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Extending some 1,400 miles from Alaska to northern California, America's Northwest Coast is one of the richest and most distinct cultural areas on earth. The region is famous for its magnificent art--masks, totem poles, woven blankets--produced by the world's most politically and economically complex hunters and gatherers. As this pioneering account shows, the history of settlement on the Northwest Coast stretches back some 11,000 years. With the stabilization of sea levels and salmon runs after 4000 B.C., many of the region's salient features began to emerge. Salmon fishing supported rapid population growth to a peak over 1,000 years ago. The spread of rain forest made available trees such ...
Just over 20 years ago the publication of two books indicated the reemergence of Darwinian ideas on the public stage. E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, spelt out and developed the implications of ideas that had been quietly revolutionizing biology for some time. Most controversial of all, needless to say, was the suggestion that such ideas had implications for human behavior in general and social behavior in particular. Nowhere was the outcry greater than in the field of anthropology, for anthropologists saw themselves as the witnesses and defenders of human di versity and plasticity in the face of what they regarded as a biological determi...
This handbook, a companion to the authoritative Handbook of Archaeological Methods, gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists on all aspects of the latest thinking about archaeological theory. It is the definitive resource for understanding how to think about archaeology.
The Handbook of Archaeological Methods comprises 37 articles by leading archaeologists on the key methods used by archaeologists in the field, in analysis, in theory building, and in managing cultural resources. The book is destined to become the key reference work for archaeologists and their advanced students on contemporary archaeological methods.
This volume provides a useful introduction to complex systems and the theory that goes with them. It is followed by a series of case studies in which human societies and environments are seen as open systems into and out of which people and objects, and energy, can flow.
Over 80 archaeologists from four continents create a benchmark volume of the ideas and practices of landscape archaeology, covering the theoretical and the practical, the research and conservation, and encasing the term in a global framework.
Despite its extreme climate, the North American Arctic holds a complex archaeological record of global significance. In this volume, leading researchers provide comprehensive coverage of the region's cultural history, addressing issues as diverse as climate change impacts on human societies, European colonial expansion, and hunter-gatherer adaptations and social organization.
Part of a resurgence in the comparative study of ancient societies, this book presents a variety of methods and approaches to comparative analysis through the examination of wide-ranging case studies. Each chapter is a comparative study, and the diverse topics and regions covered in the book contribute to the growing understanding of variation and change in ancient complex societies. The authors explore themes ranging from urbanization and settlement patterns, to the political strategies of kings and chiefs, to the economic choices of individuals and households. The case studies cover an array of geographical settings, from the Andes to Southeast Asia. The authors are leading archaeologists whose research on early empires, states, and chiefdoms is at the cutting edge of scientific archaeology.
The Arctic rim of North America presents one of the most daunting environments for humans. Cold and austere, it is lacking in plants but rich in marine mammals-primarily the ringed seal, walrus, and bowhead whale. In this book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series, the authors track the history of cultural innovations in the Arctic and Subarctic for the past 12,000 years, including the development of sophisticated architecture, watercraft, fur clothing, hunting technology, and worldviews. Climate change is linked to many of the successes and failures of its inhabitants; warming or cooling periods led to periods of resource abundance or collapse, and in several instances to long-distance migrations. At its western and eastern margins, the Arctic also experienced the impact of Asian and European world systems, from that of the Norse in the East to the Russians in the Bering Strait.
During the last Ice Age, a thousand-mile-wide land bridge connected Siberia and Alaska, creating the region known as Beringia. Over twelve thousand years ago, a procession of large mammals and the humans who hunted them crossed this bridge to America. Much of the Russian evidence for this migration has until now remained largely inaccessible to American scholars. American Beginnings brings together for the first time in one volume the most up-to-date archaeological and palaeoecological evidence on Beringia from both Russia and America. "An invaluable resource. . . . It will no doubt remain the key reference book for Beringia for many years to come."—Steven Mithen, Journal of Human Evolutio...