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In this probing study, Severin Fowles undertakes a sustained critique of religion as an analytical category in archaeological research.
Anthropological archaeologists have long attempted to develop models that will let them better understand the evolution of human social organization. In our search to understand how chiefdoms and states evolve, and how those societies differ from egalitarian 'bands', we have neglected to develop models that will aid the understanding of the wide range of variability that exists between them. This volume attempts to fill this gap by exploring social organization in tribal - or 'autonomous village' - societies from several different ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological contexts - from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period in the Near East to the contemporary Jivaro of Amazonia.
This is an up-to-date account of the different kinds of information that can be obtained through the archaeological study of pottery.
Focusing on the two major areas of the Southwest that witnessed the most intensive and sustained colonial encounters, New Mexico and the Pimería Alta compares how different forms of colonialism and indigenous political economies resulted in diverse outcomes for colonists and Native peoples. Taking a holistic approach and studying both colonist and indigenous perspectives through archaeological, ethnohistoric, historic, and landscape data, contributors examine how the processes of colonialism played out in the American Southwest. Although these broad areas—New Mexico and southern Arizona/northern Sonora—share a similar early colonial history, the particular combination of players, socioh...
"Cabana and Clark have chosen to base their research into migration on careful study of how real people actually behave over time and space. We are well served by this rugged empiricism and by the multidisciplinary breadth of their approach."?Dean R. Snow, Pennsylvania State University "A thorough survey of the ways in which anthropologists across the four subfields have defined and analyzed human migration."?John H. Relethford, author of Reflections of Our Past: How Human History Is Revealed in Our Genes All too often, anthropologists study specific facets of human migration without guidance from the other subdisciplines (archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and ling...
In studying material culture, anthropologists and archaeologists use meaningful physical objects from a culture to help understand the less tangible aspects of that culture, such as societal structure, rituals, and values. What happens when these objects are destroyed, by war, natural disaster, or other historical events? Through detailed explanations of eleven international case studies, the contributions reveal that the absence of objects can be just as telling as their presence, while the objects created to memorialize a loss also have important cultural implications. Covering everything from organ donation, to funerary rituals, to prisoners of war, The Archaeology of Absence is written at an important intersection of archaeological and anthropological study. Divided into three sections, this volume uses the "presence" of absence to compare cultural perceptions of: material qualities and created memory, the mind/body connection, temporality, and death. This rich text provides a strong theoretical framework for anthropologists and archaeologists studying material culture.
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.
Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past. Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benja...
“This book exhorts the reader to embrace the materiality of archaeology by recognizing how every step in the discipline’s scientific processes involves interaction with myriad physical artifacts, ranging from the camel-hair brush to profile drawings to virtual reality imaging. At the same time, the reader is taken on a phenomenological journey into various pasts, immersed in the lives of peoples from other times, compelled to engage their senses with the sights, smells, and noises of the publics and places whose remains they study. This is a refreshingly original and provocative look at the meaning of the material culture that lies at the foundation of the archaeological discipline.”�...
Homology and heterogeneity in Puebloan social history / Peter M. Whiteley -- Ma:tu'in : the bridge between kinship and 'clan' in the Tewa Pueblos of New Mexico / Richard I. Ford -- The historical anthropology of Tewa social organization / Scott G. Ortman -- Taos social history : a rhizomatic account / Severin M. Fowles -- From Keresan bridge to Tewa flyover : new clues about Pueblo social formations / Peter M. Whiteley -- The historical linguistics of kin-term skewing in Puebloan languages / Jane H. Hill -- Archaeological expressions of ancestral Hopi social organization / Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Dennis Gilpin -- A diachronic perspective on household and lineage structure in a Western Pueblo society / Triloki Nath Pandey -- An archaeological perspective on Zuni social history / Barbara J. Mills and T.J. Ferguson -- From Mission to Mesa : reconstructing Pueblo social networks during the Pueblo revolt period / Robert W. Preucel and Joseph R. Aguilar -- Dimensions and dynamics of pre-Hispanic Pueblo organization and authority : the Chaco Canyon conundrum / Stephen Plog -- Reimagining archaeology as anthropology : a discussion / John A. Ware