"An important addition to the growing literature on American Indian-Eropean contact in North America, offering fresh perspectives on the variability of native societies' responses to contact." -from the Foreword, by Jerald T. Milanich, Florida Museum of Natural History "The only recent volume that explicitly concentrates on biocultural contact effects based on bioarchaeology, paleopathology, and ethnohistory...and [the only one] to stress so strongly that more than disease effects were involved in the depopulation of Native Americans." -Rebecca Storey, University of Houston Most researchers of the European settlement of North America assume that Native American populations were decimated solely and uniformly by introduced disease. These authors challenge that assumption, demonstrating that Native American societies responded to European encroachment in complex and varied ways. They draw on data from population case studies in what is now the southern United States to establish convincingly that archaeological and bioanthropological research are powerful tools for cultural interpretation.
The core subject matter of bioarchaeology is the lives of past peoples, interpreted anthropologically. Human remains, contextualized archaeologically and historically, form the unit of study. Integrative and frequently inter-disciplinary, bioarchaeology draws methods and theoretical perspectives from across the sciences and the humanities. Bioarchaeology: The Contextual Study of Human Remains focuses upon the contemporary practice of bioarchaeology in North American contexts, its accomplishments and challenges. Appendixes, a glossary and 150 page bibliography make the volume extremely useful for research and teaching.
Radically rethinks the theoretical parameters through which we interpret both current and past ideas of captivity, adoption, and slavery among Native American societies in an interdisciplinary perspective. Highlights the importance of the interaction between perceptions, representations and lived experience associated with the facts of slavery.
This 13th biennial volume of the Southwest Symposium highlights three distinct archaeological themes—historical ecology, demography, and movement—tied together through the consideration of the knowledge tools of cause and explanation. These tools focus discussion on how and why questions, facilitate assessing past and current knowledge of the Pueblo Southwest, and provide unexpected bridges across the three themes. For instance, people are ultimately the source of the movement of artifacts, but that statement is inadequate for explaining how artifact movement occurred or even why, at a regional scale, different kinds of movement are implicated at different times. Answering such questions can easily incorporate questions about changes in climate or in population density or size. Each thematic section is introduced by an established author who sets the framework for the chapters that follow. Some contributors adopt regional perspectives in which both classical regions (the central San Juan or lower Chama basins) and peripheral zones (the Alamosa basin or the upper San Juan) are represented. Chapters are also broad temporally, ranging from the Younger Dryas Climatic interval (the Clovis-Folsom transition) to the Protohistoric Pueblo world and the eighteenth-century ethnogenesis of a unique Hispanic identity in northern New Mexico. Others consider methodological issues, including the burden of chronic health afflictions at the level of the community and advances in estimating absolute population size. Whether emphasizing time, space, or methodology, the authors address the processes, steps, and interactions that affect current understanding of change or stability of cultural traditions. Exploring Cause and Explanation considers themes of perennial interest but demonstrates that archaeological knowledge in the Southwest continues to expand in directions that could not have been predicted fifty years ago. Contributors: Kirk C. Anderson, Jesse A. M. Ballenger, Jeffery Clark, J. Andrew Darling, B. Sunday Eiselt, Mark D. Elson, Mostafa Fayek, Jeffrey R. Ferguson, Severin Fowles, Cynthia Herhahn, Vance T. Holliday, Sharon Hull, Deborah L. Huntley, Emily Lena Jones, Kathryn Kamp, Jeremy Kulisheck, Karl W. Laumbach, Toni S. Laumbach, Stephen H. Lekson, Virginia T. McLemore, Frances Joan Mathien, Michael H. Ort, Scott G. Ortman, Mary Ownby, Mary M. Prasciunas, Ann F. Ramenofsky, Erik Simpson, Ann L. W. Stodder, Ronald H. Towner
This handbook examines key aspects of the development of the global history of warfare and the changing patterns of warfare over time. Although scholarship has long eschewed a chronological narrative of the evolution of warfare that privileges the Western experience, global histories of warfare have had difficulty avoiding an overemphasis on the West. The present volume is a collection of themes rather than a history per se; it provides important perspectives on the emergence of warfare as a global historical experience from the ancient past to the present day. Drawing together numerous experts, it tells a broader, more inclusive story of the global, human experience with wars and warfare. The 35 cahtpers are organised in eight thematic parts: Part I: Origins of Warfare Part II: Polities and Armed Forces in the Pre-Modern Era Part III: Steppe Nomads of Eurasia Part IV: Naval Warfare and Piracy in the Pre-Industrial World Part V: The Impact of Gunpowder Part VI: Transition from Industrial to Total War Part VII: Wars of Decolonisation and Cold War Part VIII: Postmodern/New Wars These Parts offer an overview of the global experience of warfare to help readers understand how the wars and the militaries we see today have been shaped by historical developments across the globe. This handbook will be of great interest to students of military history, naval history, strategic studies and world history in general.
Explores the life of the Spanish Franciscan missionary who traveled up the Pacific coast to convert the Native Americans to Catholicism and turn them into European-style farmers and explains why he is commonly credited as the father of modern California.
Methods, Mounds, and Missions offers innovative ways of looking at existing data, as well as compelling new information, about Florida’s past. Diverse in scale, topic, time, and region, the volume’s contributions span the late Archaic through historic periods and cover much of the state’s panhandle and peninsula, with forays into the larger Southeast and circum-Caribbean area. Subjects explored in this volume include coastal ring middens, chiefly power and social interaction in mound-building societies, pottery design and production, faunal evidence of mollusk harvesting, missions and missionaries, European iron celts or chisels, Hernando de Soto’s sixteenth-century expedition, and an early nineteenth-century Seminole settlement. The essays incorporate previously underexplored markers of culture histories such as clay sources and non-chert lithic tools and address complex issues such as the entanglement of utilitarian artifacts with sociocultural and ritual realms. Experts in their topical specializations, this volume’s contributors build on the research methods and interpretive approaches of influential anthropologist Jerald Milanich. They update current archaeological interpretations of Florida history, developing and demonstrating the use of new and improved tools to answer broader and larger questions. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
“Impressive. Provides perspective on the interconnectedness of Cahokia with regional cultures, the evidence for (or against) this connection in specific areas, and the hows and whys of Cahokian influence on shaping regional cultures. There is no other comparable work.”—Lynne P. Sullivan, coeditor of Mississippian Mortuary Practices: Beyond Hierarchy and the Representationist Perspective “This volume synthesizes information regarding possible contacts—direct or indirect—with Cahokia and offers several hypotheses about how those contacts may have occurred and what evidence the archaeological record offers.”—Mary Vermilion, Saint Louis University At its height between AD 1050 and 1275, the city of Cahokia was the largest settlement of the Mississippian culture, acting as an important trade center and pilgrimage site. While the influence of Cahokian culture on the development of monumental architecture, maize-based subsistence practices, and economic complexity throughout North America is undisputed, new research in this volume reveals a landscape of influence of the regions that had and may not have had a relationship with Cahokia. Contributors find evidence for Cahokia’s hegemony—its social, cultural, ideological, and economic influence—in artifacts, burial practices, and religious iconography uncovered at far-flung sites across the Eastern Woodlands. Case studies include Kinkaid in the Ohio River Valley, Schild in the Illinois River Valley, Shiloh in Tennessee, and Aztalan in Wisconsin. These essays also show how, with Cahokia’s abandonment, the diaspora occurred via the Mississippi River and extended the culture’s impact southward. Cahokia in Context demonstrates that the city’s cultural developments during its heyday and the impact of its demise produced profound and lasting effects on many regional cultures. This close look at Cahokia’s influence offers new insights into the movement of people and ideas in prehistoric America, and it honors the final contributions of Charles McNutt, one of the most respected scholars in southeastern archaeology. Charles H. McNutt (1928‒2017) was professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Memphis and the editor of Prehistory of the Central Mississippi Valley. Ryan M. Parish is assistant professor of archaeology at the University of Memphis. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
In this volume, contributors show how stylistic and iconographic analyses of Mississippian imagery provide new perspectives on the beliefs, narratives, public ceremonies, ritual regimes, and expressions of power in the communities that created the artwork. Exploring various methodological and theoretical approaches to pre-Columbian visual culture, these essays reconstruct dynamic accounts of Native American history across the U.S. Southeast. These case studies offer innovative examples of how to use style to identify and compare artifacts, how symbols can be interpreted in the absence of writing, and how to situate and historicize Mississippian imagery. They examine designs carved into shell, copper, stone, and wood or incised into ceramic vessels, from spider iconography to owl effigies and depictions of the cosmos. They discuss how these symbols intersect with memory, myths, social hierarchies, religious traditions, and other spheres of Native American life in the past and present. The tools modeled in this volume will open new horizons for learning about the culture and worldviews of past peoples. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series Contributors: David Dye | Shawn P. Lambert | Bretton T. Giles | Vernon J. Knight, Jr. | Anna Semon | J. Grant Stauffer | Jesse Nowak | George E Lankford
