Author : William Duncan Strong
Publisher :
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 45,96 MB
Release : 2011-09
Category :
ISBN : 9781258102753
Columbia Studies In Archeology And Ethnology, V4.
Author : William Duncan Strong
Publisher :
Page : 373 pages
File Size : 34,92 MB
Release : 1952
Category : Indians of South America
ISBN : 9780231880541
An anthropological study on human cultural adaptation of mankind within the confines of a small area over a long period of time by studying the stratigraphic record of the lower and older half of the Viru Valley in Northern Peru. Describes the rise of early civilizations in the Viru Valley and the highly evolved and colorful native civilizations that occupied the area in pre-European times.
Author : Margaret Towle
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 20,26 MB
Release : 2017-07-28
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1351303945
All of man's life is in some way associated with the plant world, from his food and shelter to his art, religion and language. The study of this all-pervading relationship between man and the plant world is called ethnobotany. This book provides a systematic reconstruction of the ethnobotany of one of the hearths of American civilization, in the prehistoric cultures of the Peruvian Central Andes.As we learn more about the rise and spread of New World agriculture, it becomes evident that Peru was one of the sources of its development. Plants were cultivated here at least 2,000 years before the beginning of the Christian era. Village life was intimately bound up with this cultivation, later civilizations rested upon it as a foundation, and from Peru agriculture was diffused to other parts of the Americas.Towle bases her work on the evidence of plant remains found in archeological sites, surveys of botanical and ethnological literature, and field studies of modern plant utilization. After a methodological and historical introduction, she proceeds to a systematic listing of plant species, each fully described. She then presents the ethnobotanical data for each of the cultural-geographic divisions of the area, giving a chronological picture of the use of wild and cultivated plants against a background of the cultures of which they were part. A summary of the evolutionary trends in the region as a whole is followed by a full bibliography and index. The book contains fifteen pages of plates.Margaret A. Towle (1902-1985) received her doctorate from Columbia University in 1958 and was research fellow in ethnobotany in the Botanical Museum of Harvard University.
Author : Michael J. O'Brien
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 43,81 MB
Release : 2007-05-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 030647168X
It is difficult for today's students of archaeology to imagine an era when chronometric dating methods were unavailable. However, even a casual perusal of the large body of literature that arose during the first half of the twentieth century reveals a battery of clever methods used to determine the relative ages of archaeological phenomena, often with considerable precision. Stratigraphic excavation is perhaps the best known of the various relative-dating methods used by prehistorians. Although there are several techniques of using artifacts from superposed strata to measure time, these are rarely if ever differentiated. Rather, common practice is to categorize them under the heading `stratigraphic excavation'. This text distinguishes among the several techniques and argues that stratigraphic excavation tends to result in discontinuous measures of time - a point little appreciated by modern archaeologists. Although not as well known as stratigraphic excavation, two other methods of relative dating have figured important in Americanist archaeology: seriation and the use of index fossils. The latter (like stratigraphic excavation) measures time discontinuously, while the former - in various guises - measures time continuously. Perhaps no other method used in archaeology is as misunderstood as seriation, and the authors provide detailed descriptions and examples of each of its three different techniques. Each method and technique of relative dating is placed in historical perspective, with particular focus on developments in North America, an approach that allows a more complete understanding of the methods described, both in terms of analytical technique and disciplinary history. This text will appeal to all archaeologists, from graduate students to seasoned professionals, who want to learn more about the backbone of archaeological dating.
Author : Elizabeth P. Benson
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 38,66 MB
Release : 2012-07-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0292742630
The Moche, or Mochica, created an extraordinary civilization on the north coast of Peru for most of the first millennium AD. Although they had no written language with which to record their history and beliefs, the Moche built enormous ceremonial edifices and embellished them with mural paintings depicting supernatural figures and rituals. Highly skilled Moche artisans crafted remarkable ceramic vessels, which they painted with figures and scenes or modeled like sculpture, and mastered metallurgy in gold, silver, and copper to make impressive symbolic ornaments. They also wove textiles that were complex in execution and design. A senior scholar renowned for her discoveries about the Moche, Elizabeth P. Benson published the first English-language monograph on the subject in 1972. Now in this volume, she draws on decades of knowledge, as well as the findings of other researchers, to offer a grand overview of all that is currently known about the Moche. Touching on all significant aspects of Moche culture, she covers such topics as their worldview and ritual life, ceremonial architecture and murals, art and craft, supernatural beings, government and warfare, and burial and the afterlife. She demonstrates that the Moche expressed, with symbolic language in metal and clay, what cultures in other parts of the world presented in writing. Indeed, Benson asserts that the accomplishments of the Moche are comparable to those of their Mesoamerica contemporaries, the Maya, which makes them one of the most advanced civilizations of pre-Columbian America.
Author : Jean-Francois Millaire
Publisher : Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 47,22 MB
Release : 2009-12-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1938770552
Over the last decades, considerable effort has been directed towards the study of early complex societies of northern Peru, and in recent years archaeologists have expressed a strong interest in the art and archaeology of the Moche, Lambayeque and Chimu societies. Yet, comparatively little attention has been paid to the earlier cultural foundations of north coast civilization: the Gallinazo. In the recent years, however, the work of a number of north coast specialists brought about a large quantity of data on the Gallinazo occupation of the coast, but a coherent framework for studying this culture had yet to be defined. The present volume is the result of a round table, which gathered some thirty scholars from Europe and North and South America to discuss the Gallinazo phenomenon. In fourteen chapters, authors with different perspectives and backgrounds reconsider the nature of the Gallinazo culture and its position within north coast cultural history, while addressing wider issues about the development of complex societies in this area and within the Andean region in general. The contributions reveal a diversity of perspectives on north coast archaeology, something that is likely to stimulate methodological and theoretical debates among Andeanists, pre-Columbian specialists and New World archaeologists in general.
Author : Haagen D. Klaus
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 487 pages
File Size : 13,65 MB
Release : 2016-07-26
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1477310584
Traditions of sacrifice exist in almost every human culture and often embody a society’s most meaningful religious and symbolic acts. Ritual violence was particularly varied and enduring in the prehistoric South American Andes, where human lives, animals, and material objects were sacrificed in secular rites or as offerings to the divine. Spectacular discoveries of sacrificial sites containing the victims of violent rituals have drawn ever-increasing attention to ritual sacrifice within Andean archaeology. Responding to this interest, this volume provides the first regional overview of ritual killing on the pre-Hispanic north coast of Peru, where distinct forms and diverse trajectories of ritual violence developed during the final 1,800 years of prehistory. Presenting original research that blends empirical approaches, iconographic interpretations, and contextual analyses, the contributors address four linked themes—the historical development and regional variation of north coast sacrifice from the early first millennium AD to the European conquest; a continuum of ritual violence that spans people, animals, and objects; the broader ritual world of sacrifice, including rites both before and after violent offering; and the use of diverse scientific tools, archaeological information, and theoretical interpretations to study sacrifice. This research proposes a wide range of new questions that will shape the research agenda in the coming decades, while fostering a nuanced, scientific, and humanized approach to the archaeology of ritual violence that is applicable to archaeological contexts around the world.
Author : Helaine Silverman
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 24,40 MB
Release : 2002
Category : History
ISBN : 158729429X
Nasca society arose on the south coast of Peru two thousand years ago and evolved over the course of the next seven hundred years. Helaine Silverman's long-term, multistage work on the south coast of Peru has established her as one of the world's preeminent authorities on this brilliant and enigmatic civilization.a"Ancient Nasca Settlement and Society"ais the first extended treatment of the range of sites occupied by the people responsible for some of the most exquisite art, largest ground drawings, most intense hunting of human heads as trophies, and most ingenious hydraulic engineering of the pre-Columbian world. "Ancient Nasca Settlement and Society"ais based on Silverman's comprehensive survey of the Ingenio Valley, a water-rich tributary of the R o Grande de Nazca drainage; it also includes a critical synthesis of the settlement pattern data from the other river valleys of the system maps and tables, Silverman allows comparisons among the various phases of change in Nasca society. A companion CD-ROM provides a great deal of graphic material and allows users to manipulate the data in alternative scenarios. Silverman situates the various classes of Nasca material culture within the spatial, social, economic, political, and ideological realities that can be adduced from the archaeological record. A work of archaeo-logical ethnography focused on a once-living society, this convincing and highly original book illuminates the ancient Nasca people's social construction of space and cultural meaning through their manipulation of their natural setting and their creation of particular kinds of built environments."
Author : Duccio Bonavia
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 605 pages
File Size : 21,40 MB
Release : 2013-05-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1139619942
This book examines one of the thorniest problems of ancient American archaeology: the origins and domestication of maize. Using a variety of scientific techniques, Duccio Bonavia explores the development of maize, its adaptation to varying climates and its fundamental role in ancient American cultures. An appendix (by Alexander Grobman) provides the first-ever comprehensive compilation of maize genetic data, correlating this data with the archaeological evidence presented throughout the book. This book provides a unique interpretation of questions of dating and evolution, supported by extensive data, following the spread of maize from South to North America and eventually to Europe and beyond.
Author : Paul Wheatley
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 40,25 MB
Release :
Category : History
ISBN : 020236769X
These two volumes elucidate the manner in which there emerged, on the North China plain, hierarchically structured, functionally specialized social institutions organized on a political and territorial basis during the second millennium b.c. They describe the way in which, during subsequent centuries, these institutes were diffused through much of the rest of North and Central China. Author Paul Wheatley equates the emergence of the ceremonial center, as evidenced in Shang China, with a functional and developmental stage in urban genesis, and substantiates his argument with comparative evidence from the Americas, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Yoruba territories. The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City seeks in small measure to help redress the current imbalance between our knowledge of the contemporary, Western-style city on the one hand, and of the urbanism characteristic of the traditional world on the other. Those aspects of urban theory which have been derived predominantly from the investigation of Western urbanism, are tested against, rather than applied to ancient China. The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City examines the cosmological symbolism of the Chinese city, constructed as a world unto itself. It suggests, with a wealth of argument and evidence, that this cosmo-magical role underpinned the functional unity of the city everywhere, until new bases for urban life began to develop in the Hellenistic world. Whereas the majority of previous investigations into the nature of the Chinese city have been undertaken from the standpoint of elites, The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City has adopted a point of view closer to that of the social scientist than the geographer. Paul Wheatley was professor and chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He was most famous for his work dealing with comparative urban civilization. Some of his books include The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, 7th to 10th Centuries; Nagara and Commandery, Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Traditions; and The Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore (with K. S. Sandhu).
