front cover of The Fabric of Resistance
The Fabric of Resistance
Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru
Di Hu
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Examines the long-term social conditions that enabled large-scale rebellions in late Spanish colonial Peru
 
The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru documents the impact of Spanish colonial institutions of labor on identity and social cohesion in Peru. Through archaeological and historical lines of evidence, Di Hu examines the long-term social conditions that enabled the large-scale rebellions in the late Spanish colonial period in Peru. Hu argues that ordinary people from different backgrounds pushed back against the top-down identity categories imposed by the Spanish colonial government and in the process created a cosmopolitan social landscape that later facilitated broader rebellion.
 
Hu’s case study is Pomacocha, the site of an important Spanish colonial hacienda (agricultural estate) and obraje (textile workshop). At its height, the latter had more than one hundred working families and sold textiles all over the Andes. Through analysis of this site, Hu explores three main long-term causes of rebellions against Spanish oppression. First, the Spanish colonial economy provided motivation and the social spaces for intercaste (indigenous, African, and mestizo) mixing at textile workshops. Second, new hybrid cultural practices and political solidarity arose there that facilitated the creation of new rebellious identities. Third, the maturation in the eighteenth century of popular folklore that reflected the harsh nature of Spanish labor institutions helped workers from diverse backgrounds gain a systemic understanding of exploitation.
 
This study provides a fresh archaeological and historical perspectives on the largest and most cosmopolitan indigenous-led rebellions of the Americas. Hu interweaves analyses of society at multiple scales including fine-grained perspectives of social networks, demography, and intimate details of material life in the textile workshop. She examines a wide range of data sources including artifacts, food remains, architectural plans, account books, censuses, court documents, contracts, maps, and land title disputes.
 
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front cover of Fabrica San Jose and Middle Formative Society in the Valley of Oaxaca
Fabrica San Jose and Middle Formative Society in the Valley of Oaxaca
Robert D. Drennan
University of Michigan Press, 2019
In the early 1970s, Robert D. Drennan excavated the Middle Formative archaeological site Fábrica San José in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. In this volume he presents the results of the excavations and provides a chronology of Middle Formative ceramics. Appendix on carbonized plant remains by Richard I. Ford.
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front cover of Faction and Conversion in a Plural Society
Faction and Conversion in a Plural Society
Religious Alignments in the Hindu Kush
Robert Leroy Canfield
University of Michigan Press, 1973
In this work, anthropologist Robert Leroy Canfield discusses several powerful social systems in central Afghanistan and their impact on the geographical distribution of religious sects in the area. Territorial groups, the kinship network, and community fission all play a part in why people live where they do. Canfield did his fieldwork among the residents of the province of Bamian during the years 1966 to 1968.
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Facts on the Ground
Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society
Nadia Abu El-Haj
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Archaeology in Israel is truly a national obsession, a practice through which national identity—and national rights—have long been asserted. But how and why did archaeology emerge as such a pervasive force there? How can the practices of archaeology help answer those questions? In this stirring book, Nadia Abu El-Haj addresses these questions and specifies for the first time the relationship between national ideology, colonial settlement, and the production of historical knowledge. She analyzes particular instances of history, artifacts, and landscapes in the making to show how archaeology helped not only to legitimize cultural and political visions but, far more powerfully, to reshape them. Moreover, she places Israeli archaeology in the context of the broader discipline to determine what unites the field across its disparate local traditions and locations.

Boldly uncovering an Israel in which science and politics are mutually constituted, this book shows the ongoing role that archaeology plays in defining the past, present, and future of Palestine and Israel.
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front cover of Faithful Generations
Faithful Generations
Race and New Asian American Churches
Jeung, Russell
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Religion—both personal faith and institutional tradition—plays a central role in the lives of the 12.5 million Asians in the United States. It provides comfort and meaning, shapes ethical and political beliefs, and influences culture and arts. Faithful Generations details the significance of religion in the construction of Asian American identity. As an institutional base for the movement toward Asian American panethnicity, churches provide a space for theological and political reflection and ethnic reinvention.

With rich description and insightful interviews, Russell Jeung uncovers why and how Chinese and Japanese American Christians are building new, pan-Asian organizations. Detailed surveys of over fifty Chinese and Japanese American congregations in the San Francisco Bay area show how symbolic racial identities structure Asian American congregations. Evangelical ministers differ from mainline Christian ministers in their construction of Asian American identity. Mobilizing around these distinct identities, evangelicals and mainline Christians have developed unique pan-Asian styles of worship, ministries, and church activities. Portraits of two churches further illustrate how symbolic racial identities affect congregational life and ministries. The book concludes with a look at Asian American–led multiethnic churches.

This engaging study of the shifting relationship between religion and ethnicity is an ideal text for classes in ethnicity, religion, and Asian American studies.

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front cover of Far Western Basketmaker Beginnings
Far Western Basketmaker Beginnings
The Jackson Flat Project
Edited by Heidi Roberts, Richard V. N. Ahlstrom, and Jerry D. Spangler
University of Utah Press, 2022
The Basketmaker presence in southern Utah has traditionally been viewed as peripheral to developments originating in the Four Corners region. Far Western Basketmaker Beginnings offers an entirely new and provocative perspective—that the origins of farming on the northern Colorado Plateau are instead found far to the west along Kanab Creek.

This volume, based on the results of excavations at Jackson Flat Reservoir south of Kanab, examines a litany of firsts: the earliest Archaic pithouses ever found in this region, evidence that maize farmers arrived here a thousand years earlier than previously reported, and the emergence of a complex Basketmaker farming and foraging culture. Specialists in Far Western Puebloan culture, architecture, settlement patterns, subsistence, chronometry, and prehistoric technologies make a compelling case that farming was introduced to the region by San Pedro immigrants, and that the blending of farmers with local foraging groups gave rise to a Basketmaker lifeway by 200 BC. This book marks a giant leap forward in archaeologists’ understanding of the earliest maize farmers north and west of the Colorado River. 
 
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front cover of Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists
Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists
Interaction Between the Southwest and the Southern Plains
Edited by Katherine A. Spielmann
University of Arizona Press, 1991
Eight contributors discuss early trade relations between Plains and Pueblo farmers, the evolution of interdependence between Plains hunter-gatherers and Pueblo farmers between 1450 and 1700, and the later comanchero trade between Hispanic New Mexicans and the Plains Comanche.
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front cover of Farming, Hunting, and Fishing in the Olmec World
Farming, Hunting, and Fishing in the Olmec World
By Amber M. VanDerwarker
University of Texas Press, 2006

The Olmec who anciently inhabited Mexico's southern Gulf Coast organized their once-egalitarian society into chiefdoms during the Formative period (1400 BC to AD 300). This increase in political complexity coincided with the development of village agriculture, which has led scholars to theorize that agricultural surpluses gave aspiring Olmec leaders control over vital resources and thus a power base on which to build authority and exact tribute.

In this book, Amber VanDerwarker conducts the first multidisciplinary analysis of subsistence patterns at two Olmec settlements to offer a fuller understanding of how the development of political complexity was tied to both agricultural practices and environmental factors. She uses plant and animal remains, as well as isotopic data, to trace the intensification of maize agriculture during the Late Formative period. She also examines how volcanic eruptions in the region affected subsistence practices and settlement patterns. Through these multiple sets of data, VanDerwarker presents convincing evidence that Olmec and epi-Olmec lifeways of farming, hunting, and fishing were driven by both political and environmental pressures and that the rise of institutionalized leadership must be understood within the ecological context in which it occurred.

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front cover of The Fate of Earthly Things
The Fate of Earthly Things
Aztec Gods and God-Bodies
By Molly H. Bassett
University of Texas Press, 2015

Following their first contact in 1519, accounts of Aztecs identifying Spaniards as gods proliferated. But what exactly did the Aztecs mean by a “god” (teotl), and how could human beings become gods or take on godlike properties? This sophisticated, interdisciplinary study analyzes three concepts that are foundational to Aztec religion—teotl (god), teixiptla (localized embodiment of a god), and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles containing precious objects)—to shed new light on the Aztec understanding of how spiritual beings take on form and agency in the material world.

In The Fate of Earthly Things, Molly Bassett draws on ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic analyses, visual culture, and ritual studies to explore what ritual practices such as human sacrifice and the manufacture of deity embodiments (including humans who became gods), material effigies, and sacred bundles meant to the Aztecs. She analyzes the Aztec belief that wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim during a sacred rite could transform a priest into an embodiment of a god or goddess, as well as how figurines and sacred bundles could become localized embodiments of gods. Without arguing for unbroken continuity between the Aztecs and modern speakers of Nahuatl, Bassett also describes contemporary rituals in which indigenous Mexicans who preserve costumbres (traditions) incorporate totiotzin (gods) made from paper into their daily lives. This research allows us to understand a religious imagination that found life in death and believed that deity embodiments became animate through the ritual binding of blood, skin, and bone.

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front cover of A Fateful Day in 1698
A Fateful Day in 1698
The Remarkable Sobaipuri-O’odham Victory over the Apaches and Their Allies
Deni J. Seymour
University of Utah Press, 2014
In 1698, the Apache and their allies attacked a sleeping Sobaipuri-O’odham village on the San Pedro River at the northern edge of New Spain, now in southern Arizona. This book, about one of the most important Southwestern battles of the era in this region, reads like a mystery. At the same time, it addresses in a scholarly fashion the methodological question of how we can confidently infer anything reliable about the past.
 
Translations of original Spanish accounts by Father Kino and others convey important details about the battle, while the archaeological record and ethnographic and oral traditions provide important correctives to the historic account. A new battlefield signature of native American conflict is identified, and the fiery context of the battle provides unprecedented information about what the Sobaipuri grew and hunted in this out-of-the-way location, including the earliest known wheat.
 
That this tumultuous time was a period of flux is reflected in the defensive, communal, and ceremonial architecture of the O'odham, which accommodated Spanish tastes and techniques. Practices specific to the O’odham as they relate to the day’s events and to village life illuminate heretofore unexplained aspects of the battle. The book also records a visit by descendant O’odham, reinforcing the importance of identifying the historically documented location.
 
A Fateful Day in 1698 will be of significant interest to archaeologists and historians.
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front cover of The Faunas of Hayonim Cave, Israel
The Faunas of Hayonim Cave, Israel
A 200,000-Year Record of Paleolithic Diet, Demography, and Society
Mary C. Stiner
Harvard University Press, 2005
A decade of zooarchaeological fieldwork (1992-2001) went into Mary Stiner's pathbreaking analysis of changes in human ecology from the early Mousterian period through the end of Paleolithic cultures in the Levant. Stiner employs a comparative approach to understanding early human behavioral and environmental change, based on a detailed study of fourteen bone assemblages from Hayonim Cave and Meged Rockshelter in Israel's Galilee. Principally anthropological in outlook, Stiner's analysis also integrates chemistry, foraging and population ecology, vertebrate paleontology, and biogeography. Her research focuses first on the formation history, or taphonomy, of bone accumulations, and second on questions about the economic behaviors of early humans, including the early development of human adaptations for hunting large prey and the relative "footprint" of humans in Pleistocene ecosystems of the Levant.
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front cover of Feasting with Shellfish in the Southern Ohio Valley
Feasting with Shellfish in the Southern Ohio Valley
Archaic Sacred Sites and Rituals
Cheryl Claassen
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

In this provocative work, Cheryl Claassen challenges long-standing notions n this provocative work, Cheryl Claassen challenges long-standing notions Iabout hunter-gatherer life in the southern Ohio Valley as it unfolded some Iabout hunter-gatherer life in the southern Ohio Valley as it unfolded some I8,000 to 3,500 years ago. Focusing on freshwater shell mounds scattered 8,000 to 3,500 years ago. Focusing on freshwater shell mounds scattered along the Tennessee, Ohio, Green, and Harpeth rivers, Claassen draws on the latest archaeological research to offer penetrating new insights into the sacred world of Archaic peoples. Some of the most striking ideas are that there were no villages in the southern Ohio Valley during the Archaic period, that all of the trading and killing were for ritual purposes, and that body positioning in graves reflects cause of death primarily.


Mid-twentieth-century assessments of the shell mounds saw them as the products of culturally simple societies that cared little about their dead and were concerned only with food. More recent interpretations, while attributing greater complexity to these peoples, have viewed the sites as mere villages and stressed such factors as population growth and climate change in analyzing the way these societies and their practices evolved. Claassen, however, makes a persuasive case that the sites were actually the settings for sacred rituals of burial and
renewal and that their large shell accumulations are evidence of feasts associated with those ceremonies. She argues that the physical evidence—including the location of the sites, the largely undisturbed nature of the deposits, the high incidence of dog burials, the number of tools per body found at the sites, and the indications of human sacrifice and violent death—not only supports this view but reveals how ritual practices developed over time. The seemingly sudden demise of shellfish consumption, Claassen contends, was not due to overharvesting and environmental change; it ended, rather, because the sacred rituals changed.


Feasting with Shellfish in the Southern Ohio Valley is a work bound to stir controversy and debate among scholars of the Archaic period. Just as surely, it will encourage a new appreciation for the spiritual life of ancient peoples—how they thought about the cosmos and the mysterious forces that surrounded them.
 

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front cover of Feasts
Feasts
Archaeological and Ethnographic Pespectives on Food, Politics, and Power
Michael Dietler
University of Alabama Press, 2010

From the ancient Near East to modern-day North America, communal consumption of food and drink punctuates the rhythms of human societies. Feasts serve many social purposes, establishing alliances for war and marriage, mobilizing labor, creating political power and economic advantages, and redistributing wealth. In this collection of fifteen essays, archaeologists and ethnographers explore the material record of food and its consumption as social practice. They examine the locations of roasting pits, hearths, and refuse deposits, or the presence of special decorative ceramics, and infer ways in which feasting traditions reveal social structures of lineage, clan, moiety, and polity.

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front cover of Feeding Cahokia
Feeding Cahokia
Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland
Gayle J. Fritz
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award

An authoritative and thoroughly accessible overview of farming and food practices at Cahokia
 
Agriculture is rightly emphasized as the center of the economy in most studies of Cahokian society, but the focus is often predominantly on corn. This farming economy is typically framed in terms of ruling elites living in mound centers who demanded tribute and a mass surplus to be hoarded or distributed as they saw fit. Farmers are cast as commoners who grew enough surplus corn to provide for the elites.
 
Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland presents evidence to demonstrate that the emphasis on corn has created a distorted picture of Cahokia’s agricultural practices. Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture. Gayle J. Fritz shows that the division between the so-called elites and commoners simplifies and misrepresents the statuses of farmers—a workforce consisting of adult women and their daughters who belonged to kin groups crosscutting all levels of the Cahokian social order. Many farmers had considerable influence and decision-making authority, and they were valued for their economic contributions, their skills, and their expertise in all matters relating to soils and crops. Fritz examines the possible roles played by farmers in the processes of producing and preparing food and in maintaining cosmological balance.
 
This highly accessible narrative by an internationally known paleoethnobotanist highlights the biologically diverse agricultural system by focusing on plants, such as erect knotweed, chenopod, and maygrass, which were domesticated in the midcontinent and grown by generations of farmers before Cahokia Mounds grew to be the largest Native American population center north of Mexico. Fritz also looks at traditional farming systems to apply strategies that would be helpful to modern agriculture, including reviving wild and weedy descendants of these lost crops for redomestication. With a wealth of detail on specific sites, traditional foods, artifacts such as famous figurines, and color photos of significant plants, Feeding Cahokia will satisfy both scholars and interested readers.
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front cover of Feeding the Ancestors
Feeding the Ancestors
Tlingit Carved Horn Spoons
Anne-Marie Victor-Howe
Harvard University Press, 2007

Feeding the Ancestors presents an exquisite group of carved spoons from the Pacific Northwest that resides in the collections of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Carved from the horns of mountain goats and Dall sheep, and incorporating elements of abalone shell and metal, most of the spoons were collected in Alaska in the late nineteenth century and were made and used by members of the Tlingit tribe. Hillel Burger's beautiful color photographs reveal every nuance of the carvers' extraordinary artistry.

Anne-Marie Victor-Howe introduces the collectors and describes the means by which these and other ethnographic objects were acquired. In the process, she paints a vivid picture of the "Last Frontier" just before and shortly after the United States purchased Alaska. A specialist in the ethnography of the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast, Victor-Howe provides a fascinating glimpse into these aboriginal subsistence cultures as she explains the manufacture and function of traditional spoons. Her accounts of the clan stories associated with specific carvings and of the traditional shamanic uses of spoons are the result of extensive consultation with Tlingit elders, scholars, and carvers.

Feeding the Ancestors is the first scholarly study of traditional feast spoons and a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Pacific Northwest Coast peoples and their art.

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front cover of Festivals of Attica
Festivals of Attica
An Archaeological Commentary
Erika Simon
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

The festivals of the Athenian sacred calendar constitute a vital key to classical Greek culture and religion.  Erika Simon sets out here to explicate those complex and often obscure festivals.  By careful marshaling of a variety of proofs from literary, historical, and archaeological sources, she is able to justify some startling conclusions and achieve a comprehensive and truly original synthesis that clarifies, as never before, the probable origins and meanings of the Attic cults.

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Field Man
Life as a Desert Archaeologist
Julian D. Hayden; Edited by Bill Broyles and Diane E. Boyer
University of Arizona Press, 2012
Field Man is the captivating memoir of renowned southwestern archaeologist Julian Dodge Hayden, a man who held no professional degree or faculty position but who camped and argued with a who's who of the discipline, including Emil Haury, Malcolm Rogers, Paul Ezell, and Norman Tindale. This is the personal story of a blue-collar scholar who bucked the conventional thinking on the antiquity of man in the New World, who brought a formidable pragmatism and "hand sense" to the identification of stone tools, and who is remembered as the leading authority on the prehistory of the Sierra Pinacate in northwestern Mexico.
 
But Field Man is also an evocative recollection of a bygone time and place, a time when archaeological trips to the Southwest were "expeditions," when a man might run a Civilian Conservation Corps crew by day and study the artifacts of ancient peoples by night, when one could honeymoon by a still-full Gila River, and when a Model T pickup needed extra transmissions to tackle the back roads of Arizona.
 
To say that Julian Hayden led an eventful life would be an understatement. He accompanied his father, a Harvard-trained archaeologist, on influential excavations, became a crew chief in his own right, taught himself silversmithing, married a "city girl," helped build the Yuma Air Field, worked as a civilian safety officer, and was a friend and mentor to countless students. He also crossed paths with leading figures in other fields. Barry Goldwater and even Frank Lloyd Wright turn up in this wide-ranging narrative of a "desert rat" who was at once a throwback and--as he only half-jokingly suggests--ahead of his time.
 
Field Man is the product of years of interviews with Hayden conducted by his colleagues and friends Bill Broyles and Diane Boyer. It is introduced by noted southwestern anthropologist J. Jefferson Reid, and contains an epilogue by Steve Hayden, one of Julian's sons.
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Field Seasons
Reflections on Career Paths and Research in American Archaeology
Anna Marie Prentiss
University of Utah Press, 2012

In Field Seasons, Anna Marie Prentiss chronicles her experiences as an archaeologist, providing an insider’s look at the diverse cultures, personal agendas, and career pathways associated with American archaeology since the late twentieth century. As the narrative moves from her academic training to employment in government and private consulting to her eventual professorship at a state university, several themes emerge.

This book is about career paths. Its discussion of the diverse jobs within the archaeological profession makes it valuable to students seeking guidance about their career options. It also provides insight into the cultures of American archaeology, a discipline with many schools of thought and unique subcultures. The world of archaeological field technicians is quite different from that of government bureaucrats or academics. Prentiss also explores the elements of cultural change within archaeology while she reflects on her personal evolution throughout her thirty years within the discipline.

The book’s unique personal assessment of the state of American archaeology will appeal to a broad swath of students and professionals. Students will find it an entertaining road map to possible careers while professionals will find plenty of scholarly material concerning ethics, archaeological theory, and interpretations of the archaeological record.
 

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front cover of Fierce and Indomitable
Fierce and Indomitable
The Protohistoric Non-Pueblo World in the American Southwest
Edited by Deni J. Seymour
University of Utah Press, 2016

Trending upward as an archaeological field of study, protohistoric mobile groups provide fascinating new directions for cutting-edge research in the American Southwest and beyond. These mobile residents represent the ancient and ancestral roots of many modern indigenous peoples, including the Apaches, Jumano, Yavapai, and Ute. These important protohistoric and historic mobile people have tended to be ignored because their archaeological sites were deemed too difficult to identify, too scant to be worthy of study, and too different to incorporate. This book brings together information from a diverse collection of authors working throughout the American Southwest and its fringes to make the bold statement that these groups can be identified in the archaeological record and their sites have much to contribute to the study of cultural process, method and theory, and past lifeways. Mobile groups are integral for assessing the grand reorganizational events of the Late Prehistoric period and are key to understanding colonial contact and transformations. Now, the only analyses, overviews, and class lectures that will be considered comprehensive will be those that address the presence of these many widespread mobile peoples. 

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front cover of Finding People in Early Greece
Finding People in Early Greece
Carol G. Thomas
University of Missouri Press, 2005
Progress toward a fuller understanding of preclassical Greece was steady until the 1950s, when a general crisis in all the human-centered disciplines erupted. Scholars undertook a serious reexamination of their tools and data, producing new brands of history, geography, anthropology, archaeology, economics, and sociology. Although these new approaches were widely adopted, the developments also bred a countercurrent beginning in the 1980s and 1990s. The fallout from this backlash was serious in several respects, one of the most important of which was the elimination of the human element in the products of the “new” human-centered disciplines.
            In Finding People in Early Greece, Carol Thomas addresses these developments and the recent accommodation and rapprochement of the “old” and “new” that has emerged. She then offers two case studies: Jason and the voyage of the Argo, deriving from the “Age of Heroes,” and Hesiod, probably the first literate European, who lived ca. 700 BCE during the “Age of Revolution,” which catapulted Greece out of its long Dark Age into the vibrant Classical Age. With these two examples, Thomas shows that through a combination of scientific tools and historically oriented scholarship, a larger context in which individual subjects lived can be offered.  
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front cover of Finding Solace in the Soil
Finding Solace in the Soil
An Archaeology of Gardens and Gardeners at Amache
Bonnie J. Clark
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Finding Solace in the Soil tells the largely unknown story of the gardens of Amache, the War Relocation Authority incarceration camp in Colorado. Combining physical evidence with oral histories and archival data and enriched by the personal photographs and memories of former Amache incarcerees, the book describes how gardeners cultivated community in confinement.
Before incarceration, many at Amache had been farmers, gardeners, or nursery workers. Between 1942 and 1945, they applied their horticultural expertise to the difficult high plains landscape of southeastern Colorado. At Amache they worked to form microclimates, reduce blowing sand, grow better food, and achieve stability and preserve community at a time of dehumanizing dispossession. In this book archaeologist Bonnie J. Clark examines botanical data like seeds, garden-related artifacts, and other material evidence found at Amache, as well as oral histories from survivors and archival data including personal letters and government records, to recount how the prisoners of Amache transformed the harsh military setting of the camp into something resembling a town. She discusses the varieties of gardens found at the site, their place within Japanese and Japanese American horticultural traditions, and innovations brought about by the creative use of limited camp resources.
 
The gardens were regarded by the incarcerees as a gift to themselves and to each other. And they were also, it turns out, a gift to the future as repositories of generational knowledge where a philosophical stance toward nature was made manifest through innovation and horticultural skill. Framing the gardens and gardeners of Amache within the larger context of the incarceration of Japanese Americans and of recent scholarship on displacement and confinement, Finding Solace in the Soil will be of interest to gardeners, historical archaeologists, landscape archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and scholars of Japanese American history and horticultural history.
 
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front cover of Finding the People who Flaked the Stone at English Camp
Finding the People who Flaked the Stone at English Camp
Close, Angela E
University of Utah Press, 2006
Lithic analysis in North America traditionally has focused on bifacially retouched pieces, or bifaces. Angela Close contends that such an approach has ignored cores and debitage to the detriment of analysis.
 
At English Camp on San Juan Island, Washington, an earlier excavation (1950) kept the bifaces and discarded everything else, unstudied. Typically, the bifaces themselves have been used as type-fossils, allowing assignment of occupation to a chronological phase but serving little other purpose. North American lithic analysis has seen a move away from this approach and toward other aspects of lithic assemblages, yet the emphasis is still on the genesis of bifaces.
 
In this volume, Close uses a fine-grained study to critique American approaches to lithic analysis. Her approach is based on chaîne opératoire analysis, which applied here attempts to trace the life-histories of all artifacts in an assemblage from raw material procurement to discard and entry into the archaeological record. This approach is aimed explicitly at the people behind the artifacts.
 
Close’s final and likely controversial analysis is that women did a great deal of the tool manufacture at this particular site.
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front cover of The Fires of Vesuvius
The Fires of Vesuvius
Pompeii Lost and Found
Mary Beard
Harvard University Press, 2010

Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history, from the sixth century BCE to the present day.

Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was—more like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol?—and what it can tell us about “ordinary” life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica.

Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyd’s memorable rock concert to Primo Levi’s elegy on the victims. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.

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front cover of The First Rocky Mountaineers
The First Rocky Mountaineers
Coloradans before Colorado
Marcel Kornfeld
University of Utah Press, 2013
Based on archaeological research in Colorado’s Middle Park—a high mountain basin initially encountered by Europeans in the early 1800s and occupied for centuries by the Ute people—The First Rocky Mountaineers is a prehistory of the earliest people of the region at the conclusion of the Ice Age. The Utes and their predecessors lived and thrived for 12,000 years in this high mountain setting, an environment that demanded unique adaptive strategies because of cold stress and hypoxic conditions. People of Middle Park coped with some of the most extreme conditions of any prehistoric population in North America, dealing with the stressors of high elevations and low temperatures by intensifying food acquisition, constructing shelters, and tailoring sophisticated warm clothing. The archaeological record of these early Coloradans, while still meager, provides a wealth of information about lifeways in the Rocky Mountain high country.
 
The first inhabitants of Rocky Mountain high country left a rich record of shelters, tools, and projectile points as well as food residues in the form of bison bone, all dating between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago. This record provides a robust database for interpreting their lifeways and unique adaptations. Kornfeld offers the first treatment of the original Middle Park and Rocky Mountain human populations from a biocultural perspective. This approach suggests that both biological and cultural processes frame the outcome of a successful human adaptation. While such a process may be resisted by some anthropologists investigating low-elevation groups, it is essential when trying to understand the dynamics of those living in the high country.

Chosen by Foreword as the 2014 bronze winner in science. 
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front cover of Fish, Amphibian and Reptile Remains from Archaeological Sites
Fish, Amphibian and Reptile Remains from Archaeological Sites
Southeastern and Southwestern United States, Appendix: The Osteology of the Wild Turkey
Stanley J. Olsen
Harvard University Press, 1968
Stanley Olsen’s invaluable manual presents diagnostic characteristics of the fish, amphibian, and reptile bones commonly found in archaeological sites in the southeastern and southwestern United Stares. An appendix describes in detail the osteology of the wild turkey.
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The Fisher Site
Archaeological, Geological and Paleobotanical Studies at an Early Paleo-Indian Site in Southern Ontario, Canada
Peter L. Storck
University of Michigan Press, 1997
A detailed, multidisciplinary report on a large Early Paleoindian site in the Georgian Bay region.
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Flinders Petrie
A Life in Archaeology
Margaret S. Drower
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

Flinders Petrie has been called the “Father of Modern Egyptology”—and indeed he is one of the pioneers of modern archaeological methods. This fascinating biography of Petrie was first published to high acclaim in England in 1985. Margaret S. Drower, a student of Petrie’s in the early 1930s, traces his life from his boyhood, when he was already a budding scholar, through his stunning career in the deserts of Egypt to his death in Jerusalem at the age of eighty-nine. Drower combines her first-hand knowledge with Petrie’s own voluminous personal and professional diaries to forge a lively account of this influential and sometimes controversial figure.
    Drower presents Petrie as he was: an enthusiastic eccentric, diligently plunging into the uncharted past of ancient Egypt. She tells not only of his spectacular finds, including the tombs of the first Pharaohs, the earliest alphabetic script, a Homer manuscript, and a collection of painted portraits on mummy cases, but also of Petrie’s important contributions to the science of modern archaeology, such as orderly record-keeping of the progress of a dig and the use of pottery sherds in historical dating. Petrie's careful academic methods often pitted him against such rival archaeologists as Amélineau, who boasted he had smashed the stone jars he could not carry away to be sold, and Maspero and Naville, who mangled a pyramid at El Kula they had vainly tried to break into.

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Flintknapping
Making and Understanding Stone Tools
By John C. Whittaker
University of Texas Press, 1994

Flintknapping is an ancient craft enjoying a resurgence of interest among both amateur and professional students of prehistoric cultures. John C. Whitaker's bestselling guide is a detailed handbook on flintknapping, written from the archaeological perspective of interpreting stone tools as well as making them.

Flintknapping contains detailed, practical information on making stone tools. Whittaker starts at the beginner level and progresses to discussion of a wide range of techniques. He includes information on necessary tools and materials, as well as step-by-step instructions for making several basic stone tool types. Numerous diagrams allow the reader to visualize the flintknapping process, and drawings of many stone tools illustrate the discussions and serve as models for beginning knappers.

Written for a wide amateur and professional audience, Flintknapping will be essential for practicing knappers as well as for teachers of the history of technology, experimental archaeology, and stone tool analysis.

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Flower Worlds
Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest
Edited by Michael D. Mathiowetz and Andrew D. Turner
University of Arizona Press, 2021

The recognition of Flower Worlds is one of the most significant breakthroughs in the study of Indigenous spirituality in the Americas. These worlds are solar and floral spiritual domains that are widely shared among both pre-Hispanic and contemporary Native cultures in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Flower Worldsis the first volume to bring together a diverse range of scholars to create a truly multidisciplinary understanding of Flower Worlds. During the last thirty years, archaeologists, art historians, ethnologists, Indigenous scholars, and linguists have emphasized the antiquity and geographical extent of similar Flower World beliefs among ethnic and linguistic groups in the New World.

Flower Worlds are not simply ethereal, otherworldly domains, but rather they are embodied in lived experience, activated, invoked, and materialized through ritual practices, expressed in verbal and visual metaphors, and embedded in the use of material objects and ritual spaces. This comprehensive book illuminates the origins of Flower Worlds as a key aspect of religions and histories among societies in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. It also explores the role of Flower Worlds in shaping ritual economies, politics, and cross-cultural interaction among Indigenous peoples.

Flower Worlds reaches into multisensory realms that extend back at least 2,500 years, offering many different disciplines, perspectives, and collaborations to understand these domains. Today, Flower Worlds are expressed in everyday work and lived experiences, embedded in sacred geographies, and ritually practiced both individually and in communities. This volume stresses the importance of contemporary perspectives and experiences by opening with living traditions before delving into the historical trajectories of Flower Worlds, creating a book that melds scientific and humanistic research and emphasizes Indigenous voices.

Contributors: Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, James M. Córdova, Davide Domenici, Ángel González López, Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Michael D. Mathiowetz, Cameron L. McNeil, Felipe S. Molina, Johannes Neurath, John M. D. Pohl, Alan R. Sandstrom, David Delgado Shorter, Karl A. Taube, Andrew D. Turner, Lorena Vázquez Vallín, Dorothy Washburn

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Fluted Points of the Far West
Michael F. Rondeau
University of Utah Press, 2022

Fluted Points of the Far West provides the first large-scale overview of fluted points in the far western United States, including details of their attributes, trends in production, and range of variability. It serves as a compendium of groundbreaking research by the California Fluted Lanceolate Uniform Testing and Evaluation Database (CalFLUTED) project. Details regarding size, morphology, material, basal flaking technology, breakage patterns, repair patterns, manufacturing (as revealed by unfinished fluted bifaces), margin grinding, and flute scratching are provided through this research, both in terms of general trends and noteworthy exceptions.

Designed as a ready reference, these data are also summarized for each of the four sample states covered: California, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah. Summaries introduce the history and circumstances of fluted point studies by state, a list of references for each state used in the CalFLUTED study reports, a comprehensive listing of the relevant CalFLUTED study reports, and a breakdown by state of fluted point attribute details as listed above.

Reviews and discussions cover a range of topics, including classification of fluted points, identifying flute scars, and indicative traits that a fluted point is not from the prehistoric Far West. Additional discussions cover hafting alternatives, fluted point dating, far western fluted point typology, and the likely direction of further research on a range of fluted point topics.

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Folklore of the Atayal of Formosa and the Mountain Tribes of Luzon
Edward Norbeck
University of Michigan Press, 1950
Edward Norbeck offers a translation of folk tales of the Atayal, a tribe from the island of Taiwan. Norbeck presents the possibility that these tales are related to the mythology of other Indonesian and southeast Asian groups, especially the mountain tribes of Luzon, in the Philippines.
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Food Production in Native North America
An Archaeological Perspective
Kristen J. Gremillion
University Press of Colorado, 2018
This book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series provides a broad overview of the development of agriculture and other forms of resource management by the Native peoples of North America. Its geographical scope includes most of the continent’s temperate zone, but regions where agriculture took hold are emphasized. Temporally, this volume looks back as far as the first indigenous domesticates that emerged in the midcontinental region and follows the story into the era of European conquest.
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Food Provisioning in Complex Societies
Zooarchaeological Perspectives
Levent Atici
University Press of Colorado, 2022

Through creative combinations of ethnohistoric evidence, iconography, and contextual analysis of faunal remains, this work offers new insight into the mechanisms involved in food provisioning for complex societies. Contributors combine zooarchaeological and historical data from global case studies to analyze patterns in centralization and bureaucratic control, asymmetrical access and inequalities, and production-distribution-consumption dynamics of urban food provisioning and animal management.
 
Taking a global perspective and including both prehistoric and historic case studies, the chapters in the volume reflect some of the current best practices in the zooarchaeology of complex societies. Embedding faunal evidence within a broader anthropological explanatory framework and integrating archaeological contexts, historic texts, iconography, and ethnohistorical sources, the book discerns myriad ways that animals are key contributors to, and cocreators of, complex societies in all periods and all places. Chapters cover the diverse sociopolitical and economic roles wild animals played in Bronze Age Turkey; the production and consumption of animal products in medieval Ireland; the importance of belief systems, politics, and cosmologies in Shang Dynasty animal provisioning in the Yellow River Valley; the significance of external trade routes in the kingdom of Aksum (modern Sudan); hunting and animal husbandry at El Zotz; animal economies from two Mississippian period sites; and more.
 
Food Provisioning in Complex Societies provides an optimistic roadmap and heuristic tools to explore the diverse, resilient, and contingent processes involved in food provisioning. The book represents a novel and productive way forward for understanding the unique, yet predictably structured, provisioning systems that emerged in the context of complex societies in all parts of the world. It will be of interest to zooarchaeologists and archaeologists alike.

Contributors: Joaquin Arroyo-Cabrales, Fiona Beglane, Roderick Campbell, Kathryn Grossman, Patricia Martinez-Lira, Jacqueline S. Meier, Sarah E. Newman, Terry O'Connor, Tanya M. Peres, Gypsy C. Price, Elizabeth J. Reitz, Kim Shelton, Marcus Winter, Helina S. Woldekiros

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Foodways in Roman Republican Italy
Laura M. Banducci
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Foodways in Roman Republican Italy explores the production, preparation, and consumption of food and drink in Republican Italy to illuminate the nature of cultural change during this period. Traditionally, studies of the cultural effects of Roman contact and conquest have focused on observing changes in the public realm: that is, changing urban organization and landscape, and monumental construction. Foodways studies reach into the domestic realm: How do the daily behaviors of individuals express their personal identity, and How does this relate to changes and expressions of identity in broader society? Laura M. Banducci tracks through time the foodways of three sites in Etruria from about the third century BCE to the first century CE: Populonia, Musarna, and Cetamura del Chianti. All were established Etruscan sites that came under Roman political control over the course of the third and second centuries BCE. The book examines the morphology and use wear of ceramics used for cooking, preparing, and serving food in order to deduce cooking methods and the types of foods being prepared and consumed. Change in domestic behaviors was gradual and regionally varied, depending on local social and environmental conditions, shaping rather than responding to an explicitly “Roman” presence.

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Foodways of the Ancient Andes
Transforming Diet, Cuisine, and Society
Marta P Alfonso-Durruty
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Eating is essential for life, but it also embodies social and symbolic dimensions. This volume shows how foods and peoples were mutually transformed in the ancient Andes.

Exploring the multiple social, ecological, cultural, and ontological dimensions of food in the Andean past, the contributors of Foodways of the Ancient Andes offer diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that reveal the richness, sophistication, and ingenuity of Andean peoples. The volume spans time periods and localities in the Andean region to reveal how food is intertwined with multiple aspects of the human experience, from production and consumption to ideology and sociopolitical organization. It illustrates the Andean peoples’ resilience in the face of challenges brought about by food scarcity and environmental change. Chapters dissect the intersection of food, power, and status in early states and empires; examine the impact of food during times of conflict and instability; and illuminate how sacred and high-status foods contributed to the building of the Inka Empire.

Featuring forty-six contributors from ten countries, the chapters employ new analytical methods, integrating different food data and interdisciplinary research to show that food can provide not only simple nutrition but also a multitude of strategies, social and political relationships, and ontologies that are otherwise invisible in the archaeological record.

Contributors
Aleksa K. Alaica
Sonia Alconini
Marta Alfonso-Durruty
Sarah I. Baitzel
Véronique Bélisle
Carolina Belmar
Carrie Anne Berryman
Matthew E. Biwer
Deborah E. Blom
Tamara L. Bray
Matthew T. Brown
Maria C. Bruno
José M. Capriles
Katherine L. Chiou
Susan D. deFrance
Lucia M. Diaz
Richard P. Evershed
Maureen E. Folk
Alexandra Greenwald
Chris Harrod
Christine A. Hastorf
Iain Kendall
Kelly J. Knudson
BrieAnna S. Langlie
Cecilia Lemp
Petrus le Roux
Marcos Martinez
Anahí Maturana-Fernández
Weston C. McCool
Melanie J. Miller
Nicole Misarti
Flavia Morello
Patricia Quiñonez Cuzcano
Omar Reyes
Arturo F. Rivera Infante
Manuel San Román
Francisca Santana-Sagredo
Beth K. Scaffidi
Augusto Tessone
Andrés Troncoso
Tiffiny A. Tung
Mauricio Uribe
Natasha P. Vang
Sadie L. Weber
Kurt M. Wilson
Michelle E. Young
[more]

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Footprints of Hopi History
Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni'at
Edited by Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, T. J. Ferguson, and Chip Colwell
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Kukveni—footprints—are a powerful historical metaphor that the Hopi people use to comprehend their tangible heritage. Hopis say that the deity Máasaw instructed their ancestors to leave footprints during their migrations from their origin place to their home today as evidence that they had fulfilled a spiritual pact to serve as stewards of his land. Today’s Hopis understand these footprints to be the archaeological remains of former settlements—pottery sherds, stone tools, petroglyphs, and other physical evidence of past use and occupation of the land.

The fourteen chapters in Footprints of Hopi History: Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni’at focus on these Hopi footprints as they are understood through a variety of research techniques, including archaeology, ethnography, documentary history, plant genetics, and educational outreach. The editors and contributors offer fresh and innovative perspectives on Hopi archaeology and history, and demonstrate how one tribe has significantly advanced knowledge about its past through collaboration with archaeologists and cultural anthropologists.

The book features managerial uses of research, cultural landscape theory, use of GIS in research, archaeological interpretations of social identity and immigration, analysis of corn genetics, heritage education of youth, and research of oral traditions and documentary history. Footprints of Hopi History highlights the Hopi tribe’s leadership in sustained efforts to create bridges between tribal goals and anthropology, forging a path for others to follow.


Contributors

E. Charles Adams
Wesley Bernardini
Joëlle Clark
Chip Colwell
T. J. Ferguson
Dennis Gilpin
Kelley Hays-Gilpin
George Gumerman IV
Saul L. Hedquist
Maren P. Hopkins
Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa
Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma
Lee Wayne Lomayestewa
Patrick D. Lyons
Shirley Powell
Gregson Schachner
Thomas E. Sheridan
Mark D. Varien
Laurie D. Webster
Peter M. Whiteley
Michael Yeatts
[more]

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For the Director
Research Essays in Honor of James B. Griffin
Edited by Charles E. Cleland
University of Michigan Press, 1977
In 1975, James B. Griffin retired as director of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology. During his three decades as director and professor, he had become one of the leading archaeologists in North America and had tremendous influence over the next generation of archaeological research. To honor the man and his work, nineteen scholars contributed essays to this volume. Contributors include Ted Bank, Richard Wilkinson, Donald Janzen, George Quimby, and H. Martin Wobst. Richard Ford and Volney Jones compiled a guide to Griffin’s extensive published works.
[more]


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Foragers on America's Western Edge
The Archaeology of California's Pecho Coast
Terry L. Jones and Brian F. Codding
University of Utah Press, 2018
The California coastline has long been of interest to archaeologists. This book directs attention to the largely ignored Pecho Coast, a rugged, isolated, 20 km long peninsula between modern-day Morro Bay and Pismo Beach. Archaeological work along this stretch was last synthesized in 1972. Jones and Codding now bring together the extensive contract work and field school studies of the intervening years, shedding new light on the region’s early inhabitants.
 
The first people of the Pecho Coast were part-time residents who exploited shellfish, fish, and marine birds, including the flightless duck, Chendytes lawi, which sustained hunting drove to extinction ca. 2800 cal BP. This marked the only unequivocal case of prehistoric, human-caused extinction in western North America. Cold, productive seas allowed inhabitants to weather droughts of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (950–600 cal BP), after which shell beads became increasingly abundant, representing either the initial appearance of Chumash-speaking peoples or attempts by Chumash leaders to consolidate power through gifting, reciprocal exchange, or forced conquest. During the mission era, fishing sustained the Native community as, for the first time, individuals became fully sedentary, foraging within a limited radius to avoid contact with the Spanish.
 
This record reveals a unique story of local adaptation, anthropogenic habitat change, social differentiation, and, ultimately, resistance to colonial invasion.
[more]

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Foraging in the Past
Archaeological Studies of Hunter-Gatherer Diversity
Lemke
University Press of Colorado, 2018
The label “hunter-gatherer” covers an extremely diverse range of societies and behaviors, yet most of what is known is provided by ethnographic and historical data that cannot be used to interpret prehistory. Foraging in the Past takes an explicitly archaeological approach to the potential of the archaeological record to document the variability and time depth of hunter-gatherers.
 
Well-established and young scholars present new prehistoric data and describe new methods and theories to investigate ancient forager lifeways and document hunter-gatherer variability across the globe. The authors use relationships established by cross-cultural data as a background for examining the empirical patterns of prehistory. Covering underwater sites in North America, the peaks of the Andes, Asian rainforests, and beyond, chapters are data rich, methodologically sound, and theoretically nuanced, effectively exploring the latest evidence for behavioral diversity in the fundamental process of hunting and gathering.
 
Foraging in the Past establishes how hunter-gatherers can be considered archaeologically, extending beyond the reach of ethnographers and historians to argue that only through archaeological research can the full range of hunter-gatherer variability be documented. Presenting a comprehensive and integrated approach to forager diversity in the past, the volume will be of significance to both students and scholars working with or teaching about hunter-gatherers.
 
Contributors: Nicholas J. Conard, Raven Garvey, Keiko Kitagawa, John Krigbaum, Petra Krönneck, Steven Kuhn, Julia Lee-Thorp, Peter Mitchell, Katherine Moore, Susanne C. Münzel, Kurt Rademaker, Patrick Roberts, Britt Starkovich, Brian A. Stewart, Mary Stiner
 
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Foraging in the Tennessee River Valley
12,500 to 8,000 Years Ago
Kandace D. Hollenbach
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Plants are inarguably a significant component of the diets of foraging peoples in non-arctic environments. As such, the decisions and activities associated with the gathering and exploitation of plants are important to foragers’ subsistence pursuits. Plant remains are particularly important for understanding gathering activities. Inasmuch as plant foods comprised a considerable portion of early foragers’ diets, and the gathering and processing of these plant resources occupied a significant proportion of the population, namely women, children, and the elderly, an understanding of gathering activities and how they relate to use of the landscape is critical. Organic remains are poorly preserved in the acidic soils of the Southeast and are often limited or absent from open-air sites, but archaeological deposits protected within rockshelters provide an exception. Organic remains are consistently well preserved in their rain-protected deposits, and rockshelters are locations that groups repeatedly visited. Because of this repeated use and remarkable preservation, significant quantities of well-preserved faunal and botanical remains can be recovered from rockshelter deposits. 
 
In Foraging, Hollenbach analyzes and compares botanical remains from archaeological excavations in four rockshelters in the Middle Tennessee River Valley. The artifact assemblages of rockshelter and open-air sites are similar, so it is reasonable to assume that faunal and botanical assemblages would be similar, if open-air sites had comparable preservation of organic remains. The rich organic data recovered from rockshelters therefore may be considered representative of general subsistence and settlement strategies, and can significantly inform our views of lifeways of Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic peoples. The data produced from this analysis provides a valuable baseline of plant food use by early foragers in the region, and establishes a model of Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic lifeways in the Southeast.
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Foreign Objects
Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology
Edited by Craig N. Cipolla
University of Arizona Press, 2017

Brass tinklers and pendants. Owl effigies, copper kettles, crucifixes with blue glass stones. What do they have in common? The answer spans thousands of years and a multitude of peoples and places, and reveals how people made sense of their world as they collected and used the objects they encountered.

Foreign Objects demonstrates the breadth and vibrancy of contemporary archaeology. Taking a broad set of archaeological cases from across the Americas, editor Craig N. Cipolla and the volume contributors explore how indigenous communities have socialized foreign objects over time. The book critiques the artificial divide between prehistory and history, studying instead the long-term indigenous histories of consumption, a term typically associated with capitalism and modern-world colonialism.

The case studies range from “exotic” stone tools used millennia ago to nineteenth-century patent medicines made and marketed by an Indian doctress. Foreign Objects focuses on how indigenous groups and foreign objects became entangled with one another in myriad ways. The book explores how the framework of consumption can shed new light on trade, exchange, materiality, and cultural production.

Contributors place foreign objects in the spotlight and offer a comparison of how this general class of material played a part in indigenous and colonial worlds. Each chapter illustrates how notions of consumption fit into their place in time and also delves into how foreign objects related to ideas of the body and personhood, how people used them to participate in political and spiritual worlds, and how they presented new ways of enduring or resisting European colonialism and capitalism. Foreign Objects is a critical look at consumption through the lens of indigenous knowledge and archaeological theory.

Contributors:

Matthew A. Beaudoin
Lewis Borck
Kathleen J. Bragdon
Craig N. Cipolla
Charles R. Cobb
John L. Creese
Diana DiPaolo Loren
Martin Gallivan
Meghan C. L. Howey
Barbara J. Mills
Maxine Oland
Lee M. Panich
Patricia E. Rubertone
Christopher Shephard
Keith D. Stephenson

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A Forest of History
The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kingship
Travis W. Stanton
University Press of Colorado, 2020
David Freidel and Linda Schele’s monumental work A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (1990) offered an innovative, rigorous, and controversial approach to studying the ancient Maya, unifying archaeological, iconographic, and epigraphic data in a form accessible to both scholars and laypeople. Travis Stanton and Kathryn Brown’s A Forest of History: The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kingship presents a collection of essays that critically engage with and build upon the lasting contributions A Forest of Kings made to Maya epigraphy, iconography, material culture, and history.
 
These original papers present new, cutting-edge research focusing on the social changes leading up to the spread of divine kingship across the lowlands in the first part of the Early Classic. The contributors continue avenues of inquiry such as the timing of the Classic Maya collapse across the southern lowlands, the nature of Maya warfare, the notion of usurpation and “stranger-kings” in the Classic period, the social relationships between the ruler and elite of the Classic period Yaxchilán polity, and struggles for sociopolitical dominance among the later Classic period polities of Chichén Itzá, Cobá, and the Puuc kingdoms.
 
Many of the interpretations and approaches in A Forest of Kings have withstood the test of time, while others have not; a complete understanding of the Classic Maya world is still developing. In A Forest of History recent discoveries are considered in the context of prior scholarship, illustrating both the progress the field has made in the past quarter century and the myriad questions that remain. The volume will be a significant contribution to the literature for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Mesoamerican and Maya archaeology.
 
Contributors:
Wendy Ashmore, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Wilberth Cruz Alvarado, Arthur A. Demarest, Keith Eppich, David A. Freidel, Charles W. Golden, Stanley P. Guenter, Annabeth Headrick, Aline Magnoni, Joyce Marcus, Marilyn A. Masson, Damaris Menéndez, Susan Milbrath, Olivia C. Navarro-Farr, José Osorio León, Carlos Peraza Lope, Juan Carlos Pérez Calderón, Griselda Pérez Robles, Francisco Pérez Ruíz, Michelle Rich, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Andrew K. Scherer, Karl A. Taube
[more]

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Forgery, Replica, Fiction
Temporalities of German Renaissance Art
Christopher S. Wood
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Today we often identify artifacts with the period when they were made. In more traditional cultures, however, such objects as pictures, effigies, and buildings were valued not as much for their chronological age as for their perceived links to the remote origins of religions, nations, monasteries, and families. As a result, Christopher Wood argues, premodern Germans tended not to distinguish between older buildings and their newer replacements, or between ancient icons and more recent forgeries.
             But Wood shows that over the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, emerging replication technologies—such as woodcut, copper engraving, and movable type—altered the relationship between artifacts and time.  Mechanization highlighted the artifice, materials, and individual authorship necessary to create an object, calling into question the replica’s ability to represent a history that was not its own. Meanwhile, print catalyzed the new discipline of archaeological scholarship, which began to draw sharp distinctions between true and false claims about the past. Ultimately, as forged replicas lost their value as historical evidence, they found a new identity as the intentionally fictional image-making we have come to understand as art.
[more]

front cover of Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California
Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California
Edited by Kathleen L. Hull and John G. Douglass
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Between 1769 and 1834, an influx of Spanish, Russian, and then American colonists streamed into Alta California seeking new opportunities. Their arrival brought the imposition of foreign beliefs, practices, and constraints on Indigenous peoples.

Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California reorients understandings of this dynamic period, which challenged both Native and non-Native people to reimagine communities not only in different places and spaces but also in novel forms and practices. The contributors draw on archaeological and historical archival sources to analyze the generative processes and nature of communities of belonging in the face of rapid demographic change and perceived or enforced difference.

Contributors provide important historical background on the effects that colonialism, missions, and lives lived beyond mission walls had on Indigenous settlement, marriage patterns, trade, and interactions. They also show the agency with which Indigenous peoples make their own decisions as they construct and reconstruct their communities. With nine different case studies and an insightful epilogue, this book offers analyses that can be applied broadly across the Americas, deepening our understanding of colonialism and community.

Contributors:
Julienne Bernard
James F. Brooks
John Dietler
Stella D’Oro
John G. Douglass
John Ellison
Glenn Farris
Heather Gibson
Kathleen L. Hull
Linda Hylkema
John R. Johnson
Kent G. Lightfoot
Lee M. Panich
Sarah Peelo
Seetha N. Reddy
David W. Robinson
Tsim D. Schneider
Christina Spellman
Benjamin Vargas
[more]

front cover of Forging Southeastern Identities
Forging Southeastern Identities
Social Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Folklore of the Mississippian to Early Historic South
Gregory A. Waselkov
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, a groundbreaking collection of ten essays, covers a broad expanse of time—from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries—and focuses on a common theme of identity. These essays represent the various methods used by esteemed scholars today to study how Native Americans in the distant past created new social identities when old ideas of the self were challenged by changes in circumstance or by historical contingencies.
 
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and folklorists working in the Southeast have always recognized the region’s social diversity; indeed, the central purpose of these disciplines is to study peoples overlooked by the mainstream. Yet the ability to define and trace the origins of a collective social identity—the means by which individuals or groups align themselves, always in contrast to others—has proven to be an elusive goal. Here, editors Gregory A. Waselkov and Marvin T. Smith champion the relational identification and categorical identification processes, taken from sociological theory, as effective analytical tools.
 
Taking up the challenge, the contributors have deployed an eclectic range of approaches to establish and inform an overarching theme of identity. Some investigate shell gorgets, textiles, shell trade, infrastructure, specific sites, or plant usage. Others focus on the edges of the Mississippian world or examine colonial encounters between Europeans and native peoples. A final chapter considers the adaptive malleability of historical legend in the telling and hearing of slave narratives.
[more]

front cover of The Forgotten Kingdom
The Forgotten Kingdom
The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel
Israel Finkelstein
SBL Press, 2013

A new understanding of the history of the northern kingdom from 1350 B.C.E. to 720 B.C.E.

Beginning with the Canaanite city-states, through the Saulide dynasty, to the fall of Israel, Finkelstein presents the first comprehensive history of Israel integrating the analysis of more than thirty years of archaeological work with interpretation of ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts. Though Judah dominates the pages of the Hebrew Bible and contemporary studies, Israel dominates here as Finkelstein reveals the glory of the Omride dynasty, outlines how the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah developed parallel to one another, and highlights Israel’s transformation from kingdom to foundational idea.

Features:

  • Archaeological analysis of the region of the northern kingdom
  • Primary and secondary textual analysis from the ancient Near East and the biblical narrative
  • Maps, tables, and images
  • Discussion of Israel’s legacy
[more]

front cover of Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record
Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record
Michael Brian Schiffer
University of Utah Press, 1987

This handbook synthesizes the most important principles of cultural and environmental formation processes for both students and practicing archaeologists.

Formation Process of the Archaeological Record embodies a vision that the cultural past is knowable, but only when the nature of the evidence is thoroughly understood. It shows how the past is accessible in practice by identifying variability introduced by the diverse effects of people and nature that in some sum, form the archaeological record.

For students, it is intended as both an introduction and guide in method and theory, field work, and analysis. Practicing archaeologists will find it a valuable checklist of sources of variability when observations on the archaeological record are used to justify inferences.

[more]

front cover of Formative Mesoamerican Exchange Networks with Special Reference to the Valley of Oaxaca
Formative Mesoamerican Exchange Networks with Special Reference to the Valley of Oaxaca
Jane W. Pires-Ferreira
University of Michigan Press, 2019
For this volume, archaeologist Jane W. Pires-Ferreira analyzed artifacts from the Valley of Oaxaca in order to understand more about prehistoric trade patterns in the region. Using her analyses, she was able to describe obsidian exchange networks, iron ore mirror exchange networks, and shell exchange networks in Early and Middle Formative Mesoamerica.
[more]

front cover of The Fort Ancient Aspect
The Fort Ancient Aspect
James Bennett Griffin
University of Michigan Press, 1943
James B. Griffin presents an analysis of the archaeological remains from central Ohio Valley. He reports on sites in Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky, including the Baum site, the Feurt site, the Madisonville site, and more. This encyclopedic work is based in large part on Griffin’s study of the pottery collection in the Ceramic Repository for the Eastern United States, held at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Lavishly illustrated with 185 black and white photographs, maps, and figures.
[more]

front cover of Fort Bowie Material Culture
Fort Bowie Material Culture
Robert M. Herskovitz
University of Arizona Press, 1978
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.
[more]

front cover of Foundations of Anasazi Culture
Foundations of Anasazi Culture
The Basketmaker Pueblo Transition
Paul F Reed
University of Utah Press, 2002

This major synthesis of work explores new evidence gathered at Basketmaker III sites on the Colorado Plateau in search of further understanding of Anasazi development.

Since the 1960s, large-scale cultural resource management projects have revealed the former presence of Anasazi within the entire northern Southwest. These discoveries have resulted in a greatly expanded view of the BMIII period (A.D. 550-750) which immediately proceeds the Pueblo phase. Particularly noteworthy are finding of Basketmaker remains under those of later periods and in sites with open settings, as opposed to the more classic Basketmaker cave and rock shelter sites.

Foundations of Anasazi Culture explores this new evidence in search of further understanding of Anasazi development. Several chapters address the BMII-BMIII transition, including the initial production and use of pottery, greater reliance on agriculture, and the construction of increasingly elaborate structures. Other chapters move beyond the transitional period to discuss key elements of the Anasazi lifestyle, including the use of gray-,red-, and white-ware ceramics, pit structures, storage cists, surface rooms, full dependence on agriculture, and varying degrees of social specialization and differentiation. A number of contributions address one or more of these issues as they occur at specific sites. Other contributors consider the material culture of the period in terms of common elements in architecture, ceramics, lithic technology, and decorative media.

This work on BMIII sites on the Colorado Plateau will be useful to anyone with an interest in the earliest days of Anasazi civilization.

[more]

front cover of Foundations of New World Cultural Astronomy
Foundations of New World Cultural Astronomy
A Reader with Commentary
Anthony Aveni
University Press of Colorado, 2008
Gazing into the black skies from the Anasazi observatory at Chimney Rock or the Castillo Pyramid in the Maya ruins of Chichén Itzá, a modern visitor might wonder what ancient stargazers looked for in the skies and what they saw. Once considered unresearchable, these questions now drive cultural astronomers who draw on written and unwritten records and a constellation of disciplines to reveal the wonders of ancient and contemporary astronomies.

Cultural astronomy, first called archaeoastronomy, has evolved at ferocious speed since its genesis in the 1960s, with seminal essays and powerful rebuttals published in far-flung, specialized journals. Until now, only the most closely involved scholars could follow the intellectual fireworks. In Foundations of New World Cultural Astronomy, Anthony Aveni, one of cultural astronomy's founders and top scholars, offers a selection of the essays that built the field, from foundational works to contemporary scholarship.
Including four decades of research throughout the Americas by linguists, archaeologists, historians, ethnologists, astronomers, and engineers, this reader highlights the evolution of the field through thematic organization and point-counterpoint articles. Aveni - an award-winning author and former National Professor of the Year - serves up incisive commentary, background for the uninitiated, and suggested reading, questions, and essay topics. Students, readers, and scholars will relish this collection and its tour of a new field in which discoveries about ancient ways of looking at the skies cast light on our contemporary views.

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The Foxie Otter Site
A Multicomponent Occupation North of Lake Huron
Christopher C. Hanks
University of Michigan Press, 1988
In this volume, the author reports on the excavation and interpretation of the Foxie Otter Site, a large archaeological site on Fox Lake in Ontario, Canada. This site, which was used by native people for about 7,000 years, contains one of the longest archaeological records in the Upper Great Lakes.
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Framing Complexity in Formative Mesoamerica
Lisa Delance
University Press of Colorado, 2022
A fresh examination of variable social and economic processes, Framing Complexity in Formative Mesoamerica explores nascent social complexity during the Preclassic/Formative period in Mesoamerica and addresses broader social questions about egalitarian and transegalitarian prehispanic Mesoamerican cultural groups.
 
Contributors present multiple lines of evidence demonstrating the process of social complexity and reconsider a number of traditionally accepted models and presumed tenets as a result of the wealth of empirical data that has been gathered over the past four decades. Their chapters approach complexity as a process rather than a state of being by exploring social aggregation, the emergence of ethnic affiliations, and aspects of regional and macroregional variability.
 
Framing Complexity in Formative Mesoamerica presents some of the most recent data—and the implications of that data—for understanding the development of complex societies as human beings moved into urban environments. The book is an especially important volume for researchers and students working in Mesoamerica, as well as archaeologists taking a comparative approach to questions of complexity.
 

Contributors: Jaime J. Awe, Sarah B. Barber, Jeffrey S. Brezezinski, M. Kathryn Brown, Ryan H. Collins, Kaitlin Crow, Lisa DeLance, Gary M. Feinman, Sara Dzul Gongora, Guy David Hepp, Arthur A. Joyce, Rodrigo Martin Morales, George Micheletti, Deborah L. Nichols, Terry G. Powis, Zoe J. Rawski, Prudence M. Rice, Michael P. Smyth, Katherine E. South, Jon Spenard, Travis W. Stanton, Wesley D. Stoner, Teresa Tremblay Wagner
 
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The Fremont Culture
A Study in Culture Dynamics on the Northern Anasazi Frontier, including the Report of the Claflin-Emerson Expedition of the Peabody Museum
James H Gunnerson
University of Utah Press, 2009
In 1927, the Claflin-Emerson expedition of the Peabody Museum began a rapid and extensive archaeological reconnaissance of eastern Utah. The expedition was funded by William H. Claflin and Raymond Emerson, Bostonian businessmen with a deep devotion to the American Indian and a probing interest in the remote and mysterious regions of the American West.

Early expedition surveys and excavations conducted by Noel Morss would lead to a definition of the Fremont culture; later research would augment existing data on the Fremont by adding entirely new traits, disclosing new variations in architecture and basketry, and providing new information on the distribution of previously known traits.

In The Fremont Culture: A Study in Culture Dynamics on the Northern Anasazi Frontier, archaeologist James H. Gunnerson provides the results of his 1950s survey and excavation in the Utah area. He presents a functional synthesis of the Fremont culture and discusses the dynamics of its growth and decline.

Gunnerson’s report also uses the original field notes, maps, plans, photographs, sketches, and unpublished preliminary reports of the Claflin-Emerson expedition. Together, the reports of Morss and Gunnerson offer the most important and complete overview of the expedition available. They are fitting tributes to the men of that expedition, scientists who recognized the importance of an ancient people who once wrested a meager living from the rugged canyon country of the Green and Colorado Rivers.
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French Colonial Archaeology
The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes
Edited by John A. Walthall
University of Illinois Press, 1991
       This wide-ranging book is the first to offer---in one volume---detailed
        results of many of the investigations of French colonial sites made in
        the mid-continent during the last decade. It includes work done at Fort
        St. Louis, Fort de Chartres, Fort Massac, French Peoria, Cahokia, Prairie
        du Pont, Prairie du Rocher, and other locations controlled by the French
        during a time when their dominance in North America was more than twice
        that of Britain and Spain combined.
      Five of the book's fifteen chapters summarize major excavations at colonial
        fortifications, four of which are public monuments that currently attract
        thousands of visitors each year. Another five chapters deal with French
        colonial villages, and the remainder of the book is devoted to diet, trade,
        the role of historic documents in the reconstruction of life on the French
        colonial frontier, and other topics.
 
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front cover of From Cahokia to Larson to Moundville
From Cahokia to Larson to Moundville
A. Martin Byers
University of Tennessee Press
The orthodox view of the Mississippian social world hinges on the ideas that chiefdoms—dominance based hierarchical societies in the Eastern Woodlands of North America—vied for power, often violently bit at times cooperatively, through political and economic avenues. These chiefdoms represented something of a feudal state in prehistoric North America, which lasted up to the contact period with Europeans around 1500 A.D. In From Cahokia to Larson to Moundville, noted archaeologist A. Martin Byers challenges these assumptions and offers a contrasting view by deconstructing the chiefdom model and offering instead an autonomous social world that focused on spiritual renewal and sacred rituals. Byers presents his case through the archaeological record of Cahokia, Larson, and Moundville's monumental earthworks and, in doing so, reveals the Mississippian social community to be more complex, and more cooperative, than previously envisioned. 

A. Martin Byers, now retired, was a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal.
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From Colonization to Domestication
Population, Environment, and the Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America
D. Shane Miller
University of Utah Press, 2018
Winner of the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize.

Eastern North America is one of only a handful of places in the world where people first discovered how to domesticate plants. In this book, anthropologist Shane Miller uses two common, although unconventional, sources of archaeological data—stone tools and the distribution of archaeological sites—to trace subsistence decisions from the initial colonization of the American Southeast at the end of the last Ice Age to the appearance of indigenous domesticated plants roughly 5,000 years ago.

Miller argues that the origins of plant domestication lie within the context of a boom/bust cycle that culminated in the mid-Holocene, when hunter-gatherers were able to intensively exploit shellfish, deer, oak, and hickory. After this resource “boom” ended, some groups shifted to other plants in place of oak and hickory, which included the suite of plants that were later domesticated. Accompanying these subsistence trends is evidence for increasing population pressure and declining returns from hunting. Miller contends, however, that the appearance of domesticated plants in eastern North America, rather than simply being an example of necessity as the mother of invention, is the result of individuals adjusting to periods of both abundance and shortfall driven by climate change. 
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front cover of From Household to Empire
From Household to Empire
Society and Economy in Early Colonial New Mexico
Heather B. Trigg
University of Arizona Press, 2005
Published in cooperation with the
William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

Settlers at Santa Fe and outlying homesteads during the seventeenth century established a thriving economy that saw the exchange of commodities produced by indigenous peoples, settlers, and Franciscan friars for goods manufactured as far away as China, France, and Turkey. This early Spanish colonial period in New Mexico provides an opportunity to explore both economic activity within a colony and the relations between colony and homeland. By examining the material remains of this era from 1598 to 1680, Heather Trigg reveals a more complete picture of colonial life. Drawing on both archaeological and historical sources, Trigg analyzes the various levels of economic activity that developed: production of items in colonial households, exchanges between households, and trade between the colony and Mexico. Rather than focusing only on the flow of products and services, she also explores the social mechanisms that likely had a significant impact on the economic life of the colony. Because economic activity was important to so many aspects of daily life, she is able to show how and why colonial society worked the way it did. While focusing on the colonists, she also explores their relations with Pueblo peoples. Through her analysis of these two pools of data, Trigg generates insights not usually gleaned from the limited texts of the period, providing information about average colonists in addition to the governors and clergy usually covered in historical accounts. By using specific examples from historical documents and archaeological materials, she shows that colonists from all levels of society modified both formal and informal rules of economic behavior to better fit the reality of the colonial frontier. With its valuable comparative data on colonization, From Household to Empire provides a novel way of examining colonial economies by focusing on the maintenance and modification of social values. For all readers fascinated by the history of the Southwest, this book provides a fuller picture of life in early New Mexico than has previously been seen.
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From Mesopotamia to Iraq
A Concise History
Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine
University of Chicago Press, 2009

The recent reopening of Iraq’s National Museum attracted worldwide attention, underscoring the country’s dual image as both the cradle of civilization and a contemporary geopolitical battleground. A sweeping account of the rich history that has played out between these chronological poles, From Mesopotamia to Iraq looks back through 10,000 years of the region’s deeply significant yet increasingly overshadowed past.

Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine begin by explaining how ancient Mesopotamian inventions—including urban society, a system of writing, and mathematical texts that anticipated Pythagoras—profoundly influenced the course of human history. These towering innovations, they go on to reveal, have sometimes obscured the major role Mesopotamia continued to play on the world stage. Alexander the Great, for example, was fascinated by Babylon and eventually died there. Seventh-century Muslim armies made the region one of their first conquests outside the Arabian peninsula. And the Arab caliphs who ruled for centuries after the invasion built the magnificent city of Baghdad, attracting legions of artists and scientists. Tracing the evolution of this vibrant country into a contested part of the Ottoman Empire, a twentieth-century British colony, a republic ruled by Saddam Hussein, and the democracy it has become, Nissen and Heine repair the fragmented image of Iraq that has come to dominate our collective imagination.

In hardly any other continuously inhabited part of the globe can we chart such developments in politics, economy, and culture across so extended a period of time. By doing just that, the authors illuminate nothing less than the forces that have made the world what it is today.

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front cover of From Moon Goddesses to Virgins
From Moon Goddesses to Virgins
The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire
By Pete Sigal
University of Texas Press, 2000

For the preconquest Maya, sexuality was a part of ritual discourse and performance, and all sex acts were understood in terms of their power to create, maintain, and destroy society. As postconquest Maya adapted to life under colonial rule, they neither fully abandoned these views nor completely adopted the formulation of sexuality prescribed by Spanish Catholicism. Instead, they evolved hybridized notions of sexual desire, represented in the figure of the Virgin Mary as a sexual goddess, whose sex acts embodied both creative and destructive components.

This highly innovative book decodes the process through which this colonization of Yucatan Maya sexual desire occurred. Pete Sigal frames the discussion around a series of texts, including the Books of Chilam Balam and the Ritual of the Bacabs, that were written by seventeenth and eighteenth century Maya nobles to elucidate the history, religion, and philosophy of the Yucatecan Maya communities. Drawing on the insights of philology, discourse analysis, and deconstruction, he analyzes the sexual fantasies, fears, and desires that are presented, often unintentionally, in the "margins" of these texts and shows how they illuminate issues of colonialism, power, ritual, and gender.

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front cover of From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom
From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom
Understanding Past Land Use in the Northern Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico
Bradley J. Vierra
University of Utah Press, 2013
The American Southwest is characterized by environmentally and culturally diverse landscapes, which include the northern Rio Grande valley as it cuts through north-central New Mexico from Taos to Albuquerque. The region has a long and rich history of anthropological research primarily focused on the archaeological remains found along this valley corridor. Only recently has research involving large-scale surveys and excavations been conducted on the nearby mesas and mountains that form the rugged margins of the river valley. From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom incorporates this new research into a perspective that links the ever-changing and complementary nature of lowland and upland land use.

The essays in this collection are unified by three specific themes: landscape, movement, and technology. Landscape involves the ecological backdrop of the northern Rio Grande valley, including past and present environments. Movement refers to the positioning of people across the landscape along with the dynamic and fluid nature with which people—past and present—view their relationship with the “above” and “below.” Technology not only refers to the tools and facilities that past people may have used but to the organization of labor needed to cooperatively exploit a variety of subsistence resources and the exchange of products across the region. This volume provides both a cross section of current research from expert scholars and a broad perspective that seeks to integrate new data from lowland and upland contexts. From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom will appeal to those interested in obsidian source studies, geoarchaeology, past climatic regimes, foraging societies, early agriculture, ceramic technology, subsistence, early village formation, ethnogenesis, and historic multiethnic economies.

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front cover of From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonikē
From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonikē
Studies in Religion and Archaeology
Laura Nasrallah
Harvard University Press, 2010
This volume brings together international scholars of religion, archaeologists, and scholars of art and architectural history to investigate social, political, and religious life in Roman and early Christian Thessalonikē, an important metropolis in the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian periods and beyond. This volume is the first broadly interdisciplinary investigation of Roman and early Christian Thessalonikē in English and offers new data and new interpretations by scholars of ancient religion and archaeology. The book covers materials usually treated by a broad range of disciplines: New Testament and early Christian literature, art historical materials, urban planning in antiquity, material culture and daily life, and archaeological artifacts from the Roman to the late antique period.
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From Site to Sight
Anthropology, Photography, and the Power of Imagery, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
Melissa Banta and Curtis M. HinsleyWith a New Introduction by Ira Jackins
Harvard University Press

In 1986 the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard mounted From Site to Sight, a groundbreaking traveling exhibition on the historic and contemporary uses of photography in anthropology. Using visual materials from the vast photographic archives of the Peabody Museum and the work of members of Harvard’s anthropology department, the accompanying catalog investigates how anthropologists have employed the camera as a recording and analytic tool and as an aesthetic medium. Photographs ranging from daguerreotypes to satellite images are presented in an examination of the possibilities and limitations of using the camera as a fact-gathering and interpretive tool. The authors also explore the broader implications of the uses—and misuses—of visual imagery within the human sciences.

From Site to Sight has been a foundational text for scholars and students in the developing field of visual anthropology, illustrating the role of photographic imagery in anthropology and archaeology from the disciplines’ formative years to the 1980s. Long out of print, this classic publication is now available in an enhanced thirtieth anniversary edition with a new introductory essay by Ira Jacknis.

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From Spaniard to Creole
The Archaeology of Cultural Formation at Puerto Real, Haiti
Charles Robin Ewen
University of Alabama Press, 1991

While most studies of intercultural contact focus on the impact of the intrusive power on the native culture, this book examines the effects of the colonization process on the Spaniards in the New World during the 16th century. The site of Puerto Real on the north coast of Haiti serves as a case study. Based on the results of excavations at both Puerto Real and St. Augustine, Florida, this study suggests that the introduction of New World and African cultural elements into Spanish colonial culture began almost at contact. The model of acculturative processes, developed in St. Augustine and tested at Puerto Real, can serve to guide future Spanish colonial research. It can also be applied to non-Hispanic colonial sites in the New World. Did the French and British adapt to their new environments in a manner similar to the Spanish? Work done at Puerto Real demonstrates the utility of archaeology in the study of the effects of culture contact.

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front cover of From the Land of Ever Winter to the American Southwest
From the Land of Ever Winter to the American Southwest
Athapaskan Migrations, Mobility, and Ethnogenesis
Deni J. Seymour
University of Utah Press, 2012

The Athapaskan departure from the Canadian Subarctic centuries ago and their subsequent arrival in the American Southwest has remained the subject of continuous debate in anthropological research. This book examines archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and traditional oral history data and brings them together in fresh ways, in many cases for the first time. With a backdrop of these new and interrelated lines of evidence, each subfield must now reevaluate its approach and the forms of evidence it uses to construct arguments.

The contributors here include the most knowledgeable scholars in each of the above fields, collectively providing the most up-to-date research on early Athapaskans and their movements and migrations. Each chapter approaches Athapaskan migration with data obtained from different regions, providing clarity as to the basis for individual arguments. Often, entrenched regional visualizations and localized conventions are clarified only when placed in juxtaposition to those of other regions. Because of this, conclusions rest on sometimes widely divergent theoretical and methodological underpinnings, thus expressing preference for and conveying weight to certain types of evidence and lines of reasoning. The goal of this volume is to expose these arguments in order to clarify appropriate directions for future research, making advances possible.
 

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Frontier Forts of Iowa
Indians, Traders, and Soldiers, 1682-1862
William E. Whittaker
University of Iowa Press, 2009

At least fifty-six frontier forts once stood in, or within view of, what is now the state of Iowa. The earliest date to the 1680s, while the latest date to the Dakota uprising of 1862. Some were vast compounds housing hundreds of soldiers; others consisted of a few sheds built by a trader along a riverbank. Regardless of their size and function—William Whittaker and his contributors include any compound that was historically called a fort, whether stockaded or not, as well as all military installations—all sought to control and manipulate Indians to the advantage of European and American traders, governments, and settlers. Frontier Forts of Iowa draws extensively upon the archaeological and historical records to document this era of transformation from the seventeenth-century fur trade until almost all Indians had been removed from the region.

The earliest European-constructed forts along the Mississippi, Des Moines, and Missouri rivers fostered a complex relationship between Indians and early traders. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1804, American military forts emerged in the Upper Midwest, defending the newly claimed territories from foreign armies, foreign traders, and foreign-supported Indians. After the War of 1812, new forts were built to control Indians until they could be moved out of the way of American settlers; forts of this period, which made extensive use of roads and trails, teamed a military presence with an Indian agent who negotiated treaties and regulated trade. The final phase of fort construction in Iowa occurred in response to the Spirit Lake massacre and the Dakota uprising; the complete removal of the Dakota in 1863 marked the end of frontier forts in a state now almost completely settled by Euro-Americans.

By focusing on the archaeological evidence produced by many years of excavations and by supporting their words with a wealth of maps and illustrations, the authors uncover the past and connect it with the real history of real places. In so doing they illuminate the complicated and dramatic history of the Upper Midwest in a time of enormous change. Past is linked to present in the form of a section on visiting original and reconstructed forts today.

Contributors: 

Gayle F. Carlson
Jeffrey T. Carr
Lance M. Foster
Kathryn E. M. Gourley
Marshall B. McKusick
Cindy L. Nagel
David J. Nolan
Cynthia L. Peterson
Leah D. Rogers
Regena Jo Schantz
Christopher M. Schoen
Vicki L. Twinde-Javner
William E. Whittaker

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Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeology
From the Dent Site to the Rocky Mountains
Robert H. Brunswig
University Press of Colorado, 2007
As the Ice Age waned, Clovis hunter-gatherers began to explore and colonize the area now known as Colorado. Their descendents and later Paleoindian migrants spread throughout Colorado's plains and mountains, adapting to diverse landforms and the changing climate. In this new volume, Robert H. Brunswig and Bonnie L. Pitblado assemble experts in archaeology, paleoecology-climatology, and paleofaunal analysis to share new discoveries about these ancient people of Colorado.

The editors introduce the research with scientific context. A review of seventy-five years of Paleoindian archaeology in Colorado highlights the foundation on which new work builds, and a survey of Colorado's ancient climates and ecologies helps readers understand Paleoindian settlement patterns.

Eight essays discuss archaeological evidence from Plains to high Rocky Mountain sites. The book offers the most thorough analysis to date of Dent--the first Clovis site discovered. Essays on mountain sites show how advances in methodology and technology have allowed scholars to reconstruct settlement patterns and changing lifeways in this challenging environment.

Colorado has been home to key moments in human settlement and in the scientific study of our ancient past. Readers interested in the peopling of the New World as well as those passionate about the methods and history of archaeology will find new material and satisfying overviews in this book. Contributors include Rosa Maria Albert, Robert H. Brunswig, Reid A. Bryson, Linda Scott Cummings, James Doerner, Daniel C. Fisher, David L. Fox, Bonnie L. Pitblado, Jeffrey L. Saunders, Todd A. Surovell, R. A. Varney, and Nicole M. Waguespack.


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Frontinus' Legacy
Essays on Frontinus' de aquis urbis Romae
Deane R. Blackman and A. Trevor Hodge, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The city of Rome depended on a complex system of aqueducts for survival, and Frontinus purports to tell his readers how best to manage this system. Although his text is largely technical, his treatment of technicalities is not always clear, raising the question of how well he, and the Romans, really understood hydraulics.
This interdisciplinary study of Frontinus' work addresses the questions that lie between the lines of his text. How large a work force was required to build an aqueduct, and how did they go about doing it? What did such an undertaking cost, and who was responsible for paying? Who decided which route should be followed? Why did Frontinus feel a need to write this book? Who was his audience?
To date, Frontinus has been subjected to very little critical scrutiny. Deane R. Blackman and A. Trevor Hodge have gathered here a wide range of recognized authorities--in classics, hydraulics engineering, surveying, financing, and the formation of calcium carbonate deposits in the water conduits-- to examine the puzzle Frontinus has left us.
Deane R. Blackman is Associate Professor of Engineering, Monash University. A. Trevor Hodge is Distinguished Research Professor of Classics, Carleton University.
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front cover of A Fuego y Sangre
A Fuego y Sangre
Early Zapotec Imperialism in the Cuicatlán Cañada, Oaxaca
Elsa M. Redmond
University of Michigan Press, 1983
In this volume, Elsa M. Redmond reconstructs the history of the Cuicatec region in Oaxaca, Mexico, from the Middle Formative period through the Lomas phase, when the Zapotec state based at Monte Albán took control, into the Trujano phase and the Spanish conquest. Redmond integrates archaeological data and sixteenth-century ethnohistoric records to inform her study of the political and social strategies of the Cuicatec region during these time periods. From 1977 to 1978, Redmond conducted an archaeological survey in this region, and she presents the results of that fieldwork here.
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Fundamentals of Tree Ring Research
James H. Speer
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Tree-ring dating (dendrochronology) is a method of scientific dating based on the analysis of tree-ring growth patterns. As author James Speer notes, trees are remarkable bioindicators. Although there are other scientific means of dating climatic and environmental events, dendrochronology provides the most reliable of all paleorecords. Dendrochronology can be applied to very old trees to provide long-term records of past temperature, rainfall, fire, insect outbreaks, landslides, hurricanes, and ice storms--to name only a few events.
 
This comprehensive text addresses all of the subjects that a reader who is new to the field will need to know and will be a welcome reference for practitioners at all levels. It includes a history of the discipline, biological and ecological background, principles of the field, basic scientific information on the structure and growth of trees, the complete range of dendrochronology methods, and a full description of each of the relevant subdisciplines.
 
Individual chapters address the composition of wood, methods of field and laboratory study, dendroarchaeology, dendroclimatology, dendroecology, dendrogeomorphology, and dendrochemistry. The book also provides thorough introductions to common computer programs and methods of statistical analysis. In the final chapter, the author describes "frontiers in dendrochronology," with an eye toward future directions in the field. He concludes with several useful appendixes, including a listing of tree and shrub species that have been used successfully by dendrochronologists. Throughout, photographs and illustrations visually represent the state of knowledge in the field.
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