Results by title
1038 books match the query 'Antiquities' and 33 start with f
Faces of the Fremont
Anthropomorphic Figurines in Fremont SocietyDavid T. Yoder
University of Utah Press, 2025
The Fremont culture is famous for its anthropomorphic figurines—small clay figures occasionally dressed in clothing and decorated with jewelry—but surprisingly, archaeologists know very little about these important artifacts and their place in Fremont society. In Faces of the Fremont, the largest study of the subject ever undertaken, David T. Yoder takes a straightforward approach to cultural commentary through artifactual analysis as he interprets over 800 figurines and anthropomorphic objects.
Unlike previous research on the subject, this volume explores neglected topics within Fremont studies, including sex and gender, clothing and body decoration, hairstyles, and childhood. Complete with in-depth analysis and interpretation of the significance of the figurines to the Fremont people, as well as hundreds of beautiful color photographs, Faces of the Fremont provides a nuanced understanding of figurine manufacture, formalizes a classification system for figurine traits, and documents new and interesting geographic and temporal patterns.
Facts on the Ground
Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli SocietyNadia Abu El-Haj
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Boldly uncovering an Israel in which science and politics are mutually constituted, this book shows the ongoing role that archaeology plays in defining the past, present, and future of Palestine and Israel.
Far Western Basketmaker Beginnings
The Jackson Flat ProjectEdited by Heidi Roberts, Richard V. N. Ahlstrom, and Jerry D. Spangler
University of Utah Press, 2022
This volume, based on the results of excavations at Jackson Flat Reservoir south of Kanab, examines a litany of firsts: the earliest Archaic pithouses ever found in this region, evidence that maize farmers arrived here a thousand years earlier than previously reported, and the emergence of a complex Basketmaker farming and foraging culture. Specialists in Far Western Puebloan culture, architecture, settlement patterns, subsistence, chronometry, and prehistoric technologies make a compelling case that farming was introduced to the region by San Pedro immigrants, and that the blending of farmers with local foraging groups gave rise to a Basketmaker lifeway by 200 BC. This book marks a giant leap forward in archaeologists’ understanding of the earliest maize farmers north and west of the Colorado River.
Field Man
Life as a Desert ArchaeologistJulian D. Hayden; Edited by Bill Broyles and Diane E. Boyer
University of Arizona Press, 2012
Fierce and Indomitable
The Protohistoric Non-Pueblo World in the American SouthwestEdited by Deni J. Seymour
University of Utah Press, 2016
Trending upward as an archaeological field of study, protohistoric mobile groups provide fascinating new directions for cutting-edge research in the American Southwest and beyond. These mobile residents represent the ancient and ancestral roots of many modern indigenous peoples, including the Apaches, Jumano, Yavapai, and Ute. These important protohistoric and historic mobile people have tended to be ignored because their archaeological sites were deemed too difficult to identify, too scant to be worthy of study, and too different to incorporate. This book brings together information from a diverse collection of authors working throughout the American Southwest and its fringes to make the bold statement that these groups can be identified in the archaeological record and their sites have much to contribute to the study of cultural process, method and theory, and past lifeways. Mobile groups are integral for assessing the grand reorganizational events of the Late Prehistoric period and are key to understanding colonial contact and transformations. Now, the only analyses, overviews, and class lectures that will be considered comprehensive will be those that address the presence of these many widespread mobile peoples.
Finding Solace in the Soil
An Archaeology of Gardens and Gardeners at AmacheBonnie J. Clark
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Before incarceration, many at Amache had been farmers, gardeners, or nursery workers. Between 1942 and 1945, they applied their horticultural expertise to the difficult high plains landscape of southeastern Colorado. At Amache they worked to form microclimates, reduce blowing sand, grow better food, and achieve stability and preserve community at a time of dehumanizing dispossession. In this book archaeologist Bonnie J. Clark examines botanical data like seeds, garden-related artifacts, and other material evidence found at Amache, as well as oral histories from survivors and archival data including personal letters and government records, to recount how the prisoners of Amache transformed the harsh military setting of the camp into something resembling a town. She discusses the varieties of gardens found at the site, their place within Japanese and Japanese American horticultural traditions, and innovations brought about by the creative use of limited camp resources.
The gardens were regarded by the incarcerees as a gift to themselves and to each other. And they were also, it turns out, a gift to the future as repositories of generational knowledge where a philosophical stance toward nature was made manifest through innovation and horticultural skill. Framing the gardens and gardeners of Amache within the larger context of the incarceration of Japanese Americans and of recent scholarship on displacement and confinement, Finding Solace in the Soil will be of interest to gardeners, historical archaeologists, landscape archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and scholars of Japanese American history and horticultural history.
Finding the People who Flaked the Stone at English Camp
Close, Angela E
University of Utah Press, 2006
First Peoples of Great Salt Lake
A Cultural Landscape from Nevada to WyomingSteven R. Simms
University of Utah Press, 2023
Great Salt Lake is a celebrated, world-recognized natural landmark. It, and the broader region bound to it, is also a thoroughly cultural landscape; generations of peoples made their lives there. In an eminently readable narrative, Steven Simms, one of the foremost archaeologists of the region, traces the scope of human history dating from the Pleistocene, when First Peoples interacted with the lapping waters of Lake Bonneville, to nearly the present day. Through vivid descriptions of how people lived, migrated, and mingled, with persistence and resilience, Simms honors the long human presence on the landscape.
First Peoples of Great Salt Lake takes a different approach to understanding the ancients than is typical of archaeology. De-emphasizing categories and labels, it traces changing environments, climates, and peoples through the notion of place. It challenges the "Pristine Myth," the cultural bias that Indigenous peoples were timeless, changeless, primitive, and the landscapes they lived in sparsely populated and perpetually pristine. First Peoples and their descendants modified the forests and understory vegetation, shaped wildlife populations, and adapted to long-term climate change. Native Americans of Great Salt Lake were very much part of their world, and the story here is one of long continuity through dramatic cultural change.
Florentine Codex
Book 2: The CeremoniesBernardino de Sahagun
University of Utah Press, 1981
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Two gives comprehensive accounts of the religious ceremonies and days of feasting during the time of the Aztecs, including prayers, songs, and the duties and roles of Aztecs inside the temples during the ceremonies. This book also details the various tributes and sacrifices given to specific gods.
Fluted Points of the Far West
Michael F. Rondeau
University of Utah Press, 2022
Fluted Points of the Far West provides the first large-scale overview of fluted points in the far western United States, including details of their attributes, trends in production, and range of variability. It serves as a compendium of groundbreaking research by the California Fluted Lanceolate Uniform Testing and Evaluation Database (CalFLUTED) project. Details regarding size, morphology, material, basal flaking technology, breakage patterns, repair patterns, manufacturing (as revealed by unfinished fluted bifaces), margin grinding, and flute scratching are provided through this research, both in terms of general trends and noteworthy exceptions.
Designed as a ready reference, these data are also summarized for each of the four sample states covered: California, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah. Summaries introduce the history and circumstances of fluted point studies by state, a list of references for each state used in the CalFLUTED study reports, a comprehensive listing of the relevant CalFLUTED study reports, and a breakdown by state of fluted point attribute details as listed above.
Reviews and discussions cover a range of topics, including classification of fluted points, identifying flute scars, and indicative traits that a fluted point is not from the prehistoric Far West. Additional discussions cover hafting alternatives, fluted point dating, far western fluted point typology, and the likely direction of further research on a range of fluted point topics.
Food Production in Native North America
An Archaeological PerspectiveKristen J. Gremillion
University Press of Colorado, 2018
Food Storage in Michigan's Late Woodland
The Work of Indigenous WomenKathryn M. Frederick
University of Alabama Press, 2026
Incorporates experimental archaeology to understand the food-caching strategies led by Indigenous women in Late Woodland Michigan.
This experimental archaeology book centers on the decision of Indigenous women in Michigan’s Late Woodland to store food in cache pits for later use, to ensure a stable food supply. These food storage techniques were efforts to increase communal chances of survival in direct responses to sociopolitical changes. Kathryn M. Frederick highlights the importance of food storage in these communities and the decision-making and behaviors behind it.
To discover why food storage became a popular practice at that period, Frederick considered the efficacy of subterranean food storage and constructed experiments to understand the timing and use of cache pits and to test their reliability and efficiency. She also compiled ethnographic data on location, environmental conditions, movement strategies, and types of foodstuffs stored for dozens of hunter-gatherer groups. Two distinct patterns of food storage emerged: “reliant” and “redundant.” Frederick argues that the Indigenous women utilized a system of reliant storage during times of abundance but could switch to a redundant system as the socioeconomic climate shifted. This book will interest a wide swath of archaeologists and others interested in Indigenous foodways and women’s key roles.
Foodways in Roman Republican Italy
Laura M. Banducci
University of Michigan Press, 2021
Foodways in Roman Republican Italy explores the production, preparation, and consumption of food and drink in Republican Italy to illuminate the nature of cultural change during this period. Traditionally, studies of the cultural effects of Roman contact and conquest have focused on observing changes in the public realm: that is, changing urban organization and landscape, and monumental construction. Foodways studies reach into the domestic realm: How do the daily behaviors of individuals express their personal identity, and How does this relate to changes and expressions of identity in broader society? Laura M. Banducci tracks through time the foodways of three sites in Etruria from about the third century BCE to the first century CE: Populonia, Musarna, and Cetamura del Chianti. All were established Etruscan sites that came under Roman political control over the course of the third and second centuries BCE. The book examines the morphology and use wear of ceramics used for cooking, preparing, and serving food in order to deduce cooking methods and the types of foods being prepared and consumed. Change in domestic behaviors was gradual and regionally varied, depending on local social and environmental conditions, shaping rather than responding to an explicitly “Roman” presence.
Foragers and Farmers of the Northern Kayenta Region
Excavations along the Navajo Mountain RoadPhil Geib
University of Utah Press, 2011
Foragers and Farmers of the Northern Kayenta Region presents the results of a major archaeological excavation project on Navajo tribal land in the Four Corners area and integrates this new information with existing knowledge of the archaeology of the northern Kayenta region. The excavation of thirty-three sites provides a cross section of prehistory from which Navajo Nation archaeologists retrieved a wealth of information about subsistence, settlement, architecture, and other aspects of past lifeways. The project’s most important contributions involve the Basketmaker and Archaic periods, and include a large number of radiocarbon dates on high-quality samples. Dating back to the early Archaic period (ca. 7000 BC) and ranging forward through the Basketmaker components to the Puebloan period, this volume is a powerful record of ancient peoples and their cultures. Detailed supplementary data will be available on the University of Utah Press Web site upon publication of this summary volume.
Volume 2: Archaic Site Descriptions
Volume 3: Basketmaker Site Descriptions
Volume 4: Puebloan Site Descriptions
Volume 5: Analyses and Interpretation
Appendix Volume
Foragers and Farmers
Population Interaction and Agricultural Expansion in Prehistoric EuropeSusan Alling Gregg
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Gregg examines anthropological, ecological, and archaeological dimensions of prehistoric population interaction. She then examines the ecological requirements of both crops and livestock and, in order to identify an optimal farming strategy for Early Neolithic populations, develops a computer simulation to examine various resource mixes. Turning to the foragers, she models the effects that interaction with the farmers would have had on the foragers' subsistence-settlement system.
Supporting her model with archaeological, ecological, and ethnobotanical evidence from southwest Germany, Gregg shows that when foragers and farmers occur contemporaneously, both need to be considered before either can be understood. Theoretically and methodologically, her work builds upon earlier studies of optimal diet and foraging strategy, extending the model to food-producing populations. The applicability of Gregg's generalized model for both wild and domestic resources reaches far beyond her case study of Early Neolithic Germany; it will interest both Old and New World archaeologists.
Foragers on America's Western Edge
The Archaeology of California's Pecho CoastTerry L. Jones and Brian F. Codding
University of Utah Press, 2018
The first people of the Pecho Coast were part-time residents who exploited shellfish, fish, and marine birds, including the flightless duck, Chendytes lawi, which sustained hunting drove to extinction ca. 2800 cal BP. This marked the only unequivocal case of prehistoric, human-caused extinction in western North America. Cold, productive seas allowed inhabitants to weather droughts of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (950–600 cal BP), after which shell beads became increasingly abundant, representing either the initial appearance of Chumash-speaking peoples or attempts by Chumash leaders to consolidate power through gifting, reciprocal exchange, or forced conquest. During the mission era, fishing sustained the Native community as, for the first time, individuals became fully sedentary, foraging within a limited radius to avoid contact with the Spanish.
This record reveals a unique story of local adaptation, anthropogenic habitat change, social differentiation, and, ultimately, resistance to colonial invasion.
Foraging in the Tennessee River Valley
12,500 to 8,000 Years AgoKandace D. Hollenbach
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road
The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central AsiaPeter Hopkirk
University of Massachusetts Press, 1980
Foreign Objects
Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American ArchaeologyEdited by Craig N. Cipolla
University of Arizona Press, 2017
Brass tinklers and pendants. Owl effigies, copper kettles, crucifixes with blue glass stones. What do they have in common? The answer spans thousands of years and a multitude of peoples and places, and reveals how people made sense of their world as they collected and used the objects they encountered.
Foreign Objects demonstrates the breadth and vibrancy of contemporary archaeology. Taking a broad set of archaeological cases from across the Americas, editor Craig N. Cipolla and the volume contributors explore how indigenous communities have socialized foreign objects over time. The book critiques the artificial divide between prehistory and history, studying instead the long-term indigenous histories of consumption, a term typically associated with capitalism and modern-world colonialism.
The case studies range from “exotic” stone tools used millennia ago to nineteenth-century patent medicines made and marketed by an Indian doctress. Foreign Objects focuses on how indigenous groups and foreign objects became entangled with one another in myriad ways. The book explores how the framework of consumption can shed new light on trade, exchange, materiality, and cultural production.
Contributors place foreign objects in the spotlight and offer a comparison of how this general class of material played a part in indigenous and colonial worlds. Each chapter illustrates how notions of consumption fit into their place in time and also delves into how foreign objects related to ideas of the body and personhood, how people used them to participate in political and spiritual worlds, and how they presented new ways of enduring or resisting European colonialism and capitalism. Foreign Objects is a critical look at consumption through the lens of indigenous knowledge and archaeological theory.
Contributors:
Matthew A. Beaudoin
Lewis Borck
Kathleen J. Bragdon
Craig N. Cipolla
Charles R. Cobb
John L. Creese
Diana DiPaolo Loren
Martin Gallivan
Meghan C. L. Howey
Barbara J. Mills
Maxine Oland
Lee M. Panich
Patricia E. Rubertone
Christopher Shephard
Keith D. Stephenson
Forging Southeastern Identities
Social Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Folklore of the Mississippian to Early Historic SouthGregory A. Waselkov
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Forging Southeastern Identities explores the many ways archaeologists and ethnohistorians define and trace the origins of Native Americans’ collective social identity.
Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, a groundbreaking collection of ten essays, covers a broad expanse of time—from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries—and focuses on a common theme of identity. These essays represent the various methods used by esteemed scholars today to study how Native Americans in the distant past created new social identities when old ideas of the self were challenged by changes in circumstance or by historical contingencies.
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and folklorists working in the Southeast have always recognized the region’s social diversity; indeed, the central purpose of these disciplines is to study peoples overlooked by the mainstream. Yet the ability to define and trace the origins of a collective social identity—the means by which individuals or groups align themselves, always in contrast to others—has proven to be an elusive goal. Here, editors Gregory A. Waselkov and Marvin T. Smith champion the relational identification and categorical identification processes, taken from sociological theory, as effective analytical tools.
Taking up the challenge, the contributors have deployed an eclectic range of approaches to establish and inform an overarching theme of identity. Some investigate shell gorgets, textiles, shell trade, infrastructure, specific sites, or plant usage. Others focus on the edges of the Mississippian world or examine colonial encounters between Europeans and native peoples. A final chapter considers the adaptive malleability of historical legend in the telling and hearing of slave narratives.
Fort Toulouse
The French Outpost at the Alabamas on the CoosaDaniel H Thomas, with an introduciton by Gregory A. Waselkov
University of Alabama Press, 1989
Situated at the head of the Alabama River system—at the juncture of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers—Fort Toulouse in 1717 was planned to keep the local Indians neutral, if not loyal, to the French and contain the British in their southernmost Atlantic colonies. Unlike the usual frontier settlements, Fort Toulouse was both a diplomatic post, since its officers acted as resident ministers, and a military post. Because it was located in a friendly territory adjoining an area under a rival (British) influence, the post participated in psychological warfare rather than in blood-letting. It used trade and aid, and was familiar with spies and double-agents—welcoming and debriefing British defectors; no cannon was discharged in anger at Toulouse.
The most eminent figure to have been connected directly with Fort Toulouse was General Andrew Jackson, who established a military post there during the War of 1812 after his victory over the Indians at Horseshoe Bend. The outpost was named Fort Jackson in his honor and played a key role in the treaty negotiations and eventual settlement of the Indian land by Americans.
In addition to discussing geopolitical and military affairs and diplomatic relations with Indian chiefs, Thomas describes daily life at the post and the variety of interactions between residents and visitors. Waselkov's introduction places the original 1960 book within the context of the existing scholarship of that time and adds an extensive and enlightening review of the most recent archaeological and historical research to Thomas' pioneering work.
Foundations of Anasazi Culture
The Basketmaker Pueblo TransitionPaul F Reed
University of Utah Press, 2002
This major synthesis of work explores new evidence gathered at Basketmaker III sites on the Colorado Plateau in search of further understanding of Anasazi development.
Since the 1960s, large-scale cultural resource management projects have revealed the former presence of Anasazi within the entire northern Southwest. These discoveries have resulted in a greatly expanded view of the BMIII period (A.D. 550-750) which immediately proceeds the Pueblo phase. Particularly noteworthy are finding of Basketmaker remains under those of later periods and in sites with open settings, as opposed to the more classic Basketmaker cave and rock shelter sites.
Foundations of Anasazi Culture explores this new evidence in search of further understanding of Anasazi development. Several chapters address the BMII-BMIII transition, including the initial production and use of pottery, greater reliance on agriculture, and the construction of increasingly elaborate structures. Other chapters move beyond the transitional period to discuss key elements of the Anasazi lifestyle, including the use of gray-,red-, and white-ware ceramics, pit structures, storage cists, surface rooms, full dependence on agriculture, and varying degrees of social specialization and differentiation. A number of contributions address one or more of these issues as they occur at specific sites. Other contributors consider the material culture of the period in terms of common elements in architecture, ceramics, lithic technology, and decorative media.
This work on BMIII sites on the Colorado Plateau will be useful to anyone with an interest in the earliest days of Anasazi civilization.
Framing Complexity in Formative Mesoamerica
Lisa Delance
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Contributors present multiple lines of evidence demonstrating the process of social complexity and reconsider a number of traditionally accepted models and presumed tenets as a result of the wealth of empirical data that has been gathered over the past four decades. Their chapters approach complexity as a process rather than a state of being by exploring social aggregation, the emergence of ethnic affiliations, and aspects of regional and macroregional variability.
Framing Complexity in Formative Mesoamerica presents some of the most recent data—and the implications of that data—for understanding the development of complex societies as human beings moved into urban environments. The book is an especially important volume for researchers and students working in Mesoamerica, as well as archaeologists taking a comparative approach to questions of complexity.
Contributors: Jaime J. Awe, Sarah B. Barber, Jeffrey S. Brezezinski, M. Kathryn Brown, Ryan H. Collins, Kaitlin Crow, Lisa DeLance, Gary M. Feinman, Sara Dzul Gongora, Guy David Hepp, Arthur A. Joyce, Rodrigo Martin Morales, George Micheletti, Deborah L. Nichols, Terry G. Powis, Zoe J. Rawski, Prudence M. Rice, Michael P. Smyth, Katherine E. South, Jon Spenard, Travis W. Stanton, Wesley D. Stoner, Teresa Tremblay Wagner
Framing a Lost City
Science, Photography, and the Making of Machu PicchuBy Amy Cox Hall
University of Texas Press, 2017
When Hiram Bingham, a historian from Yale University, first saw Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a ruin obscured by overgrowth whose terraces were farmed a by few families. A century later, Machu Picchu is a UNESCO world heritage site visited by more than a million tourists annually. This remarkable transformation began with the photographs that accompanied Bingham’s article published in National Geographic magazine, which depicted Machu Picchu as a lost city discovered. Focusing on the practices, technologies, and materializations of Bingham’s three expeditions to Peru (1911, 1912, 1914–1915), this book makes a convincing case that visualization, particularly through the camera, played a decisive role in positioning Machu Picchu as both a scientific discovery and a Peruvian heritage site.
Amy Cox Hall argues that while Bingham’s expeditions relied on the labor, knowledge, and support of Peruvian elites, intellectuals, and peasants, the practice of scientific witnessing, and photography specifically, converted Machu Picchu into a cultural artifact fashioned from a distinct way of seeing. Drawing on science and technology studies, she situates letter writing, artifact collecting, and photography as important expeditionary practices that helped shape the way we understand Machu Picchu today. Cox Hall also demonstrates that the photographic evidence was unstable, and, as images circulated worldwide, the “lost city” took on different meanings, especially in Peru, which came to view the site as one of national patrimony in need of protection from expeditions such as Bingham’s.
Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad
The Geography of ResistanceCheryl Janifer LaRoche
University of Illinois Press, 2013
French Colonial Archaeology
The Illinois Country and the Western Great LakesEdited by John A. Walthall
University of Illinois Press, 1991
results of many of the investigations of French colonial sites made in
the mid-continent during the last decade. It includes work done at Fort
St. Louis, Fort de Chartres, Fort Massac, French Peoria, Cahokia, Prairie
du Pont, Prairie du Rocher, and other locations controlled by the French
during a time when their dominance in North America was more than twice
that of Britain and Spain combined.
Five of the book's fifteen chapters summarize major excavations at colonial
fortifications, four of which are public monuments that currently attract
thousands of visitors each year. Another five chapters deal with French
colonial villages, and the remainder of the book is devoted to diet, trade,
the role of historic documents in the reconstruction of life on the French
colonial frontier, and other topics.
Friar and the Maya
Diego de Landa and the Account of the Things of Yucatanby Matthew Restall, Amara Solari, John F. Chuchiak IV & Traci Ardren
University Press of Colorado, 2023
For generations, scholars used (and misused) the Account as the sole eyewitness insight into an ancient civilization. It is credited to the sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan, monastic inquisitor, and bishop Diego de Landa, whose legacy is complex and contested. His extensive writings on Maya culture and history were lost in the seventeenth century, save for the fragment that is the Account, discovered in the nineteenth century, and accorded near-biblical status in the twentieth as the first “ethnography” of the Maya. However, the Account is not authored by Landa alone; it is a compilation of excerpts, many from writings by other Spaniards—a significant revelation made here for the first time.
This new translation accurately reflects the style and vocabulary of the original manuscript. It is augmented by a monograph—comprising an introductory chapter, seven essays, and hundreds of notes—that describes, explains, and analyzes the life and times of Diego de Landa, the Account, and the role it has played in the development of modern Maya studies. The Friar and the Maya is an innovative presentation on an important and previously misunderstood primary source.
From Colonization to Domestication
Population, Environment, and the Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North AmericaD. Shane Miller
University of Utah Press, 2018
Eastern North America is one of only a handful of places in the world where people first discovered how to domesticate plants. In this book, anthropologist Shane Miller uses two common, although unconventional, sources of archaeological data—stone tools and the distribution of archaeological sites—to trace subsistence decisions from the initial colonization of the American Southeast at the end of the last Ice Age to the appearance of indigenous domesticated plants roughly 5,000 years ago.
Miller argues that the origins of plant domestication lie within the context of a boom/bust cycle that culminated in the mid-Holocene, when hunter-gatherers were able to intensively exploit shellfish, deer, oak, and hickory. After this resource “boom” ended, some groups shifted to other plants in place of oak and hickory, which included the suite of plants that were later domesticated. Accompanying these subsistence trends is evidence for increasing population pressure and declining returns from hunting. Miller contends, however, that the appearance of domesticated plants in eastern North America, rather than simply being an example of necessity as the mother of invention, is the result of individuals adjusting to periods of both abundance and shortfall driven by climate change.
From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom
Understanding Past Land Use in the Northern Rio Grande Valley, New MexicoBradley J. Vierra
University of Utah Press, 2013
The essays in this collection are unified by three specific themes: landscape, movement, and technology. Landscape involves the ecological backdrop of the northern Rio Grande valley, including past and present environments. Movement refers to the positioning of people across the landscape along with the dynamic and fluid nature with which people—past and present—view their relationship with the “above” and “below.” Technology not only refers to the tools and facilities that past people may have used but to the organization of labor needed to cooperatively exploit a variety of subsistence resources and the exchange of products across the region. This volume provides both a cross section of current research from expert scholars and a broad perspective that seeks to integrate new data from lowland and upland contexts. From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom will appeal to those interested in obsidian source studies, geoarchaeology, past climatic regimes, foraging societies, early agriculture, ceramic technology, subsistence, early village formation, ethnogenesis, and historic multiethnic economies.
From Quarry to Cornfield
The Political Economy of Mississippian Hoe ProductionCharles Richard Cobb
University of Alabama Press, 2001
An innovative model for examining the technology of hoe production and its contribution to the agriculture of Mississippian communities.
Lithic specialist Charles Cobb examines the political economy in Mississippian communities through a case study of raw material procurement and hoe production and usage at the Mill Creek site on Dillow Ridge in southwest Illinois. Cobb outlines the day-to-day activities in a Mississippian chiefdom village that flourished from about A.D. 1250 to 1500. In so doing, he provides a fascinating window into the specialized tasks of a variety of "day laborers" whose contribution to the community rested on their production of stone hoes necessary in the task of feeding the village. Overlooked in most previous studies, the skills and creativity of the makers of the hoes used in village farming provide a basis for broader analysis of the technology of hoe use in Mississippian times.
Although Cobb's work focuses on Mill Creek, his findings at this site are representative of the agricultural practices of Mississippian communities throughout the eastern United States. The theoretical underpinnings of Cobb's study make a clear case for a reexamination of the accepted definition of chiefdom, the mobilization of surplus labor, and issues of power, history, and agency in Mississippian times. In a well-crafted piece of writing, Cobb distinguishes himself as one of the leaders in the study of lithic technology. From Quarry to Cornfield will find a well-deserved place in the ongoing discussions of power and production in the Mississippian political economy.
From the Land of Ever Winter to the American Southwest
Athapaskan Migrations, Mobility, and EthnogenesisDeni J. Seymour
University of Utah Press, 2012
The Athapaskan departure from the Canadian Subarctic centuries ago and their subsequent arrival in the American Southwest has remained the subject of continuous debate in anthropological research. This book examines archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and traditional oral history data and brings them together in fresh ways, in many cases for the first time. With a backdrop of these new and interrelated lines of evidence, each subfield must now reevaluate its approach and the forms of evidence it uses to construct arguments.
The contributors here include the most knowledgeable scholars in each of the above fields, collectively providing the most up-to-date research on early Athapaskans and their movements and migrations. Each chapter approaches Athapaskan migration with data obtained from different regions, providing clarity as to the basis for individual arguments. Often, entrenched regional visualizations and localized conventions are clarified only when placed in juxtaposition to those of other regions. Because of this, conclusions rest on sometimes widely divergent theoretical and methodological underpinnings, thus expressing preference for and conveying weight to certain types of evidence and lines of reasoning. The goal of this volume is to expose these arguments in order to clarify appropriate directions for future research, making advances possible.
Frontier Forts of Iowa
Indians, Traders, and Soldiers, 1682-1862William E. Whittaker
University of Iowa Press, 2009
At least fifty-six frontier forts once stood in, or within view of, what is now the state of Iowa. The earliest date to the 1680s, while the latest date to the Dakota uprising of 1862. Some were vast compounds housing hundreds of soldiers; others consisted of a few sheds built by a trader along a riverbank. Regardless of their size and function—William Whittaker and his contributors include any compound that was historically called a fort, whether stockaded or not, as well as all military installations—all sought to control and manipulate Indians to the advantage of European and American traders, governments, and settlers. Frontier Forts of Iowa draws extensively upon the archaeological and historical records to document this era of transformation from the seventeenth-century fur trade until almost all Indians had been removed from the region.
The earliest European-constructed forts along the Mississippi, Des Moines, and Missouri rivers fostered a complex relationship between Indians and early traders. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1804, American military forts emerged in the Upper Midwest, defending the newly claimed territories from foreign armies, foreign traders, and foreign-supported Indians. After the War of 1812, new forts were built to control Indians until they could be moved out of the way of American settlers; forts of this period, which made extensive use of roads and trails, teamed a military presence with an Indian agent who negotiated treaties and regulated trade. The final phase of fort construction in Iowa occurred in response to the Spirit Lake massacre and the Dakota uprising; the complete removal of the Dakota in 1863 marked the end of frontier forts in a state now almost completely settled by Euro-Americans.
By focusing on the archaeological evidence produced by many years of excavations and by supporting their words with a wealth of maps and illustrations, the authors uncover the past and connect it with the real history of real places. In so doing they illuminate the complicated and dramatic history of the Upper Midwest in a time of enormous change. Past is linked to present in the form of a section on visiting original and reconstructed forts today.
Gayle F. Carlson
Jeffrey T. Carr
Lance M. Foster
Kathryn E. M. Gourley
Marshall B. McKusick
Cindy L. Nagel
David J. Nolan
Cynthia L. Peterson
Leah D. Rogers
Regena Jo Schantz
Christopher M. Schoen
Vicki L. Twinde-Javner
William E. Whittaker
Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeology
From the Dent Site to the Rocky MountainsRobert H. Brunswig
University Press of Colorado, 2007
The editors introduce the research with scientific context. A review of seventy-five years of Paleoindian archaeology in Colorado highlights the foundation on which new work builds, and a survey of Colorado's ancient climates and ecologies helps readers understand Paleoindian settlement patterns.
Eight essays discuss archaeological evidence from Plains to high Rocky Mountain sites. The book offers the most thorough analysis to date of Dent--the first Clovis site discovered. Essays on mountain sites show how advances in methodology and technology have allowed scholars to reconstruct settlement patterns and changing lifeways in this challenging environment.
Colorado has been home to key moments in human settlement and in the scientific study of our ancient past. Readers interested in the peopling of the New World as well as those passionate about the methods and history of archaeology will find new material and satisfying overviews in this book. Contributors include Rosa Maria Albert, Robert H. Brunswig, Reid A. Bryson, Linda Scott Cummings, James Doerner, Daniel C. Fisher, David L. Fox, Bonnie L. Pitblado, Jeffrey L. Saunders, Todd A. Surovell, R. A. Varney, and Nicole M. Waguespack.