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Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research
While those who study human origins now agree that the evolution of modern human form extends back much further in time than the evolution of modern human behavior, they disagree sharply as to how to interpret the substantive data. Two fundamentally incommensurate interpretations of our origins, the "Replacement" camp and the "Continuity" camp, have now emerged out of pre-existing models and theories that go back to the last quarter of the 19th century. This book contends that these positions are based on radically different biases and assumptions about what the remote human past was like. The purpose of this volume is to examine those conceptual differences, not to arrive at a consensus, but rather to explore the reasons why a consensus might never be possible.
Troubled Times
Evidence amassed in Troubled Times indicates that, much like in the modern world, violence was not an uncommon aspect of prehistoric dispute resolution. From the civilizations of the American Southwest to the Mesolithic of Central Europe, the contributors examine violence in hunter-gatherer as well as state societies from both the New and Old Worlds. Drawing upon cross-cultural analyses, archaeological data, and skeletal remains, this collection of papers offers evidence of domestic violence, homicide, warfare, cannibalism, and ritualized combat among ancient peoples. Beyond the physical evidence, various models and explanations for violence in the past are explored.
Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers
How did warfare originate? Was it human genetics? Social competition? The rise of complexity? Intensive study of the long-term hunter-gatherer past brings us closer to an answer. The original chapters in this volume examine cultural areas on five continents where there is archaeological, ethnographic, and historical evidence for hunter-gatherer conflict despite high degrees of mobility, small populations, and relatively egalitarian social structures. Their controversial conclusions will elicit interest among anthropologists, archaeologists, and those in conflict studies.
Gender and the Archaeology of Death
Anthropologist, archaeologists, and art historians detail their approaches to studying gender in burial practices and in other mortuary contexts. They compare European and American traditions in this field, outline methods for analyzing gender in cultures of varying complexity and with different levels of documentation, and describe some of the successes of such efforts. Consideration is given to the relationships between gender, ideology, power, signification, and the interpretation of evidence. c. Book News Inc.
The Archaeology of Violence
The Archaeology of Violence is an interdisciplinary consideration of the role of violence in social-cultural and sociopolitical contexts. The volume draws on the work of archaeologists, anthropologists, classicists, and art historians, all of whom have an interest in understanding the role of violence in their respective specialist fields in the Mediterranean and Europe. The focus is on three themes: contexts of violence, politics and identities of violence, and sanctified violence. In contrast to many past studies of violence, often defined by their subject specialism, or by a specific temporal or geographic focus, this book draws on a wide range of both temporal and spatial examples and offers new perspectives on the study of violence and its role in social and political change. Rather than simply equating violence with warfare, as has been done in many archaeological cases, the volume contends that the focus on warfare has been to the detriment of our understanding of other forms of "non-warfare" violence and has the potential to affect the ways in which violence is recognized and discussed by scholars, and ultimately has repercussions for understanding its role in society.
The Cutting-Off Way
Incorporating archeology, anthropology, cartography, and Indigenous studies into military history, Wayne E. Lee has argued throughout his distinguished career that wars and warfare cannot be understood by a focus that rests solely on logistics, strategy, and operations. Fighting forces bring their own cultural traditions and values onto the battlefield. In this volume, Lee employs his "cutting-off way of war" (COWW) paradigm to recast Indigenous warfare in a framework of the lived realities of Native people rather than with regard to European and settler military strategies and practices. Indigenous people lacked deep reserves of population or systems of coercive military recruitment and as ...
Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages
Ancestral Pueblo farmers encountered the deep, well watered, and productive soils of the central Mesa Verde region of Southwest Colorado around A.D. 600, and within two centuries built some of the largest villages known up to that time in the U.S. Southwest. But one hundred years later, those villages were empty, and most people had gone. This cycle repeated itself from the mid-A.D. 1000s until 1280, when Puebloan farmers permanently abandoned the entire northern Southwest. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines how climate change, population size, interpersonal conflict, resource depression, and changing social organization contribute to explaining these dramatic shifts. Comparing the simulations from agent-based models with the precisely dated archaeological record from this area, this text will interest archaeologists working in the Southwest and in Neolithic societies around the world as well as anyone applying modeling techniques to understanding how human societies shape, and are shaped by the environments we inhabit.
Bioarchaeology of Climate Change and Violence
The goal of this monograph is to emphasize with empirical data the complexity of the relationship between climate change and violence. Bioarchaeology is the integration of human skeletal remains from ancient societies with the cultural and environmental context. Information on mortality, disease, diet and other factors provide important data to examine long chronologies of human existence, particularly during periods of droughts and life-threatening climate changes. Case studies are used to reconstruct the responses and short and long-term adaptations made by groups before, during and after dramatic changes in weather and climate. Interpersonal and group violence is also analyzed. The authors find that while in some cases there is an increase in trauma and violence, in other cases there is not. Human groups are capable of avoiding violent altercations and increasing broad networks of cooperation that help to mitigate the effects of climate change. A case study from the U.S. Southwest is provided that shows the variable and surprising ways that ancient farmers in the past dealt with long term droughts.
On Wars
A history of wars through the ages and across the world, and the irrational calculations that so often lie behind them Benjamin Franklin once said, "There never was a good war or a bad peace." But what determines whether war or peace is chosen? Award-winning sociologist Michael Mann concludes that it is a handful of political leaders--people with emotions and ideologies, and constrained by inherited culture and institutions--who undertake such decisions, usually irrationally choosing war and seldom achieving their desired results. Mann examines the history of war through the ages and across the globe--from ancient Rome to Ukraine, from imperial China to the Middle East, from Japan and Europe to Latin and North America. He explores the reasons groups go to war, the different forms of wars, how warfare has changed and how it has stayed the same, and the surprising ways in which seemingly powerful countries lose wars. In masterfully combining ideological, economic, political, and military analysis, Mann offers new insight into the many consequences of choosing war.
Nurturing Our Humanity
Nurturing Our Humanity offers a new perspective on our personal and social options in today's world, showing how to structure our environments--from family and gender relations to politics and economics--to support our great capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity. It examines where societies fall on the partnership-domination scale, and how this impacts equity, sustainability, peace, and how our brains develop. Combining cutting-edge findings from biological and social science, it explains regressions to strongman rule and other dangerous trends; re-examines our past (including societies that for millennia oriented toward partnership); and outlines actions to move us in this life-sustaining and enhancing direction.
