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The Yaqui of Mexico were early converts to Christianity in New Spain. Yet they came to be regarded with hostility by the newly emerging Mexican government. Many Yaquis fled Mexico in the early twentieth century and established a settlement in Arizona where they resumed a peaceful existence centered around their ceremonial calendar.

Edward Spicer devoted most of his professional career to the study of the Yaquis and came to be regarded as a leading authority on that tribe. At the inception of his forty years of research stands Pascua, a firsthand description of daily village life.

This monograph marks the first presentation of a detailed Classic period ceramic chronology for central and southern Veracruz, the first detailed study of a Gulf Coast pottery production locale, and the first sourcing-distribution study of a Gulf Coast pottery complex.

Spanish imperial attempts to form strong Indian alliances to thwart American expansion in the Mississippi Valley.

 

Charles Weeks explores the diplomacy of Spanish colonial officials in New Orleans and Natchez in order to establish posts on the Mississippi River and Tombigbee rivers in the early 1790s. Another purpose of this diplomacy, urged by Indian leaders and embraced by Spanish officials, was the formation of a regional Indian confederation that would deter American expansion into Indian lands.

Weeks shows how diplomatic relations were established and maintained in the Gulf South between Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee chiefs and their Spanish counterparts aided by traders who had become integrated into Indian societies. He explains that despite the absence of a European state system, Indian groups had diplomatic skills that Europeans could understand: full-scale councils or congresses accompanied by elaborate protocol, interpreters, and eloquent metaphorical language.

Paths to a Middle Ground is both a narrative and primary documents. Key documents from Spanish archival sources serve as a basis for the examination of the political culture and imperial rivalry playing out in North America in the waning years of the 18th century.

 

 

 

In a story that could only be told by someone who was an insider, this book reveals the background behind major legislative achievements of U.S. Tribal Nations leaders in the 1970s and beyond. American Indian attorney and proud Chippewa Cree Nation citizen Alan R. Parker gives insight into the design and development of the public policy initiatives that led to major changes in the U.S. government’s relationships with Tribal Nations. Here he relates the history of the federal government’s attempts, beginning in 1953 and lasting through 1965, to “terminate” its obligations to tribes that had been written into over 370 Indian treaties in the nineteenth century. When Indian leaders gathered in Chicago in 1961, they developed a common strategy in response to termination that led to a new era of “Indian Self-Determination, not Termination,” as promised by President Nixon in his 1970 message to Congress. Congressional leaders took up Nixon’s challenge and created a new Committee on Indian Affairs. Parker was hired as Chief Counsel to the committee, where he began his work by designing legislation to stop the theft of Indian children from their communities and writing laws to settle long-standing Indian water and land claims based on principles of informed consent to negotiated agreements. A decade later, Parker was called back to the senate to work as staff director to the Committee on Indian Affairs, taking up legislation designed by tribal leaders to wrest control from the Bureau of Indian Affairs over governance on the nation’s 250 Indian reservations and negotiating agreements between the tribes that led to the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. A valuable educational tool, this text weaves together the ideas and goals of many different American Indian leaders from different tribes and professional backgrounds, and shows how those ideas worked to become the law of the land and transform Indian Country.

 

“[People of Pascua] sketches the history and culture of the Tucson area Yaqui and contains case studies of a number of the informants. What constituted ‘Yaquiness’ in Pascua was mainly a common language, a shared historical tradition, and an aberrant form of Catholic Christianity laced with Yaqui concepts. This clearly and concisely written book is very important in its own terms both as an early example of the use of life histories in ethnology and as a significant contribution to Yaqui studies.”—Choice
 

Diverse in their languages and customs, the Native American peoples of the Great Lakes region—the Miamis, Ho-Chunks, Potawatomis, Ojibwas, and many others—shared a tumultuous history. In the colonial era their rich homeland became a target of imperial ambition and an invasion zone for European diseases, technologies, beliefs, and colonists. Yet in the face of these challenges, their nations’ strong bonds of trade, intermarriage, and association grew and extended throughout their watery domain, and strategic relationships and choices allowed them to survive in an era of war, epidemic, and invasion.

In Peoples of the Inland Sea, David Andrew Nichols offers a fresh and boundary-crossing history of the Lakes peoples over nearly three centuries of rapid change, from pre-Columbian times through the era of Andrew Jackson’s Removal program. As the people themselves persisted, so did their customs, religions, and control over their destinies, even in the Removal era. In Nichols’s hands, Native, French, American, and English sources combine to tell this important story in a way as imaginative as it is bold. Accessible and creative, Peoples of the Inland Sea is destined to become a classroom staple and a classic in Native American history.

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.
 

Dry whiskey, Divine herb, Devil’s root, Medicine of God, Peyote: for some people, to use it is to hear colors and see sounds. For many Native Americans, it brings an ability to reach out of their physical lives, to communicate with the spirits, and to become complete. For chemists, pharmacologists, and psychiatrists, the plant is fascinating in its complexity and in the ways its chemicals work upon the human mind.

What is it in peyote that causes such unusual effects? Can modern medical science learn anything from Native Americans’ use of peyote in curing a wide variety of ailments? What is the Native American Church, and how do its members use peyote? Does anyone have the legal right to use drugs or controlled substances in religious ceremonies?

Within this volume are answers to these and dozens of other questions surrounding the controversial and remarkable cactus. Greatly expanded and brought up-to-date from the 1980 edition, these pages describe peyote ceremonies and the users’ experiences, and also cover the many scientific and legal aspects of using the plant. Well written, informative, comprehensive, and enlightening, the book will be welcomed by counselors, anthropologists, historians, physicians, chemists, lawyers, and observers of the contemporary drug scene, as well as by interested general readers.

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.

The Phoenix Indian School was a boarding school founded in 1891 with the goal of fostering the assimilation of Native Americans into white society. The school served as a federal educational institution for Native American children from tribes in Arizona and elsewhere in the Southwest.

This book provides a history of the school from 1930 until the graduation of its final class of nineteen students in 1990. Dorothy Parker tells how the Phoenix Indian School not only adapted to policy changes instituted by the federal government but also had to contend with events occurring in the world around it, such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the advent of the "red power" movement.

Although the Phoenix Indian School has closed its doors forever, the National Park Service has undertaken an archaeological analysis of the site and an architectural documentation of the school's buildings. This history of its final years further attests to the legacy of this institution.

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.

A companion volume to Environmental Conflict in Alaska, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska chronicles the central land and wildlife issues and the growth of environmental conservation in Alaska during its Russian and territorial eras.

The Alaskan frontier tempted fur traders, whalers, salmon fishers, gold miners, hunters, and oilmen to take what they could without regard for long-term consequences. Wildlife species, ecosystems, and Native cultures suffered, sometimes irreparably. Damage to wildlife and lands drew the attention of environmentalists, including John Muir, who applied their influence to enact wildlife protection laws and set aside lands for conservation. Alaska served as a testing ground for emergent national resource policy in the United States, as environmental values of species and ecosystem sustainability replaced the unrestrained exploitation of Alaska's early frontier days.

Efforts of conservation leaders and the territory's isolation, small human population, and late development prevented widespread destruction and gave Americans a unique opportunity to protect some of the world's most pristine wilderness.

Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska illustrates the historical precedents for current natural resource disputes in Alaska and will fascinate readers interested in wildlife and conservation.

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.

A survey of Native American earthlodge research from across the Great Plains.

Early explorers initially believed the earthlodge homes of Plains village peoples were made entirely of earth. Actually, however, earthlodges are timber-frame structures, with the frame covered by successive layers of willows, grass, and earth, and with a tunnel-like entryway and a smoke hole in the center of the roof. The products of nearly a millennium of engineering development, historic period lodges were massively built. With diameters up to 60 feet across, they comprise the largest and most complex artifacts built on the Plains until the 20th century. Sheltering nuclear or extended families and their possessions—beds, stored food and clothing, weapons, sweatlodges, and even livestock—they shaped Plains villagers' lives both physically and symbolically.

This collection of papers explores current research in the ethnography and archaeology of Plains earthlodges, considering a variety of Plains tribes, including the Mandan, Hidatsa, Cheyenne, and their late prehistoric period predecessors. Acknowledged experts in the field discuss topics including lodge construction, architecture, maintenance, deterioration, and lifespan; the ritual practices performed in them; their associations with craft traditions, medicine lodges, and the Sun Dance; their gender symbolism; and their geophysical signatures.

With technological advances allowing an ever greater recognition of archaeological evidence in situ, future earthlodge research will yield even more information on their owners and residents. This volume provides a much-needed baseline for such research as well as comparative data for the occurrence of earthlodges in other sections of North America.

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.

Plants That We Eat is a handy, easy-to-use guide to the abundant edible plant life of Alaska. Drawing on centuries of knowledge that have kept the Inupiat people healthy, the book uses photographs and descriptions to teach newcomers to the north how to recognize which plants are safe to eat. Organized by seasons, from spring greens through summer berries to autumn roots, the book also features an appendix identifying poisonous plants.

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.

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. 

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.

One of the largest archaeological projects ever undertaken in North America, Peabody Coal Company's Black Mesa Archaeological Project conducted investigations in northeastern Arizona from 1967 to 1983. This mammoth undertaking recognized and recovered the remains of ephemeral camps, early agricultural sites, Puebloan villages, and Navajo settlements stretching over nearly ten millennia of human occupation.

Now a single comprehensive work summarizes the results of this intensive survey, excavation, and analysis. Prehistoric Culture Change on the Colorado Plateau offers the only complete synthesis of Kayenta-area archaeology as well as the single most intensive study of the ancestral Puebloan and Navajo occupation of the Four Corners region. It also provides the human context for more than two decades of theoretical, methodological, and empirical work.

The authors—all associated with the Black Mesa project—synthesize previous analyses of faunal, lithic, ceramic, chronometric, and human osteological data, weaving a coherent and compelling story of the prehistory and ethnohistory of northern Arizona. Through these data, they provide a summary of culture history which emphasizes that organizational variation and other aspects of culture change are largely a response to a changing natural environment.

The volume provides a systematic overview of human occupation on and around Black Mesa through time, beginning with the Paleoindian period, moving through the Archaic and Basketmaker periods, considering the Puebloan dispersion and the magnificent remains of the Pueblo III period, and culminating with Hopi and Navajo perspectives on their history. The authors examine relationships among population density, subsistence strategies, and social organization, and use these data to identify the regional context within which the Black Mesa people may have operated during different time periods.

Broad in scope with a wealth of supporting detail, Prehistoric Culture Change on the Colorado Plateau offers a basic reference on this important project that collects twenty years of analysis into one volume. It is a unique touchstone in Southwest archaeology that will stand as the last word on Black Mesa.

Prehistoric Games of North American Indians is a collection of studies on the ancient games of indigenous peoples of North America. The authors, all archaeologists, muster evidence from artifacts, archaeological features, ethnography, ethnohistory, and to a lesser extent linguistics and folklore. Chapters sometimes center on a particular game (chunkey rolling disc game or patolli dice game, for example) or sometimes on a specific prehistoric society and its games (Aztec acrobatic games, games of the ancient Fremont people), and in one instance on the relationship between slavery and gaming in ancient indigenous North American societies.

In addition to the intrinsic value of pursuing the time depth of these games, some of which remain popular and culturally important today among Native Americans or within the broader society, the book is important for demonstrating a wide variety of research methods and for problematizing a heretofore overlooked research topic. Issues that emerge include the apparently ubiquitous but difficult to detect presence of gambling, the entanglement of indigenous games and the social logic of the societies in which they are embedded, the characteristics of women’s versus men’s games or those of in-group and out-group gaming, and the close correspondence between gaming and religion. The book’s coverage is broad and balanced in terms of geography, level of socio-cultural organization and gender. 

At the confluence of the Illinois, the Missouri, and the Mississippi Rivers lies the "American Bottom," a broad floodplain that prehistoric peoples inhabited for millennia. Precisely how did they live? What were their ties to the natural world around them? In this study, based upon some six years of intensive archeological and geological research at Labras Lake in St. Clair County, Illinois, Richard W. Yerkes interprets a wealth of important new data in a stimulating and original fashion.

With a fine-tuned control of the data, Yerkes challenges prevailing theories based on simple classifications of stone tools according to shape or on simple models of diffuse and focal economies. He views environment as a dynamic factor in economic and cultural life, rather than as merely a backdrop to it. Using incident light microscopy, he examines wear patterns on stone tools to determine what activities were performed during each period the site was inhabited—the Late Archaic, the Late Woodland, and the Mississippian. As he documents environmental change at Labras Lake, he analyzes plant and animal remains in context to explore diet and seasonal patterns of subsistence and settlement.

The result is a more accurate and detailed picture than ever before what prehistoric life on the Mississippi floodplain was like. Yerkes shows how to assess the duration and size of occupations and how to determine where and when true permanent settlements arose. What others call "sedentary encampments" he reveals as sequences of small residental occupations for a narrow range of activities during shorter, seasonal periods. His contribution to the study of the development of sedentism is potentially far-reaching and will interest many North American anthropologists and archeologists.

Prehistoric Lifeways of the Great Basin Wetlands examines how the earliest inhabitants of the Great basin in Nevada, Utah, and Oregon made use of ancient marshes and lakes.

When the Great Salt Lake receded in the 1980s from its highest historically recorded levels, it exposed a large number of archaeological and burial sites. Other wetland areas in the region experienced similar flooding and site exposure. The resulting archaeological bonanza resolved long-standing controversy over the role of wetlands in prehistoric Great Basin human subsistence. Previously, archaeologists argued two disparate views: either wetlands offered a wealth of resources and served as a magnet for human occupation and rather sedentary lifestyles, or wetlands provided only meager fare that was insufficient to promote increased sedentism. The exposure of human remains coincided with improved analytic techniques, enabling new conclusions about diet, behavior, and genetic affiliation.

This volume presents findings from three Great Basin wetland areas: Great Salt Lake, Stillwater Marsh (Nevada) and Malheur Lake (Oregon). The evidence presented here does not indicate the superiority of one interpretation over another but offers a more complex picture of variable adaptation, high mobility, and generally robust health among peoples living in a harsh setting with heavy physical demands. It is the first volume to draw together new approaches to the study of earlier human societies, including analysis of mtDNA for population reconstruction and cross-sectional geometric assessment of long bones for behavior interpretation.

To many people in South Florida, and "oldtimer" is someone who has lived there for more than five years. Prehistoric Peoples of South Florida considers the culture history of the real South Florida "oldtimers" dating from 10,000 B.C. through the invasion by Europeans and analyzes the ways in which they adapted to their environment through time—or caused their environment to adapt to them.

South Florida is a biological island, its plant communities circumscribed by the southern limits of frost. Its peoples were distinct from those to the north and were less studied by scholars. In recent years the pace of research has increased, but there has been no attempt at synthesis since John M. Goggin wrote his still-unpublished manuscript on the Glades nearly half a century ago. Prehistoric Peoples of South Florida assembles the available knowledge and discusses competing theories, and does so in terms that are understandable to the general reader. McGoun outlines a cultural system that maintained an impressive continuity for 10,000 years—before being destroyed by two centuries of European contact.



 

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, archaeologists Earl and Ann Axtell Morris discovered an abundance of sandals from the Basketmaker II and III through Pueblo III periods while excavating rockshelters in northeastern Arizona. These densely twined sandals made of yucca yarn were intricately crafted and elaborately decorated, and Earl Morris spent the next 25 years overseeing their analysis, description, and illustration. This is the first full published report on this unusual find, which remains one of the largest collections of sandals in Southwestern archaeology. This monograph offers an integrated archaeological and technical study of the footwear, providing for the first time a full-scale analysis of the complicated weave structures they represent. Following an account by anthropologist Elizabeth Ann Morris of her parents' research, textile authority Ann Cordy Deegan gives an overview of prehistoric Puebloan sandal types and of twined sandal construction techniques, revealing the subtleties distinguishing Basketmaker sandals of different time periods. Anthropologist Kelley Ann Hays-Gilpin then discusses the decoration of twined sandals and speculates on the purpose of such embellishment.

University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 123

This study examines prehistoric use of the Stillwater Marsh in the Carson Desert of western Nevada and the adjacent Stillwater Mountains based on an archaeological survey undertaken in 1980 and 1981, and excavations conducted in 1987. Much of the argument about the use of wetlands revolved around whether they were used be sedentary hunter-gatherers, were just one stop of a family’s seasonal round, or were used only as backup resources. As a result, this report focuses on the issues of hunter-gatherer subsistence and mobility.

The Central Mississippi Valley, defined as the region along the Mississippi River from where the Ohio River joins in the north to its confluence with the Arkansas River in the south, lies between the two most important archaeological areas of the Southeast: American Bottom/Cahokia and the Lower Yazoo Basin. The valley has been influenced by these major centers and has a complex history of its own. Contributions from experts throughout the region present current, if sometimes conflicting, views of the regional cultural sequences supported by data from recent surveys and excavations, as well as radiocarbon and chronometric determinations. By examining this new information and reevaluating earlier interpretations of local archaeological sequences, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of the valley and defines future research goals.

Geoarchaeological studies can significantly enhance interpretations of human prehistory by allowing archaeologists to decipher from sediments and soils the effects of earth processes on the evidence of human activity. While a number of previous books have provided broad geographic and temporal treatments of geoarchaeology, this new volume presents a single author's view intended for North American archaeologists. Waters deals with those aspects of geoarchaeology—stratigraphy, site formation processes, and landscape reconstruction—most fundamental to archaeology, and he focuses on the late Quaternary of North America, permitting in-depth discussions of the concepts directly applicable to that research. Assuming no prior geologic knowledge on the part of the reader, Waters provides a background in fundamental geological processes and the basic tools of geoarchaeology. He then proceeds to relate specific physical processes, microenvironments, deposits, and landforms associated with riverine, desert, lake, glacial, cave, coastal, and other environments to archaeological site formation, location, and context. This practical volume illustrates the contributions of geoarchaeological investigations and demonstrates the need to make such studies an integral part of archaeological research. The text is enhanced by more than a hundred line drawings and photographs.

CONTENTS
1. Research Objectives of Geoarchaeology
2. Geoarchaeological Foundations: The Archaeological Site Matrix: Sediments and Soils / Stratigraphy / The Geoarchaeological Interpretation of Sediments, Soils, and Stratigraphy
3. Alluvial Environments: Streamflow / Sediment Erosion, Transport, and Deposition / Alluvial Environments: Rivers, Arroyos, Terraces, and Fans / Alluvial Landscapes Evolution and the Archaeological Record / Alluvial Landscape Reconstruction
4. Eolian Environments: Sediment Erosion, Transport, and Deposition / Sand Dunes / Loess and Dust / Stone Pavements / Eolian Erosion / Volcanic Ash (Tephra)
5. Springs, Lakes, Rockshelters, and Other Terrestrial Environments: Springs / Lakes / Slopes / Glaciers / Rockshelters and Caves
6. Coastal Environments: Coastal Processes / Late Quaternary Sea Level Changes / Coastal Environments / Coastal Landscape Evolution and the Archaeological Record / Coastal Landscape Reconstruction
7. The Postburial Disturbance af Archaeological Site Contexts: Cryoturbation / Argilliturbation / Graviturbation / Deformation / Other Physical Disturbances / Floralturbation / Faunalturbation
8. Geoarchaeological Research
Appendix A: Geoarchaeological Studies Illustrating the Effects of Fluvial Landscape Evolution on the Archaeological Record
Appendix B: Geoarchaeological Studies Illustrating Site-Specific Synchronic and Diachronic Alluvial Landscape Reconstructions
Appendix C: Geoarchaeological Studies Illustrating Regional Synchronic and Diachronic Alluvial Landscape Reconstructions