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Lavishly illustrated with nearly 400 color images, Painting the Maya Universe is the most thorough study and brilliant display of Classic Maya ceramic painting yet published. Building on twenty years of research and debate, Dorie Reents-Budet and her collaborators Joseph W. Ball, Ronald L. Bishop, Virginia M. Fields, and Barbara MacLeod bring together many perspectives, including the art historical, archaeological, epigraphical, and ethnohistorical, to examine one of the world’s great but overlooked painting traditions. With an emphasis on sixth- to eighth-century pottery featuring both pictorial and hieroglyphic imagery, Painting the Maya Universe presents an extraordinary exploration of the cultural roles and meanings of these Guatemalan, Belizean, and Mexican elite painted ceramics. Maya pottery is discussed both in aesthetic terms and for the important information it reveals about Maya society, artistry, politics, history, religion, and ritual. The range of ceramic painting styles developed during this period is also presented and defined in detail.
Painting the Maya Universe is the first publication to present a definitive translation of the hieroglyphic texts painted on these objects. With many glyphs deciphered here for the first time, this analysis reveals much about how these vessels were perceived and used by the Maya, their owners’ names, and, in several cases, the names of the artists who created them. This information is combined with archaeological and other data, including nuclear chemical analyses, to correlate painting styles with specific Maya sites.
Published in conjunction with Duke University Museum of Art and an exhibition touring the United States, Painting the Maya Universe presents an astonishing visual record as well as a monumental scholarly achievement. With photographs by Justin Kerr, the foremost photographer of pre-Columbian art, it includes over 90 unique full-color rollout photographs, each showing the entire surface of an object in a single frame. The book also addresses the questions and controversy regarding the loss of information that occurs when objects are removed from their archaeological context to become part of public and private collections.
Painting the Maya Universe will energize discussion of Maya pottery, hieroglyphic texts, and iconography. Its photographs, a lasting resource on this great painting tradition, will stimulate and delight the eye. It is a breakthrough in art history and Latin American scholarship that will enrich general readers and scholars alike.

Paleoindian Lifeways of the Cody Complex represents the first synthesis in the more than fifty year history of one of the most important Paleoindian cultural traditions in North America. Research on the Cody complex (~10,000–8,000 radiocarbon yrs B.P.) began in the 1940s; however, until now publications have focused almost exclusively on specific sites, issues of projectile point technology and typology, and bison hunting. This volume provides fresh perspectives and cutting-edge research that significantly increases our understanding of the Cody complex by focusing more squarely on the human behaviors that created the archaeological record, rather than on more strictly technical aspects of the artifacts and faunal remains.

Because the Cody complex extends from the central Canadian plains to the Gulf of Mexico and from Nevada to the eastern Great Lakes—making it second only to Clovis in geographical expanse—this volume will appeal to a wide range of North American archaeologists. Across this broad geographic distribution, the contributors address hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies from diverse ecosystems at the onset of the Holocene, which will also make it of interest to human ecologists and paleoenvironmental  researchers. Paleoindian Lifeways of the Cody Complex provides an innovative synthesis of a well-known but little-studied cultural tradition that opens the door for a new generation of exciting research.

Were the earliest inhabitants of the Great Basin 'Paleoindians' in the traditional sense? Were they highly mobile foragers? Did they hunt large, now extinct animals like mammoth, horse, and camel?
 

Great Basin archaeologists have argued that the earliest inhabitants possessed an organization strategy of mixed 'Paleoindian' and 'Archaic' lifeways, referring to them as 'Paleoarchaic.'
 

Recent excavations of rock shelters and caves, coupled with innovative studies of the surface archaeological record have increased our understanding of human organization in the Great Basin during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. When did humans first inhabit the Great Basin? How do we interpret projectile point variability from late Pleistocene and early Holocene contexts? What land-use and foraging strategies characterized the early inhabitants? Did these hunter-gatherers possess a Paleoindian or Paleoarchaic lifeway?
 

This volume offers an updated perspective of human ecology and organization during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Great Basin, 13,000–8,000 years ago.

Papyri from Karanis: The Granary C123 is the twenty- first volume of University of Michigan papyri and the fourth devoted to texts from the University’s excavations at Karanis. The volume offers a contextualized edition of thirty-seven documents found in  a single structure, a large granary (C123) originally built in the first century CE, in addition to an analysis of the archaeology and history of the structure.

The documents are presented with an introduction, transcription of the original Greek or Latin, translation, commentary, and images. A unique community prayer to the emperor and gods (827) is the volume’s most notable contribution. The other papyri are a mix of private and public documents (petitions, declarations, letters, lists, etc.) that date from between the first century BCE and the fourth century CE. The typological and chronological mix of texts shows that they do not form an undisturbed archive but were rather a dump of wastepaper and other household objects.

Michigan’s excavated papyri are here presented for the first time on the basis of their archaeological find spot rather than being organized according to content. The volume’s introduction provides a possible model for analyzing legacy data from the Karanis excavations stored at the University of Michigan. The book will be of interest to papyrologists, ancient historians, and archaeologists of Greco- Roman Egypt.

The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas.

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the world reacted with shock on seeing residents of this distinctive city left abandoned to the floodwaters. After the last rescue was completed, a new worry arose—that New Orleans’s unique historic fabric sat in ruins, and we had lost one of the most charming old cities of the New World.
 
In Patina, anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy examines what was lost and found through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Tracking the rich history and unique physicality of New Orleans, she explains how it came to adopt the nickname “the antique city.” With innovative applications of thing theory, Patina studies the influence of specific items—such as souvenirs, heirlooms, and Hurricane Katrina ruins—to explore how the city’s residents use material objects to comprehend time, history, and their connection to one another. A leading figure in archaeology of the contemporary, Dawdy draws on material evidence, archival and literary texts, and dozens of post-Katrina interviews to explore how the patina aesthetic informs a trenchant political critique. An intriguing study of the power of everyday objects, Patina demonstrates how sharing in the care of a historic landscape can unite a city’s population—despite extreme divisions of class and race—and inspire civil camaraderie based on a nostalgia that offers not a return to the past but an alternative future.

This edited volume, which emerged from a symposium organized at the 2014 SAA meeting in Austin, Texas, covers recent Paleoamerican research and site excavations from Patagonia to Canada. Contributors discuss the peopling of the Americas, early American assemblages, lifeways, and regional differences. Many scholars present current data previously unavailable in English. Chapters are organized south to north in an attempt to shake the usual north-centric focus of Pleistocene–Early Holocene archaeological studies and to bring to the forefront the many fascinating discoveries being made in southern latitudes. The diversity of approaches over a large geographic expanse generates discussion that prompts a re-evaluation of predominant paradigms about how the expansion of Homo sapiens in the Western Hemisphere took place. Those who work in Paleoamerican studies will embrace this book for its new data and for its comparative look at the Americas.

How does prehistoric material get from its place of origin to its location of archaeological recovery? While this question may seem basic, a moment’s reflection suggests that the answers carry important implications for arc-haeological interpretation about social organization, settlement, and subsistence practices. Archaeologists know much about the temporal and spatial distribution of materials in prehistoric western North America, but comparatively little has emerged regarding the causes of such distributions. Trade and exchange, mobility, and direct access all have been credited with observed distributions, but the reasons for settling on specific behavioral linkages is rarely made clear.

This volume investigates the circumstances and conditions under which trade/exchange, direct access, and/or mobility best account for material conveyance across varying distances at different times in the past. Each chapter contextualizes distributional and chemical data, evaluates competing distribution hypotheses, and addresses the reasoning and inferences employed to arrive at conclusions about the human behaviors responsible for the distributions of materials. Contributors showcase a range of diverse and creative ways of thinking about these issues in the California and Great Basin archaeological record, and why it matters.
 

Recent decades have seen an upsurge in visitation to rock art sites as well as an increase in commercial reproduction of rock art and attempts to understand the meaning and function of that art within the indigenous cultures that produced it. What motivates this growing interest and what do these interpretations and appropriations of Native American petroglyphs and pictographs reveal about contemporary cultural dynamics? Focusing on the southwestern U.S., this book critically examines the contemporary implications of the interpretation, appropriation, commodification, and management of indigenous rock art.
 
Neither archaeological interpretations nor commercial reproductions of rock art operate in a cultural vacuum. Both the motivation to seek out rock art and the specific meanings attached to it are deeply embedded in narratives about Native Americans already created by anthropologists, archaeologists, photographers, novelists, film and television producers, the tourism industry, and New Age discourse. For those interested in rock art as a window into indigenous cultures of the past, our contemporary projections of meanings are of great concern. Applying the tools of critical/cultural studies to both academic and popular discourse, Rogers explores the implications of such projections for rock art studies, contemporary gender dynamics, and the neocolonial relationship between Euro-Americans and Native Americans.
 

For two and a half centuries, Philadelphians have been actively involved in archaeological research. In particular, three vital and venerable cultural institutions—the American Philosophical Society (founded 1743), the Academy of Natural Sciences (founded 1812), and the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (founded 1893)—have nurtured the "systematic study of antiquities." 

The ten essays in this volume focus on Philadelphians who were concerned with Americanist archaeology, or the "archaeology of the New World." As Europeans, and later, Euroamericans, spread across North, Central, and South America in the 16th through the 19th centuries, they encountered a bewildering variety of native peoples, customs, and languages, as well as tens of thousands of ancient ruins attesting to a long endemic culture history of obvious complexity. 

The essays examine most of the key players in the development of the methods to study these phenomena. Enlightenment scholars such as Benjamin Smith Barton, Peter S. Duponceau, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Garrison Brinton, John Wesley Powell, and Benjamin Rush all contributed to the surge of scientific study of America's prehistoric cultures. So did two pioneering women who have received scant attention to date—Sara Yorke Stevenson and Lucy W. Wilson—but whose work is well treated in this study. Other essays detail the varied contributions of C. C. Abbott, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Clarence B. Moore, Edgar Lee Hewett, and John L. Cotter. This volume should stimulate continued interest in the origins and history of archaeology and the relationship of Philadelphia patrons and institutions to scientific inquiry.


 

Philo T. Farnsworth (1906–1971) has been called the "forgotten father of television." He grew up in Utah and southern Idaho, and was described as a genius by those who knew and worked with him. With only a high school education, Farnsworth drew his first television schematic for his high school teacher in Rigby, Idaho. Subsequent claims and litigation notwithstanding, he was the first to transmit a television image.

Farnsworth filed ten patents between 1927 and 1929 for camera tubes (transmitting), circuitry, and the cathode ray tube (viewing). After his early years as an inventor in San Francisco, he worked as an engineer, doing battle with RCA in the 1930s over patent rights, formed the Farnsworth Television Company in the 1940s, and worked for IT&T after their purchase of the Farnsworth enterprises. Every television set sold utilized at least six of his basic patents.

Because of endless legal wrangling with RCA over patent rights, he received very little financial reward for his television patents. Donald Godfrey examines the genius and the failures in the life of Philo Farnsworth as he struggled to be both inventor and entrepreneur.

Pinson Mounds: Middle Woodland Ceremonialism in the Midsouth is a comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of the largest Middle Woodland mound complex in the Southeast. Located in west Tennessee about ten miles south of Jackson, the Pinson Mounds complex includes at least thirteen mounds, a geometric earthen embankment, and contemporary short-term occupation areas within an area of about four hundred acres. A unique feature of Pinson Mounds is the presence of five large, rectangular platform mounds from eight to seventy-two feet in height. Around A.D. 100, Pinson Mounds was a pilgrimage center that drew visitors from well beyond the local population and accommodated many distinct cultural groups and people of varied social stations. Stylistically nonlocal ceramics have been found in virtually every excavated locality, all together representing a large portion of the Southeast. Along with an overview of this important and unique mound complex, Pinson Mounds also provides a reassessment of roughly contemporary centers in the greater Midsouth and Lower Mississippi Valley and challenges past interpretations of the Hopewell phenomenon in the region.

Translating professional archaeological research into meaningful and thoughtful educational experiences for the public has taken on increased urgency in recent years. This book presents eight case studies by professional archaeologists who discuss innovative approaches and advances in research methodology while examining the myriad challenges associated with interpreting this work for the public. Each study focuses on a particular Native American bison-kill site and shares the unique path from archaeological investigation to the creation of a public interpretive facility. Collectively the chapters comprise a comprehensive exploration of the multifaceted linkages between archaeological research and public education—ranging in scope from the interrelationships of an interpretive facility with its surrounding communities to the nuances of explaining bone decomposition to site visitors. These examples provide valuable insights from which archaeologists and science interpreters of all disciplines can conceptualize and build their own educational programs.

Plains villagers had a well-developed life way of intensive horticulture, bison hunting, and residence in substantial timber houses. This volume documents how Plains village culture emerged as a widespread and cohesive cultural adaptation from its roots in late Plains woodland cultures, as well as how it was repeatedly altered by internal and external forces. It addresses the historical emergence of these peoples, greatly transformed and decimated as the Wichitas, Omaha, Pawnees, Arikaras, Mandans, and Hidatsas.

This volume presents a cross section of current research about the origins and internal developments of prehistoric Plains village people in the Central and Northern Plains.

The Plainview Paleoindian artifact style was first recognized in 1947, after numerous projectile points were found during excavations of a bison kill site near Plainview, Texas. In the decades that followed, however, Plainview became something of a catch-all category with artifacts from across the continent being lumped together based merely on gross similarities. This volume unravels the meaning of Plainview, detailing what is known about this particular technology and time period. Contributing authors from the United States and Mexico present new data gleaned from the reinvestigation of past excavations, notes, maps, and materials from the original Plainview site as well as reports from other Plainview Paleoindian sites across the Great Plains, northern Mexico, and the southwestern United States. 

Plants from the Past is a fascinating, comprehensive record of the work of two dedicated plant scientists who were instrumental in the establishment of archaeobotany and paleoethnobotany as vigorous subdisciplines within American archaeology. Hugh Carson Cutler and Leonard Watson Blake worked together for many decades at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, identifying and interpreting plant remains from archaeological sites all over North America. 

Covering a period of 30 years and tracing the development of the study of plant remains from archaeological sites, the volume will give archaeologists access to previously unavailable data and interpretations. It features the much-sought-after extensive inventory "Plants from Archaeological Sites East of the Rockies," which serves as a reference to archaeobotanical collections curated at the Illinois State Museum. The chapters dealing with protohistory and early historic foodways and trade in the upper Midwest are especially relevant at this time of increasing attention to early Indian-white interactions. 

The editors' introduction provides coherence and historical context for the papers and points to the book's potential as a resource for future research. Graced by Dr. Blake's brief introductions to each chapter, Plants from the Past neatly compiles the earliest research in archaeobotany by two originators of the science.
 

Who owns the past and the objects that physically connect us to history? And who has the right to decide this ownership, particularly when the objects are sacred or, in the case of skeletal remains, human? Is it the museums that care for the objects or the communities whose ancestors made them? These questions are at the heart of Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, an unflinching insider account by a leading curator who has spent years learning how to balance these controversial considerations.

Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. This book offers his personal account of the process of repatriation, following the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a skeleton from a tribe considered by some to be extinct. These specific stories reveal a dramatic process that involves not merely obeying the law, but negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics.

Things, like people, have biographies. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but vitally important way for museums and tribes to acknowledge that fact—and heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history.
 

Recalls education and daily life at Point of Pines field school and also provides the background for the scientific papers that have resulted from the research that was undertaken there. Appendixes list contributions to Point of Pines archaeology, staff members and students, and institutions represented by attendees.

Political authority contains an inherent contradiction. Rulers must reinforce social inequality and bolster their own unique position at the top of the sociopolitical hierarchy, yet simultaneously emphasize social similarities and the commonalities shared by all. Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica explores the different and complex ways that those who exercised authority in the region confronted this contradiction.

New data from a variety of well-known scholars in Mesoamerican archaeology reveal the creation, perpetuation, and contestation of politically authoritative relationships between rulers and subjects and between nobles and commoners. The contributions span the geographic breadth and temporal extent of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica—from Preclassic Oaxaca to the Classic Petén region of Guatemala to the Postclassic Michoacán—and the contributors weave together archaeological, epigraphic, and ethnohistoric data.

Grappling with the questions of how those exercising authority convince others to follow and why individuals often choose to recognize and comply with authority, Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica discusses why the study of political authority is both timely and significant, reviews how scholars have historically understood the operation of political authority, and proposes a new analytical framework to understand how rulers rule.

Contributors include Sarah B. Barber, Joanne Baron, Christopher S. Beekman, Jeffrey Brzezinski, Bryce Davenport, Charles Golden, Takeshi Inomata, Arthur A. Joyce, Sarah Kurnick, Carlo J. Lucido, Simon Martin, Tatsuya Murakami, Helen Perlstein Pollard, and Víctor Salazar Chávez.

This distinctive book is the first to address the topic of landscape archaeology in early states from a truly global perspective. It provides an excellent introduction to—and overview of—the discipline today. The volume grew out of the Fifth Biennial Meeting of the Complex Societies Group, whose theme, States and the Landscape, paid tribute to the work of Robert McC. Adams. When Adams began publishing in the 1960s, the interdependence of cities and their countrysides, and the information revealed through the spatial patterning of communities, went largely unrecognized. Today, as this useful collection makes clear, these interpretive insights are fundamental to all archaeologists who investigate the roles of complex polities in their landscapes.

Polities and Power features detailed studies from an intentionally disparate array of regions, including Mesoamerica, Andean South America, southwestern Asia, East Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. Each chapter or pair of chapters is followed by a critical commentary. In concert, these studies strive to infer social, political, and economic meaning from archaeologically discerned landscapes associated with societies that incorporate some expression of state authority. The contributions engage a variety of themes, including the significance of landscapes as they condition and reflect complex polities; the interplay of natural and cultural elements in defining landscapes of state; archaeological landscapes as ever-dynamic entities; and archaeological landscapes as recursive structures, reflected in palimpsests of human activity.

Individually, many of these contributions are provocative, even controversial. Taken together, they reveal the contours of landscape archaeology at this particular evolutionary moment.

Encapsulating two decades of research, Polity and Ecology in Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca is the first major treatment of the lower Río Verde region of Oaxaca, investigating its social, political, and ecological history. Tracing Formative period developments from the earliest known evidence of human presence to the collapse of Río Viejo (the region's first centralized polity), the volume synthesizes the archaeological and paleoecological evidence from the valley.

This period saw the earliest agricultural settlements in the region as well as the origins of sedentism and social complexity, and witnessed major changes in floodplain and coastal environments that expanded the productivity of subsistence resources. The book addresses theoretically significant questions of broad relevance such as the origins and spread of agriculture, the social negotiation of complex political formations, the effects of long-distance trade and interaction, the macroregional effects of landscape change, and prehispanic ideology and political power.

Focusing on questions of interregional interaction, environmental change, and political centralization, Polity and Ecology in Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca provides a comprehensive understanding of the Formative period archaeology of this important and long neglected region of Oaxaca.

Because nearly all aspects of culture depend on the movement of bodies, objects, and ideas, mobility has been a primary topic during the past forty years of archaeological research on small-scale societies. Most studies have concentrated either on local moves related to subsistence within geographically bounded communities or on migrations between regions resulting from pan-regional social and environmental changes. Gregson Schachner, however, contends that a critical aspect of mobility is the transfer of people, goods, and information within regions. This type of movement, which geographers term "population circulation," is vitally important in defining how both regional social systems and local communities are constituted, maintained, and—most important—changed.

Schachner analyzes a population shift in the Zuni region of west-central New Mexico during the thirteenth century AD that led to the inception of major demographic changes, the founding of numerous settlements in frontier zones, and the initiation of radical transformations of community organization. Schachner argues that intraregional population circulation played a vital role in shaping social transformation in the region and that many notable changes during this period arose directly out of peoples' attempts to create new social mechanisms for coping with frequent and geographically extensive residential mobility. By examining multiple aspects of population circulation and comparing areas that were newly settled in the thirteenth century to some that had been continuously occupied for hundreds of years, Schachner illustrates the role of population circulation in the formation of social groups and the creation of contexts conducive to social change.
 

The peoples of the American Southwest during the 13th through the 17th centuries witnessed dramatic changes in settlement size, exchange relationships, ideology, social organization, and migrations that included those of the first European settlers. Concomitant with these world-shaking events, communities of potters began producing new kinds of wares—particularly polychrome and glaze-paint decorated pottery—that entailed new technologies and new materials. The contributors to this volume present results of their collaborative research into the production and distribution of these new wares, including cutting-edge chemical and petrographic analyses. They use the insights gained to reflect on the changing nature of communities of potters as they participated in the dynamic social conditions of their world.

Pottery is one of the most important classes of artifacts available to archaeologists and anthropologists. Every year, volumes of data are generated detailing ceramic production, distribution, and consumption. How these data can be interpreted in relation to the social and cultural framework of prehistoric societies in Mesoamerica is the subject of this book.

Nine chapters written by some of the most well known and respected scholars in the field offer readers an in-depth look at key advances from the past fifteen years. These scholars examine ethnoarchaeological studies and the Preclassic/Formative, Classic, and Postclassic periods and cover geographic areas from eastern to central Mesoamerica. In a series of case studies, contributors address a range of new and developing theories and methods for inferring the technological, organizational, and social dimensions of pottery economics, and draw on a range of sociopolitical examples. Specific topics include the impacts and costs of innovations, the role of the producer in technological choices, the outcomes when errors in vessel formation are tolerated or rectified, the often undocumented multiple lives and uses of ceramic pieces, and the difficulties associated with locating and documenting ceramic production areas in tropical lowlands.

A compelling collection that clearly integrates and synthesizes a wide array of data, this book is the definitive text on pottery economics in Mesoamerica and an important contribution to the fields of anthropology, archaeology, ancient history, and the economics of pre-industrial societies.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1 . Conceptual Issues in Mesoamerican Pottery Economics
Christopher A. Pool and George J. Bey III

2 . An Ethnoarchaeological Perspective on Local Ceramic Production and Distribution in the Maya Highlands
Michael Deal

3 . Why Was the Potter’s Wheel Rejected? Social Choice and Technological Change in Ticul, Yucatán, Mexico
Dean E. Arnold, Jill Huttar Wilson, and Alvaro L. Nieves

4 . Ceramic Production at La Joya, Veracruz: Early Formative Techno Logics and Error Loads
Philip J. Arnold III

5 . Blanco Levantado: A New World Amphora
George J. Bey III

6 . Pottery Production and Distribution in the Gulf Lowlands of Mesoamerica
Barbara L. Stark

7 . Household Production and the Regional Economy in Ancient Oaxaca: Classic Period Perspectives from Hilltop El Palmillo and Valley-Floor Ejutla
Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nicholas

8 . Pottery Production and Exchange in the Petexbatun Polity, Petén, Guatemala
Antonia E. Foias and Ronald L. Bishop

9 . Aztec Otumba, AD 1200--1600: Patterns of the Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Ceramic Products
Thomas H. Charlton, Cynthia L. Otis Charlton, Deborah L. Nichols, and Hector Neff

References Cited
About the Contributors
Index
 

Although most ceramic studies describe vessel production and use, the causes and rates of pottery discard are often neglected in archaeological studies. Michael Shott presents analytical methods for determining pottery use life and demonstrates why use life should not be overlooked.
 
Over a five-year period Shott inventoried the household pottery of about twenty-five homes in five towns in Michoacán, Mexico, recording age and types of use. He also looked at a subsample on a monthly basis over two years to estimate the magnitude of early vessel failure that would go unnoticed in an annual census. His analysis of about 900 vessels clearly shows that context does not explain use life, but vessel size does. Bigger pots last longer. Consulting other ethnoarchaeological sources for comparison and cross-cultural perspectives, Shott shows that his results can be applied to other archaeological datasets for determining numbers of original whole vessels as well as site occupation span. 
 

By analyzing the pottery found at a well-known archaeological site, Hilgeman constructs the long-awaited timeline for the rise and decline of this ancient society.

Located near present-day Evansville, Indiana, the Angel site is one of the important archaeological towns associated with prehistoric Mississippian society. More than two million artifacts were collected from this site during excavations from 1939 to 1989, but, until now, no systematic survey of the pottery sherds had been conducted. This volume, documenting the first in-depth analysis of Angel site pottery, also provides scholars of Mississippian culture with a chronology of this important site.

Angel is generally thought to have been occupied from before A.D. 1200 to 1450, but scholars have been forced to treat this period as one chronological unit without any sense of the growth and decline of the society that occupied it. Using radiocarbon assays and an analysis of its morphological and stylistic attributes of pottery, Sherri Hilgeman is able to divide the occupation of Angel into a series of recognizable stages. She then correlates those stages with similar ones at other archaeological excavations—especially nearby Kincaid—making it possible to compare Angel society with other native cultures of the lower Ohio Valley. Through this important contribution to native pottery studies, Hilgeman opens a window into the lifeways of prehistoric Angel society and places that society in the larger context of Mississippian culture.

 

 

This volume is compilation of individual papers from the Great Basin/California Pottery Workshop of April 1983. The papers include data reports, literature reviews, statements of theoretical positions, and analytical methodology. All address ceramics, primarily of undecorated wares, from the Great Basin and nearby areas. 

The contributions to this volume represent a diverse array of Mesoamerican archaeological studies that are all theo-retically rooted to larger, global debates concerning issues of power and identity—two logically paired concepts. While social identity has been the focus of more critical analysis in recent years, the concept of power has received far less attention. Most studies focus on large-scale, institutional forms of power and the ruling body. Here, the focus is on relations of power, addressing broader segments of society outside the dominant group, that often are ignored in traditional reconstructions of past societies.

Harrison-Buck has compiled works that address a common criticism of social theory in the field of anthropological archaeology—the lack of strong case studies and corroborating facts supporting the abstract and often complex social theoretical concepts presented by scholars. Each contributor offers innovative method and theory and provides alternative and varied approaches to understanding power and identity in the archaeological record. They draw from a wide range of related disciplines and theoretical frameworks, including feminism, queer theory, cognitive studies, and postcolonial theory. The provocative case studies and exciting theoretical applications presented here will stimulate lively debate among scholars working both in and outside of Mesoamerica.
 

Examines issues of culture contact and social identity by exploring how the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries played out in the daily lives of Cherokee households, especially those excavated at the Townsend site in eastern Tennessee
 

Much of Jamaican prehistoric research—like that in the rest of the Caribbean basin—has been guided by at least a subconscious attempt to allow prehistoric native peoples to find their places within the charts established by Irving Rouse, who guided Caribbean research for much of the last half-century. The pre-Columbian peoples of Jamaica, and not merely their material culture, are beginning to take form, revealing their lifestyles and rituals, and taking their rightful place among the cultures of the New World.

 

Pre-Columbian Jamaica represents the first substantial attempt to summarize the prehistoric evidence from the island in a single published account since J. E. Duerden’s invaluable 1897 article on the subject, which is also reprinted within this volume. The book is designed to provide general commentary that can stand alone and be read as a continuous narrative; and as an additional and valuable resource is the accompanying CD-ROM that furnishes a great range of further illustrations, data, calculations, measurements, and comparisons. This data is curated at the Archaeology Laboratory at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, in Kingston, and was presented to the university by Dr. James Lee in 2000. His gift, and the comprehensive study that followed, provide the impetus for both the book and the CD-ROM. 

“[This book] presents a great amount of new information for a poorly known or understood area of northern Mexico, and provides a pleasant integration of the methods and theories of anthropology, geography, and ecology in a well-organized manner. . . . This report represents an important contribution to our understanding of cultural evolution and environmental adaptation in the Valley of Sonora and lays a strong framework for future studies and discussions.”—Journal of Arizona History

“Kosakowsky’s book, produced in the clear, easy-to-read and well-designed format . . . is a substantive contribution to Maya ceramic studies. She details the significant changes in the ceramic sequence and in so doing provides the kind of information that enables other ceramicists, and other Mayanists, to compare the Cuello phenomenon with developments elsewhere. Studies such as these are the building blocks of any larger-scale structural understanding of Maya cultural change.”—Journal of Latin American Studies

Among ancient Mesoamerican and Southwestern peoples, water was as essential as maize for sustenance and was a driving force in the development of complex society. Control of water shaped the political, economic, and religious landscape of the ancient Americas, yet it is often overlooked in Precolumbian studies. Now one volume offers the latest thinking on water systems and their place within the ancient physical and mental language of the region.

Precolumbian Water Management examines water management from both economic and symbolic perspectives. Water management facilities, settlement patterns, shrines, and water-related imagery associated with civic-ceremonial and residential architecture provide evidence that water systems pervade all aspects of ancient society. Through analysis of such data, the contributors seek to combine an understanding of imagery and the religious aspects of water with its functional components, thereby presenting a unified perspective of how water was conceived, used, and represented in ancient greater Mesoamerica. The collection boasts broad chronological and geographical coverage—from the irrigation networks of Teotihuacan to the use of ritual water technology at Casas Grandes—that shows how procurement and storage systems were adapted to local conditions.

The articles consider the mechanisms that were used to build upon the sacredness of water to enhance political authority through time and space and show that water was not merely an essential natural resource but an important spiritual one as well, and that its manipulation was socially far more complex than might appear at first glance. As these papers reveal, an understanding of materials associated with water can contribute much to the ways that archaeologists study ancient cultural systems. Precolumbian Water Management underscores the importance of water management research and the need to include it in archaeological projects of all types.