For more than 25 years Denis Williams, one of Guyana's most accomplished scholars, travelled from one end of the country to the other conducting surveys and excavations. The result is the first comprehensive reconstruction of the history and characteristics of human settlement of the Guianas. In this work of painstaking scholarship, Denis William integrated a wide variety of evidence from original research with previously published archaelogical, geological, ecological, ethnographic, climatic and even nutritional data to develop the first major synthesis of the prehistory of Guyana. Prehistoric Guiana includes over 250 sketches, photographs, maps and tables as well as an extensive bibliography.
The Guiana Shield is an ancient geological formation located in the northern part of South America, covering an area of one million square kilometres. Despite its hostile environment, it is home to many unusual and highly specialized plants and animals, which constitute a rich area of biodiversity. Chapters in this book include hydrology, nutrient cycling, forest phenology, insect-plant interactions, forest microclimate, plant distributions, forest dynamics and conservation and management of flora and fauna. It provides a comprehensive and detailed review of the ecology, biology and natural history of the forests of the area.
South America is a vast, relatively isolated, landmass that includes 12 independent countries and one region (Guyane Française) with diverse ethnic groups speaking hundreds of different languages and dialects, and extraordinary creativity. Indigenous people have occupied its different habitats while transforming the landscape and themselves, with extraordinary dedication and success. This dictionary opens a window to these peoples through many entries, in an integrated approach that allows to connect the multiple facets of indigenous life before 1492. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Ancient South America contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and the culture of ancient South America. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about ancient South America.
Gianluca Delfino’s study of one of the Caribbean’s most controversial authors paves the way for looking at Wilson Harris’s body of work in a new light. Harris’s imaginative approach to reality is discussed in relation to the categories of history and time with reference to several novels, with a special focus on The Infinite Rehearsal, Jonestown, and The Dark Jester, spanning more than forty years of his vast literary production. Delfino’s analysis, encompassing critical perspectives ranging from African philosophy to Jungian readings through historiography and anthropology, demonstrates that Harris’s works as a whole show a remarkable unity of thought rooted in their author’s complex imagination. As a result, the cross-cultural quality of Harris’s thought emerges as a healing outcome of the traumatic colonial encounter, bringing together elements of Amerindian, African, and European origin in an ongoing dialogue with time, nature, and the psyche.
Evelyn A. Williams, a former teacher of art and design, is a practising painter with a recently established studio in Guyana, where she applies the principles of Mbari. Current research interests include Denis Williams's artworks and the vernacular architecture of the Village Movement. --Book Jacket.
This is the first in a six-volume publication which examines the history of the Caribbean, its people and landscape on a thematic basis. This volume covers the history of the origins of the earliest Caribbean peoples and analyses their various political, social, cultural and economic organisations over time, in and around the region. Topics covered include: ethnohistorical research; biogeographic teleconnections; the Palaeoindians in Cuba and surrounding regions; agricultural societies; indigenous societies at the time of the Spanish Conquest; the hierarchy of chiefdoms; and the development of slavery.
New perspectives on transitions in human history This book is about transitional periods of cultural and environmental change as seen through the lenses of archaeology and ethnography. Incorporating data from across six continents and tracing the human experience from the Late Pleistocene to the present, these chapters offer a global comparative perspective on transitional states. Questions of causality are considered, as are hypotheses about the processes of cultural change. Archaeology on the Threshold focuses on major transitions such as the shift from foraging to agriculture, the adoption of new technologies, the emergence of large-scale societies, the transition from egalitarian to inegalitarian leadership, and changes that occur in socioeconomic and ideological systems as a result of climate change and disease. Theoretical approaches range from processual to postprocessual, humanistic, and interpretive. Methodologies include ethnoarchaeology, the use of ethnographic analogy, cross-cultural comparisons and large-scale data approaches, oral history, the historical record, participant observation, and focus group discussions. Challenging archaeologists to query long-held assumptions and theoretical positions, this volume aims to refocus inquiry into change-causing and larger evolutionary processes to problematize notions of revolutionary, irrevocable change. These case studies examine and shed light on assumptions regarding the linearity and oscillations of adaptations, with intriguing implications for archaeological inferences.
