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The first Aleut ethnography in over three decades, Aleut Identities provides a contemporary view of indigenous Alaskans and is the first major work to emphasize the importance of commercial labour and economies to maintain traditional means of survival. Examining the ways in which social relations and the status formation are affected by environmental concerns, government policies, and market forces, the author highlights how communities have responded to worldwide pressures. An informative work that challenges conventional notions of "traditional," Aleut Identities demonstrates possible methods by which Indigenous communities can maintain and adapt their identity in the face of unrelenting change.
This edited volume mainly focuses on the practice of taking and displaying various body parts as trophies in both North and South America. The editors and contributors (which include Native Peoples from both continents) examine the evidence and causes of Amerindian trophy taking. Additionally, they present objectively and discuss dispassionately the topic of human proclivity toward ritual violence. This book fills the gap in literature on this subject.
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.
In this book, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, and Aboriginal leaders focus on how Coast Salish lives and identities have been influenced by the two colonizing nations (Canada and the US) and by shifting Aboriginal circumstances. Contributors point to the continual reshaping of Coast Salish identities and our understandings of them through litigation and language revitalization, as well as community efforts to reclaim their connections with the environment. They point to significant continuity of networks of kinfolk, spiritual practices, and understandings of landscape. This is the first book-length effort to directly incorporate Aboriginal perspectives and a broad interdisciplinary approach to research about the Coast Salish.
Alliance and Conflict combines a richly descriptive study of intersocietal relations in early nineteenth-century Northwest Alaska with a bold theoretical treatise on the structure of the world system as it might have been in ancient times. Ernest S. Burch Jr. illuminates one aspect of the traditional lives of the I_upiaq Eskimos in unparalleled detail and depth. Basing his account on observations made by early Western explorers, interviews with Native historians, and archeological research, Burch describes the social boundaries and geographic borders formerly existing in Northwest Alaska and the various kinds of transactions that took place across them. These ranged from violence of the most...
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.
Interactions between societies are among the most powerful forces in human history. However, because they are difficult to reconstruct from archaeological data, they have often been overlooked and understudied by archaeologists. This is particularly true for hunter-gatherer societies, which are frequently seen as adapting to local conditions rather than developing in the context of large-scale networks. When Worlds Collide presents a new model for discerning interaction networks based on the archaeological record, and then applies the model to long-term change in an Arctic society. Max Friesen has adapted and expanded world-system theory in order to develop a model that explains how hunter-g...
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.
The Archive of Place weaves together a series of narratives about environmental history in a particular location � British Columbia's Chilcotin Plateau. In the mid-1990s, the Chilcotin was at the centre of three territorial conflicts. Opposing groups, in their struggle to control the fate of the region and its resources, invoked different understandings of its past � and different types of evidence � to justify their actions. These controversies serve as case studies, as William Turkel examines how people interpret material traces to reconstruct past events, the conditions under which such interpretation takes place, and the role that this interpretation plays in historical consciousness and social memory. It is a wide-ranging and original study that extends the span of conventional historical research.
Human violence is an inescapable aspect of our society and culture. As the archaeological record clearly shows, this has always been true. What is its origin? What role does it play in shaping our behavior? How do ritual acts and cultural sanctions make violence acceptable? These and other questions are addressed by the contributors to The Bioarchaeology of Violence. Organized thematically, the volume opens by laying the groundwork for new theoretical approaches that move beyond interpretation; it then examines case studies from small-scale conflict to warfare to ritualized violence. Experts on a wide range of ancient societies highlight the meaning and motivation of past uses of violence, revealing how violence often plays an important role in maintaining and suppressing the challenges to the status quo, and how it is frequently a performance meant to be witnessed by others. The interesting and nuanced insights offered in this volume explore both the costs and the benefits of violence throughout human prehistory.