Take a guided tour of more than 15,000 years of life in Texas Mr. Marcom has authored a volume that makes the incredibly diverse archaeological record of Texas accessible to interested laypersons and beginning avocational archaeologists.
Houston and Southeast Texas have an ancient, storied prehistory. Using data from hundreds of archeological site reports, a changing coastal landscape modeled through time in 3D, historical information on Native Americans taken from the accounts of the earliest European visitors, and digital GIS mapping to weave it all together, this book recounts the development of the physical landscape of this region and the cultures of its Native American inhabitants from the peak of the last ice age until the Spanish colonial era. Its 504 pages are illustrated with nearly 350 full color maps, charts, drawings and photographs.
From Dallas-Fort Worth to El Paso, Goodnight to Marfa to Langtry, and scores of places in between, the second of two towering volumes assembled by Gerald Moorhead and a team of dedicated authors offers readers a definitive guide to the architecture of the Lone Star State. Canvassing Spanish and Mexican buildings in the south and southwest and the influence of Anglo- and African American styles in the east and north, the latest book in the Buildings of the United States series serves both as an accessible architectural and cultural history and a practical guide. More than 1,000 building entries survey the most important and representative examples of forts, courthouses, houses, churches, commercial buildings, and works by internationally renowned artists and architects, from the Kimbell Art Museum's Louis Kahn Building to Donald Judd's art installations at La Mansana de Chinati/The Block. Brief essays highlight such topics as the history and construction of federal forts, the growth and spread of Harvey House restaurants, and the birth of Conrad Hilton's hotel empire. Enlivened by 350 illustrations and 45 maps, Buildings of Texas: East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains, and West affords local and out-of-state visitors, as well as more distant readers, a compelling journey filled with countless discoveries.
With cultural remains dated unequivocally to 13,000 calendar years ago, Dry Creek assumed major importance upon its excavation and study by W. Roger Powers. The site was the first to conclusively demonstrate a human presence that could be dated to the same time as the Bering Land Bridge. As Powers and his team studied the site, their work verified initial expectations. Unfortunately, the research was never fully published. Dry Creek: The Archaeology and Paleoecology of a Late Pleistocene Alaskan Hunting Camp is ready to take its rightful place in the ongoing research into the peopling of the Americas. Containing the original research, this book also updates and reconsiders Dry Creek in light of more recent discoveries and analysis.
An analysis of the intellectual and emotional life of ancient Mesoamerican people through studies of figural works and inscriptions. All of human experience flows from bodies that feel, express emotion, and think about what such experiences mean. But is it possible for us, embodied as we are in a particular time and place, to know how people of long ago thought about the body and its experiences? In this groundbreaking book, three leading experts on the Classic Maya (ca. AD 250 to 850) marshal a vast array of evidence from Maya iconography and hieroglyphic writing, as well as archaeological findings, to argue that the Classic Maya developed an approach to the human body that we can recover and understand today. Starting with a cartography of the Maya body as depicted in imagery and texts, the authors explore how the body was replicated in portraiture; how it experienced the world through ingestion, the senses, and the emotions; how the body experienced war and sacrifice and the pain and sexuality; how words, often heaven-sent, could be embodied; and how bodies could be blurred through spirit possession. From these investigations, the authors convincingly demonstrate that the Maya conceptualized the body in varying roles, as a metaphor of time, as a gendered, sexualized being, in distinct stages of life, as an instrument of honor and dishonor, as a vehicle for communication and consumption, as an exemplification of beauty and ugliness, and as a dancer and song-maker. Their findings open a new avenue for empathetically understanding the ancient Maya as living human beings who experienced the world as we do, through the body.
The authors present evidence that specific place names do exist in Maya inscriptions, and show that identifying these names sheds considerable light on both past and present questions about the Maya.
The tale begins over three-hundred years ago, when the Fair People—the goblins, fairies, dragons, and other fabled and fantastic creatures of a dozen lands—fled the Old World for the New, seeking haven from the ways of Man. With them came their precious jewels: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls... But then the Fair People vanished, taking with them their twelve fabulous treasures. And they remained hidden until now... Across North America, these twelve treasures, over ten-thousand dollars in precious jewels, are buried. The key to finding each can be found within the twelve full color paintings and verses of The Secret. Yet The Secret is much more than that. At long last, you can learn not only the whereabouts of the Fair People's treasure, but also the modern forms and hiding places of their descendants: the Toll Trolls, Maitre D'eamons, Elf Alphas, Tupperwerewolves, Freudian Sylphs, Culture Vultures, West Ghosts and other delightful creatures in the world around us. The Secret is a field guide to them all. Many "armchair treasure hunt" books have been published over the years, most notably Masquerade (1979) by British artist Kit Williams. Masquerade promised a jewel-encrusted golden hare to the first person to unravel the riddle that Williams cleverly hid in his art. In 1982, while everyone in Britain was still madly digging up hedgerows and pastures in search of the golden hare, The Secret: A Treasure Hunt was published in America. The previous year, author and publisher Byron Preiss had traveled to 12 locations in the continental U.S. (and possibly Canada) to secretly bury a dozen ceramic casques. Each casque contained a small key that could be redeemed for one of 12 jewels Preiss kept in a safe deposit box in New York. The key to finding the casques was to match one of 12 paintings to one of 12 poetic verses, solve the resulting riddle, and start digging. Since 1982, only two of the 12 casques have been recovered. The first was located in Grant Park, Chicago, in 1984 by a group of students. The second was unearthed in 2004 in Cleveland by two members of the Quest4Treasure forum. Preiss was killed in an auto accident in the summer of 2005, but the hunt for his casques continues.