Read and Download eBook Full
Author: Kandace D. Hollenbach
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 2009-04-19
Total Pages: 314
ISBN-13: 0817355227
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Foraging the Tennessee River Valley, 12,500 to 8,000 Years Ago, Hollenbach analyzes and compares botanical remains from archaeological excavations in four rockshelters in the Middle Tennessee River Valley.
Author: Donald Edward Davis
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2021-11-15
Total Pages: 393
ISBN-13: 0820369500
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBefore 1910 the American chestnut was one of the most common trees in the eastern United States. Although historical evidence suggests the natural distribution of the American chestnut extended across more than four hundred thousand square miles of territory—an area stretching from eastern Maine to southeast Louisiana—stands of the trees could also be found in parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Washington State, and Oregon. An important natural resource, chestnut wood was preferred for woodworking, fencing, and building construction, as it was rot resistant and straight grained. The hearty and delicious nuts also fed wildlife, people, and livestock. Ironically, the tree that most piqued the emotions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans has virtually disappeared from the eastern United States. After a blight fungus was introduced into the United States during the late nineteenth century, the American chestnut became functionally extinct. Although the virtual eradication of the species caused one of the greatest ecological catastrophes since the last ice age, considerable folklore about the American chestnut remains. Some of the tree’s history dates to the very founding of our country, making the story of the American chestnut an integral part of American cultural and environmental history. The American Chestnut tells the story of the American chestnut from Native American prehistory through the Civil War and the Great Depression. Davis documents the tree’s impact on nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American life, including the decorative and culinary arts. While he pays much attention to the importation of chestnut blight and the tree’s decline as a dominant species, the author also evaluates efforts to restore the American chestnut to its former place in the eastern deciduous forest, including modern attempts to genetically modify the species.
Author: R. P. Stephen Davis
Publisher:
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 408
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: David G. Anderson
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2012-04-03
Total Pages: 293
ISBN-13: 1646425596
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series represents a period-by-period synthesis of southeastern prehistory designed for high school and college students, avocational archaeologists, and interested members of the general public. It also serves as a basic reference for professional archaeologists worldwide on the record of a remarkable region.
Author: Monica L. Smith
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2017-06-15
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 1607325942
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUsing case studies from around the globe—including Mesoamerica, North and South America, Africa, China, and the Greco-Roman world—and across multiple time periods, the authors in this volume make the case that abundance provides an essential explanatory perspective on ancient peoples’ choices and activities. Economists frequently focus on scarcity as a driving principle in the development of social and economic hierarchies, yet focusing on plenitude enables the understanding of a range of cohesive behaviors that were equally important for the development of social complexity. Our earliest human ancestors were highly mobile hunter-gatherers who sought out places that provided ample food, water, and raw materials. Over time, humans accumulated and displayed an increasing quantity and variety of goods. In households, shrines, tombs, caches, and dumps, archaeologists have discovered large masses of materials that were deliberately gathered, curated, distributed, and discarded by ancient peoples. The volume’s authors draw upon new economic theories to consider the social, ideological, and political implications of human engagement with abundant quantities of resources and physical objects and consider how individual and household engagements with material culture were conditioned by the quest for abundance. Abundance shows that the human propensity for mass consumption is not just the result of modern production capacities but fulfills a longstanding focus on plenitude as both the assurance of well-being and a buffer against uncertainty. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students in economics, anthropology, and cultural studies. Contributors: Traci Ardren, Amy Bogaard, Elizabeth Klarich, Abigail Levine, Christopher R. Moore, Tito E. Naranjo, Stacey Pierson, James M. Potter, François G. Richard, Christopher W. Schmidt, Carol Schultze, Payson Sheets, Monica L. Smith, Katheryn C. Twiss, Mark D. Varien, Justin St. P. Walsh, María Nieves Zedeño
Author: Stephen B. Carmody
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Published: 2019-12-31
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 0817320423
DOWNLOAD EBOOKArchaeological case studies consider material evidence of religion and ritual in the pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands Archaeologists today are interpreting Native American religion and ritual in the distant past in more sophisticated ways, considering new understandings of the ways that Native Americans themselves experienced them. Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America broadly considers Native American religion and ritual in eastern North America and focuses on practices that altered and used a vast array of material items as well as how physical spaces were shaped by religious practices. Unbound to a single theoretical perspective of religion, contributors approach ritual and religion in diverse ways. Importantly, they focus on how people in the past practiced religion by altering and using a vast array of material items, from smoking pipes, ceremonial vessels, carved figurines, and iconographic images, to sacred bundles, hallucinogenic plants, revered animals, and ritual architecture. Contributors also show how physical spaces were shaped by religious practice, and how rock art, monuments, soils and special substances, and even land- and cityscapes were part of the active material worlds of religious agents. Case studies, arranged chronologically, cover time periods ranging from the Paleoindian period (13,000–7900 BC) to the late Mississippian and into the protohistoric/contact periods. The geographical scope is much of the greater southeastern and southern Midwestern culture areas of the Eastern Woodlands, from the Central and Lower Mississippi River Valleys to the Ohio Hopewell region, and from the greater Ohio River Valley down through the Deep South and across to the Carolinas. Contributors Sarah E. Baires / Melissa R. Baltus / Casey R. Barrier / James F. Bates / Sierra M. Bow / James A. Brown / Stephen B. Carmody / Meagan E. Dennison / Aaron Deter-Wolf / David H. Dye / Bretton T. Giles / Cameron Gokee / Kandace D. Hollenbach / Thomas A. Jennings / Megan C. Kassabaum / John E. Kelly / Ashley A. Peles / Tanya M. Peres / Charlotte D. Pevny / Connie M. Randall / Jan F. Simek / Ashley M. Smallwood / Renee B. Walker / Alice P. Wright
Author: Sarah E. Price
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2018-01-16
Total Pages: 291
ISBN-13: 1683400437
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Makes the case that the everyday should and does matter in archaeology. The content is fresh, the approaches are varied, and the case is convincing."--Adam King, editor of Archaeology in South Carolina: Exploring the Hidden Heritage of the Palmetto State Focusing on the daily concerns and routine events of people in the past, Investigating the Ordinary argues for a paradigm shift in the way southeastern archaeologists operate. Instead of dividing archaeological work by time periods or artifact types, the essays in this volume unite separate areas of research through the theme of the everyday. Ordinary activities studied here range from flint-knapping to ceremonial crafting, from subsistence to social gatherings, and from the Paleoindian period to the nineteenth century. Contributors demonstrate that attention to everyday life can help researchers avoid overemphasizing data and jargon and instead discover connections between the people of different eras. This approach will also inspire archaeologists with ways to engage the public with their work and with the deep history of the southeastern United States.
Author: Cheryl Claassen
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 2015-06-15
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 0817318542
DOWNLOAD EBOOKClaassen’s work focuses on the American Archaic period (marked by the end of the Ice Age approximately 11,000 years ago) and a geographic area bounded by the edge of the Great Plains, Newfoundland, and southern Florida. This period and region share specific beliefs and practices such as human sacrifice, dirt mound burial, and oyster shell middens. This interpretive guide serves as a platform for new interpretations and theories on this period. For example, Claassen connects rituals to topographic features and posits the Pleistocene-Holocene transition as a major stimulus to Archaic beliefs. She also expands the interpretation of existing data previously understood in economic or environmental terms to include how this same data may also reveal spiritual and symbolic practices. Similarly, Claassen interprets Archaic culture in terms of human agency and social constraint, bringing ritual acts into focus as drivers of social transformation and ethnogenesis.
Author: C. Britt Bousman
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2012-10-22
Total Pages: 346
ISBN-13: 1603447784
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe end of the Pleistocene era brought dramatic environmental changes to small bands of humans living in North America: changes that affected subsistence, mobility, demography, technology, and social relations. The transition they made from Paleoindian (Pleistocene) to Archaic (Early Holocene) societies represents the first major cultural shift that took place solely in the Americas. This event—which manifested in ways and at times much more varied than often supposed—set the stage for the unique developments of behavioral complexity that distinguish later Native American prehistoric societies. Using localized studies and broad regional syntheses, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the diversity of adaptations to the dynamic and changing environmental and cultural landscapes that occurred between the Pleistocene and early portion of the Holocene. The authors' research areas range from Northern Mexico to Alaska and across the continent to the American Northeast, synthesizing the copious available evidence from well-known and recent excavations.With its methodologically and geographically diverse approach, From the Pleistocene to the Holocene: Human Organization and Cultural Transformations in Prehistoric North America provides an overview of the present state of knowledge regarding this crucial transformative period in Native North America. It offers a large-scale synthesis of human adaptation, reflects the range of ideas and concepts in current archaeological theoretical approaches, and acts as a springboard for future explanations and models of prehistoric change.
Author: Steven E. Woodworth
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 1999-08-01
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 9780803235991
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen Vicksburg fell to Union forces under General Grant in July 1863, the balance turned against the Confederacy in the trans-Appalachian theater. The Federal success along the river opened the way for advances into central and eastern Tennessee, which culminated in the battle of Chickamauga and then a struggle for the strategically important city of Chattanooga. Chickamauga, one of the bloodiest battles in a war noted for carnage, is usually counted as a Confederate victory, albeit a costly one. That battle - indeed the entire campaign - is marked by muddle and blunders occasionally relieved by strokes of brilliant generalship and high courage. The campaign ended significant Confederate presence in Tennessee. It also left the Union poised for advance upon Atlanta and the Confederacy on the brink of defeat in the western theater.
