front cover of Havasupai Legends
Havasupai Legends
Religion and Mythology of the Havasupai Indians of the Grand Canyon
Robert C Euler
University of Utah Press, 1994
For almost seven hundred years, the Havasupai Indians, who call themselves People of the Blue Water, have lived in an area that includes the depths of the western Grand Canyon and the heights of the San Francisco Peaks. Here they inhabited the greatest altitude variation of any Indians in Southwestern America.

Written in consultation with some of the last Havasupai shamans, this book details their religious beliefs, customs, and healing practices. A second section presents legends of the Havasupai origin, the first people, and tales of Coyote, Gila Monster, Bear, and others.
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The Hayduke Trail
A Guide to the Backcountry Hiking Trail on the Colorado Plateau
Joe Mitchell
University of Utah Press, 2005
Traversing six national parks (Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce, Grand Canyon, Zion), a national recreation area, a national monument, and various wilderness, primitive, and wilderness study areas, the Hayduke Trail is a challenging, 800-mile backcountry route on the Colorado Plateau. Whimsically named for a character in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, the trail begins in Arches National Park and ends in Zion National Park, stays entirely on public land, and traverses the complete variety of terrain available to hikers on the Plateau short of technical climbing.

Joe Mitchell and Mike Coronella pioneered Hayduke after concluding that a long trail—such as the Appalachian or Pacific Crest— was possible on the Plateau, thus introducing more people to these unique and threatened public lands. The Hayduke Trail includes detailed maps of the entire route, suggested cache points, and a wealth of description and tips for tackling this intense undertaking.

Hiking the entire route requires at least three months, though like other long trails it can be broken into smaller segments. The guide, featured in the March 2005 issue of National Geographic Adventure Magazine, is designed for experienced desert trekkers seeking a thorough-hiking experience on a well-tested route.
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Heart Of The Sound
Marybeth Holleman
University of Utah Press, 2004

"You can’t step in the same river twice—although I once believed I could. I believed that the pieces of my life I had chosen, those I held close to my heart, would, once chosen and held, remain the same."—from the book

How does one recover from disaster? That question is at the heart of Marybeth Holleman’s lyrical, elegiac response to the repercussions of the Exxon Valdez oil spill that devastated Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. Twining together the destruction of an ecosystem and the disintegration of her marriage, Holleman explores the resiliency of nature—both wild and human—and the ways in which that resiliency is tested. Like the oil that remains pooled beneath rocks years after the tanker spill, the emotional wounds of the past lie just below the surface. Recovery and restoration from the pain wrought by human hands does not come easily.

If much of nature writing is about the heart’s search for an unspoiled, perfect landscape, The Heart of the Sound is about what happens when the return-to-paradise fantasy is over and paradise is lost. In language rich with passion and hard-won insight, Holleman creates a captivating picture of a woman who found her Eden in the sweeping fjords of Alaska only to lose it to ecological tragedy. But somewhere within that loss, she finds herself.

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Heart Petals
The Personal Correspondence of David Oman McKay to Emma Ray McKay
Mary Jane Woodger
University of Utah Press, 2005
12 June 1906
Love feeds and grows on love, and while it grows, it increases the capacity of the soul for loving. So our love was perfect when I kissed you at the altar; it is perfect to-day; it will be perfect when the century strikes ‘half-past;’ it will be perfect eternally. - from the book
David O. McKay served as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1951 until his death in 1970. A devout and devoted leader, he was no less devoted to his beloved wife, Emma Ray McKay. In this collection of letters from the David Oman McKay Papers at the J. Willard Marriott Library of the University of Utah, McKay’s courtship of Emma Ray Riggs and the early days of the couple’s marriage are revealed in his own words.
The McKays were married in the Salt Lake Latter-day Saints Temple on January 2, 1901, the first “sealing” of the twentieth century. They became known as the church’s happiest couple. One of the things that cultivated that happiness were the poems and expressions of endearment McKay presented his wife, offerings he referred to as 'heart petals'. The letters collected here are replete with touching examples of those gifts of love.
Throughout this correspondence, McKay reveals his innermost feelings, joys, heartaches, and determinations, imparting a wealth of insights into his personal, caring nature and documenting his growth from a young, inexperienced missionary to a mature leader within the LDS Church. But most striking of all in these letters is the blossoming of a true, devoted love that lasted over seventy years.
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Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement
Julie Debra Neuffer
University of Utah Press, 2014
In 1961, Helen Andelin, housewife and mother of eight, languished in a lackluster, twenty-year-old marriage. A religious woman, she fasted and prayed for help. As she studied a set of women’s advice booklets from the 1920s, Andelin had an epiphany that not only changed her life but also affected the lives of millions of American women. She applied the principles from the booklets and found that her disinterested husband became loving and attentive. He bought her gifts and hurried home from work to be with her. Andelin took her new-found happiness as a sign that it was her religious duty to share these principles with other women. She began leading small discussion groups for women at her church. The results were dramatic. In 1963, at the urging of her followers, Andelin wrote and self-published Fascinating Womanhood. The book, which borrowed heavily from those 1920s advice booklets, the Bible, and classical literature, eventually sold over three million copies and launched a nationwide organization of classes and seminars led by thousands of volunteer teachers.

Countering second-wave feminists in the 1960s, Andelin preached family values and urged women not to have careers, but to become good wives, mothers, and homemakers instead. A woman’s true happiness, taught Andelin, could only be realized if she admired, cared for, and obeyed her husband. As Andelin’s notoriety grew, so did the backlash from her critics. Undeterred, she became a national celebrity, who was interviewed extensively and appeared in sold-out speaking engagements.

Andelin’s message calling for the return to traditional roles appealed to many in a time of uncertainty and radical social change. This study provides an evenhanded and important look at a crucial, but often overlooked cross section of American women as they navigated their way through the turbulent decades following the post-war calm of the 1950s.

Winner of the Mormon History Association's Best Biography Award.
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front cover of Her Mouth as Souvenir
Her Mouth as Souvenir
Heather June Gibbons
University of Utah Press, 2018
Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize
 
In a startling voice propelled by desire and desperation on the verge of laughter, these poems leap from the mundane to the sublime, from begging to bravado, from despair to reverie, revealing the power that comes from hanging on by a thread. Poet Heather June Gibbons conjures belief in the absence of faith, loneliness in the digital age, beauty in the face of absurdity—all through the cataract of her sunglasses’ cracked lens. In this debut collection, we are shown a world so turbulent, anxious, and beautiful, we know it must be ours. Under pressure, these poems sing.
Includes a foreword by Jericho Brown.

From the poem “Bobby Reads Chekhov”
They say if you’re sad, you haven’t been
smiling enough. Want to make better decisions?
Eat more cheese. Perception is reality,
my horrible boss used to say when I’d try
to explain anything she couldn’t see,
though maybe she was right. Can we know
reality any other way? The painter saw
purple in the trees, so he painted them purple.
Leaving the gallery, we see purple everywhere.
Studies have shown meditation makes
brain waves akin to coma. Is that so,
you say, fingering your tiny screen.
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High in Utah
Michael Weibel
University of Utah Press, 1999
If you measured the highest point in each county, which of the fifty states would have the highest average elevation? You probably didn’t say Utah, but in fact the average elevation of the state’s county high points is approximately 11,222 feet (Colorado is second at 10,971 feet). Most but not all of Utah’s high peaks grow out of a series of mountain ranges that form a backbone from north to south through the middle of the state. Surprisingly, most can also be climbed in a day, and during the warm months climbing gear may be unnecessary. Some summits are even attainable by car.

High in Utah is quite consciously a book for peak baggers, complete with a checklist and elevations. Summits range from Kings Peak, Utah’s highest at 13,528’ to the unnamed peak in Rich County, a mere 9,255’. In addition to the county high points, this book also has four “classic” climbs: Mt. Olympus in Salt Lake County; Mt. Timpanogos above Provo; Notch Peak in the House Range west of Delta; and Wellsville Cone, Cache Valley’s western landmark.

Since finding a place to start can often be the most frustrating part of a hike, emphasis is placed on directions to each trailhead. There is a road map for each hike, as well as a trail map showing contours. The routes in this guide are not always the easiest or most practical, but they may be the most appealing and are often the most commonly used (lessening human impact on other potential routes). Difficulty levels range from 'extreme'—long, steep routes that may require some route finding—to 'too easy'—reachable by car. Two sets of hiking times are provided to accommodate variations in hiking speed, and there are also sections on flora and fauna, mountain weather, low-impact hiking and camping, equipment, and altitude sickness.

"Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either."
—Edward Abbey, 1927–1989
[more]

front cover of High Uinta Trails
High Uinta Trails
John Veranth
University of Utah Press, 1998
 An indispensable resource for selecting a destination and planning a trip in the High Uintas.

High Uinta Wilderness—three emotion-charged words that describe a very precious place. The highest mountains, the unique alpine ecosystem, and the largest designated Wilderness in Utah are all found here.

This is a complete rewriting of the original High Uinta Trails, first published in 1974. Access road and land management information has been expanded, new areas and routes have been added, and trail conditions have been completely updated.

The descriptions of the trails, lakes, ridges, and summits are an indispensable resource for selecting a destination and planning a trip but there are still plenty of undocumented places in the Uintas to explore.
[more]

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Highpoints of the United States
A Guide to the Fifty State Summits
Don W. Holmes
University of Utah Press, 2023

The highpoints of the fifty states range from Alaska’s 20,310-foot-high Mount McKinley to 345 feet at Lakewood Park in Florida. Some highpoints, such as Mount Mitchell in North Carolina and New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, can be reached by car on a sightseeing drive. Others, including Colorado’s Mount Elbert or Mount Marcy in New York, are accessible as wilderness day hikes. Still others, such as Mount Rainier in Washington or Gannett Peak in Wyoming, are strenuous and risky mountaineering challenges that should be attempted only by experienced climbers. Whatever your level of skill and interest, these varied highpoints offer a diverse range of experiences.

The third edition of this classic guide updates route descriptions and maps, changes to private property ownership and public lands requirements, lists of guides and outfitters, and essential online resources. As with the two popular previous editions, Highpoints of the United States is arranged alphabetically by state, each site description accompanied with a map, photographs, information on trailhead, main and alternative routes, elevation gain, conditions, historical and natural history notes, and lists of potential guides or outfitters. Appendices include a list of highpoints by region and by elevation, useful resources, and a personal log for the unashamed “peak-bagger.”

Whether you’re an armchair hiker or a seasoned climber, interested only in your state’s highest point or all fifty, this book will be an invaluable companion and reference.

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front cover of Highpoints of the United States
Highpoints of the United States
A Guide to the Fifty State Summits
Don Holmes
University of Utah Press, 2000

The highpoints of the fifty states range from Alaska’s 20,320 foot high Mount McKinley to 345 feet at Lakewood Park in Florida. Some highpoints, such as Mount Mitchell in North Carolina and New Hampshire’s Mount Washington can be reached by automobile on a sightseeing drive. Others such as Colorado’s Mount Elbert or Mount Marcy in New York are accessible as wilderness day hikes. Still others, such as Mount Rainier in Washington or Gannett Peak in Wyoming, are strenuous and risky mountaineering challenges that should be attempted only by experienced climbers. Whatever your level of skill and interest, Highpoints of the United States offers a diverse range of experiences.

Arranged alphabetically by state, each listing has a map, photographs, and information on trailhead, main and alternative routes, elevation gain, and conditions. Historical and natural history notes are also included, as are suggestions for specific guidebooks to a region or climb. Appendices include a list of highpoints by region, by elevation, and a personal log for the unashamed "peak-bagger."

Whether you’re an armchair hiker or a seasoned climber, interested only in your state’s highest point or all fifty, this book will be an invaluable companion and reference.

[more]

front cover of A Hiking Guide To Cedar Mesa
A Hiking Guide To Cedar Mesa
Peter Francis Tassoni
University of Utah Press, 2001
The Cedar Mesa country in southeast Utah is a land of convoluted cliffs with arches, natural bridges, hoodoos, spires, hat rocks, ledges, and alcoves. It is a land of flash floods and extreme temperatures that demands much from those who would explore it. It is also an unparalleled museum of geological features and ancestral Puebloan culture. This fascinating culture flowered for more than a millennium and visitors to southeast Utah are treated to a sampling of archaeological wonders.

A Hiking Guide to Cedar Mesa describes sixty-three routes, ranging from quarter-mile walks to fifteen-mile day hikes, loops, and multi-day backpack trips. There is essential information on permits, weather, gear, road, trailhead access, geology, human history in the region, and leave-no-trace camping.

Care is given to name only those well-known archaeological sites that are visible or immediately accessible from roads. Throughout, the author emphasizes proper visitation protocol for fragile archaeological sites. He states, "I have been touched by this landscape and would prefer to keep its teachings and secrets to myself, but I cannot. The experience of the desert should be available to everyone with the motivation to encounter it."
[more]

front cover of A Hiking Guide to the Geology of the Wasatch Mountains
A Hiking Guide to the Geology of the Wasatch Mountains
Mill Creek and Neffs Canyons, Mount Olympus, Big and Little Cottonwood and Bells Canyons
William T Parry
University of Utah Press, 2005

Northern Utah’s Wasatch Mountains are popular destinations for outdoor enthusiasts in every season. These mountains rise spectacularly from the relatively flat valley floor to thirteen peaks over 11,000 feet in elevation. An additional nineteen peaks rise more than 10,000 feet in elevation. Although many hiking guides exist for the Wasatch Mountains, there has been no guide book that focuses on the geologic features visible from the trails—until now.

Written by a recognized authority on the geology of the Wasatch Mountains, this guide is meant to enrich the experience of outdoor enthusiasts who want to understand the geological history and development of the Wasatch range. The first section of the book introduces the major geological time periods—the record of mountain building events from oldest to youngest, the effects of glaciation, and the development of the present topography. It then follows with a descriptive trail guide for each major trail system, including Mill Creek and Neffs Canyons, Mount Olympus, Little and Big Cottonwood Canyons, and Bells Canyon. Trail length, elevation gain, relative difficulty, and major geological features are outlined for each trail. Now you can hike these trails with the answers to all your geologic questions right at your fingertips.

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front cover of Hiking The Escalante
Hiking The Escalante
Rudi Lambrechts
University of Utah Press, 1999

An invaluable resource to anyone traversing the Escalante, this comprehensive guide details 43 hikes.

Publisher's Note: Realizing there are virtually no marked trails in the Escalante country (mostly canyons that wander and have many intersections, challenging anyone to write explicit description), this book includes directions to the trailhead, how to follow a particular route with choices of side canyons along the way, and occasional alternate endings. Some of the hikes may be appropriate for beginners. Some only the most experienced should attempt.

[more]

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Hiking the Escalante
In the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, New Edition
Rudi Lambrechtse
University of Utah Press, 2015
The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument covers 1.7 million acres in southern Utah, offering the hiker an experience of deep solitude surrounded by a wealth of geological, biological, and archaeological treasures. Hiking the Escalante opens the door to exploration of this highly scenic area of meandering canyons with relatively few marked trails. It lists fifty hikes by degree of difficulty and includes directions to trailheads, instructions for how to follow particular routes, choices of side canyons along the way, suggestions for loop hikes, and occasional alternative endings. A detailed road log will guide you to each of four described sections. Along with hike descriptions, the book provides information on the geology, natural history, and human history of the area. This second edition contains seven new hikes, new photographs, and updated information about hike terrain. 
[more]

front cover of Hiking the Wasatch
Hiking the Wasatch
Revised Edition
John Veranth
University of Utah Press, 1988
Few places offer the hiking opportunities available right here in the Wasatch. Hundreds of miles of trails and three Wilderness Areas are within a few minutes’ drive of Salt Lake City. John Veranth has hiked all these trails and has written a comprehensive guidebook with hiking suggestions arranged by season and difficulty.

Beginners will find detailed descriptions of easy hikes on well-maintained trails. Challenging routes to seldom-visited cirques and summits are suggested for the expert.

Maps, photos, and line drawings accompany the trail descriptions. Data tables list distances and hiking times. The geology, native plants, human history, and contemporary issues are discussed to aid in understanding these wonderful mountains. 
[more]

front cover of A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan
A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan
1557-2000
Victoria R. Bricker
University of Utah Press, 2018
Victoria Bricker’s painstaking work is based on almost one thousand provenienced notarial documents and letters written by native speakers of Yucatec Maya from colonial times to the modern day. Because the documents are dated and also specify the town where they were written, Bricker was able to determine when and where grammatical changes first appeared in the language and the trajectory of their movement across the Yucatan peninsula. This exemplary grammar of Yucatec Maya includes examples and careful explanations of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures of the language. Bricker’s research is distinguished in its treatment of seemingly aberrant spellings of Maya words as clues to the way they were actually pronounced at different times in the past. Her chapters include topics seldom covered, such as deictic particles, affects, and reduplication. Of special interest is a poetic form of reduplication composed of couplets (or triplets) found in documents from each of the centuries, indicating the continuity of this genre from the Colonial to the Modern version of this language.
 
[more]

front cover of A History of Utah International
A History of Utah International
From Construction to Mining
Sterling D Sessions
University of Utah Press, 2005

The story of how the Utah Construction Company, founded in Ogden, Utah in 1900, became Utah International, a multinational corporation, is known to historians of the American West but perhaps not by the general public. The publication of this book remedies that omission.

During its first decades, the company built railroads and dams and was one of the Six Companies Consortium that built Hoover Dam. Utah Construction was also engaged in numerous war-contract activities during World War II. In the postwar period, the company expanded its activities into mining and land development and moved its headquarters to San Francisco. Changing its name to Utah Construction and Mining, and eventually to Utah International, the corporation became one of the most successful multinational mining companies in the world. In 1976, Utah International and General Electric negotiated the largest yet corporate merger in the United States.

Based on the Utah International archives housed in the Stewart Library at Weber State University, the story of Utah International describes more than projects: it is also the story of how two remarkable entrepreneurs, Marriner Stoddard Eccles and Edmund Wattis Littlefield, transformed the company incorporated in 1900 by the Wattis brothers into the largest and most profitable mining company in the United States.

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front cover of A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top
A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top
Fraud and Deceit in the Golden Age of American Mining
Dan Plazak
University of Utah Press, 2006
Coal, silver, gold. There is something about the allure of hidden treasure that puts a glint in people’s eyes. By gathering such familiar stories as that of Nevada’s infamous Comstock Lode with a succession of lesser-known scandals, Dan Plazak provides an entertaining and informative volume that delightfully investigates the history of mining frauds in the United States from the Civil War to World War I.
[more]

front cover of Holes in Our Moccasins, Holes in Our Stories
Holes in Our Moccasins, Holes in Our Stories
Apachean Origins and the Promontory, Franktown, and Dismal River Archaeological Records
Edited by John W. Ives and Joel C. Janetski
University of Utah Press, 2022
From 1930 to 1931, Julian Steward recovered hundreds of well-worn moccasins, along with mittens, bison robe fragments, bows, arrows, pottery, bone and stone tools, cordage, gaming pieces, and abundant faunal remains, making Utah’s Promontory Caves site one of the most remarkable hunter-gatherer archaeological records in western North America. Although Steward recognized that the moccasins and other artifacts were characteristic of the Canadian Subarctic and northern Plains and not the Great Basin, his findings languished for decades. 

This volume connects Steward’s work with results from new excavations in Promontory Caves 1 and 2 and illustrates that the early Promontory Phase resulted from an intrusive large-game hunting population very different from nearby late Fremont communities. Lingering for just one or two human generations, the cave occupants began to accept people as well as material and symbolic culture from surrounding thirteenth-century neighbors. Volume contributors employ a transdisciplinary approach to evaluate the possibility that the Promontory Phase materials reflect the presence of Apachean ancestors.  In these records lies the seeds for the intensive Plains-Puebloan interactions of the centuries that followed. 
 
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Home Waters
A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River
George B Handley
University of Utah Press, 2010

People who flyfish know that a favorite river bend, a secluded spot in moving waters, can feel like home—a place you know intimately and intuitively. In prose that reads like the flowing current of a river, scholar and essayist George Handley blends nature writing, local history, theology, environmental history, and personal memoir in his new book Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River.

Handley’s meditations on the local Provo River watershed present the argument that a sense of place requires more than a strong sense of history and belonging, it requires awareness and commitment. Handley traces a history of settlement along the Provo that has profoundly transformed the landscape and yet neglected its Native American and environmental legacies. As a descendent of one of the first pioneers to irrigate the area, and as a witness to the loss of orchards, open space, and an eroded environmental ethic, Handley weaves his own personal and family history into the landscape to argue for sustainable belonging. In avoiding the exclusionist and environmentally harmful attitudes that come with the territorial claims to a homeland, the flyfishing term, “home waters,” is offered as an alternative, a kind of belonging that is informed by deference to others, to the mysteries of deep time, and to a fragile dependence on water. While it has sometimes been mistakenly assumed that the Mormon faith is inimical to good environmental stewardship, Handley explores the faith’s openness to science, its recognition of the holiness of the creation, and its call for an ethical engagement with nature. A metaphysical approach to the physical world is offered as an antidote to the suicidal impulses of modern society and our persistent ambivalence about the facts of our biology and earthly condition. Home Waters contributes a perspective from within the Mormon religious experience to the tradition of such Western writers as Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams, Steven Trimble, and Amy Irvine.

Winner of the Mormon Letters Award for Memoir.

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House of Mourning
A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre
Shannon A Novak
University of Utah Press, 2008

On September 11, 1857, some 120 men, women, and children from the Arkansas hills were murdered in the remote desert valley of Mountain Meadows, Utah. This notorious massacre was, in fact, a mass execution: having surrendered their weapons, the victims were bludgeoned to death or shot at point-blank range. The perpetrators were local Mormon militiamen whose motives have been fiercely debated for 150 years.

In House of Mourning, Shannon A. Novak goes beyond the question of motive to the question of loss. Who were the victims at Mountain Meadows? How had they settled and raised their families in the American South, and why were they moving west once again? What were they hoping to find or make for themselves at the end of the trail? By integrating archival records and oral histories with the first analysis of skeletal remains from the massacre site, Novak offers a detailed and sensitive portrait of the victims as individuals, family members, cultural beings, and living bodies.

The history of the massacre has often been treated as a morality tale whose chief purpose was to vilify (or to glorify) some collective body. Resisting this tendency to oversimplify the past, Novak explores Mountain Meadows as a busy and dangerous intersection of cultural and material forces in antebellum America. House of Mourning is a bold experiment in a new kind of history, the biocultural analysis of complex events.

Winner of the Society for Historical Archaeology James Deetz Book Award. 
 

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front cover of Household Archaeology at the Bridge River Site (EeRl4), British Columbia
Household Archaeology at the Bridge River Site (EeRl4), British Columbia
Spatial Distributions of Features, Lithic Artifacts, and Faunal Remains on Fifteen Anthropogenic Floors from Housepit 54
Anna Marie Prentiss, Ethan Ryan, Ashley Hampton, Kathryn Bobolinski, Pei-Lin Yu, Matthew Schmader, and Alysha Edwards
University of Utah Press, 2022
Household Archaeology at Bridge River offers a unique contribution to the study of household archaeology, providing unprecedented insights into the history of a long-lived house in the Interior Pacific Northwest. With fifteen intact anthropogenic floors dating to pre-Colonial times, Bridge River’s Housepit 54 provides an extraordinary archaeological record—the first to allow researchers to adequately test for relationships between occupational variation and social change.

The authors take a methodological approach that integrates the study of household spatial organization with consideration of archaeological formation processes. Repeating the same set of analyses for each floor, they examine stability from standpoints of occupation and abandonment cycles, structure and organization of activity areas, and variation in positioning of wealth-related items. This volume is an outstanding example of research undertaken through a collaborative partnership between scholars from the University of Montana and the community of the St’át’imc Nation.
 
[more]

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Household Economy at Wall Ridge
A Fourteenth-Century Central Plains Farmstead in the Missouri Valley
Edited by Stephen C. Lensink, Joseph A. Tiffany, and Shirley J. Schermer
University of Utah Press, 2020

Household Economy at Wall Ridge tells the story of a Native American household that occupied a lodge on the eastern Plains border during the early 1300s AD. Contributors use cutting-edge methods and the site’s unparalleled archaeological record to shed light on the daily technological, subsistence, and dietary aspects of the occupants’ lives. This work represents the first comprehensive study of a prehistoric Central Plains household in over half a century.

The research covers archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, dating, ceramics, lithics, bone and shell tools, diet, climate, ecology, and more. The study of plant and animal usage from the lodge stands as a tour de force of analytical methods, including stable isotope data that permit the discovery of dietary items missed by traditional studies. Many of these items have never been reported before from Central Plains sites. The book firmly sets the site’s occupancy at AD 1305, with a margin of error of only a few years. This result, based on high-precision dating methods, exceeds in accuracy all previously dated Plains lodges and provides a temporal backdrop for evaluating household activities.

[more]

front cover of Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines
Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines
Lewis Henry Morgan
University of Utah Press, 2003

A classic, available again.

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) was trained as a lawyer, but in the second part of his life he focused his attention on the emerging science of ethnography.

Covering areas of North and Central America, Morgan’s last book, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines was the first to regard a set of problems that is still currently debated: what does domestic architecture show anthropologists and archaeologists about social organization, and how does social organization combine with a system of production technology and ecological adjustment to influence domestic and public architecture? As William Longacre makes clear in the new introduction, the development of anthropological archaeology was profoundly affected by this book, and its impact continues to resonate.

Demonstrating a lack of ethnocentrism rare for his day, Morgan gathered most of his own data from the field and from a gigantic correspondence. The result is a lively, readable work that is still fascinating and instructive today.

[more]

front cover of How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic
How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic
Remedying Institutional Failures
Allen Buchanan, with contributions by Cécile Fabre and Sir Paul Tucker
University of Utah Press, 2024
There is no shortage of criticisms of U.S. COVID-19 policy. This book argues that officials at the highest levels lied to the public or deliberately suppressed relevant information, shamelessly over-sold the efficacy of masks and vaccines, and enacted lock-down policies of unproven value that caused massive economic, educational, and psycho-social damage.

In How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic Allen Buchanan argues that, contrary to widespread opinion, the primary cause of flawed COVID-19 policy was not defective leadership, but rather institutional failure. Decisions were made through processes that lacked the most basic safeguards against the large-institution “yes-man” and group-think phenomena and included virtually no provisions for holding decision makers accountable. More fundamentally, policy makers did not fulfill the crucial duty to provide plausible public justifications for their decisions. They disguised the fact that scientific opinion was divided on the appropriateness of the policies they endorsed and labeled those who disagreed with them as anti-scientific. In some cases, they responded to criticism, not by engaging it on the issues, but by branding their critics as quacks.
[more]

front cover of Humanist Mystics
Humanist Mystics
Nationalism and the Commemoration of Saints in Turkey
Mark Soileau
University of Utah Press, 2018
When the Ottoman Empire met its demise in the early twentieth century, the new Republic of Turkey closed down the Sufi orders, rationalizing that they were antimodern. Yet the nascent nation, faced with defining its cultural heritage, soon began to promote the legacies of three Sufi saints: Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, Hacı Bektaş Veli, and Yunus Emre. Their Turkish ethnicity, along with universalist themes found in their poetry and legends—of love, peace, fellowship, and tolerance—became the focus of their commemoration. With this reinterpretation of their characters—part of a broader secularist project—these saints came to be considered the great Turkish humanists. Their veneration came to play an important role in the nationalist formulation of Turkish culture, but the universalism of their humanism has exposed fissures in society over the place of religion in the nation.
 
Humanist Mystics is the first book to examine Islam and secularism within Turkish nationalist ideology through the lens of commemorated saints. Soileau surveys Anatolian and Turkish religious and political history as the context for his closer attention to the lives and influence of these three Sufi saints. By comparing premodern hagiographic and scholarly representations with twentieth-century monographs, literary works, artistic media, and commemorative ceremonies, he shows how the saints have been transformed into humanist mystics and how this change has led to debates about their character and relevance.
[more]

front cover of Hunters of the Mid-Holocene Forest
Hunters of the Mid-Holocene Forest
Old Cordilleran Culture Sites at Granite Falls, Washington
James C. Chatters, Jason B. Cooper, and Philippe D. LeTourneau
University of Utah Press, 2020
University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 134

This volume examines an almost purely lithic record known in the Puget Sound region as the Olcott Complex. Only loosely described off and on since the early 1960s by a series of researchers, none of whom used the same analytical approach, the Olcott record has never been systematically analyzed until now. As a result, this book fills in enormous gaps in our knowledge regarding the age, mode of subsistence, and adaptive strategy of the Olcott Complex. Chatters and colleagues describe the intensive excavation of three Olcott sites that were threatened by highway construction. The book concludes by pulling those findings together to place the Olcott Complex into its proper place in regional prehistory. An exemplary model of how to conduct archaeological research, the volume demonstrates how important research issues can be addressed in a cultural resource management context.

Extensive appendices available online.
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