The Archaeology of Villages in Eastern North America


Book Description

The emergence of village-communities profoundly transformed social organization in every part of the world where such societies developed. Contributors to 'The Archaeology of Villages in Eastern North America' employ archaeological and historical evidence to explore the development of villages among eastern North American indigenous societies of the deep and recent past. Rich data sets from archaeology and contemporary social theory are employed to document the physical attributes of villages, the structural organization and aggregation of such entities, what it means to be a villager, cosmological and ritual systems, and how villages were entangled with one another in regional networks.




Bears


Book Description

Although scholars have long recognized the mythic status of bears in Indigenous North American societies of the past, this is the first volume to synthesize the vast amount of archaeological and historical research on the topic. Bears charts the special relationship between the American black bear and humans in eastern Native American cultures across thousands of years. These essays draw on zooarchaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence from nearly 300 archaeological sites from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Contributors explore the ways bears have been treated as something akin to another kind of human—in the words of anthropologist Irving Hallowell, “other than human persons”—in Algonquian, Cherokee, Iroquois, Meskwaki, Creek, and many other Native cultures. Case studies focus on bear imagery in Native art and artifacts; the religious and economic significance of bears and bear products such as meat, fat, oil, and pelts; bears in Native worldviews, kinship systems, and cosmologies; and the use of bears as commodities in transatlantic trade. The case studies in Bears demonstrate that bears were not only a source of food, but were also religious, economic, and political icons within Indigenous cultures. This volume convincingly portrays the black bear as one of the most socially significant species in Native eastern North America. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series




Archaeology of Native North America


Book Description

This comprehensive text is intended for the junior-senior level course in North American Archaeology. Written by accomplished scholar Dean Snow, this new text approaches native North America from the perspective of evolutionary ecology. Succinct, streamlined chapters present an extensive groundwork for supplementary material, or serve as a core text.The narrative covers all of Mesoamerica, and explicates the links between the part of North America covered by the United States and Canada and the portions covered by Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the Greater Antilles. Additionally, book is extensively illustrated with the author's own research and findings.




The Archaeology of Ancient North America


Book Description

Unlike extant texts, this textbook treats pre-Columbian Native Americans as history makers who yet matter in our contemporary world.







War Paths, Peace Paths


Book Description

Archaeologists, ethnohistorians, osteologists, and cultural anthropologists have only recently begun to address seriously the issue of Native American war and peace in the eastern United States. New methods for identifying prehistoric cooperation and conflict in the archaeological record are now helping to advance our knowledge of their existence and importance. Focusing on four major issues in prehistoric warfare studies--settlement patterns, skeletal trauma, weaponry, and iconography--David H. Dye presents a new interpretation of ancient war and peace east of the Mississippi. He considers evidence for raiding and more organized forms of warfare, accounts of native warfare witnessed by sixteenth-century Europeans, and the various causes of warfare, such as revenge, competition for resources, and ideology. War Paths, Peace Paths offers an innovative analysis of cooperation and conflict in the prehistoric eastern United States.




The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology reviews the continent's first and last foragers, farmers, and great pre-Columbian civic and ceremonial centers, from Chaco Canyon to Moundville and beyond.




Chinese Diaspora Archaeology in North America


Book Description

Archaeologists are increasingly interested in studying the experiences of Chinese immigrants, yet this area of research is mired in long-standing interpretive models that essentialize race and identity. Showcasing the enormous amount of data available on the lives of Chinese people who migrated to North America in the nineteenth century, this volume charts new directions by providing fresh approaches to interpreting immigrant life. In this volume, leading scholars first tackle broad questions of how best to position and understand these populations. They then delve into a variety of site-based and topical case studies, providing new approaches to themes like Chinese immigrant foodways and highlighting understudied topics including entrepreneurialism, cross-cultural interactions, and conditions in the Jim Crow South. Pushing back against old colonial-based tropes, contributors call for an awareness of the transnational relationships created through migration, engagement with broader archaeological and anthropological debates, and the expansion of research into new contexts and topics. Contributors: Linda Bentz | Todd J. Braje | Kelly N. Fong | D. Ryan Gray | J. Ryan Kennedy | Christopher Merritt | Laura W. | Virginia S. Popper | Adrian Praetzellis | Mary Praetzellis | Chelsea Rose | Douglas E. Ross | Charlotte K. Sunseri | Barbara L. Voss | Priscilla Wegars | Henry Yu




The Oxford Handbook of Zooarchaeology


Book Description

Animals have played a fundamental role in shaping human history, and the study of their remains from archaeological sites - zooarchaeology - has gradually been emerging as a powerful discipline and crucible for forging an understanding of our past. This Handbook offers a cutting-edge, global compendium of zooarchaeology that seeks to provide a holistic view of the role played by animals in past human cultures. Case studies from across five continents explore ahuge range of human-animal interactions from an array of geographical, historical, and cultural contexts, and also illuminate the many approaches and methods adopted by different schools and traditions instudying these relationships.




Prehistoric Food Production in North America


Book Description

As Richard I. Ford explains in his preface to this volume, the 1980s saw an “explosive expansion of our knowledge about the variety of cultivated and domesticated plants and their history in aboriginal America.” This collection presents research on prehistoric food production from Ford, Patty Jo Watson, Frances B. King, C. Wesley Cowan, Paul E. Minnis, and others.




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