This volume presents a long-overdue synthesis and update on West Mexican archaeology. Ancient West Mexico has often been portrayed as a ‘marginal’ or ‘underdeveloped’ area of Mesoamerica. This book shows that the opposite is true and that it played a critical role in the cultural and historical development of the Mesoamerican ecumene.
"This volume highlights the diversity and complexity of western Mexico's pre-Hispanic cultures and argues that the region was more similar than many researchers have believed to the rest of the Mesoamerican world"--
This book explores material culture and human adaptations to nature over time, with a focus on ceramics. The author also explores the role of ethnoarchaeology and ethnohistory as key elements of a broad research strategy that seeks to understand human interaction with nature over time.
Trade before Civilization explores the role that long-distance exchange played in the establishment and/or maintenance of social complexity, and its role in the transformation of societies from egalitarian to non-egalitarian. Bringing together research by an international and methodologically diverse team of scholars, it analyses the relationship between long-distance trade and the rise of inequality. The volume illustrates how elites used exotic prestige goods to enhance and maintain their elevated social positions in society. Global in scope, it offers case studies of early societies and sites in Europe, Asia, Oceania, North America, and Mesoamerica. Deploying a range of inter-disciplinary and cutting-edge theoretical approaches from a cross-cultural framework, the volume offers new insights and enhances our understanding of socio-political evolution. It will appeal to archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, conflict theorists, and ethnohistorians, as well as economists seeking to understand the nexus between imported luxury items and cultural evolution.
This book explores the subsistence strategies that ancient Mesoamericans implemented to survive and thrive in their environments. It discusses the natural settings, production sites, techniques, artifacts, cultural landscapes, traditional knowledge, and other features linked to human subsistence in aquatic environments.
Based on recent archaeological surveys and excavations, the chapters in this volume provide current, comprehensive, area-by-area summaries of the region's Precolumbian past. Research in the last two decades has indicated that the evolution and adaptations of the indigenous cultures of the region parallel those found elsewhere in Mesoamerica, from the simple Formative groups to the complex states of the North. The topics discussed in the book--areal and cultural syntheses and specific problems such as chronology, social organization, and economic systems--present much new information crucial to the understanding of cultural variations in Mesoamerica.
Indigenous sign-systems, such as pictographs, petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and khipu, are usually understood as relics from an inaccessible past. That is far from the truth, however, as Edgar Garcia makes clear in Signs of the Americas. Rather than being dead languages, these sign-systems have always been living, evolving signifiers, responsive to their circumstances and able to continuously redefine themselves and the nature of the world. Garcia tells the story of the present life of these sign-systems, examining the contemporary impact they have had on poetry, prose, visual art, legal philosophy, political activism, and environmental thinking. In doing so, he brings together a wide range of indigenous and non-indigenous authors and artists of the Americas, from Aztec priests and Amazonian shamans to Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Jaime de Angulo, Charles Olson, Cy Twombly, Gloria Anzaldúa, William Burroughs, Louise Erdrich, Cecilia Vicuña, and many others. From these sources, Garcia depicts the culture of a modern, interconnected hemisphere, revealing that while these “signs of the Americas” have suffered expropriation, misuse, and mistranslation, they have also created their own systems of knowing and being. These indigenous systems help us to rethink categories of race, gender, nationalism, and history. Producing a new way of thinking about our interconnected hemisphere, this ambitious, energizing book redefines what constitutes a “world” in world literature.
The question of ethnicity is highly controversial in contemporary archaeology. Indigenous and nationalist claims to territory, often rely on reconstructions of the past based on the traditional identification of 'cultures' from archaeological remains. Sian Jones responds to the need for a reassessment of the ways in which social groups are identified in the archaeological record, with a comprehensive and critical synthesis of recent theories of ethnicity in the human sciences. In doing so, she argues for a fundamentally different view of ethnicity, as a complex dynamic form of identification, requiring radical changes in archaeological analysis and interpretation.
The present volume provides a fascinating overview of geometrical ideas and perceptions from the earliest cultures to the mathematical and artistic concepts of the 20th century. It is the English translation of the 3rd edition of the well-received German book “5000 Jahre Geometrie,” in which geometry is presented as a chain of developments in cultural history and their interaction with architecture, the visual arts, philosophy, science and engineering. Geometry originated in the ancient cultures along the Indus and Nile Rivers and in Mesopotamia, experiencing its first “Golden Age” in Ancient Greece. Inspired by the Greek mathematics, a new germ of geometry blossomed in the Islamic civilizations. Through the Oriental influence on Spain, this knowledge later spread to Western Europe. Here, as part of the medieval Quadrivium, the understanding of geometry was deepened, leading to a revival during the Renaissance. Together with parallel achievements in India, China, Japan and the ancient American cultures, the European approaches formed the ideas and branches of geometry we know in the modern age: coordinate methods, analytical geometry, descriptive and projective geometry in the 17th an 18th centuries, axiom systems, geometry as a theory with multiple structures and geometry in computer sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries. Each chapter of the book starts with a table of key historical and cultural dates and ends with a summary of essential contents of geometr y in the respective era. Compelling examples invite the reader to further explore the problems of geometry in ancient and modern times. The book will appeal to mathematicians interested in Geometry and to all readers with an interest in cultural history. From letters to the authors for the German language edition I hope it gets a translation, as there is no comparable work. Prof. J. Grattan-Guinness (Middlesex University London) "Five Thousand Years of Geometry" - I think it is the most handsome book I have ever seen from Springer and the inclusion of so many color plates really improves its appearance dramatically! Prof. J.W. Dauben (City University of New York) An excellent book in every respect. The authors have successfully combined the history of geometry with the general development of culture and history. ... The graphic design is also excellent. Prof. Z. Nádenik (Czech Technical University in Prague)
