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A landmark work that will instigate vigorous and wide-ranging discussions on institutions in Western life, and the power of material culture to both enforce and negate cultural norms Institutions pervade social life. They express community goals and values by defining the limits of socially acceptable behavior. Institutions are often vested with the resources, authority, and power to enforce the orthodoxy of their time. But institutions are also arenas in which both orthodoxies and authority can be contested. Between power and opposition lies the individual experience of the institutionalized. Whether in a boarding school, hospital, prison, almshouse, commune, or asylum, their experiences ca...
Offering a field-tested analytic method for identifying faunal remains, along with helpful references, images, and examples of the most commonly encountered North American species, Identifying and Interpreting Animal Bones: A Manual provides an important new reference for students, avocational archaeologists, and even naturalists and wildlife enthusiasts. Using the basic principles outlined here, the bones of any vertebrate animal, including humans, can be identified and their relevance to common research questions can be better understood. Because the interpretation of archaeological sites depends heavily on the analysis of surrounding materials—soils, artifacts, and floral and faunal rem...
Lost City, Found Pyramid: Understanding Alternative Archaeologies and Pseudoscientific Practices explores the phenomenon of pseudoarchaeology in popular culture and the ways that professional archaeologists can respond to sensationalized depictions of archaeology and archaeologists.
This book argues archaeology is uniquely placed to contribute a variety of perspectives on the current life-cycles of cities including processes of decay, revitalization, and transformation. It foregrounds the materialities of post-industrial, post-modern and other urban transformations through a diverse, international collection of case studies.
What happens when we blur time and allow ourselves to haunt or to become haunted by ghosts of the past? Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure demonstrates the value of conceiving of ghosts not just as metaphors, but as mechanisms for making the past more concrete and allowing the negative specters of enduring historical legacies, such as colonialism and capitalism, to be exorcised.
Exploring a wide range of settings and circumstances in which individuals or groups of people have been forced to move from one geographical location to another, the case studies in this volume demonstrate what archaeology can reveal about the agents, causes, processes, and effects of human removal. Contributors focus on material culture and the built environment at colonial villages, frontier farms, industrial complexes, natural disaster areas, and other sites of removal dating from the colonization of North America to the present. They address topics including class, race, memory, identity, and violence. One essay investigates the link between mapmaking and the relocation of Mississippi Ch...
This volume offers lively current debates and case studies in historical archaeology selected from around the world, including North America, Latin America, Africa, the Pacific, and Europe. Authored by 19 experts in the field. Explores how historical archaeologists think about their work, piecing together information from both material culture and documents in an attempt to understand the lives of the people and societies they study. Engages with current theory in an accessible manner. Truly global in its approach but avoids subsuming local experiences of people into global patterns. Summarizes not only the current state of historical archaeology, but also sets the course for the field in decades to come.
New scholarship provides insights into the archaeology and cultural history of African American life from a collection of sites in the Mid-Atlantic
Having survived the turmoil of Reconstruction, several hundred African American tenant farmers were settled on Skidaway Island, Georgia, and led a fairly quiet existence. In 1877 Benedictine monks intruded into this relatively safe, if desperately poor, haven and built a Catholic mission and boys’ boarding school. For the next two decades, the Benedictines and locals negotiated for influence over the islanders’ religious convictions and education. Faith in Education at the Skidaway Island Benedictine Mission brings together the recovered archaeological data and extensive Benedictine archives to reconstruct the intersecting lives of monks, students, lay brothers, and African American neig...
The Poor Laws in the United Kingdom left a built and material legacy of over two centuries of legislative provision for the poor and infirm. Workhouses represent the first centralized, state-organized system for welfare, though they maintain a notorious historical reputation. Workhouses were intended to be specialized institutions, with dedicated subdivisions for the management of different categories of inmate. Examining the workhouse provision from an archaeological perspective, the authors demonstrate the heterogeneity of the Poor Law system from a built heritage perspective. This volume forms a social archaeology of the lived experience of poverty and health in the nineteenth century.