinary built environment.

What emerges are the subtle, often sophisticated ways in which the Inca manipulated space and architecture in order to impose their authority, identity, and agenda. The remains of grand buildings, as well as a series of deft architectural gestures in the landscape, reveal the unique places that were created within the royal estate and how one space deeply informed the other. These dynamic settings created private places for an aging ruler to spend time with a preferred wife and son, while also providing impressive spaces for imperial theatrics that reiterated the power of Topa Inca, the choice of his preferred heir, and the ruler’s close relationship with sacred forces.

This careful study of architectural details also exposes several false paradigms that have profoundly misguided how we understand Inca architecture, including the belief that it ended with the arrival of Spaniards in the Andes. Instead, Nair reveals how, amidst the entanglement and violence of the European encounter, an indigenous town emerged that was rooted in Inca ways of understanding space, place, and architecture and that paid homage to a landscape that defined home for Topa Inca.