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Ancient Southeast Mesoamerica explores the distinctive development and political history of the region from its earliest inhabitants up to the Spanish conquest. It demonstrates how inhabitants from different locales were organized within a matrix of social networks, and how they mobilized the assets that they needed to achieve their own goals.
Global tourism is perhaps the largest scale movement of goods, services, and people in history. Consequently, it is a significant catalyst for economic development and sociopolitical change. While tourism increasingly accounts for ever greater segments of national economies, the consequences of this growth for intercultural interaction are diverse and uncertain. The proliferation of tourists also challenges classic theoretical descriptions of just what an economy is. What are the commodities being consumed? What is the division of labor between producers and clients in creating the value of tourist exchanges? How do culture, power, and history shape these interactions? What are the prospects...
A timely synthesis of the latest research and perspectives on ancient Maya economics, this volume illuminates the sophistication and intricacy of economic systems in the Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic periods. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines move beyond paradigms of elite control and centralized exchange to focus on individual agency, highlighting production and exchange that took place at all levels of society. Case studies draw on new archaeological evidence from rural households and urban marketplaces to reconstruct the trade networks for tools, ceramics, obsidian, salt, and agricultural goods throughout the empire. They also describe the ways household production inte...
This edited volume analyzes the belief in supernatural gamekeepers and/or animal masters of wildlife from a cross-cultural perspective. It documents the antiquity and widespread occurrence of the belief in supernatural gamekeepers at the global level. This interdisciplinary volume documents both the antiquity and the widespread geographical distribution of this belief along with surveying the various manifestations of this cosmology by way of studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America. Some chapters explore the manifestations of this belief as they appear in petroglyphs/pictographs and other forms of material culture. Others focus on the environmental impacts of these bel...
The Ancient Maya Marketplace, edited by Eleanor M. King, reviews the debate on prehispanic Maya markets. The volume's contributors challenge the model of a non-commercialized Maya economy and offer compelling new evidence for the existence and identification of ancient marketplaces among the Maya.
Increasingly, economists have acknowledged that a major limitation to economic theory has been its failure to incorporate human values and beliefs as motivational factors. This book explores how values and beliefs structure the dual processes of provisioning and consuming.
In commemoration of Lothar von Falkenhausens 60th birthday, this volume assembles eighteen scholarly essays that explore the intersection between art, economy, and ritual in ancient East Asia. The contributions are clustered into four themes: Ritual Economy, Ritual and Sacrifice, Technology, Community, Interaction, and Objects and Meaning, which collectively reflect the theoretical, methodological, and historical questions that Falkenhausen has been examining via his scholarship, research, and teaching throughout his career. Most of the chapters work with archaeological and textual data from China, but there are also studies of materials from Mongolia, Korea, Southeast Asia and even Egypt, showing the global impact of Falkenhausens work. The chronological range of studies extends from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age in China, into the early imperial, medieval, and early modern periods. The authors discuss art, economy, ritual, interaction, and technology in the broad context of East Asian archaeology and its connection to the world beyond.
In volume 2 of Birding and Mysticism: Enlightenment Through Bird Watching, there is no traditional table of contents; rather, there are the five main parts and their sections and subsections, which contain the substantive ideas and memes of volume 2, followed by six appendices. The main thrust of volume 2 concerns the many aspects, faces, and forms of mysticism: religious, spiritual, rational, scientific, personal, and practical.
This lively and engaging ethnography, written and designed with students in mind, uses the experiences and perspectives of a set of long-time market vendors in San Lorenzo, a neighborhood in the historic center of Florence, Italy, to explore how cultural identities are formed in periods of profound economic and social change.