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This is the first detailed analysis of a completely excavated northern Iroquoian community, a sixteenth-century ancestral Wendat village on the north shore of Lake Ontario. The site resulted from the coalescence of multiple small villages into one well-planned and well-integrated community. Jennifer Birch and Ronald F. Williamson frame the development of this community in the context of a historical sequence of site relocations. The social processes that led to its formation, the political and economic lives of its inhabitants, and their relationships to other populations in northeastern North America are explored using multiple scales of analysis. This book is key for those interested in the history and archaeology of eastern North America, the social, political, and economic organization of Iroquoian societies, the archaeology of communities, and processes of settlement aggregation.
The study of ancient architecture reveals much about the social constructs and culture of the architects, builders, and inhabitants of the structures, but few studies bridge the gap between architecture and archaeology. This comprehensive examination of sites in the Ohio Valley, going as far north as Ontario, integrates structural engineering and wood science technology into the toolkit of archaeologists. Presenting the most current research on structures from pre-European contact, Building the Past allows archaeologists to expand their interpretations from simply describing postmold patterns to more fully envisioning the complex architecture of critical locations like Hopewell, Moorehead Circle, and Brown’s Bottom.
Historical archaeology of landscapes initially followed the pattern of Classical Archaeology by studying elite men's gardens. Over time, particularly in North America, the field has expanded to cover larger settlement areas, but still often with ungendered and elite focus. The editors of this volume seek to fill this important gap in the literature by presenting studies of gendered power dynamics and their effect on minority groups in North America. Case studies presented include communities of Native Americans, African Americans, multi-ethnic groups, religious communities, and industrial communities. Just as the research focus has previously neglected the groups presented here, so too has funding to preserve important archaeological sites. As the contributors to this important volume present a new framework for understanding the archaeology of religious and social minority groups, they also demonstrate the importance of preserving the cultural landscapes, particularly of minority groups, from destruction by the modern dominant culture. A full and complete picture of cultural preservation has to include all of the groups that interacted form it.
Presenting examples from the fields of critical race studies, cultural resource management, digital archaeology, environmental studies, and heritage studies, Trowels in the Trenches demonstrates the many different ways archaeology can be used to contest social injustice. This volume shows that activism in archaeology does not need to involve radical or explicitly political actions but can be practiced in subtler forms as a means of studying the past, informing the present, and creating a better future. In case studies that range from the Upper Paleolithic period to the modern era and span the globe, contributors show how contemporary economic, environmental, political, and social issues are ...
Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the evolution of village societies and the transition to a ‘Neolithic’ way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities. Between these two landmarks in human cultural development lies a critical stage in social and political evolution. Throughout world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities have come together into larger and more complex social formations. These community aggregates were, essentially, middle-range; situated between the earliest villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. This volume explores the social proc...
The Iroquois confederacy, one of the most influential Native American groups encountered by early European settlers, is commonly perceived as having plunged into steep decline in the late seventeenth century due to colonial encroachment into the Great Lakes region. Kurt Jordan challenges long-standing interpretations that depict the Iroquois as defeated, colonized peoples by demonstrating that an important nation of that confederacy, the Senecas, maintained an impressive political and economic autonomy and resisted colonialism with a high degree of success. By combining archaeological data grounded in the material culture of the Seneca Townley-Read site with historical documents, Jordan answers larger questions about the Seneca's cultural sustainability and durability in an era of intense colonial pressures. He offers a detailed reconstruction of daily life in the Seneca community and demonstrates that they were extremely selective about which aspects of European material culture, plant and animal species, and lifeways they allowed into their territory.
« Because of the ceremonial and ritual aspects of the practice in Native American societies, smoking pipes are important cultural artifacts. The essays in Smoking and Culture constitute the first sustained inerpretive study of smoking pipes, focusing on the cultural significance of smoking both before and after European contact. »--Résumé de l'éditeur.
The Far Northeast, a peninsula incorporating the six New England states, New York east of the Hudson, Quebec south of the St. Lawrence River and Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the Maritime Provinces, provided the setting for a distinct chapter in the peopling of North America. Late Pleistocene Archaeology and Ecology in the Far Northeast focuses on the Clovis pioneers and their eastward migration into this region, inhospitable before 13,500 years ago, especially in its northern latitudes. Bringing together the last decade or so of research on the Paleoindian presence in the area, Claude Chapdelaine and the contributors to this volume discuss, among other topics, the style variations in the fluted...
This scholarly collection explores the method and theory of the archaeological study of indigenous persistence and long-term colonial entanglement. Each contributor offers an examination of the complex ways that indigenous communities in the Americas have navigated the circumstances of colonial and postcolonial life, which in turn provides a clearer understanding of anthropological concepts of ethnogenesis and hybridity, survivance, persistence, and refusal. Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas highlights the unique ability of historical anthropology to bring together various kinds of materials--including excavated objects, documents in archives, and print and oral histories--to provide more textured histories illuminated by the archaeological record. The work also extends the study of historical archaeology by tracing indigenous societies long after their initial entanglement with European settlers and colonial regimes. The contributors engage a geographic scope that spans Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and other models of colonization.
This work explores the archaeologies of daily living left by the indigenous and other displaced peoples impacted by European colonial expansion over the last 600 years. Case studies from North America, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Ireland significantly revise conventional historical narratives of those interactions, their presumed impacts, and their ongoing relevance for the material, social, economic, and political lives and identities of contemporary indigenous and other peoples.