front cover of Appalachia in the Classroom
Appalachia in the Classroom
Teaching the Region
Theresa L. Burriss
Ohio University Press, 2013

Appalachia in the Classroom contributes to the twenty-first century dialogue about Appalachia by offering topics and teaching strategies that represent the diversity found within the region. Appalachia is a distinctive region with various cultural characteristics that can’t be essentialized or summed up by a single text.

Appalachia in the Classroom offers chapters on teaching Appalachian poetry and fiction as well as discussions of nonfiction, films, and folklore. Educators will find teaching strategies that they can readily implement in their own classrooms; they’ll also be inspired to employ creative ways of teaching marginalized voices and to bring those voices to the fore. In the growing national movement toward place-based education, Appalachia in the Classroom offers a critical resource and model for engaging place in various disciplines and at several different levels in a thoughtful and inspiring way.

Contributors: Emily Satterwhite, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, John C. Inscoe, Erica Abrams Locklear, Jeff Mann, Linda Tate, Tina L. Hanlon, Patricia M. Gantt, Ricky L. Cox, Felicia Mitchell, R. Parks Lanier, Jr., Theresa L. Burriss, Grace Toney Edwards, and Robert M. West.

[more]

front cover of Appalachia Inside Out V1
Appalachia Inside Out V1
Conflict Change
Robert J. Higgs
University of Tennessee Press, 1995
Edited by Robert J. Higgs, Ambrose N. Manning, and Jim Wayne Miller
These two volumes constitute the most comprehensive anthology of writings on Appalachia ever assembled. Representing the work of approximately two hundred authors—fiction writers, poets, scholars in disciplines such as history, literary criticism, and sociology—Appalachia Inside Out reveals the fascinating diversity of the region and lays to rest many of the reductive stereotypes long associated with it.
Intended as a sequel to the widely respected collection Voices of the Hills, edited by Robert Higgs and Ambrose Manning and published twenty years ago, these volumes reflect the recent proliferation of imaginative and critical writing about Appalachia—a proliferation that suggests nothing less than a renaissance of collective self-assessment. The selections are organized around a variety of themes (including "War and Revolution," "Feuds and Violence," "Nature and Progress," "Dialect and Language," "Exile, Return, and Sense of Place," and "Majority and Minority") and reveal both the radical changes the region has undergone as well as the persistence of certain defining features.
The title Appalachia Inside Out refers in part to the fact that Appalachia has never existed in timeless isolation from the rest of country and the world; rather, it has both absorbed outside influences and exerted influence of its own. The title also indicates the editors' effort to look not only at the visible Appalachia but at the forces that underlie its history and culture. What emerges in these pages is an Appalachia both familiar and strange: a mirror of lived life on the one hand and, on the other, a haunted realm of unimaginable loss and bewitching possibility.
The Editors: Robert J. Higgs is professor of English, emeritus, at East Tennessee State University and the author of Laurel and Thorn: The Athlete in American Literature.
Ambrose N. Manning is professor of English, emeritus, at East Tennessee State University and a noted collector of folk songs and folklore.
Jim Wayne Miller, a poet, novelist, and essayist, is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies at Western Kentucky University.


[more]

front cover of Appalachia Inside Out V2
Appalachia Inside Out V2
Culture Custom
Robert J. Higgs
University of Tennessee Press, 1995
The two volumes of Appalachia Inside Out constitute the most comprehensive anthology of writings on Appalachia ever assembled. Representing the work of approximately two hundred authors-fiction writers, poets, scholars in disciplines such as history, literary criticism, and sociology-Appalachia Inside Out reveals the fascinating diversity of the region and lays to rest many of the reductive stereotypes long associated with it.
[more]

front cover of Appalachian Cultural Competency
Appalachian Cultural Competency
A Guide for Medical, Mental Health, and Social Service Professionals
Susan E. Keefe
University of Tennessee Press, 2005
Health and human service practitioners who work in Appalachia know that the typical “textbook” methods for dealing with clients often have little relevance in the context of Appalachian culture. Despite confronting behavior and values different from those of mainstream America, these professionals may be instructed to follow organizational mandates that are ineffective in mountain communities, subsequently drawing criticism from their clients for practices that are deemed insensitive or controversial. In Appalachian Cultural Competency, Susan E. Keefe has assembled fifteen essays by a multidisciplinary set of scholars and professionals, many nationally renowned for their work in the field of Appalachian studies. Together, these authors argue for the development of a cultural model of practice based on respect for local knowledge, the value of community diversity, and collaboration between professionals and local communities, groups, and individuals. The essays address issues of both practical and theoretical interest, from understanding rural mountain speech to tailoring mental health therapies for Appalachian clients. Other topics include employee assistance programs for Appalachian working-class women, ways of promoting wellness among the Eastern Cherokees, and understanding Appalachian death practices.Keefe advocates an approach to delivering health and social services that both acknowledges and responds to regional differences without casting judgments or creating damaging stereotypes and hierarchies. Often, she observes, the “reflexive” approach she advocates runs counter to formal professional training that is more suited to urban and non-Appalachian contexts. Health care professionals, mental health therapists, social workers, ministers, and others in social services will benefit from the specific cultural knowledge offered by contributors, illustrated by case studies in a myriad of fields and situations. Grounded in real, tested strategies—and illustrated clearly through the authors’ experiences—Appalachian Cultural Competency is an invaluable sourcebook, stressing the importance of cultural understanding between professionals and the Appalachian people they serve.
[more]

front cover of Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century
Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century
Kirk Hazen
West Virginia University Press, 2020
Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century provides a complete exploration of English in Appalachia for a broad audience of scholars and educators. Starting from the premise that just as there is no single Appalachia, there is no single Appalachian dialect, this essay collection brings together wide-ranging perspectives on language variation in the region. Contributors from the fields of linguistics, education, and folklore debunk myths about the dialect’s ancient origins, examine subregional and ethnic differences, and consider the relationships between language and identity—individual and collective—in a variety of settings, including schools. They are attentive to the full range of linguistic expression, from everyday spoken grammar to subversive Dale Earnhardt memes.

A portal to the language scholarship of the last thirty years, Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century translates state-of-the-art research for a nonspecialist audience, while setting the agenda for further study of language in one of America’s most recognized regions.
[more]

front cover of The Appalachian Frontier
The Appalachian Frontier
America's First Surge Westward
John Anthony Caruso
University of Tennessee Press, 2003
John Anthony Caruso’s The Appalachian Frontier, first published in 1959, captures the drama and sweep of a nation at the beginning of its westward expansion. Bringing to life the region’s history from its earliest seventeenth-century scouting parties to the admission of Tennessee to the Union in 1796, Caruso describes the exchange of ideas, values, and cultural traits that marked Appalachia as a unique frontier.

Looking at the rich and mountainous land between the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, The Appalachian Frontier follows the story of the Long Hunters in Kentucky; the struggles of the Regulators in North Carolina; the founding of the Watauga, Transylvania, Franklin, and Cumberland settlements; the siege of Boonesboro; and the patterns and challenges of frontier life. While narrating the gripping stories of such figures as Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, and Chief Logan, Caruso combines social, political, and economic history into a comprehensive overview of the early mountain South.

In his new introduction, John C. Inscoe examines how this work exemplified the so-called consensus school of history that arose in the United States during the cold war. Unabashedly celebratory in his analysis of American nation building, Caruso shows how the development of Appalachia fit into the grander scheme of the evolution of the country. While there is much in The Appalachian Frontier that contemporary historians would regard as one-sided and romanticized, Inscoe points out that “those of us immersed so deeply in the study of the region and its people sometimes tend to forget that the white settlement of the mountain south in the eighteenth century was not merely the chronological foundation of the Appalachian experience. As Caruso so vividly demonstrates, it is also represented a vital—even defining—stage in the American progression across the continent.”

The Author: John Anthony Caruso was a professor of history at West Virginia University. He died in 1997.

John C. Inscoe is professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is editor of Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation and author of Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina.

[more]

front cover of Appalachian Gateway
Appalachian Gateway
An Anthology of Contemporary Stories and Poetry
George Brosi and Kate Egerton
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Featuring the work of twenty-five fiction writers and poets, this anthology is a captivating introduction to the finest of contemporary Appalachian literature. Here are short stories and poems by some of the region’s most dynamic and best-loved authors: Barbara Kingsolver, Ron Rash, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Morgan, Lisa Alther, and Lee Smith among others. In addition to compelling selections from each writer’s work, the book includes illuminating biographical sketches and bibliographies for each author.

These works encompass a variety of themes that, collectively, capture the essence of Appalachia: love of the land, family ties, and the struggle to blend progress with heritage.  Readers will enjoy this book not just for the innate value of good literature but also for the insights it provides into this fascinating area. This book of fiction is an enlightening companion to non-fiction overviews of the region, including the Encyclopedia of Appalachia and A Handbook to Appalachia: An Introduction to the Region, both published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2006. In fact the five sections of this book are the same as those of the Encyclopedia.

Educators and students will find this book especially appropriate for courses in creative writing, Appalachian studies and Appalachian literature. Editor George Brosi’s foreword presents an historical overview of Appalachian Literature, while Kate Egerton and Morgan Cottrell’s afterword offers a helpful guide for studying Appalachian literature in a classroom setting.

George Brosi is the editor of Appalachian Heritage, a literary quarterly, and, along with his wife, Connie, runs a retail book business specializing in books from and about the Appalachian region. He has taught creative writing, Appalachian studies and Appalachian literature.

Kate Egerton is an associate professor of English at Berea College. She has taught Appalachian literature and published scholarship in that field as well as in modern drama.

Samantha Cole majored in Appalachian Studies and worked for Appalachian Heritage while a student at Berea College. Morgan Cottrell is a West Virginia native who took Kate Egerton's Appalachian literature class at Berea College.

[more]

front cover of Appalachian Images
Appalachian Images
Folk Popular Culture
W.K. Mcneil
University of Tennessee Press, 1995

front cover of Appalachian Reckoning
Appalachian Reckoning
A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy
Anthony Harkins
West Virginia University Press, 2019

2020 American Book Award winner, Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award
Weatherford Award winner, nonfiction


With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What about Hillbilly Elegy accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future?

Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.

[more]

front cover of Appalachians All
Appalachians All
East Tennesseans and the Elusive History of an American Region
Mark T. Banker
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

“A singular achievement. Mark Banker reveals an almost paradoxical Appalachia that trumps all the stereotypes. Interweaving his family history with the region’s latest scholarship, Banker uncovers deep psychological and economic interconnections between East Tennessee’s ‘three Appalachias’—its tourist-laden Smokies, its urbanized Valley, and its strip-mined Plateau.”
—Paul Salstrom, author of Appalachia’s Path to Dependency

"Banker weaves a story of Appalachia that is at once a national and regional history, a family saga, and a personal odyssey.  This book reads like a conversation with a good friend who is well-read and well-informed, thoughtful, wise, and passionate about his subject.  He brings new insights to those who know the region well, but, more importantly, he will introduce the region's complexities to a wider audience."
—Jean Haskell, coeditor, <i>Encyclopedia of Appalachia</i>

Appalachians All intertwines the histories of three communities—Knoxville with its urban life, Cades Cove with its farming, logging, and tourism legacies, and the Clearfork Valley with its coal production—to tell a larger story of East Tennessee and its inhabitants. Combining a perceptive account of how industrialization shaped developments in these communities since the Civil War with a heartfelt reflection on Appalachian identity, Mark Banker provides a significant new regional history with implications that extend well beyond East Tennessee’s boundaries.

Writing with the keen eye of a native son who left the area only to return years later, Banker uses elements of his own autobiography to underscore the ways in which East Tennesseans, particularly “successful” urban dwellers, often distance themselves from an Appalachian identity. This understandable albeit regrettable response, Banker suggests, diminishes and demeans both the individual and region, making stereotypically “Appalachian” conditions self-perpetuating. Whether exploring grassroots activism in the Clearfork Valley, the agrarian traditions and subsequent displacement of Cades Cove residents, or Knoxvillians’ efforts to promote trade, tourism, and industry, Banker’s detailed historical excursions reveal not only a profound richness and complexity in the East Tennessee experience but also a profound interconnectedness.

Synthesizing the extensive research and revisionist interpretations of Appalachia that have emerged over the last thirty years, Banker offers a new lens for constructively viewing East Tennessee and its past. He challenges readers to reconsider ideas that have long diminished the region and to re-imagine Appalachia. And ultimately, while Appalachians All speaks most directly to East Tennesseans and other Appalachian residents, it also carries important lessons for any reader seeking to understand the crucial connections between history, self, and place.

Mark T. Banker, a history teacher at Webb School of Knoxville, resides on the farm where he was raised in nearby Roane County. He earned his PhD at the University of New Mexico and is the author of Presbyterian Missions and Cultural Interaction in the Far Southwest, 1850–1950. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Presbyterian History, Journal of the West, OAH Magazine of History, and Appalachian Journal.

[more]

front cover of An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
Revised and Updated Edition
Lydia Maria Child, Edited with an introduction by Carolyn L. Karcher
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

Published in Boston in 1833, Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans provided the abolitionist movement with its first full-scale analysis of race and enslavement. Controversial in its own time, the Appeal surveyed the institution of slavery from historical, political, economic, legal, racial, and moral perspectives and advocated for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved without compensation to their enslavers. By placing American slavery in historical context and demonstrating how slavery impacted—and implicated—Americans of all regions and races, the Appeal became a central text for the abolitionist movement that continues to resonate in the present day.

This revised and updated edition is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s illuminating introduction, a chronology of Child’s life, and a list of books for further reading.

[more]

front cover of An Appeal to Justice
An Appeal to Justice
Litigated Reform of Texas Prisons
By Ben M. Crouch and James W. Marquart
University of Texas Press, 1989

How does a prison achieve institutional order while safeguarding prisoners' rights? Since the early 1960s, prison reform advocates have aggressively used the courts to extend rights and improve life for inmates, while prison administrators have been slow to alter the status quo. Litigated reform has been the most significant force in obtaining change.

An Appeal to Justice is a critical tudy of how the Texas Department of Corrections was transformed by Ruiz v. Estelle, the most sweeping class-action suit in correctional law history. Orders from federal judge William W. Justice rapidly moved the Texas system from one of the most autonomous, isolated, and paternalistic system to a more constitutional bureaucracy. In many respects the Texas experience is a microcosm of the transformation of American corrections over the second half of the twentieth century.

This is a careful account of TDC's fearful past as a plantation system, its tumultuous litigated reform, and its subsequent efforts to balance prisoner rights and prison order. Of major importance is the detailed examination of the broad stages of the reform process (and its costs and benefits) and an intimate look at prison brutality and humanity. The authors examine the terror tactics of the inmate guards, the development of prisoner gangs and widespread violence during the reforms, and the stability that eventually emerged. They also detail the change of the guard force from a relatively small, cohesive cadre dependent on discretion, personal loyalty, and physical dominance to a larger and more fragmented security staff controlled by formal procedures.

Drawing on years of research in archival sources and on hundreds of interviews with prisoners, administrators, and staff, An Appeal to Justice is a unique basis for assessing the course and consequences of prison litigation and will be valuable reading for legislators, lawyers, judges, prison administrators, and concerned citizens, as well as prison and public policy scholars.

[more]

front cover of An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad
An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad
Scandal in the Raj
Benjamin B. Cohen
Harvard University Press, 2019

The dramatic story of Mehdi Hasan and Ellen Donnelly, whose marriage convulsed high society in nineteenth-century India and whose notorious trial and fall reverberated throughout the British Empire, setting the benchmark for Victorian scandals.

In April 1892, a damning pamphlet circulated in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, the capital of the largest and wealthiest princely state in the British Raj. An anonymous writer charged Mehdi Hasan, an aspiring Muslim lawyer from the north, and Ellen Donnelly, his Indian-born British wife, with gross sexual misconduct and deception. The scandal that ensued sent shock waves from Calcutta to London. Who wrote this pamphlet, and was it true?

Mehdi and Ellen had risen rapidly among Hyderabad’s elites. On a trip to London they even met Queen Victoria. Not long after, a scurrilous pamphlet addressed to “the ladies of Hyderabad” charged the couple with propagating a sham marriage for personal gain. Ellen, it was claimed, had been a prostitute, and Mehdi was accused of making his wife available to men who could advance his career. To avenge his wife and clear his name, Mehdi filed suit against the pamphlet’s printer, prompting a trial that would alter their lives.

Based on private letters, courtroom transcripts, secret government reports, and scathing newspaper accounts, Benjamin Cohen’s riveting reconstruction of the couple’s trial and tribulations lays bare the passions that ran across racial lines and the intimate betrayals that doomed the Hasans. Filled with accusations of midnight trysts and sexual taboos, An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad is a powerful reminder of the perils facing those who tried to rewrite society’s rules. In the struggle of one couple, it exposes the fault lines that would soon tear a world apart.

[more]

front cover of The Appearing Demos
The Appearing Demos
Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement
Pang Laikwan
University of Michigan Press, 2020
As the waves of Occupy movements gradually recede, we soon forget the political hope and passions these events have offered. Instead, we are increasingly entrenched in the simplified dichotomies of Left and Right, us and them, hating others and victimizing oneself. Studying Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, which might be the largest Occupy movement in recent years, The Appearing Demos urges us to re-commit to democracy at a time when democracy is failing on many fronts and in different parts of the world.
 
The 79-day-long Hong Kong Umbrella Movement occupied major streets in the busiest parts of the city, creating tremendous inconvenience to this city famous for capitalist order and efficiency. It was also a peaceful collective effort of appearance, and it was as much a political event as a cultural one. The urge for expressing an independent cultural identity underlined both the Occupy movement and the remarkably rich cultural expressions it generated. While understanding the specificity of Hong Kong’s situations, The Appearing Demos also comments on some global predicaments we are facing in the midst of neoliberalism and populism. It directs our attention from state-based sovereignty to city-based democracy, and emphasizes the importance of participation and cohabitation. The book also examines how the ideas of Hannah Arendt are useful to those happenings much beyond the political circumstances that gave rise to her theorization. The book pays particular attention to the actual intersubjective experiences during the protest. These experiences are local, fragile, and sometimes inarticulable, therefore resisting rationality and debates, but they define the fullness of any individual, and they also make politics possible. Using the Umbrella Movement as an example, this book examines the “freed” political agents who constantly take others into consideration in order to guarantee the political realm as a place without coercion and discrimination. In doing so, Pang Laikwan demonstrates how politics means neither to rule nor to be ruled, and these movements should be defined by hope, not by goals.
[more]

front cover of Appetites
Appetites
Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China
Judith Farquhar
Duke University Press, 2002
Judith Farquhar’s innovative study of medicine and popular culture in modern China reveals the thoroughly political and historical character of pleasure. Ranging over a variety of cultural terrains--fiction, medical texts, film and television, journalism, and observations of clinics and urban daily life in Beijing—Appetites challenges the assumption that the mundane enjoyments of bodily life are natural and unvarying. Farquhar analyzes modern Chinese reflections on embodied existence to show how contemporary appetites are grounded in history.
From eating well in improving economic times to memories of the late 1950s famine, from the flavors of traditional Chinese medicine to modernity’s private sexual passions, this book argues that embodiment in all its forms must be invented and sustained in public reflections about personal and national life. As much at home in science studies and social theory as in the details of life in Beijing, this account uses anthropology, cultural studies, and literary criticism to read contemporary Chinese life in a materialist and reflexive mode. For both Maoist and market reform periods, this is a story of high culture in appetites, desire in collective life, and politics in the body and its dispositions.
[more]

front cover of Appified
Appified
Culture in the Age of Apps
Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Snapchat. WhatsApp. Ashley Madison. Fitbit. Tinder. Periscope. How do we make sense of how apps like these-and thousands of others-have embedded themselves into our daily routines, permeating the background of ordinary life and standing at-the-ready to be used on our smartphones and tablets? When we look at any single app, it's hard to imagine how such a small piece of software could be particularly notable. But if we look at a collection of them, we see a bigger picture that reveals how the quotidian activities apps encompass are far from banal: connecting with friends (and strangers and enemies), sharing memories (and personally identifying information), making art (and trash), navigating spaces (and reshaping places in the process). While the sheer number of apps is overwhelming, as are the range of activities they address, each one offers an opportunity for us to seek out meaning in the mundane. Appified is the first scholarly volume to examine individual apps within the wider historical and cultural context of media and cultural studies scholarship, attuned to issues of politics and power, identity and the everyday.
[more]

front cover of Apple Pie and Enchiladas
Apple Pie and Enchiladas
Latino Newcomers in the Rural Midwest
By Ann V. Millard and Jorge Chapa
University of Texas Press, 2004

The sudden influx of significant numbers of Latinos to the rural Midwest stems from the recruitment of workers by food processing plants and small factories springing up in rural areas. Mostly they work at back-breaking jobs that local residents are not willing to take because of the low wages and few benefits. The region has become the scene of dramatic change involving major issues facing our country—the intertwining of ethnic differences, prejudice, and poverty; the social impact of a low-wage workforce resulting from corporate transformations; and public policy questions dealing with economic development, taxation, and welfare payments.

In this thorough multidisciplinary study, the authors explore both sides of this ethnic divide and provide the first volume to focus comprehensively on Latinos in the region by linking demographic and qualitative analysis to describe what brings Latinos to the area and how they are being accommodated in their new communities. The fact is that many Midwestern communities would be losing population and facing a dearth of workers if not for Latino newcomers. This finding adds another layer of social and economic complexity to the region's changing place in the global economy. The authors look at how Latinos fit into an already fractured social landscape with tensions among townspeople, farmers, and others. The authors also reveal the optimism that lies in the opposition of many Anglos to ethnic prejudice and racism.

[more]

front cover of Applications Of Feminist Legal Theory
Applications Of Feminist Legal Theory
edited by D. Kelly Weisberg
Temple University Press, 1996
This book, the second of two volumes, examines the pressing issues that affect women—pornography, prostitution, battery, rape, pay equity, sexual harassment, motherhood, abortion, adoption, new reproductive technologies—and considers them through the lens of feminist legal theory. It features more than sixty articles by well-known legal scholars and feminists. The contributions are arranged thematically and include an introduction and comprehensive literature review by the editor. Applications of Feminist Legal Theory to Women's Lives will be a valuable text for students, a resource for scholars and policy makers, and a useful introduction for general readers.
[more]

front cover of Applied Factor Analysis
Applied Factor Analysis
Rudolf J. Rummel
Northwestern University Press, 1970
Applied Factor Analysis was written to help others apply factor analysis throughout the sciences with the conviction that factor analysis is a calculus of the social sciences. The book developed from research undertaken to do a 236-variable cross-national analysis. 
[more]

front cover of An Appraisal of Tree-Ring Dated Pottery in the Southwest
An Appraisal of Tree-Ring Dated Pottery in the Southwest
David A. Breternitz
University of Arizona Press, 1966
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 Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice
Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice
Jean Lave
University of Chicago Press, 2011

In this extended meditation, Jean Lave interweaves analysis of the process of apprenticeship among the Vai and Gola tailors of Liberia with reflections on the evolution of her research on those tailors in the late 1970s. In so doing, she provides both a detailed account of her apprenticeship in the art of sustained fieldwork and an insightful overview of thirty years of changes in the empirical and theoretical facets of ethnographic practice. Examining the issues she confronted in her own work, Lave shows how the critical questions raised by ethnographic research erode conventional assumptions, altering the direction of the work that follows.

As ethnography takes on increasing significance to an ever widening field of thinkers on topics from education to ecology, this erudite but accessible book will be essential to anyone tackling the question of what it means to undertake critical and conceptually challenging fieldwork. Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice explains how to seriously explore what it means to be human in a complex world—and why it is so important.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Approaches to Social Archaeology
Colin Renfrew
Harvard University Press, 1984

A leader in world archaeology argues that the archaeological record can and should be used to reconstruct the social structure of past societies, that archaeology ought, in effect, to become social archaeology. Colin Renfrew believes that the goal is to discover how and why cultures change through time and space. In the thirteen essays collected in this volume he examines various approaches to the problem.

Renfrew begins with specific demonstrations of what can be learned about social organization from the archaeological record. He looks for regularities in the spatial organization of societies and shows what they reveal about social dominance and power. He considers trade and exchange in the broadest context as human interaction. He relates chiefdoms and monument building to the mobilization of labor. Renfrew next moves to the dynamic issue of how cultures change. He examines the use of systems thinking in archaeology, proposing it as a way to avoid overly simple explanations, and demonstrates the power of new statistical techniques and computer programs.

In a final provocative section Renfrew suggests that sudden changes in the archaeological record—the "collapse" of civilizations—should not be seen as anomalies to be explained by the action of some outside agent but rather as predictable instances of "systems collapse."

[more]

front cover of Approaches to Social Theory
Approaches to Social Theory
Stewart Lindenberg
Russell Sage Foundation, 1986
Many social scientists lament the increasing fragmentation of their discipline, the trend toward specialization and away from engagement with overarching issues. Opportunities to transcend established subdisciplinary boundaries are rare, but the extraordinary conference that gave rise to this volume was one such occasion. The W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki Memorial Conference on Social Theory, held at the University of Chicago, brought together an outstanding array of scholars representing a variety of contending approaches to social theory. In panels, presentations, and general discussions, these scholars confronted one another in the context of an entire range of approaches. But as readers of this deftly edited collection will discover, the conference was more than a forum for abstract theoretical debate. These papers and discussions represent original scholarly contributions that exemplify orientations to social theory by examining real problems in the functioning of society—from large-scale economic growth and decline to the dynamics of interpersonal interaction. By exploring a few central issues in different ways, this unique conference worked through some lively theoretical incompatibilities and established genuine potential for communication, for complementary and collaborative effort at the core of sociology. The excitement of that dialogue, and the intellectual vitality it generated, are captured for the reader in Approaches to Social Theory. "Meaty presentations and confrontations of ideas by people whose views we respect...Recommended to anyone interested in the current state of social theory." —Contemporary Sociology
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Approaching Australia
Papers from the Harvard Australian Studies Symposium
Harold Bolitho
Harvard University Press, 1998
These papers, each by a notable Australian scholar, offer several approaches to the Australian experience, past, present, and future. The authors hail from different disciplines, but what they have in common is their familiarity with the United States and their experience in interpreting their homeland to an American audience. As they discuss poetry and politics, nationalism and feminism, Aboriginal society and urbanization, they also explore a common theme: the emergence of a distinctive Australian entity, and the contribution to it of the United States.
[more]

front cover of Approaching the Millennium
Approaching the Millennium
Essays on Angels in America
Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Tony Kushner's complex and demanding play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes has been the most talked about, analyzed, and celebrated play of the decade. The critic Harold Bloom has included Kushner's play in his "Western canon" alongside Shakespeare and the Bible, and drama scholar John M. Clum has termed it "a turning point in the history of gay drama, the history of American drama, and of American literary culture." While we might be somewhat wary of the instant canonization that such critical assessments confer, clearly Kushner's play is an important work, honored by the Pulitzer Prize, thought worthy of recognition on "purely aesthetic" grounds at the same time that it has been embraced--and occasionally rejected--for its politics.
Kushner's play explicitly positions itself in the current American conflict over identity politics, yet also situates that debate in a broader historical context: the American history of McCarthyism, of immigration and the "melting pot," of westward expansion, and of racist exploitation. Furthermore, the play enters into the politically volatile struggles of the AIDS crisis, struggles themselves interconnected with the politics of sexuality, gender, race, and class.
The original essays in Approaching the Millennium explore the complexities of the play and situate it in its particular, conflicted historical moment. The contributors help us understand and appreciate the play as a literary work, as theatrical text, as popular cultural phenomenon, and as political reflection and intervention. Specific topics include how the play thematizes gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity; the postmodern incarnation of the Brechtian epic; AIDS and the landscape of American politics. The range of different international productions of Angels in America provides a rich basis for discussion of its production history, including the linguistic and cultural shifts required in its "translation" from one stage to the next.
The last section of Approaching the Millennium includes interviews with Tony Kushner and other key creators and players involved in the original productions of Angels. The interviews explore issues raised earlier in the volume and dialogues between the creative artists who have shaped the play and the critics and "theatricians" engaged in responding to it.
Contributors to this volume are Arnold Aronson, Art Borreca, Gregory W. Bredbeck, Michael Cadden, Nicholas de Jongh, Allen J. Frantzen, Stanton B. Garner, Deborah R. Geis, Martin Harries, Steven F. Kruger, James Miller, Framji Minwalla, Donald Pease, Janelle Reinelt, David Román, David Savran, Ron Scapp, and Alisa Solomon.
Deborah Geis is Associate Professor of English, Queens College, City University of New York. Steven F. Kruger is Professor and Chair of the Department of English, Queens College, City University of New York.
[more]

front cover of Appropriate[Ing] Dress
Appropriate[Ing] Dress
Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America
Carol Mattingly
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Carol Mattingly examines the importance of dress and appearance for nineteenth-century women speakers and explores how women appropriated gendered conceptions of dress and appearance to define the struggle for representation and power that is rhetoric. Although crucial to women’s effectiveness as speakers, Mattingly notes, appearance has been ignored because it was taken for granted by men.

Because women rarely spoke in public before the nineteenth century, no guidelines existed regarding appropriate dress when they began to speak to audiences. Dress evoked immediate images of gender, an essential consideration for women speakers because of its strong association with place, locating women in the domestic sphere and creating a primary image that women speakers would work with—and against—throughout the century. Opposition to conspicuous change for women often necessitated the subtle transfer of comforting images when women sought to inhabit traditionally masculine spaces. The most successful women speakers carefully negotiated expectations by highlighting some conventions even as they broke others.

[more]

front cover of Appropriately Indian
Appropriately Indian
Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class
Smitha Radhakrishnan
Duke University Press, 2011
Appropriately Indian is an ethnographic analysis of the class of information technology professionals at the symbolic helm of globalizing India. Comprising a small but prestigious segment of India’s labor force, these transnational knowledge workers dominate the country’s economic and cultural scene, as do their notions of what it means to be Indian. Drawing on the stories of Indian professionals in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South Africa, Smitha Radhakrishnan explains how these high-tech workers create a “global Indianness” by transforming the diversity of Indian cultural practices into a generic, mobile set of “Indian” norms. Female information technology professionals are particularly influential. By reconfiguring notions of respectable femininity and the “good” Indian family, they are reshaping ideas about what it means to be Indian.

Radhakrishnan explains how this transnational class creates an Indian culture that is self-consciously distinct from Western culture, yet compatible with Western cosmopolitan lifestyles. She describes the material and symbolic privileges that accrue to India’s high-tech workers, who often claim ordinary middle-class backgrounds, but are overwhelmingly urban and upper caste. They are also distinctly apolitical and individualistic. Members of this elite class practice a decontextualized version of Hinduism, and they absorb the ideas and values that circulate through both Indian and non-Indian multinational corporations. Ultimately, though, global Indianness is rooted and configured in the gendered sphere of home and family.

[more]

front cover of Appropriation and Representation
Appropriation and Representation
Feng Menglong and the Chinese Vernacular Story
Shuhui Yang
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Feng Menglong (1574–1646) was recognized as the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of his time. He is known today for compiling three famous collections of vernacular short stories, each containing forty stories, collectively known as Sanyan.
Appropriation and Representation adapts concepts of ventriloquism and dialogism from Bakhtin and Holquist to explore Feng’s methods of selecting source materials. Shuhui Yang develops a model of development in which Feng’s approach to selecting and working with his source materials becomes clear.
More broadly, Appropriation and Representation locates Feng Menglong’s Sanyan in the cultural milieu of the late Ming, including the archaist movement in literature, literati marginality and anxieties, the subversive use of folk works, and the meiren xiangcao tradition—appropriating a female identity to express male frustration. Against this background, a rationale emerges for Feng’s choice to elevate and promote the vernacular story while stepping back form an overt authorial role.
[more]

front cover of Aquamarine Blue 5
Aquamarine Blue 5
Personal Stories of College Students with Autism
Dawn Prince-Hughes
Ohio University Press, 2002

Rated Outstanding by the American Association of School Libraries

This is the first book to be written by autistic college students about the challenges they face. Aquamarine Blue 5 details the struggle of these highly sensitive students and shows that there are gifts specific to autistic students that enrich the university system, scholarship, and the world as a whole.

Dawn Prince-Hughes presents an array of writings by students who have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism, showing their unique ways of looking at and solving problems. In their own words, they portray how their divergent thinking skills could be put to great use if they were given an opportunity. Many such students never get the chance because the same sensitivity that gives them these insights makes the flicker of fluorescent lights and the sound of chalk on the board unbearable For simple—and easily remedied—reasons, we lose these students, who are as gifted as they are challenged.

Aquamarine Blue 5 is a showcase of the strength and resilient character of individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome. It will be an invaluable resource for those touched by this syndrome, their friends and families, and school administrators.

[more]

front cover of Aqueduct Hunting in the Seventeenth Century
Aqueduct Hunting in the Seventeenth Century
Raffaele Fabretti's De aquis et aquaeductibus veteris Romae
Harry B. Evans
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Aqueduct hunting has been a favorite pastime for visitors to Rome since antiquity, although serious study of how the Eternal City obtained its water did not begin until the seventeenth century. It was Raffaele Fabretti (1619-1700), the well-known Italian antiquarian and epigrapher, who began the first systematic research of the Roman aqueduct system.
Fabretti's treatise, De aquis et aquaeductibus veteris Romae dissertationes tres, is cited as a matter of course by all later scholars working in the area of Roman topography. Its findings--while updated and supplemented by more recent archaeological efforts--have never been fully superseded. Yet despite its enormous importance and impact on scholarly efforts, the De aquis has never yet been translated from the original Latin. Aqueduct Hunting in the Seventeenth Century provides a full translation of and commentary on Fabretti's writings, making them accessible to a broad audience and carefully assessing their scholarly contributions.
Harry B. Evans offers his reader an introduction to Fabretti and his scholarly world. A complete translation and a commentary that focuses primarily on the topographical problems and Fabretti's contribution to our understanding of them are also provided. Evans also assesses the contributions and corrections of later archaeologists and topographers and places the De aquis in the history of aqueduct studies.
Evans demonstrates that Fabretti's conclusions, while far from definitive, are indeed significant and merit wider attention than they have received to date. This book will appeal to classicists and classical archaeologists, ancient historians, and readers interested in the history of technology, archaeology, and Rome and Italy in the seventeenth century.
Harry B. Evans is Professor of Classics, Fordham University.
[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good
Susanne M. DeCrane
Georgetown University Press, 2004

To dismiss the work of philosophers and theologians of the past because of their limited perceptions of the whole of humankind is tantamount to tossing the tot out with the tub water. Such is the case when feminist scholars of religion and ethics confront Thomas Aquinas, whose views of women can only be described as misogynistic. Rather than dispense with him, Susanne DeCrane seeks to engage Aquinas and reflect his otherwise compelling thought through the prism of feminist theology, hermeneutics, and ethics.

Focusing on one of Aquinas's great intellectual contributions, the fundamental notion of "the common good"—in short, the human will toward peace and justice—DeCrane demonstrates the currency of that notion through a contemporary social issue: women's health care in the United States and, specifically, black women and breast cancer. In her skillful re-engagement with Aquinas, DeCrane shows that certain aspects of religious traditions heretofore understood as oppressive to women and minority groups can actually be parsed, "retrieved," and used to rectify social ills.

Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good is a bold and intellectually rigorous feminist retrieval of an important text by a Catholic scholar seeking to remain in the tradition, while demanding that the tradition live up to its emphasis on human equity and justice.

[more]

front cover of Arab-American Faces and Voices
Arab-American Faces and Voices
The Origins of an Immigrant Community
By Elizabeth Boosahda
University of Texas Press, 2003

As Arab Americans seek to claim their communal identity and rightful place in American society at a time of heightened tension between the United States and the Middle East, an understanding look back at more than one hundred years of the Arab-American community is especially timely. In this book, Elizabeth Boosahda, a third-generation Arab American, draws on over two hundred personal interviews, as well as photographs and historical documents that are contemporaneous with the first generation of Arab Americans (Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians), both Christians and Muslims, who immigrated to the Americas between 1880 and 1915, and their descendants.

Boosahda focuses on the Arab-American community in Worcester, Massachusetts, a major northeastern center for Arab immigration, and Worcester's links to and similarities with Arab-American communities throughout North and South America. Using the voices of Arab immigrants and their families, she explores their entire experience, from emigration at the turn of the twentieth century to the present-day lives of their descendants. This rich documentation sheds light on many aspects of Arab-American life, including the Arab entrepreneurial motivation and success, family life, education, religious and community organizations, and the role of women in initiating immigration and the economic success they achieved.

[more]

front cover of Arabian Oasis City
Arabian Oasis City
The Transformation of 'Unayzah
By Soraya Altorki and Donald P. Cole
University of Texas Press, 1989

Vast social change has occurred in the Middle East since the oil boom of the mid-1970s. As the first anthropological study of an urban community in Saudi Arabia since that oil boom, Arabian Oasis City is also the first to document those changes.

Based on extensive interviews and participant observation with both men and women, the authors record and analyze the transformation that has occurred in this ancient oasis city throughout the twentieth century: the creation of the present Saudi Arabian state and of a new national economy based on the export of oil and the economic boom brought about by the dramatic increases in the price of oil following the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. In addition, the authors reveal the changes brought about by the fall in the price of oil beginning in 1982 and analyze the problems confronting ‘Unayzah in its aftermath.

By demonstrating that the area was not exclusively dominated by tribalism and Bedouin nomads, this empirical case study destroys stereotypical views about Saudi Arabia. Indeed, it proves the existence—prior to the coming of the modern Saudi Arabian state— of surplus agricultural and craft production and the full development of local, regional, and long-distance trade networks. It shows that women, although veiled, played active roles in work outside the household. The social impact of change over the years is, however, profound—especially the gradual replacement of the extended family by the nuclear family, changing patterns of husband-wife relationships, the impact of self-earned income on the status of women, and the emergence of a new middle class of employees and entrepreneurs. Because of the high degree of gender segregation in this area of research, Altorki and Cole give us a fortunate collaboration between a Saudi Arabian female scholar and an American male scholar experienced in research in the Middle East.

[more]

front cover of Arabs in America
Arabs in America
Building a New Future
edited by Michael W. Suleiman
Temple University Press, 1999
For many North Americans, Arab Americans are invisible, recalled only when words like "terrorism" or "anti-American sentiments" arise. However, people of Arab descent have been contributing to U. S. an d  Canadian culture since the 1870s in fields as diverse as literature, science, politics, medicine, and commerce -- witness surgeon Michael DeBakey, former Oregon governor Victor Atiyeh, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and Canadian M.P. Mac Harb. Yet while Arab American contributions to our society are significant and Arab Americans surpass the U.S. average in both education and economics, they still struggle for recognition and acceptance.

In this volume, editor Michael Suleiman brings together 21 prominent scholars from a wide range of perspectives -- including anthropology, economics, history, law, literature and culture, political science, and sociology -- to take a close look at the status of Arabs in North America. Topics range from the career of Arab American singer, dancer, and storyteller Wadeeha Atiyeh to a historical examination of Arab Americans and Zionism. The contributors discuss in Detroit, a group of well-educated Jordanian men, and the Shi'a Muslims -- to illustrate the range of Arab emigre experience. More broadly, they examine Arab American identity, political activism, and attempts by Arab immigrants to achieve respect and recognition in their new homes. They address both the  present situation for Arab Americans and prospects for their future.

Arabs in America will engage anyone interested in Arab American studies, ethnic studies, and American studies.
[more]

front cover of Arabs of the Jewish Faith
Arabs of the Jewish Faith
The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria
Schreier, Joshua
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Exploring how Algerian Jews responded to and appropriated France's newly conceived "civilizing mission" in the mid-nineteenth century, Arabs of the Jewish Faith shows that the ideology, while rooted in French Revolutionary ideals of regeneration, enlightenment, and emancipation, actually developed as a strategic response to the challenges of controlling the unruly and highly diverse populations of Algeria's coastal cities.
[more]

front cover of Aramis, or The Love of Technology
Aramis, or The Love of Technology
Bruno Latour
Harvard University Press, 1996
Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a technological dream gone wrong. The story of the birth and death of Aramis—the guided-transportation system intended for Paris—is told in this thought-provoking and fictional account by several different parties: an engineer and his professor; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and finally Aramis itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis’s trail—conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence—perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon. This charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study, is Latour at his thought-provoking best.
[more]

front cover of Arapaho Historical Traditions
Arapaho Historical Traditions
Hinono'einoo3itoono
Alonzo Moss, Sr.
University of Manitoba Press, 2005
Told by Paul Moss (1911-1995), a highly respected storyteller and ceremonial leader, these twelve texts introduce us to an immensely rich literature. As works of an oral tradition, they had until now remained beyond the reach of those who do not speak the Arapaho language. Here, for the first time, these outstanding examples of indigenous North American literature are printed in their original language (in the standard orthography used on the Wind River Reservation) but made accessible to a wider audience through English translation and comprehensive introductions, notes, commentaries and an Arapaho-English glossary.The Arapaho traditions chosen for this anthology tell of hunting, scouting, fighting, horse-stealing, capture and escape, friendly encounters between tribes, diplomacy and war, conflict with the U.S. and battles with its troops. They also include accounts of vision quests and religious rites, the fate of an Arapaho woman captured by Utes, and Arapaho uses of the "Medicine Wheel"in the Bighorn Mountains.
[more]

front cover of The Arapaho Language
The Arapaho Language
Andrew Cowell
University Press of Colorado, 2015
The Arapaho Language is the definitive reference grammar of an endangered Algonquian language. Arapaho differs strikingly from other Algonquian languages, making it particularly relevant to the study of historical linguistics and the evolution of grammar. Andrew Cowell and Alonzo Moss Sr. document Arapaho's interesting features, including a pitch-based accent system with no exact Algonquian parallels, radical innovations in the verb system, and complex contrasts between affirmative and non-affirmative statements.

Cowell and Moss detail strategies used by speakers of this highly polysynthetic language to form complex words and illustrate how word formation interacts with information structure. They discuss word order and discourse-level features, treat the special features of formal discourse style and traditional narratives, and list gender-specific particles, which are widely used in conversation. Appendices include full sets of inflections for a variety of verbs.

Arapaho is spoken primarily in Wyoming, with a few speakers in Oklahoma. The corpus used in The Arapaho Language spans more than a century of documentation, including multiple speakers from Wyoming and Oklahoma, with emphasis on recent recordings from Wyoming. The book cites approximately 2,000 language examples drawn largely from natural discourse - either recorded spoken language or texts written by native speakers.

With The Arapaho Language, Cowell and Moss have produced a comprehensive document of a language that, in its departures from its nearest linguistic neighbors, sheds light on the evolution of grammar.

[more]

front cover of Araucanian Culture in Transition
Araucanian Culture in Transition
Mischa Titiev
University of Michigan Press, 1951
In this classic work, renowned anthropologist Mischa Titiev presents his research on the Araucanian tribe of Chile. Based on fieldwork he did in 1948, he describes many aspects of the Araucanian culture, from land use and kinship to ceremonies and games. Illustrated.
[more]

front cover of Arbitrary Lines
Arbitrary Lines
How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
M. Nolan Gray
Island Press, 2022
What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development?
 
It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations and stories, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities.
 
The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling.
 
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reform is in the air, with cities and states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether. Some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land-use planning work without zoning.
 
In Arbitrary Lines, Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common confusions and myths about how American cities regulate growth and examining the major contemporary critiques of zoning. Gray sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city.
 
Despite mounting interest, no single book has pulled these threads together for a popular audience. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray fills this gap by showing how zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, and how we can think about a new way of planning a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable American city.
 
[more]

front cover of Arc of Interference
Arc of Interference
Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge
João Biehl and Vincanne Adams, editors
Duke University Press, 2023
The radically humanistic essays in Arc of Interference refigure our sense of the real, the ethical, and the political in the face of mounting social and planetary upheavals. Creatively assembled around Arthur Kleinman’s medical anthropological arc and eschewing hegemonic modes of intervention, the essays advance the notion of a care-ful ethnographic praxis of interference. To interfere is to dislodge ideals of naturalness, blast enduring binaries (human/nonhuman, self/other, us/them), and redirect technocratic agendas while summoning relational knowledge and the will to create community. The book’s multiple ethnographic arcs of interference provide a vital conceptual toolkit for today’s world and a badly needed moral perch from which to peer toward just horizons.

Contributors. Vincanne Adams, João Biehl, Davíd Carrasco, Lawrence Cohen, Jean Comaroff, Robert Desjarlais, Paul Farmer, Marcia Inhorn, Janis H. Jenkins, David S. Jones, Salmaan Keshavjee, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Adriana Petryna
[more]

front cover of Arc of the Journeyman
Arc of the Journeyman
Afghan Migrants in England
Nichola Khan
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A monumental account of one migrant community’s everyday lives, struggles, and aspirations 

Forty years of continuous war and conflict have made Afghans the largest refugee group in the world. In this first full-scale ethnography of Afghan migrants in England, Nichola Khan examines the imprint of violence, displacement, kinship obligations, and mobility on the lives and work of Pashtun journeyman taxi drivers in Britain. Khan’s analysis is centered in the county of Sussex, site of Brighton’s orientalist Royal Pavilion and the former home of colonial propagandist Rudyard Kipling. Her nearly two decades of relationships and fieldwork have given Khan a deep understanding of the everyday lives of Afghan migrants, who face unrelenting pressures to remit money to their struggling relatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, adhere to traditional values, and resettle the wives and children they have left behind. 

This kaleidoscopic narrative is enriched by the migrants’ own stories and dreams, which take on extra significance among sleep-deprived taxi drivers. Khan chronicles the way these men rely on Pashto poems and aphorisms to make sense of what is strange or difficult to bear. She also attests to the pleasures of local family and friends who are less demanding than kin back home—sharing connection and moments of joy in dance, excursions, picnics, and humorous banter. Khan views these men’s lives through the lenses of movement—the arrival of friends and family, return visits to Pakistan, driving customers, even the journey to remit money overseas—and immobility, describing the migrants who experience “stuckness” caused by unresponsive bureaucracies, chronic insecurity, or struggles with depression and other mental health conditions. 

Arc of the Journeyman is a deeply humane portrayal that expands and complicates current perceptions of Afghan migrants, offering a finely analyzed description of their lives and communities as a moving, contingent, and fully contemporary force.

[more]

front cover of The Arcades Project
The Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin
Harvard University Press, 1999

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

[more]


logo for University of Tennessee Press
Archaeological Adaptation
Case Studies of Cultural Transformation from the Southeast and Caribbean
C. Clifford Boyd
University of Tennessee Press, 2019
Archaeological Adaptation: Case Studies of Cultural Transformation from the Southeast and Caribbean honors the work of longtime University of Tennessee anthropology professor Gerald Schroedl, whose career encompassed fieldwork and research in both prehistoric and historic archaeology. Schroedl’s early career often focused its analysis on Mississippian and Cherokee sites, while his later years found him delving into historic archaeology in the Caribbean. Revisiting these touchstones of Schroedl’s work, editor C. Clifford Boyd here gathers essays around the disciplinary theme of documentation and analysis of change. Contributors study excavations in Tennessee, Virginia, South Carolina, wider southern Appalachia, and the Caribbean, providing insight into Native American, African American, and English civilizations. Artifacts, architecture, human and structural remains, and climatic and environmental factors yield insight into changing settlement patterns, tribal practices, material culture, economic and political power relations, and health and nutrition. A preface tracing Schroedl’s career and an afterword addressing developments in archaeological theory round out the volume.
 
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Anthropology
Archaeological Anthropology
Perspectives on Method and Theory
Edited by James M. Skibo, Michael W. Graves, and Miriam T. Stark
University of Arizona Press, 2014
For centuries, the goal of archaeologists was to document and describe material artifacts, and at best to make inferences about the origins and evolution of human culture and about prehistoric and historic societies. During the 1960s, however, a number of young, primarily American archaeologists, including William Longacre, rebelled against this simplistic approach. Wanting to do more than just describe, Longacre and others believed that genuine explanations could be achieved by changing the direction, scope, and methodology of the field. What resulted was the New Archaeology, which blended scientific method and anthropology. It urged those working in the field to formulate hypotheses, derive conclusions deductively and, most important, to test them. While, over time the New Archaeology has had its critics, one point remains irrefutable: archaeology will never return to what has since been called its “state of innocence.”

In this collection of twelve new chapters, four generations of Longacre protégés show how they are building upon and developing but also modifying the theoretical paradigm that remains at the core of Americanist archaeology. The contributions focus on six themes prominent in Longacre’s career: the intellectual history of the field in the late twentieth century, archaeological methodology, analogical inference, ethnoarchaeology, cultural evolution, and reconstructing ancient society.

More than a comprehensive overview of the ideas developed by one of the most influential scholars in the field, however, Archaeological Anthropology makes stimulating contributions to contemporary research. The contributors do not unequivocally endorse Longacre’s ideas; they challenge them and expand beyond them, making this volume a fitting tribute to a man whose robust research and teaching career continues to resonate.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Approaches to and Heritage Perspectives on Modern Conflict
Archaeological Approaches to and Heritage Perspectives on Modern Conflict
Beyond the Battlefields
Max van der Schriek
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
From a wider disciplinary perspective, modern conflict archaeology is now a thoroughly established and mature sub-discipline. However, a significant problem conflict archaeologists in the Netherlands face is that modern eras, including both World Wars, have so far not received serious attention. Although both World Wars appeal strongly to the popular imagination, until recently Dutch researchers had not approached modern conflict from an academic archaeological perspective to any great extent. This is partly the result of problematic legislation on archaeological activity in the Netherlands. When applied and interpreted appropriately, archaeology can play an important role in the preservation, contemporary experience and historical reconstruction of recent conflicts. However, as this book argues, research methods other than excavations will be needed in order to conduct conflict archaeology in the Netherlands effectively. This study aims to develop a Dutch approach to conflict archaeology, integrating archaeology, heritage research and history at a landscape scale.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in Ancient Societies
Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in Ancient Societies
Christopher P. Garraty
University Press of Colorado, 2010
Ancient market activities are dynamic in the economies of most ancient states, yet they have received little research from the archaeological community. Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in Ancient Societies is the first book to address the development, change, and organizational complexity of ancient markets from a comparative archaeological perspective.

Drawing from historical documents and archaeological records from Mesoamerica, the U.S. Southwest, East Africa, and the Andes, this volume reveals the complexity of ancient marketplace development and economic behavior both in hierarchical and non-hierarchical societies. Highlighting four principal themes-the defining characteristics of market exchange; the recognition of market exchange archaeologically; the relationship among market, political, and other social institutions; and the conditions in which market systems develop and change-the book contains a strong methodological and theoretical focus on market exchange.

Diverse contributions from noted scholars show the history of market exchange and other activities to be more dynamic than scholars previously appreciated. Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in Ancient Societies will be of interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, material-culture theorists, economists, and historians.

[more]

front cover of Archaeological Concepts for the Study of the Cultural Past
Archaeological Concepts for the Study of the Cultural Past
Alan P Sullivan III
University of Utah Press, 2008
One idiosyncrasy of archaeology in North America is that it is considered a sub-field of cultural anthropology. To explore the dimensions of this situation, editor Alan P. Sullivan assembled a group of practicing archaeologists, each with different expertise, to analyze problems with the current disciplinary arrangement and to recommend changes in practice and pedagogy that might coalesce into a truly archaeological study of the cultural past.
By using the theoretical tension that has arisen between archaeology and cultural anthropology, the contributors illustrate the effectiveness of concepts and methods that have little, if any, overlap with those of the mother discipline.
Archaeological Concepts for the Study of the Cultural Past examines the degree to which the historically close relationship between archaeology and cultural anthropology may actually have inhibited archaeological investigations—particularly of those aspects of the cultural past that may be ethnographically undocumented or incompletely described.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Explorations in Caves of the Point of Pines Region, Arizona
Archaeological Explorations in Caves of the Point of Pines Region, Arizona
James C. Gifford
University of Arizona Press, 1980
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 The Archaeological Guide to Iowa
The Archaeological Guide to Iowa
William E. Whittaker, Lynn M. Alex, Mary De La Garza
University of Iowa Press, 2015
Iowa has the reputation of being one big corn field, so you may be surprised to learn it boasts a rich crop of recorded archaeological sites as well—approximately 27,000 at last count. Some are spectacular, such as the one hundred mounds at Sny Magill in Effigy Mounds National Monument, while others consist of old abandoned farmsteads or small scatters of prehistoric flakes and heated rocks. Untold numbers are completely gone or badly disturbed—destroyed by plowing, erosion, or development.

Fortunately, there are many sites open to the public where the remnants of the past are visible, either in their original location or in nearby museum exhibits. Few things are more inspiring than walking among the Malchow Mounds, packed so tightly it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Strolling around downtown Des Moines is a lot more interesting when you are aware of the mounds, Indian villages, and the fort that once stood there. And, although you can’t visit the Wanampito site, you can see the splendid seventeenth-century artifacts excavated from it at Heery Woods State Park.

For people who want to experience Iowa’s archaeological heritage first hand, this one-of-a-kind guidebook shows the way to sixty-eight important sites. Many are open to visitors or can be seen from a public location; others, on private land or no longer visible on the landscape, live on through artifact displays. The guide also includes a few important sites that are not open to visitors because these places have unique stories to tell. Sites of every type, from every time period, and in every corner of the state are featured. Whether you have a few hours to indulge your curiosity or are planning a road trip across the state, this guide will take you to places where Iowa’s deep history comes to life.
[more]

front cover of An Archaeological Investigation on the Loboi Plain, Baringo District, Kenya
An Archaeological Investigation on the Loboi Plain, Baringo District, Kenya
William R. Farrand
University of Michigan Press, 1976
In 1973, researchers from the University of Michigan conducted a survey in the Loboi area, north of Lake Bogoria (Lake Hannington) in west Kenya, north of Nairobi. The goal of the project was to record archaeological remains in the area. In 1965, Mary Leakey had noted the presence of stone tools and faunal remains in Loboi, and her son Richard Leakey, director of the National Museums of Kenya, suggested the area should be further studied. In addition to the intensive survey, the researchers excavated seven small test units at five sites and recovered archaeological materials.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Investigations in a Northern Albanian Province
Archaeological Investigations in a Northern Albanian Province
Results of the Projekti Arkeologjik i Shkodrës (PASH): Volume One: Survey and Excavation Results
Michael L. Galaty and Lorenc Bejko, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2023
To date, very few northern Albanian archaeological sites have been surveyed and excavated. Situated beyond the reach, and allure, of the Classical Greek colonies of south-central Albania, the region has drawn less scholarly attention. But in various ways, northern Albania is just as important to the ongoing archaeological debates regarding the origins of inequality and the rise of social complexity.

Some of the earliest and largest hill forts and tumuli (burial mounds) in Albania, dating to the Bronze and Iron Age, are located in Shkodër. Shkodër (Rozafa) Castle became the capital of the so-called Illyrian Kingdom, which was conquered by Rome in the early 3rd century BC. This research report, focused on the province of Shkodër, is based on five years of field and laboratory work and is the first synthetic archaeological treatment of this region.

The results of the Projekti Arkeologjik i Shkodrës (or PASH) are presented here in two volumes. Volume 1 includes geological context, a literature review, historical background, and reports on the regional survey and test excavations at three settlements and three tumuli. In Volume 2, the authors describe the artifacts recovered through survey and excavation, including chipped stone, small finds, and pottery from the prehistoric, Classical, Roman, medieval, and post-medieval periods. They also present results of faunal, petrographic, chemical, carpological, and strontium isotope analyses of the artifacts. Extensive supporting data is available on the University of Michigan's Deep Blue data repository: 
https://doi.org/10.7302/xnpy-0e60.

These two volumes place northern Albania—and the Shkodër Province in particular—at the forefront of archaeological research in the Balkans.

 
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Investigations in a Northern Albanian Province
Archaeological Investigations in a Northern Albanian Province
Results of the Projekti Arkeologjik i Shkodrës (PASH): Volume Two: Artifacts and Artifact Analysis
Michael L. Galaty and Lorenc Bejko, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2023
To date, very few northern Albanian archaeological sites have been surveyed and excavated. Situated beyond the reach, and allure, of the Classical Greek colonies of south-central Albania, the region has drawn less scholarly attention. But in various ways, northern Albania is just as important to the ongoing archaeological debates regarding the origins of inequality and the rise of social complexity.

Some of the earliest and largest hill forts and tumuli (burial mounds) in Albania, dating to the Bronze and Iron Age, are located in Shkodër. Shkodër (Rozafa) Castle became the capital of the so-called Illyrian Kingdom, which was conquered by Rome in the early 3rd century BC. This research report, focused on the province of Shkodër, is based on five years of field and laboratory work and is the first synthetic archaeological treatment of this region.

The results of the Projekti Arkeologjik i Shkodrës (or PASH) are presented here in two volumes. Volume 1 includes geological context, a literature review, historical background, and reports on the regional survey and test excavations at three settlements and three tumuli. In Volume 2, the authors describe the artifacts recovered through survey and excavation, including chipped stone, small finds, and pottery from the prehistoric, Classical, Roman, medieval, and post-medieval periods. They also present results of faunal, petrographic, chemical, carpological, and strontium isotope analyses of the artifacts. Extensive supporting data is available on the University of Michigan's Deep Blue data repository: 
https://doi.org/10.7302/xnpy-0e60

These two volumes place northern Albania—and the Shkodër Province in particular—at the forefront of archaeological research in the Balkans.

 
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Investigations in Northeastern Xuzestan, 1976
Archaeological Investigations in Northeastern Xuzestan, 1976
Edited by Henry T. Wright
University of Michigan Press, 1976
In the region of Xuzestan (also “Khuzestan”), in southwestern Iran, early inhabitants domesticated plants and animals and developed permanent settlements and complex political states. In this volume, editor Henry T. Wright presents the results of three archaeological surveys in this important region. Contributors report on findings by time period, including the Paleolithic, Archaic, Susiana, Uruk, Protoelamite, Elamite, and Islamic periods.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Investigations on Agattu, Aleutian Islands
Archaeological Investigations on Agattu, Aleutian Islands
Albert C. Spaulding
University of Michigan Press, 1962
Albert C. Spaulding reports on the 1949 excavations on the island of Agattu, at the western end of the Aleutian Islands. Spaulding and his team identified the remains of two villages on Agattu, within which they opened four excavation units. They found numerous burials and hundreds of artifacts, including stone tools, bone ornaments and tools, and animal bone. The site is dated to about 615 BC.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East
Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East
T. J. Wilkinson
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Society for American Archaeology Book Award Winner

Many fundamental studies of the origins of states have built upon landscape data, but an overall study of the Near Eastern landscape itself has never been attempted. Spanning thousands of years of history, the ancient Near East presents a bewildering range of landscapes, the understanding of which can greatly enhance our ability to infer past political and social systems.

Tony Wilkinson now shows that throughout the Holocene humans altered the Near Eastern environment so thoroughly that the land has become a human artifact, albeit one that retains the power to shape human societies. In this trailblazing book—the first to describe and explain the development of the Near Eastern landscape using archaeological data—Wilkinson identifies specific landscape signatures for various regions and periods, from the early stages of complex societies in the fifth to sixth millennium B.C. to the close of the Early Islamic period around the tenth century A.D.

From Bronze Age city-states to colonized steppes, these signature landscapes of irrigation systems, tells, and other features changed through time along with changes in social, economic, political, and environmental conditions. By weaving together the record of the human landscape with evidence of settlement, the environment, and social and economic conditions, Wilkinson provides a holistic view of the ancient Near East that complements archaeological excavations, cuneiform texts, and other conventional sources.

Through this overview, culled from thirty years' research, Wilkinson establishes a new framework for understanding the economic and physical infrastructure of the region. By describing the basic attributes of the ancient cultural landscape and placing their development within the context of a dynamic environment, he breaks new ground in landscape archaeology and offers a new context for understanding the ancient Near East.

[more]

front cover of Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains
Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains
Laura L. Scheiber
University Press of Colorado, 2008
Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains combines history, anthropology, archaeology, and geography to take a closer look at the relationships between land and people in this unique North American region.

Focusing on long-term change, this book considers ethnographic literature, archaeological evidence, and environmental data spanning thousands of years of human presence to understand human perception and construction of landscape. The contributors offer cohesive and synthetic studies emphasizing hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.

Using landscape as both reality and metaphor, Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains explores the different and changing ways that people interacted with place in this transitional zone between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern prairies.

The contemporary archaeologists working in this small area have chosen diverse approaches to understand the past and its relationship to the present. Through these ten case studies, this variety is highlighted but leads to a common theme - that the High Plains contains important locales to which people, over generations or millennia, return. Providing both data and theory on a region that has not previously received much attention from archaeologists, especially compared with other regions in North America, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature. Contributors:
o Paul Burnett
o Oskar Burger
o Minette C. Church
o Philip Duke
o Kevin Gilmore
o Eileen Johnson
o Mark D. Mitchell
o Michael R. Peterson
o Lawrence Todd

[more]

front cover of Archaeological Narratives of the North American Great Plains
Archaeological Narratives of the North American Great Plains
From Ancient Pasts to Historic Resettlement
Sarah J. Trabert
University Press of Colorado, 2021
Stretching from Canada to Texas and the foothills of the Rockies to the Mississippi River, the North American Great Plains have a complex and ancient history. The region has been home to Native peoples for at least 16,000 years. This volume is a synthesis of what is known about the Great Plains from an archaeological perspective, but it also highlights Indigenous knowledge, viewpoints, and concerns for a more holistic understanding of both ancient and more recent pasts. Written for readers unfamiliar with archaeology in the region, the book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series emphasizes connections between past peoples and contemporary Indigenous nations, highlighting not only the history of the area but also new theoretical understandings that move beyond culture history. This overview illustrates the importance of the Plains in studies of exchange, migration, conflict, and sacred landscapes, as well as contact and colonialism in North America. In addition, the volume includes considerations of federal policies and legislation, as well as Indigenous social movements and protests over the last hundred years so that archaeologists can better situate Indigenous heritage, contemporary Indigenous concerns, and lasting legacies of colonialism today.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Observations North of the Rio Colorado
Archaeological Observations North of the Rio Colorado
Neil M Judd
University of Utah Press, 2010

Archeological Observations North of the Rio Colorado was originally published in 1926 as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology (Bulletin 82). It contains the report of six seasons of fieldwork undertaken by Neil M. Judd for the Bureau between 1915 and 1920 in western Utah and northwestern Arizona. The original investigation set out to examine alleged prehistoric sites near Beaver, Utah—specifically sites related to the “Pueblo ruins” found elsewhere in the Southwest. This in turn led to a much larger project, as there were more sites than expected recognized as having a cultural affinity with other prehistoric Puebloan sites. During these six years, Judd’s team covered a region from the Grand Canyon to the northern shore of the Great Salt Lake, east to the Green River and west into the deserts of Nevada.

This book is part of the University of Utah Press’s ongoing effort to reprint selected out-of-print volumes that apply directly to Utah archaeology, in an attempt to allow current students easier access and use of historic information. Owing to continued development, increased artifact collection, and on-going degradation, Utah archaeology is far different today than it was a century ago. The scientific works of these early archaeologists provide a glimpse of the variability that existed within sites and geographic areas in the early 1900s and gives a picture of Utah archaeology in an earlier era.

[more]

front cover of Archaeological Perspectives on the Southern Appalachians
Archaeological Perspectives on the Southern Appalachians
A Multiscalar Approach
Ramie A. Gougeon
University of Tennessee Press, 2015
In the last four decades, southeastern archaeology has increasingly developed a processual method of looking at archaeological data through varying levels of scale. By adjusting the scale, archaeologists can further define societal interactions and exchanges, which is particularly useful to those researching the Mississippian period, as the rise and fall of chiefdoms was both internally complex and externally influenced by broader regional factors. This use of the most current research methods has enabled a more comprehensive understanding of prehistoric and historic sociopolitical entities.
            In Archaeological Perspectives of the Southern Appalachians, Ramie A. Gougeon and Maureen S. Meyers have brought together a dozen archaeologists to delineate multiscalar approaches to Native American sites throughout southern Appalachia. The essays range in topic from ceramic assemblages in northern Georgia to public architecture in North Carolina to the frontiers of southern Appalachia in Virginia. Throughout the volume, the contributors discuss varying scales of analysis in their own research to flesh out the importance of maintaining different perspectives when evaluating archaeological evidence.
            Additionally, the volume makes particular reference to the work of David Hally, whose influence on not only the editors and contributors but on southeastern archaeology as a whole cannot be overstated. While Hally was neither a pioneer nor vocal champion of scale variation, his impeccable research, culminating with the publication of his magnum opus King: The Social Archaeology of a Late Mississippian Town in Northwestern Georgia paved the way for younger scholars to truly develop research methods for holistic social archaeology.
 
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Perspectives on the Transmission and Transformation of Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean
Archaeological Perspectives on the Transmission and Transformation of Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean
J. Clarke
Council for British Research in the Levant, 2005
The eastern Mediterranean was the centre of trade for many centuries, sitting at the junction of what are now Europe, Asia and Africa. It was the place where exotic produce and products could be traded or exchanged for things that had their origins perhaps thousands of miles away. But wherever trade takes place, a similar exchange of ideas, technology and culture also occurs. This book presents thirty papers on this very subject, looking at the ways in which we can measure the transmission of culture, and how this transmission varied across time and space.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains
Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains
Andrew Clark
University Press of Colorado, 2018

The Great Plains has been central to academic and popular visions of Native American warfare, largely because the region’s well-documented violence was so central to the expansion of Euroamerican settlement. However, social violence has deep roots on the Plains beyond this post-Contact perception, and these roots have not been systematically examined through archaeology before. War was part, and perhaps an important part, of the process of ethnogenesis that helped to define tribal societies in the region, and it affected many other aspects of human lives there. In Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains, anthropologists who study sites across the Plains critically examine regional themes of warfare from pre-Contact and post-Contact periods and assess how war shaped human societies of the region.

Contributors to this volume offer a bird’s-eye view of warfare on the Great Plains, consider artistic evidence of the role of war in the lives of indigenous hunter-gatherers on the Plains prior to and during the period of Euroamerican expansion, provide archaeological discussions of fortification design and its implications, and offer archaeological and other information on the larger implications of war in human history. Bringing together research from across the region, this volume provides unprecedented evidence of the effects of war on tribal societies. Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains is a valuable primer for regional warfare studies and the archaeology of the Great Plains as a whole.

ContributorsPeter Bleed, Richard R. Drass, David H. Dye, John Greer, Mavis Greer, Eric Hollinger, Ashley Kendell, James D. Keyser, Albert M. LeBeau III, Mark D. Mitchell, Stephen M. Perkins, Bryon Schroeder, Douglas Scott, Linea Sundstrom, Susan C. Vehik

[more]

front cover of Archaeological Remote Sensing in North America
Archaeological Remote Sensing in North America
Innovative Techniques for Anthropological Applications
Edited by Duncan P. McKinnon and Bryan S. Haley
University of Alabama Press, 2017
The latest on the rapidly growing use of innovative archaeological remote sensing for anthropological applications in North America
 
Updating the highly praised 2006 publication Remote Sensing in Archaeology, edited by Jay K. Johnson, Archaeological Remote Sensing in North America: Innovative Techniques for Anthropological Applications is a must-have volume for today’s archaeologist. Targeted to practitioners of archaeological remote sensing as well as students, this suite of current and exemplary applications adheres to high standards for methodology, processing, presentation, and interpretation.
 
The use of remote sensing technologies to address academic and applied archaeological and anthropological research problems is growing at a tremendous rate in North America. Fueling this growth are new research paradigms using innovative instrumentation technologies and broader-area data collection methods. Increasingly, investigators pursuing these new approaches are integrating remote sensing data collection with theory-based interpretations to address anthropological questions within larger research programs.
 
In this indispensable volume, case studies from around the country demonstrate the technically diverse and major remote sensing methods and their integration with relevant technologies, such as geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS), and include various uses of the “big four”: magnetometry, resistivity, ground-penetrating radar (GPR), and electromagnetic induction.
 
The study explores four major anthropological themes: site structure and community organization; technological transformation and economic change; archaeological landscapes; and earthen mound construction and composition. Concluding commentary from renowned expert Kenneth L. Kvamme overviews the practices, advances, and trends of geophysics and remote sensing in the past decade.
 
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacan, Mexico
Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacan, Mexico
Sigvald Linne, with a foreword by Staffan Brunius and introduction by George L.
University of Alabama Press, 2003
The field data and archaeological analysis of the first controlled excavations of the vast "City of the Gods" in central Mexico
 
In 1932, the Ethnographical Museum of Sweden sent an archaeological expedition to Mexico under the direction of Sigvald Linné to determine the full extent of this ancient Teotihuacan occupation and to collect exhibit-quality artifacts. Of an estimated 2,000-plus residential compounds at Teotihuacan, only 20 apartment-like structures were excavated at the time. Yet Linné’s work revealed residential patterns that have been confirmed later in other locations.
 
Some of the curated objects from the Valley of Mexico and the adjacent state of Puebla are among the most rare and unique artifacts yet found. Another important aspect of this research was that, with the aid of the Museum of Natural History in Washington, Linné’s team conducted ethnographic interviews with remnant native Mexican peoples whose culture had not been entirely destroyed by the Conquest, thereby collecting and preserving valuable information for later research.
 
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Salvage in the Walter F. George Basin of the Chattahoochee River in Alabama
Archaeological Salvage in the Walter F. George Basin of the Chattahoochee River in Alabama
David DeJarnette
University of Alabama Press, 2010
A viable cultural chronology of the Chattahoochee River Valley region from the earliest Paleoindian and Archaic foragers to the period of early European-Indian contact
 
David L. DeJarnette, the founder of scientific archaeology in the state of Alabama, reports on archaeological surveys and excavations undertaken in the Chattahoochee River Valley between 1947 and 1962. The three contributors, Wesley R. Hurt, Edward B. Kurjack, and Fred Lamar Pearson Jr., each made signal contributions to the archaeology of the southeastern states. With their mentor, David L. DeJarnette, they worked out a viable cultural chronology of the region from the earliest Paleoindian and Archaic foragers to the period of early European-Indian contact. They excavated key sites, including the Woodland period Shorter Mound, the protohistoric Abercrombie village, and Spanish Fort Apalachicola, in addition to a number of important Creek Indian town sites of the eighteenth century. All are here, illustrated abundantly by site photographs, maps, and of course, the artifacts recovered from these remarkable investigations.
 
Copublication with the Historic Chattahoochee Commission
 
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Settlement Pattern Data from the Chalco, Xochimilco, Ixtapalapa, Texcoco and Zumpango Regions, Mexico
Archaeological Settlement Pattern Data from the Chalco, Xochimilco, Ixtapalapa, Texcoco and Zumpango Regions, Mexico
Jeffrey R. Parsons, Keith W. Kintigh, and Susan A. Gregg
University of Michigan Press, 1983
This report is a descriptive tabulation of settlement pattern data collected by University of Michigan projects in the Valley of Mexico between 1967 and 1973. Data is presented in tabular form for hundreds of sites, including information on environmental zones, elevation, rainfall, soil depth, phases of occupation, and more.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940–1947
Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940–1947
Philip Phillips, James A. Ford, and James B. Griffin; edited and with a new introduction by Stephen Williams
University of Alabama Press, 2003
Documents prehistoric human occupation along the lower reaches of the Mississippi River
 
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
 
The Lower Mississippi Survey was initiated in 1939 as a joint undertaking of three institutions: the School of Geology at Louisiana State University, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Fieldwork began in 1940 but was halted during the war years. When fieldwork resumed in 1946, James Ford had joined the American Museum of Natural History, which assumed co-sponsorship from LSU. The purpose of the Lower Mississippi Survey (LMS)—a term used to identify both the fieldwork and the resultant volume—was to investigate the northern two-thirds of the alluvial valley of the lower Mississippi River, roughly from the mouth of the Ohio River to Vicksburg. This area covers about 350 miles and had been long regarded as one of the principal hot spots in eastern North American archaeology.
 
Phillips, Ford, and Griffin surveyed over 12,000 square miles, identified 382 archaeological sites, and analyzed over 350,000 potsherds in order to define ceramic typologies and establish a number of cultural periods. The commitment of these scholars to developing a coherent understanding of the archaeology of the area, as well as their mutual respect for one another, enabled the publication of what is now commonly considered the bible of southeastern archaeology. Originally published in 1951 as volume 25 of the Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, this work has been long out of print.
 
Because Stephen Williams served for 35 years as director of the LMS at Harvard, succeeding Phillips, and was closely associated with the authors during their lifetimes, his new introduction offers a broad overview of the work’s influence and value, placing it in a contemporary context.
 
[more]

front cover of An Archaeological Survey of the Keban Reservoir Area of East-Central Turkey
An Archaeological Survey of the Keban Reservoir Area of East-Central Turkey
Robert Whallon
University of Michigan Press, 1979
In this volume, author Robert Whallon reports on the results of an archaeological survey in east central Turkey. The crew found dozens of sites representing about 6,000 years of occupation, from the Early Chalcolithic (4500 BC) to the Ottoman period (roughly AD 1500). Included are drawings and detailed descriptions of the many ceramic wares recovered, as well as site maps and a thorough analysis of settlement patterns.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Variability and Interpretation in Global Perspective
Archaeological Variability and Interpretation in Global Perspective
Alan P. Sullivan
University Press of Colorado, 2016
In Archaeological Variability and Interpretation in Global Perspective, contributors illustrate the virtues of various ecological, experimental, statistical, typological, technological, and cognitive/social approaches for understanding the origins, formation histories, and inferential potential of a wide range of archaeological phenomena. As archaeologists worldwide create theoretically inspired and methodologically robust narratives of the cultural past, their research pivots on the principle that determining the origins and histories of archaeological phenomena is essential in understanding their relevance for a variety of anthropological problems.

The chapters explore how the analysis of artifact, assemblage, and site distributions at different spatial and temporal scales provides new insights into how mobility strategies affect lithic assemblage composition, what causes unstable interaction patterns in complex societies, and which factors promote a sense of “place” in landscapes of abandoned structures. In addition, several chapters illustrate how new theoretical approaches and innovative methods promote reinterpretations of the regional significance of historically important archaeological sites such as Myrtos-Pyrgos (Crete, Greece), Aztalan (Wisconsin, USA), Tabun Cave (Israel), and Casas Grandes (Chihuahua, Mexico).

The studies presented in Archaeological Variability and Interpretation in Global Perspective challenge orthodoxy, raise research-worthy controversies, and develop strong inferences about the diverse evolutionary pathways of humankind using theoretical perspectives that consider both new information and preexisting archaeological data.

Contributors: C. Michael Barton, Brian F. Byrd, Gerald Cadogan, Philip G. Chase, Harold L. Dibble, Matthew J. Douglass, Patricia C. Fanning, Lynne Goldstein, Simon J. Holdaway, Kathryn A. Kamp, Sam Lin, Emilia Oddo, Zeljko Rezek, Julien Riel-Salvatore, Gary O. Rollefson, Jeffrey Rosenthal, Barbara J. Roth, Sissel Schroeder, Justin I. Shiner, John C. Whittaker, David R. Wilcox
[more]

front cover of Archaeologies of African American Life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic
Archaeologies of African American Life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic
Edited by Michael J. Gall and Richard F. Veit
University of Alabama Press, 2017
A 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
 
New scholarship provides insights into the archaeology and cultural history of African American life from a collection of sites in the Mid-Atlantic
 
This groundbreaking volume explores the archaeology of African American life and cultures in the Upper Mid-Atlantic region, using sites dating from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Sites in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York are all examined, highlighting the potential for historical archaeology to illuminate the often overlooked contributions and experiences of the region’s free and enslaved African American settlers.
 
Archaeologies of African American Life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic brings together cutting-edge scholarship from both emerging and established scholars. Analyzing the research through sophisticated theoretical lenses and employing up-to-date methodologies, the essays reveal the diverse ways in which African Americans reacted to and resisted the challenges posed by life in a borderland between the North and South through the transition from slavery to freedom. In addition to extensive archival research, contributors synthesize the material finds of archaeological work in slave quarter sites, tenant farms, communities, and graveyards.
 
Editors Michael J. Gall and Richard F. Veit have gathered new and nuanced perspectives on the important role free and enslaved African Americans played in the region’s cultural history. This collection provides scholars of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions, African American studies, material culture studies, religious studies, slavery, the African diaspora, and historical archaeologists with a well-balanced array of rural archaeological sites that represent cultural traditions and developments among African Americans in the region. Collectively, these sites illustrate African Americans’ formation of fluid cultural and racial identities, communities, religious traditions, and modes of navigating complex cultural landscapes in the region under harsh and disenfranchising circumstances.
 
[more]

front cover of Archaeologies of Touch
Archaeologies of Touch
Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing
David Parisi
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A material history of haptics technology that raises new questions about the relationship between touch and media

Since the rise of radio and television, we have lived in an era defined increasingly by the electronic circulation of images and sounds. But the flood of new computing technologies known as haptic interfaces—which use electricity, vibration, and force feedback to stimulate the sense of touch—offering an alternative way of mediating and experiencing reality. 

In Archaeologies of Touch, David Parisi offers the first full history of these increasingly vital technologies, showing how the efforts of scientists and engineers over the past three hundred years have gradually remade and redefined our sense of touch. Through lively analyses of electrical machines, videogames, sex toys, sensory substitution systems, robotics, and human–computer interfaces, Parisi shows how the materiality of touch technologies has been shaped by attempts to transform humans into more efficient processors of information. 

With haptics becoming ever more central to emerging virtual-reality platforms (immersive bodysuits loaded with touch-stimulating actuators), wearable computers (haptic messaging systems like the Apple Watch’s Taptic Engine), and smartphones (vibrations that emulate the feel of buttons and onscreen objects), Archaeologies of Touch offers a timely and provocative engagement with the long history of touch technology that helps us confront and question the power relations underpinning the project of giving touch its own set of technical media.

[more]

front cover of Archaeologists as Activists
Archaeologists as Activists
Can Archaeologists Change the World?
Edited by M. Jay Stottman
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Examines the various ways in which archaeologists can and do use their research to forge a partnership with the past and guide the ongoing dialogue between the archaeological record and various contemporary stakeholders

Could archaeologists benefit contemporary cultures and be a factor in solving world problems? Can archaeologists help individuals? Can archaeologists change the world? These questions form the root of “archaeology activism” or “activist archaeology”: using archaeology to advocate for and affect change in contemporary communities.

Archaeologists currently change the world through the products of their archaeological research that contribute to our collective historical and cultural knowledge. Their work helps to shape and reshape our perceptions of the past and our understanding of written history. Archaeologists affect contemporary communities through the consequences of their work as they become embroiled in controversies over negotiating the past and the present with native peoples. Beyond the obvious economic contributions to local communities caused by heritage tourism established on the research of archaeologists at cultural sites, archaeologists have begun to use the process of their work as a means to benefit the public and even advocate for communities.

In this volume, Stottman and his colleagues examine the various ways in which archaeologists can and do use their research to forge a partnership with the past and guide the ongoing dialogue between the archaeological record and the various contemporary stakeholders. They draw inspiration and guidance from applied anthropology, social history, public history, heritage studies, museum studies, historic preservation, philosophy, and education to develop an activist approach to archaeology—theoretically, methodologically, and ethically.
 
[more]

front cover of An Archaeologist's Guide to Organic Residues in Pottery
An Archaeologist's Guide to Organic Residues in Pottery
Eleanora A. Reber
University of Alabama Press, 2022
A guide for mastering the technical specialty of organic residue analysis of pottery
 
Pottery analysis is a crucial component of excavating an archaeological site. Organic residues in pottery are made up of chemicals that absorb into pots over their lifetime. These residues can reveal what people ate, whether different types of vessels were used for different cooking or foodstuffs preparation, and whether “elite” vessels were in use.

Organic residue analysis is a technical specialty that blends an unusual type of instrumental organic chemistry and archaeology. Because it is considered an obscure technique, archaeologists of all degrees of experience tend to struggle with how to apply the technology to archaeological questions and how to sample effectively in the field to answer these questions.

Eleanora A. Reber’s An Archaeologist’s Guide to Organic Residues in Pottery is a user-friendly resource for all archaeologists. Composed of case studies gleaned from Reber’s more than twenty years of archaeological research, this guide covers the range of residues encountered in the field and explains the methods and application of organic residue analysis.

Reber illustrates the useful aspects of residue analysis, such as compound-specific isotope analysis for the identification of traces of maize and marine resources, conifer resins, and the psychoactive alkaloid biomarkers caffeine and nicotine. Special attention is paid to sampling and construction of meaning as well as research questions to help field archaeologists integrate residue analysis seamlessly into their projects
[more]

front cover of Archaeologists in Print
Archaeologists in Print
Publishing for the People
Amara Thornton
University College London, 2018
Archaeologists in Print is a history of popular publishing in archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a pivotal period of expansion and development in both archaeology and publishing. It examines how British archaeologists produced books and popular periodical articles for a nonscholarly audience and explores the rise in archaeologists’ public visibility. Notably, it analyzes women’s experiences in archaeology alongside better-known male contemporaries as shown in their books and archives. In the background of this narrative is the history of Britain’s imperial expansion and contraction, and the evolution of modern tourism in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Archaeologists exploited these factors to gain public and financial support and interest, and build and maintain a reading public for their work, supported by the seasonal nature of excavation and tourism. Reinforcing these publishing activities through personal appearances in the lecture hall, exhibition space and site tour, and in new media—film, radio and television—archaeologists shaped public understanding of archaeology.

The image of the archaeologist as adventurous explorer of foreign lands, part spy, part foreigner, eternally alluring, solidified during this period. That legacy continues, undimmed, today.
[more]

front cover of Archaeology and Ancient Religion in the American Midcontinent
Archaeology and Ancient Religion in the American Midcontinent
Edited by Brad H. Koldehoff and Timothy R. Pauketat
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Analyses of big datasets signal important directions for the archaeology of religion in the Archaic to Mississippian Native North America

Across North America, huge data accumulations derived from decades of cultural resource management studies, combined with old museum collections, provide archaeologists with unparalleled opportunities to explore new questions about the lives of ancient native peoples. For many years the topics of technology, economy, and political organization have received the most research attention, while ritual, religion, and symbolic expression have largely been ignored. This was often the case because researchers considered such topics beyond reach of their methods and data.

In Archaeology and Ancient Religion in the American Midcontinent, editors Brad H. Koldehoff and Timothy R. Pauketat and their contributors demonstrate that this notion is outdated through their analyses of a series of large datasets from the midcontinent, ranging from tiny charred seeds to the cosmic alignments of mounds, they consider new questions about the religious practices and lives of native peoples. At the core of this volume are case studies that explore religious practices from the Cahokia area and surrounding Illinois uplands. Additional chapters explore these topics using data collected from sites and landscapes scattered along the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys.

This innovative work facilitates a greater appreciation for, and understanding of, ancient native religious practices, especially their seamless connections to everyday life and livelihood. The contributors do not advocate for a reduced emphasis on technology, economy, and political organization; rather, they recommend expanding the scope of such studies to include considerations of how religious practices shaped the locations of sites, the character of artifacts, and the content and arrangement of sites and features. They also highlight analytical approaches that are applicable to archaeological datasets from across the Americas and beyond.
[more]

front cover of Archaeology and Apprenticeship
Archaeology and Apprenticeship
Body Knowledge, Identity, and Communities of Practice
Edited by Willeke Wendrich
University of Arizona Press, 2012
Archaeologists study a wide array of material remains to propose conclusions about non-material aspects of culture. The intricacies of these findings have increased over recent decades, but only limited attention has been paid to what the archaeological record can tell us about the transfer of cultural knowledge through apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship is broadly defined as the transmission of culture through a formal or informal teacher–pupil relationship. This collection invites a wide discussion, citing case studies from all over the world and yet focuses the scholarship into a concise set of contributions. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how archaeology can benefit greatly from the understanding of the social dimensions of knowledge transfer. This book also examines apprenticeship in archaeology against a backdrop of sociological and cognitive psychology literature, to enrich the understanding of the relationship between material remains and enculturation.

Each of the authors in this collection looks specifically at how material remains can reveal several specific aspects of ancient cultures: What is the human potential for learning? How do people learn? Who is teaching? Why are they learning? What are the results of such learning? How do we recognize knowledge transfer in the archaeological record? These fundamental questions are featured in various forms in all chapters of the book. With case studies from the American Southwest, Alaska, Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Mesopotamia, this book will have broad appeal for scholars—particularly those concerned with cultural transmission and traditions of learning and education—all over the world.
[more]

front cover of Archaeology and Ceramics at the Marksville Site
Archaeology and Ceramics at the Marksville Site
Alan Toth
University of Michigan Press, 1974
The Marksville site, which is believed to be contemporaneous with and connected to Hopewell sites in Ohio and Illinois, is in Avoyelles Parish in central Louisiana, in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In this volume, Alan Toth compiles information drawn from three early archaeological excavations at Marksville. The excavations were led by Gerard Fowke in 1926; Frank M. Setzler and James A. Ford in 1933; and Robert S. Neitzel and Edwin B. Doran in 1939. Includes a ceramic analysis for all three excavations, black and white photographs of ceramics, and 14 tables of ceramic counts.
[more]

front cover of Archaeology and Desertification
Archaeology and Desertification
The Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey, Southern Jordan
G. Barker
Council for British Research in the Levant, 2007
The Wadi Faynan is a harshly beautiful and desertic landscape in southern Jordan, situated between the hyper-arid deserts of the Wadi 'Arabah and the rugged and wetter Mountains of Edom. Archaeology and Desertification presents the results of the Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey, an inter-disciplinary study of landscape change undertaken in the Wadi Faynan by a team of archaeologists and geographers with the goal of contributing to present-day desertification debates by providing a long-term perspective on the relationship between environmental change and human history. The Wadi Faynan was the focus for some of the earliest farming in the Near East, and the earliest metallurgy, and in Roman times was a centre for copper and lead mining. The project reveals how past communities of farmers, shepherds, and miners managed their challenging environment, the solutions they developed, their successes and failures, and their short- and long-term environmental impacts. The richness of the palaeoclimatic, archaeological and palaeoecological data reveals an environmental/cultural history of complex pathways, synergies, and feedbacks operating at many different geographical scales, rates, and intensities. The project's findings on the complexity of past and present people:environment relations in the Wadi Faynan affirm the power of inter-disciplinary landscape archaeology to contribute significantly to the desertification debate. With global warming likely to threaten the lives of millions of people in the semi-arid and arid lands that comprise over a third of the planet through the course of this century, with potentially dire consequences for adjacent populations in better-watered regions, understanding the complexity of past responses to aridification has never been more urgent.
[more]

front cover of Archaeology and Geoinformatics
Archaeology and Geoinformatics
Case Studies from the Caribbean
Edited by Basil A. Reid
University of Alabama Press, 2008
Provides tremendous insight and an excellent grasp of the special geoinformatics needs of Caribbean researchers

Addressing the use of geoinformatics in Caribbean archaeology, this volume is based on case studies drawn from specific island territories, namely, Barbados, St. John, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Nevis, St. Eustatius, and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as inter-island interaction and landscape conceptualization in the Caribbean region. Geoinformatics is especially critical within the Caribbean where site destruction is intense due to storm surges, hurricanes, ocean and riverine erosion, urbanization, industrialization, and agriculture, as well as commercial development along the very waterfronts that were home to many prehistoric peoples. By demonstrating that the region is fertile ground for the application of geoinformatics in archaeology, this volume places a well-needed scholarly spotlight on the Caribbean.
[more]

front cover of Archaeology and Identity on the Pacific Coast and Southern Highlands of Mesoamerica
Archaeology and Identity on the Pacific Coast and Southern Highlands of Mesoamerica
Edited by Claudia García-Des Lauriers and Michael W. Love
University of Utah Press, 2016

The Pacific coast and southern highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala is a region significant to debates about the origins of social complexity, interaction, and colonialism. The area, however, has received uneven attention and much of what we know is largely restricted to the Preclassic period. This theoretically eclectic volume presents greater temporal coverage, is geographically unified, and engages some of the most important questions of each period through a discussion of the archaeology of identity.
     Chapters range from traditional assessments of identity to discussion of practice and relational personhood; all share a concern for how archaeology and ethnohistory provide opportunities and challenges in the reconstruction of identities. The region is one with a multifaceted history of interactions between local populations and those from other parts of Mesoamerica. Linguistic diversity, landscape, and artistic representations have added to the complexities of understanding identity formation here. Rather than providing a unified voice on the issues, Archaeology and Identity on the Pacific Coast and Southern Highlands of Mesoamerica is a dialogue presented through case studies, one that will hopefully encourage future research in this complex and little understood region of Mesoamerica. 

[more]

front cover of The Archaeology and Rock Art of Swordfish Cave
The Archaeology and Rock Art of Swordfish Cave
Clayton G. Lebow
University of Utah Press, 2015
University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 129

Swordfish Cave is a well-known rock art site located on Vandenberg Air Force Base in south central California. Named for the swordfish painted on its wall, the cave is a sacred Chumash site. It was under threat from various processes and required measures to conserve it. Nearly all of the cave’s interior was excavated to create a rock art viewing area. That effort revealed previously unknown rock art and made it possible to closely examine how early occupants used the space inside the cave. They identified three periods of human use, including an initial occupation around 3,550 years ago, an occupation about 660 years later, and a final Native American occupation that occurred much later, between A.D. 1787 and 1804. The discovery of tools used to make the pictographs linked the art to the two early occupations, pushing back the generally understood antiquity of rock art on California’s Central Coast by more than 2,000 years.
     Two aspects make this study unusual: datable materials associated with rock art and complete removal of cave deposits. Well illustrated with photographs, maps, and drawings of both the art itself and the excavations and materials revealed therein, the book presents a rare opportunity to directly link archaeology and rock art and to examine the spatial organization of prehistoric human habitation. 
[more]

front cover of Archaeology as a Process
Archaeology as a Process
Processualism and Its Progeny
Michael J O'Brien
University of Utah Press, 2007
The publication in 1962 of Lew Binford’s paper "Archaeology as Anthropology" is generally considered to mark the birth of processualism—a critical turning point in American archaeology. In the hands of Binford and other young University of Chicago graduates of the 1960s, this "new" archaeology became the mainstream approach in the U.S. The realignment that the processualists proposed was so thorough that its effects are still being felt today. Predictably, processualism also spun off a number of other "isms," several of which grew up to challenge its supremacy.

Archaeology as a Process traces the intellectual history of Americanist archaeology in terms of the research groups that were at the forefront of these various approaches, concentrating as much on the archaeologists as it does on method and theory, thus setting it apart from other treatments published in the last fifteen years.

Peppered with rare photographs of well-known archaeologists in some interesting settings, the book documents the swirl and excitement of archaeological controversy for the past forty years with over 1,600 references and an in-depth treatment of all the major intellectual approaches. The contributors examine how archaeology is conducted—the ins and outs of how various groups work to promote themselves—and how personal ambition and animosities can function to further rather than retard the development of the discipline.
[more]

front cover of Archaeology As Anthropology
Archaeology As Anthropology
A Case Study
William A. Longacre
University of Arizona Press, 1970
This paper is important in the rapidly increasing preoccupation of American archeologists with the basic theories of their discipline. . . . An excellent example of how basic descriptive data can be used.—American Anthropologist
[more]

front cover of Archaeology at El Perú-Waka'
Archaeology at El Perú-Waka'
Ancient Maya Performances of Ritual, Memory, and Power
Edited by Olivia C. Navarro-Farr and Michelle Rich
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Archaeology at El Perú-Waka’ is the first book to summarize long-term research at this major Maya site. The results of fieldwork and subsequent analyses conducted by members of the El Perú-Waka’ Regional Archaeological Project are coupled with theoretical approaches treating the topics of ritual, memory, and power as deciphered through material remains discovered at Waka’.  The book is site-centered, yet the fifteen wide-ranging contributions offer readers greater insight to the richness and complexity of Classic-period Maya culture, as well as to the ways in which archaeologists believe ancient peoples negotiated their ritual lives and comprehended their own pasts.
 
El Perú-Waka’ is an ancient Maya city located in present-day northwestern Petén, Guatemala. Rediscovered by petroleum exploration workers in the mid-1960s, it is the largest known archaeological site in the Laguna del Tigre National Park in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve. The El Perú-Waka’ Regional Archaeological Project initiated scientific investigations in 2003, and through excavation and survey, researchers established that Waka’ was a key political and economic center well integrated into Classic-period lowland Maya civilization, and reconstructed many aspects of Maya life and ritual activity in this ancient community. The research detailed in this volume provides a wealth of new, substantive, and scientifically excavated data, which contributors approach with fresh theoretical insights. In the process, they lay out sound strategies for understanding the ritual manipulation of monuments, landscapes, buildings, objects, and memories, as well as related topics encompassing the performance and negotiation of power throughout the city’s extensive sociopolitical history.
[more]

front cover of Archaeology at Shiloh Indian Mounds, 1899-1999
Archaeology at Shiloh Indian Mounds, 1899-1999
Paul D. Welch
University of Alabama Press, 2006
One hundred years of archaeological excavations at an important American landmark, the Shiloh Indian Mounds archaeological site, a National Historic Landmark

The Shiloh Indian Mounds archaeological site, a National Historic Landmark, is a late prehistoric community within the boundaries of the Shiloh National Military Park on the banks of the Tennessee River, where one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War was fought in April 1862. Dating between AD 1000 and 1450, the archaeological site includes at least eight mounds and more than 100 houses. It is unique in that the land has never been plowed, so visitors can walk around the area and find the collapsed remains of 800-year-old houses and the 900-meter-long palisade with bastions that protected the village in prehistoric times. Although its location within a National Park boundary has protected the area from the recent ravages of man, riverbank erosion began to undermine the site in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, Paul Welch began a four-year investigation culminating in a comprehensive report to the National Park Service on the Shiloh Indian Mounds.
 
These published findings confirm that the Shiloh site was one of at least fourteen Mississippian mound sites located within a 50 km area and that Shiloh was abandoned in approximately AD 1450. It also establishes other parameters for the Shiloh archaeological phase. This current volume is intended to make information about the first 100 years of excavations at the Shiloh site available to the archaeological community.
 
[more]

front cover of Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution
Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution
A Tale of Two Taverns and the Growth of Philadelphia
Rebecca Yamin
Temple University Press, 2019

When the Museum of the American Revolution acquired the land at Third and Chestnut streets in Olde City, Philadelphia, it came with the condition that an archaeological investigation be conducted. The excavation that began in the summer of 2014 yielded treasures in the trash: unearthed privy pits provided remarkable finds from a mid-eighteenth-century tavern to relics from a button factory dating to the early twentieth century. These artifacts are described and analyzed by urban archaeologist Rebecca Yamin in Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution.

Yamin, lead archaeologist on the dig, catalogues items—including earthenware plates and jugs, wig curlers, clay pipes, and liquor bottles—to tell the stories of their owners and their roles in Philadelphia history. As she uncovers the history of the people as well as their houses, taverns, and buildings that were once on the site, she explains  that by looking at these remains, we see the story of the growth of Philadelphia from its colonial beginnings to the Second World War.

Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution is a perfect keepsake for armchair archaeologists, introductory students, and history buffs.

[more]

front cover of Archaeology below the Cliff
Archaeology below the Cliff
Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society
Matthew C. Reilly
University of Alabama Press, 2019
First book-length archaeological study of a nonelite white population on a Caribbean plantation

Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society is the first archaeological study of the poor whites of Barbados, the descendants of seventeenth-century European indentured servants and small farmers. “Redlegs” is a pejorative to describe the marginalized group who remained after the island transitioned to a sugar monoculture economy dependent on the labor of enslaved Africans. A sizable portion of the “white” minority, the Redlegs largely existed on the peripheries of the plantation landscape in an area called “Below Cliff,” which was deemed unsuitable for profitable agricultural production. Just as the land on which they resided was cast as marginal, so too have the poor whites historically and contemporarily been derided as peripheral and isolated as well as idle, alcoholic, degenerate, inbred, and irrelevant to a functional island society and economy.

Using archaeological, historical, and oral sources, Matthew C. Reilly shows how the precarious existence of the Barbadian Redlegs challenged elite hypercapitalistic notions of economics, race, and class as they were developing in colonial society. Experiencing pronounced economic hardship, similar to that of the enslaved, albeit under very different circumstances, Barbadian Redlegs developed strategies to live in a harsh environment. Reilly’s investigations reveal that what developed in Below Cliff was a moral economy, based on community needs rather than free-market prices.

Reilly extensively excavated households from the tenantry area on the boundaries of the Clifton Hall Plantation, which was abandoned in the 1960s, to explore the daily lives of poor white tenants and investigate their relationships with island economic processes and networks. Despite misconceptions of strict racial isolation, evidence also highlights the importance of poor white encounters and relationships with Afro-Barbadians. Historical data are also incorporated to address how an underrepresented demographic experienced the plantation landscape. Ultimately, Reilly’s narrative situates the Redlegs within island history, privileging inclusion and embeddedness over exclusion and isolation.
 
[more]


front cover of Archaeology, History, and Formation of Identity in Ancient Israel
Archaeology, History, and Formation of Identity in Ancient Israel
Filip Capek
Karolinum Press, 2023
A critical examination of the history of Israel.

When did Israel begin? The origins of ancient Israel are shrouded in mystery, and those hoping to explore the issue must utilize resources from three different fields—archaeology, epigraphy, and biblical texts—and then examine their interrelations while keeping in mind that the name Israel was not used to describe just one state but referred to numerous entities at different times.

Archaeology, History, and Formation of Identity in Ancient Israel provides a critical reading of Israel’s history. It is neither a harmonizing reading, which takes the picture painted by texts as a given fact, nor a reading supporting biblical texts with archaeological and epigraphic data; instead, it offers the reader multiple options to understand biblical narratives on a historical and theological level. In addition to presenting the main currents in the field, the book draws upon the latest discoveries from Czech-Israeli excavations to offer new hypotheses and reconstructions based on the interdisciplinary dialogue between biblical studies, archaeology, and history.
[more]

front cover of Archaeology, History, and Predictive Modeling
Archaeology, History, and Predictive Modeling
Research at Fort Polk, 1972-2002
David G. Anderson and Steven D. Smith
University of Alabama Press, 2003
Allows scholars to more easily examine the record of human activity over the past 13,000 or more years in this part of western Louisiana and adjacent portions of east Texas

Fort Polk Military Reservation encompasses approximately 139,000 acres in western Louisiana 40 miles southwest of Alexandria. As a result of federal mandates for cultural resource investigation, more archaeological work has been undertaken there, beginning in the 1970s, than has occurred at any other comparably sized area in Louisiana or at most other localities in the southeastern United States. The extensive program of survey, excavation, testing, and large-scale data and artifact recovery, as well as historic and archival research, has yielded a massive amount of information. While superbly curated by the U.S. Army, the material has been difficult to examine and comprehend in its totality.

With this volume, Anderson and Smith collate and synthesize all the information into a comprehensive whole. Included are previous investigations, an overview of local environmental conditions, base military history and architecture, and the prehistoric and historic cultural sequence. An analysis of location, environmental, and assemblage data employing a sample of more than 2,800 sites and isolated finds was used to develop a predictive model that identifies areas where significant cultural resources are likely to occur. Developed in 1995, this model has already proven to be highly accurate and easy to use.

Archaeology, History, and Predictive Modeling will allow scholars to more easily examine the record of human activity over the past 13,000 or more years in this part of western Louisiana and adjacent portions of east Texas. It will be useful to southeastern archaeologists and anthropologists, both professional and amateur.
 
[more]

front cover of Archaeology in the Digital Era
Archaeology in the Digital Era
Papers from the 40th Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA), Southampton, 26-29 March 2012
Edited by Graeme Earl, et al.
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
CAA is the foremost conference on digital archaeology, and this volume offers a comprehensive and up-to date reference to the state of the art. This volume contains a selection of the best papers presented at the 40th Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA), held in Southampton from 26 to 29 March 2012. The papers, all written and peer-reviewed by experts in the field of digital archaeology, explore a multitude of topics to showcase ground-breaking technologies and best practice from various archaeological and informatics disciplines, with a variety of case studies from all over the world.Download the Table of Contents and a sample chapter
[more]

front cover of Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest
Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest
Papers in Honor of Don D. Fowler
Nancy J. Parezo
University of Utah Press, 2014
Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest is a compilation of papers by friends and colleagues that honor Don D. Fowler. The volume encompasses the breadth and depth of Fowler’s work in archaeology and sister disciplines with original scholarship on the human past of the arid west. Included are theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers that synthesize and present fresh perspectives on Great Basin and Southwest archaeology and cover a sweep of topics from Paleoindian research to collaboration with Native Americans. Fowler has continually reminded scholars that to understand the past we must know how the local and specific is regionally and transculturally contextualized, how what we know came to be recognized, studied, and interpreted—in short, how the past still affects the present—and how regional and topical archaeology is part of a disciplinary endeavor that is as concerned with rigorous and inclusive knowledge production as it is with site description and cultural syntheses.

Readers will learn about the nature of archaeological careers, how archaeology has been conceptualized and conducted, the strengths and limitations of past and present approaches, and the institution building and political processes in which archaeologists engage. Contributors posit new thoughts designed to stimulate new lines of research and reflect on the state of our current knowledge about a wealth of topics. Each paper asks four questions about what Great Basin and southwestern archaeologists currently know: Where have we been? Where are we now? What do we still need to learn? Where are we going? This comprehensive volume will be of interest to those practicing or teaching archaeology and to students seeking to understand the intricacies of Great Basin and Southwest archaeology.

[more]

front cover of Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest, Part 2
Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest, Part 2
Papers in Honor of Don D. Fowler
Nancy J. Parezo
University of Utah Press, 2014
Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest is a compilation of papers by friends and colleagues that honor Don D. Fowler. The volume encompasses the breadth and depth of Fowler’s work in archaeology and sister disciplines with original scholarship on the human past of the arid west. Included are theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers that synthesize and present fresh perspectives on Great Basin and Southwest archaeology and cover a sweep of topics from Paleoindian research to collaboration with Native Americans. Fowler has continually reminded scholars that to understand the past we must know how the local and specific is regionally and transculturally contextualized, how what we know came to be recognized, studied, and interpreted—in short, how the past still affects the present—and how regional and topical archaeology is part of a disciplinary endeavor that is as concerned with rigorous and inclusive knowledge production as it is with site description and cultural syntheses.

Readers will learn about the nature of archaeological careers, how archaeology has been conceptualized and conducted, the strengths and limitations of past and present approaches, and the institution building and political processes in which archaeologists engage. Contributors posit new thoughts designed to stimulate new lines of research and reflect on the state of our current knowledge about a wealth of topics. Each paper asks four questions about what Great Basin and southwestern archaeologists currently know: Where have we been? Where are we now? What do we still need to learn? Where are we going? This comprehensive volume will be of interest to those practicing or teaching archaeology and to students seeking to understand the intricacies of Great Basin and Southwest archaeology.

[more]

front cover of Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest, Part 3
Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest, Part 3
Papers in Honor of Don D. Fowler
Nancy J. Parezo
University of Utah Press, 2014
Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest is a compilation of papers by friends and colleagues that honor Don D. Fowler. The volume encompasses the breadth and depth of Fowler’s work in archaeology and sister disciplines with original scholarship on the human past of the arid west. Included are theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers that synthesize and present fresh perspectives on Great Basin and Southwest archaeology and cover a sweep of topics from Paleoindian research to collaboration with Native Americans. Fowler has continually reminded scholars that to understand the past we must know how the local and specific is regionally and transculturally contextualized, how what we know came to be recognized, studied, and interpreted—in short, how the past still affects the present—and how regional and topical archaeology is part of a disciplinary endeavor that is as concerned with rigorous and inclusive knowledge production as it is with site description and cultural syntheses.

Readers will learn about the nature of archaeological careers, how archaeology has been conceptualized and conducted, the strengths and limitations of past and present approaches, and the institution building and political processes in which archaeologists engage. Contributors posit new thoughts designed to stimulate new lines of research and reflect on the state of our current knowledge about a wealth of topics. Each paper asks four questions about what Great Basin and southwestern archaeologists currently know: Where have we been? Where are we now? What do we still need to learn? Where are we going? This comprehensive volume will be of interest to those practicing or teaching archaeology and to students seeking to understand the intricacies of Great Basin and Southwest archaeology.

[more]

front cover of Archaeology, Narrative, and the Politics of the Past
Archaeology, Narrative, and the Politics of the Past
The View from Southern Maryland
Julia A. King
University of Tennessee Press, 2012

In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches—archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical—to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces.
    The sites King examines include the region’s vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary’s City, established as Maryland’s first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary’s City, for example, early on became the center of Maryland’s “founding narrative” of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the area’s Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories.
    As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region’s more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research—particularly archaeological research—that produces new stories and “counter-narratives” that challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a complicated past.

Julia A. King is an associate professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she coordinates the Museum Studies Program and directs the SlackWater Center, a consortium devoted to exploring, documenting, and interpreting the changing landscapes of Chesapeake communities. She is also coeditor, with Dennis B. Blanton, of Indian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region.

[more]

front cover of The Archaeology of Ancient Arizona
The Archaeology of Ancient Arizona
Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Carved from cliffs and canyons, buried in desert rock and sand are pieces of the ancient past that beckon thousands of visitors every year to the American Southwest. Whether Montezuma Castle or a chunk of pottery, these traces of prehistory also bring archaeologists from all over the world, and their work gives us fresh insight and information on an almost day-to-day basis. Who hasn't dreamed of boarding a time machine for a trip into the past?

This book invites us to step into a Hohokam village with its sounds of barking dogs, children's laughter, and the ever-present grinding of mano on metate to produce the daily bread. Here, too, readers will marvel at the skills of Clovis elephant hunters and touch the lives of other ancestral people known as Mogollon, Anasazi, Sinagua, and Salado. Descriptions of long-ago people are balanced with tales about the archaeologists who have devoted their lives to learning more about "those who came before." Trekking through the desert with the famed Emil Haury, readers will stumble upon Ventana Cave, his "answer to a prayer." With amateur archaeologist Richard Wetherill, they will sense the peril of crossing the flooded San Juan River on the way to Chaco Canyon. Others profiled in the book are A. V. Kidder, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, Julian Hayden, Harold S. Gladwin, and many more names synonymous with the continuing saga of southwestern archaeology.

This book is an open invitation to general readers to join in solving the great archaeological puzzles of this part of the world. Moreover, it is the only up-to-date summary of a field advancing so rapidly that much of the material is new even to professional archaeologists. Lively and fast paced, the book will appeal to anyone who finds magic in a broken bowl or pueblo wall touched by human hands hundreds of years ago. For all readers, these pages offer a sense of adventure, that "you are there" stir of excitement that comes only with making new discoveries about the distant past.
[more]

front cover of The Archaeology of Arcuate Communities
The Archaeology of Arcuate Communities
Spatial Patterning and Settlement in the Eastern Woodlands
Edited by Martin Menz, Analise Hollingshead, and Haley Messer
University of Alabama Press, 2024
The Archaeology of Arcuate Communities is an edited collection of ten essays that illuminate how Indigenous communities of the Eastern Woodlands, from 10,000 BC to the 1550s, are analyzed and interpreted by archaeologists today. Volume editors Martin Menz, Analise Hollingshead, and Haley Messer define the persistent circular or “arcuate” pattern of Native settlements in this region as a spatial manifestation of community activities that reinforced group identity alongside plazas, mounds, and other architectural features.

The varied case studies in this volume focus on specific communities, how they evolved, and the types of archaeological data that have been used to assess them. Part I, “Defining the Domestic Unit in Arcuate Communities,” reveals social distinctions between households and household clusters in arcuate communities, how they differ in terms of stylistic patterns and exchange, and how they combined to form distinct social groups at different scales within a broader community. Part II, “Organizing Principles of Arcuate Communities,” broadens the scope to identify the organizing principles of entire arcuate communities, such as the central role of plazas in structuring their development, how the distribution of households and central features within communities was contested and reorganized, and the importance of mounds in both delineating arcuate communities and marking their position on the landscape. Part III, “Comparison and Change in Arcuate Communities,” comprises case studies that examine changes in the organization of arcuate communities over time. Rounding out the volume is a concluding chapter that assesses how and why communities around the world formed in circular patterns.

A valuable resource for archaeologists, this collection will also be of interest to those seeking to learn about Native North American settlement, ceremony, and community organization.
 
[more]

front cover of The Archaeology of Carrier Mills
The Archaeology of Carrier Mills
10,000 Years in the Saline Valley of Illinois
Richard W. Jefferies
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987

Archaeological sites throughout southern Illinois provide a chronicle of the varying ways people have lived in that area during the past 10,000 years. This book focuses on the results of a five-year archaeological investigation in a 143-acre area known as the Carrier Mills Archaeo­logical District. This area, rich in archaeological treasures, offers many keys to the prehistoric people of southern Illinois. Archaeologists in this study have sought to learn the ages of the various prehistoric occupations represented at the sites; to better un­derstand the technology and social organization of these prehistoric people; to collect information about diet, health, and physical characteristics of the prehistoric inhabitants; and to investigate the remains of the 19th-century Lakeview settlement.

[more]

front cover of The Archaeology of Class War
The Archaeology of Class War
The Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1913-1914
Karin Larkin
University Press of Colorado, 2009
The Archaeology of the Colorado Coalfield War Project has conducted archaeological investigations at the site of the Ludlow Massacre in Ludlow, Colorado, since 1996. With the help of the United Mine Workers of America and funds from the Colorado State Historical Society and the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, the scholars involved have integrated archaeological finds with archival evidence to show how the everyday experiences of miners and their families shaped the strike and its outcome.The Archaeology of Class War weaves together material culture, documents, oral histories, landscapes, and photographs to reveal aspects of the strike and life in early twentieth-century Colorado coalfields unlike any standard documentary history. Excavations at the site of the massacre and the nearby town of Berwind exposed tent platforms, latrines, trash dumps, and the cellars in which families huddled during the attack. Myriad artifacts—from canning jars to a doll’s head—reveal the details of daily existence and bring the community to life.The Archaeology of Class War will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, and general readers interested in mining and labor history.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter