You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This collection, addressing a topic of ongoing interest and debate in American archaeology, examines the evolution of ranked chiefdoms in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States during the period A.D. 700–1200. The volume brings together a broad range of professionals engaged in the fieldwork that has vitalized the theoretical debates on the development of Mississippi Valley cultures. The initial chapter provides a general discussion of various explanations for the rise of these distinctive ranked societies in the eastern United States (A.D. 750-1050) and sets the stage for the interdisciplinary analysis from multiple viewpoints that follows. The first section discusses a cluster of ...
This fascinating volume brings together leading specialists, who have analyzed the thoughts and records documenting the worldviews of a wide range of pre-modern societies. Presents evidence from across the ages; from antiquity through to the Age of Discovery Provides cross-cultural comparison of ancient societies around the globe, from the Chinese to the Incas and Aztecs, from the Greeks and Romans to the peoples of ancient India Explores newly discovered medieval Islamic materials
In The Native Ground, Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Eu...
With essays by Stephen Davis, Penelope Drooker, Patricia K. Galloway, Steven Hahn, Charles Hudson, Marvin Jeter, Paul Kelton, Timothy Pertulla, Christopher Rodning, Helen Rountree, Marvin T. Smith, and John Worth The first two-hundred years of Western civilization in the Americas was a time when fundamental and sometimes catastrophic changes occurred in Native American communities in the South. In The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists provide perspectives on how this era shaped American Indian society for later generations and how it even affects these communities today. This collection of essays presents the most current...
"Makes the case that the everyday should and does matter in archaeology. The content is fresh, the approaches are varied, and the case is convincing."--Adam King, editor of Archaeology in South Carolina: Exploring the Hidden Heritage of the Palmetto State Focusing on the daily concerns and routine events of people in the past, Investigating the Ordinary argues for a paradigm shift in the way southeastern archaeologists operate. Instead of dividing archaeological work by time periods or artifact types, the essays in this volume unite separate areas of research through the theme of the everyday. Ordinary activities studied here range from flint-knapping to ceremonial crafting, from subsistence to social gatherings, and from the Paleoindian period to the nineteenth century. Contributors demonstrate that attention to everyday life can help researchers avoid overemphasizing data and jargon and instead discover connections between the people of different eras. This approach will also inspire archaeologists with ways to engage the public with their work and with the deep history of the southeastern United States.
Case studies combine archaeological data and oral tradition to illustrate how the archaeological expression of beliefs and meanings passed down in the oral tradition may be interpreted. Explanations in Iconography: Ancient American Indian Art, Symbol, and Meaning is a significant contribution to the field of archaeology – a contribution in iconography studies that has gradually been coming into its own. Iconography is a rich and fascinating field, as applied to the complex, and heretofore enigmatic, imagery on many ancient Pre-Columbian artifacts. When viewed through the lens of early ethnographic records and American Indian oral traditions, as well as information from knowledgeable Americ...
The Powers Phase Project was a multiyear archaeological program undertaken in southeastern Missouri by the University of Michigan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The project focused on the occupation of a large Pleistocene-age terrace in the Little Black River Lowland—a large expanse of lowlying land just east of the Ozark Highland—between roughly A. D. 1250 and A. D. 1400. The largest site in the region is Powers Fort—a palisaded mound center that - ceived archaeological attention as early as the late nineteenth century. Archa- logical surveys conducted south of Powers Fort in the 1960s revealed the pr- ence of numerous smaller sites of varying size that contained artifact assembla...
This volume explores political change in chiefdoms, specifically how complex chiefdoms emerge and collapse, and how this process—called cycling—can be examined using archaeological, ethnohistoric, paleoclimatic, paleosubsistence, and physical anthropological data. The focus for the research is the prehistoric and initial contact-era Mississippian chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States, specifically the societies occupying the Savannah River basin from ca. A.D. 1000 to 1600. This regional focus and the multidisciplinary nature of the investigation provide a solid introduction to the Southeastern Mississippian archaeological record and the study of cultural evolution in general.
The Schultz site is an Early Woodland site on the Tittabawassee River in Saginaw County, Michigan. In this volume, author Doreen Ozker describes the site: its stratigraphy and plant and faunal remains, as well as ceramics and lithics. She also situates the site in the context of the Early Woodland community. She distinguishes Late Archaic and Early Woodland from each other, and as a result, redefines Early Woodland culture.