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The Etruscan city of Caere and eleven other Etruscan city-states were among the first urban centers in ancient Italy. Roman descriptions of Etruscan cities highlight their wealth, beauty, and formidable defenses. Although Caere left little written historical record outside of funerary inscriptions, its complex story can be deciphered by analyzing surviving material culture, including architecture, tomb paintings, temples, sanctuaries, and materials such as terracotta, bronze, gold, and amber found in Etruscan crafts. Studying Caere provides valuable insight not only into Etruscan history and culture but more broadly into urbanism and the development of urban centers across ancient Italy.

Comprehensive in scope, Caere is the first English-language book dedicated to the study of its eponymous city. Collecting the work of an international team of scholars, it features chapters on a wide range of topics, such as Caere’s formation and history, economy, foreign relations, trade networks, art, funerary traditions, built environment, religion, daily life, and rediscovery. Extensively illustrated throughout, Caere presents new perspectives on and analysis of not just Etruscan civilization but also the city’s role in the wider pan-Mediterranean basin.

Unearthing the demographic past of the Caribbean to illuminate its cultural origins and transformations.

According to the European chronicles, at the time of contact, the Greater Antilles were inhabited by the Taino or Arawak Indians, who were organized in hierarchical societies. Since its inception Caribbean archaeology has used population as an important variable in explaining many social, political, and economic processes such as migration, changes in subsistence systems, and the development of institutionalized social stratification.

In Caribbean Paleodemography, L. Antonio Curet argues that population has been used casually by Caribbean archaeologists and proposes more rigorous and promising ways in which demographic factors can be incorporated in our modeling of past human behavior. He analyzes a number of demographic issues in island archaeology at various levels of analysis, including inter- and intra-island migration, carrying capacity, population structures, variables in prehistory, cultural changes, and the relationship with material culture and social development. With this work, Curet brings together the diverse theories on Greater Antilles island populations and the social and political forces governing their growth and migration.

Ceremonial Lithics in Classic Mesoamerica explores how and why ceremonial lithic artifacts were made in ancient Mesoamerica’s Classic period, focusing on their implications for economic and sociopolitical organization. Technological analyses of unique examples are interpreted to understand the processes of lithic production and how chipped stone was ritualized across Mesoamerica.

Investigations of ritualized lithics also draw on iconography, epigraphy, and ethnohistory to understand the meaning of these objects, including the so-called eccentric flints and obsidians of the Maya area and Central Mexico, massive debitage deposits in tomb contexts, and the use of utilitarian objects in ceremonial contexts. In the cases of the largest and most elaborate artifacts (e.g., the effigy flints of Copan, Honduras and the obsidian serpents of Teotihuacan), authors examine what the basic production processes may have been, while cases of blade and debitage deposits focus on how the objects were produced within their social context, in what sequence, and why they may have been chosen for ritual deposition.

Ceremonial Lithics in Classic Mesoamerica is the first book to address from a pan-Mesoamerican perspective how and why these objects were made. While obsidian and flint carried their own respective symbolic meanings, the final form of an artifact and the process of its production also contributed to its identification. Hence, this volume is an essential step toward understanding the ancient meanings imbued in these material objects.
 

Monte Albán was the capital of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, ca. 500 BC–AD 600, but once its control began to wane, other sites filled the political vacuum. Archaeologists have long awaited a meticulous excavation of one of these sites—one that would help us better understand the process that transformed second-tier sites into a series of polities or señoríos that competed with each other for centuries.

This book reports in detail on Ronald Faulseit’s excavations at the site of Dainzú-Macuilxóchitl in the Valley of Oaxaca. His 2007–2010 mapping and excavation seasons focused on the Late Classic (AD 600–900) and Early Postclassic (AD 900–1300). The spatial distributions of surface artifacts—collected during the intensive mapping and systematic surface collecting—on residential terraces at Cerro Danush are analyzed to evaluate evidence for craft production, ritual, and abandonment at the community level. This community analysis is complemented by data from the comprehensive excavation of a residential terrace, which documents diachronic patterns of behavior at the household level. The results from Faulseit’s survey and excavations are evaluated within the theoretical frameworks of political cycling and resilience theory. Faulseit concludes that resilient social structures may have helped orchestrate reorganization in the dynamic political landscape of Oaxaca after the political collapse of Monte Albán.

Expanding the study of Etruscan habitation sites to include not only traditional cities but also smaller Etruscan communities, Cetamura del Chianti examines a settlement that flourished during an exceptional time period, amid wars with the Romans in the fourth to first centuries BCE.

Situated in an ideal hilltop location that was easy to defend and had access to fresh water, clay, and timber, the community never grew to the size of a city, and no known references to it survive in ancient writings; its ancient name isn’t even known. Because no cities were ever built on top of the site, excavation is unusually unimpeded. Intriguing features described in Cetamura del Chianti include an artisans’ zone with an adjoining sanctuary, which fostered the cult worship of Lur and Leinth, two relatively little known Etruscan deities, and ancient wells that reveal the cultural development and natural environment, including the vineyards and oak forests of Chianti, over a period of some six hundred years. Deeply enhancing our understanding of an intriguing economic, political, and cultural environment, this is a compelling portrait of a singular society.

Documents the maritime historical research and archaeological fieldwork used to identify the wreck of the notorious schooner Clotilda

Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship is the first definitive work to examine the maritime historical and archaeological record of one of the most infamous ships in American history. Clotilda was owned by Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher, who, on a dare, equipped it to carry captured Africans from what is now Benin and bring them to Alabama in 1860—some fifty years after the import of captives to be enslaved was banned. To hide the evidence, Clotilda was set afire and sunk.

What remained was a substantially intact, submerged, and partially buried shipwreck located in a backwater of the Mobile River. The site of the wreck was an open secret to some people who knew Meaher, but its identity remained unknown for more than a century as various surveys through the years failed to locate the ship.

This volume, authored by the archaeological team who conducted a comprehensive, systematic survey of a forgotten “ship graveyard,” details the exhaustive forensic work that conclusively identified the wreck, as well as the stories and secrets that have emerged from the partly burned hulk. James P. Delgado and his coauthors discuss the various searches for Clotilda, sharing the forensic data and other analyses showing how those involved concluded that this wreck was indeed Clotilda. Additionally, they offer physical evidence not previously shared that situates the schooner and its voyage in a larger context of the slave trade.

Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship serves as a nautical biography of the ship as well. After reviewing the maritime trade in and out of Mobile Bay, this account places Clotilda within the larger landscape of American and Gulf of Mexico schooners and chronicles its career before being used as a slave ship. All of its voyages had a link to slavery, and one may have been another smuggling voyage in violation of federal law. The authors have also painstakingly reconstructed Clotilda’s likely appearance and characteristics.
 

Around 11,000 years ago, a Paleoindian culture known to us as "Clovis" occupied much of North America. Considered to be among the continent's earliest human inhabitants, the Clovis peoples were probably nomadic hunters and gatherers whose remaining traces include camp sites and caches of goods stored for utilitarian or ritual purposes.

This book offers the first comprehensive study of a little-known aspect of Clovis culture—stone blade technology. Michael Collins introduces the topic with a close look at the nature of blades and the techniques of their manufacture, followed by a discussion of the full spectrum of Clovis lithic technology and how blade production relates to the production of other stone tools. He then provides a full report of the discovery and examination of fourteen blades found in 1988 in the Keven Davis Cache in Navarro County, Texas.

Collins also presents a comparative study of known and presumed Clovis blades from many sites, discusses the Clovis peoples' caching practices, and considers what lithic technology and caching behavior can add to our knowledge of Clovis lifeways. These findings will be important reading for both specialists and amateurs who are piecing together the puzzle of the peopling of the Americas, since the manufacture of blades is a trait that Clovis peoples shared with the Upper Paleolithic peoples in Europe and northern Asia.

This volume provides the most comprehensive overview of archaeological research into the late Pleistocene and early Holocene occupation of the North American Far West in over a decade. It focuses on the relationship between stemmed and fluted point technologies in the region, which has recently risen to the forefront of debate about the initial settlement of the Americas. Established and early career researchers apply a wide range of analytical approaches to explore chronological, geographical, and technological aspects of these tools and what they reveal about the people who made them. While such interrelationships have intrigued archaeologists for nearly a century, until now they have not been systematically examined together in a single curated volume.

Contributions are organized into three main sections: stemmed point technologies, fluted point technologies, and broader interactions. Topics range from regional overviews of chronologies and technologies to site-level findings containing extensive new data. The culmination of many years of work by dozens of researchers, this volume lays new groundwork for understanding technological innovation, diversity, and exchange among early Indigenous peoples in North America.