Based on the 28th International Archaeometry Symposium jointly sponsored by the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Getty Conservation Institute, this volume offers a rare opportunity to survey under a single cover a wide range of investigations concerning pre-Columbian materials. Twenty chapters detail research in five principal areas: anthropology and materials science; ceramics; stone and obsidian; metals; and archaeological sites and dating. Contributions include Heather Lechtman's investigation of “The Materials Science of Material Culture,” Ron L. Bishop on the compositional analysis of pre-Columbian pottery from the Maya region, Ellen Howe on the use of silver and lead from the Mantaro Valley in Peru, and J. Michael Elam and others on source identification and hydration dating of obsidian artifacts.
The fact that labor supply consists of men, women, and children in families with their own accustomed and often well-loved ways of living is often overlooked in any discussion of "the farm labor problem." this study uses both agricultural economics and cultural anthropology in analyzing employment problems. The analysis covers (1) histories of the development of the citrus, lettuce, and cotton industries with examples of companies using different harvesting operations, (2) the economics of the technologies, (3) the workers, (4) the participants in their distinctive cultural and institutional settings--Mexican-American, anglo-isolate, negro, Indian, and management, and (5) the participants in their common technological setting. Some of the conclusions were--(1) Arizona agriculture, as a variant of southwestern agriculture, is an instrument of exploitation of unsophisticated, culturally unassimilated peoples, and functions also as an assimilative mechanism working in the direction of upward occupational mobility and by doing depletes itself of its own labor supply, (2) displacement of the higher occupational classes tends to be permanent because its members do not fit the lower occupational classes, and (3) when members of the lower occupational classes are replaced by higher class workers, the members of the lower classes tend to remain in the industry and compete for the new higher-status jobs. Some implications for farm employment and manpower were--(1) an unemployed worker should be retrained in a higher occupational class, (2) if a worker is displaced from the highest occupational status in the industry, he should be retrained for another industry, (3) anglo-isolates cannot be rehabilitated by training programs, and (4) the concept of training for occupational adjustment must be broadened to deal effectively with institutional and cultural factors.
In the late 1880s, Pleasant Valley, Arizona, descended into a nightmare of violence, murder, and mayhem. By the time the Pleasant Valley War was over, eighteen men were dead, four were wounded, and one was missing, never to be found. Valley of the Guns explores the reasons for the violence that engulfed the settlement, turning neighbors, families, and friends against one another. While popular historians and novelists have long been captivated by the story, the Pleasant Valley War has more recently attracted the attention of scholars interested in examining the underlying causes of western violence. In this book, author Eduardo Obregón Pagán explores how geography and demographics aligned to create an unstable settlement subject to the constant threat of Apache raids. The fear of surprise attack by day and the theft of livestock by night prompted settlers to shape their lives around the expectation of sudden violence. As the forces of progress strained natural resources, conflict grew between local ranchers and cowboys hired by ranching corporations. Mixed-race property owners found themselves fighting white cowboys to keep their land. In addition, territorial law enforcement officers were outsiders to the community and approached every suspect fully armed and ready to shoot. The combination of unrelenting danger, its accompanying stress, and an abundance of firearms proved deadly. Drawing from history, geography, cultural studies, and trauma studies, Pagán uses the story of Pleasant Valley to demonstrate a new way of looking at the settlement of the West. Writing in a vivid narrative style and employing rigorous scholarship, he creatively explores the role of trauma in shaping the lives and decisions of the settlers in Pleasant Valley and offers new insight into the difficulties of survival in an isolated frontier community.
The contributors to this volume propose strategies of urgent and vital importance that aim to make today’s urban environments more resilient. Resilience, the ability of complex systems to adapt to changing conditions, is a key frontier in ecological research and is especially relevant in creative urban design, as urban areas exemplify complex systems. With something approaching half of the world’s population now residing in coastal urban zones, many of which are vulnerable both to floods originating inland and rising sea levels, making urban areas more robust in the face of environmental threats must be a policy ambition of the highest priority. The complexity of urban areas results from their spatial heterogeneity, their intertwined material and energy fluxes, and the integration of social and natural processes. All of these features can be altered by intentional planning and design. The complex, integrated suite of urban structures and processes together affect the adaptive resilience of urban systems, but also presupposes that planners can intervene in positive ways. As examples accumulate of linkage between sustainability and building/landscape design, such as the Shanghai Chemical Industrial Park and Toronto’s Lower Don River area, this book unites the ideas, data, and insights of ecologists and related scientists with those of urban designers. It aims to integrate a formerly atomized dialog to help both disciplines promote urban resilience.
"For a calculated 1,400 years, Snaketown was a viable village, but unlike so many tells in the Near East, the people remained the same while their culture changed. The smoothly graded typological sequences for most attributes suggest to me that the ethnic identity of the inhabitants was not interrupted, that they were one and the same people experiencing normal internal evolutionary cultural modifications with occasional boosts of features and ideas newly arrived from the outside." —Emil W. Haury
