First published in 1998. The Land of Prehistory reveals the powerful ideological function American archaeology has naively served, from the discipline's construction in Victorian societal reform movements to the present. Alice Beck Kehoe chronicles major movements and influences such as the support of racist Spencerian evolutionism and Manifest Destiny ideologies, and the 1960s New Archaeology pandering to Big Science money. She concludes with a discussion of the recent revolutionary shift to multicultural voices within the field.
Arizona’s San Pedro Valley is a natural corridor through which generations of native peoples have traveled for more than 12,000 years, and today many tribes consider it to be part of their ancestral homeland. This book explores the multiple cultural meanings, historical interpretations, and cosmological values of this extraordinary region by combining archaeological and historical sources with the ethnographic perspectives of four contemporary tribes: Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Zuni, and San Carlos Apache. Previous research in the San Pedro Valley has focused on scientific archaeology and documentary history, with a conspicuous absence of indigenous voices, yet Native Americans maintain oral traditions that provide an anthropological context for interpreting the history and archaeology of the valley. The San Pedro Ethnohistory Project was designed to redress this situation by visiting archaeological sites, studying museum collections, and interviewing tribal members to collect traditional histories. The information it gathered is arrayed in this book along with archaeological and documentary data to interpret the histories of Native American occupation of the San Pedro Valley. This work provides an example of the kind of interdisciplinary and politically conscious work made possible when Native Americans and archaeologists collaborate to study the past. As a methodological case study, it clearly articulates how scholars can work with Native American stakeholders to move beyond confrontations over who “owns” the past, yielding a more nuanced, multilayered, and relevant archaeology.
Robert Kennedy, director of the National Park Service, analyzes the discovery of North America and the loss of ancient civilization, from the cities, roads, and commerce of the past as the nation evolved into present day. In Hidden Cities, Robert Kennedy sets out on the bold quest of recovering the rich heritage of the North American peoples through a reimagination of the true relations of their modern-day successors and neighbors. From the Spanish and French explorers that discovered the land that would one day make up the United States to present day in the country, very few Euro-Americans have paid attention to the evidence and meaning of the nation’s heritage. As Kennedy shows the magnificence of the mound-building cultures through the sometimes prejudiced eyes of the founding generation, he reveals the astounding history of the North American continent in a way that sheds important light on the credit Native American predecessors deserve but many refuse to give.
A 2016 Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students K-12 (National Science Teachers Association-Children's Book Council The Early Cretaceous brings readers closer to prehistoric life than ever before. What it would be like to see a living, breathing dinosaur? The Early Cretaceous brings readers closer to prehistoric life than ever before. By combining the latest paleontological findings with highly detailed, intimate drawings of wildlife from the Early Cretaceous, readers will look into the eyes of some of the most fascinating creatures to ever inhabit the earth. Written and illustrated in the style of a naturalist's notebook, the viewer will be given a first-hand account of what it is like to stand alongside everything from the first birds to flying dinosaurs to some of the largest creatures ever to walk the earth. Through detailed illustrations and descriptive narrative, readers will discover how some dinosaurs survived polar blizzards, while others were able to pump blood five stories high to reach their brains. While many books on prehistoric life lump dinosaurs into the general timeline of the Mesozoic Period, no book currently dissects plant and animal life during one specific period. This allows the book to explore wildlife seldom featured in publications, many of them recent discoveries. The Early Cretaceous is backed by the research of one of paleontology's most acclaimed theorists, giving the book the most up to date scientific interpretation regarding animal behaviors, interactions, and recreations. "The illustrations and artistic layout are exceptionally beautiful. This is a book children will cherish, keep, and remember, and adults will be delighted to add to their collection." - Sylvia Czerkas, Author and Director The Dinosaur Museum, Utah "The illustrations are fantastic! The Nigersaurus 'grazing' is one of the nicest reconstructions of a rebbachisaurid I've ever seen." - Matthew C. Lamanna, Ph.D., Assistant Curator, Section of Vertebrate Paleontology, Carnegie Museum of Natural History "Fantastic artwork!" - Andrew Milner, Paleontologist and Curator at St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site "The art is amazing" - Phil Hore, National Dinosaur Museum, Australia "I *love* it! The style reminds me of a very cool sci-fi book that I had as a kid (and still have), Dougal Dixon's After Man: A Zoology of the Future. Dixon's book is a wonderful, lavishly illustrated introduction to evolutionary principles that helped set me on the path to becoming a professional paleontologist. I suspect your book is going to be similarly inspirational to many of today's aspiring scientists." - Matthew C. Lamanna, Ph.D., Assistant Curator, Section of Vertebrate Paleontology, Carnegie Museum of Natural History
This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.
Along the Atlantic seaboard, from Scotland to Spain, are numerous rock carvings made four to five thousand years ago, whose interpretation poses a major challenge to the archaeologist. In the first full-length treatment of the subject, based largely on new fieldwork, Richard Bradley argues that these carvings should be interpreted as a series of symbolic messages that are shared between monuments, artefacts and natural places in the landscape. He discusses the cultural setting of the rock carvings and the ways in which they can be interpreted in relation to ancient land use, the creation of ritual monuments and the burial of the dead. Integrating this fascinating yet little-known material into the mainstream of prehistoric studies, Richard Bradley demonstrates that these carvings played a fundamental role in the organization of the prehistoric landscape.
The national monuments of Wupatki, Walnut Canyon, and Montezuma's Castle showcase the treasures of the first people who settled and developed farms, towns, and trade routes throughout northern Arizona and beyond. The Hopis call these ancient peoples "Hisat'sinom," and Spanish explorers named their hard, arid homeland the sierra sin agua, mountains without water. Indeed, much of the region receives less annual precipitation than the quintessential desert city of Tucson. In Hisat'sinom: Ancient Peoples in a Land without Water, archaeologists explain how the people of this region flourished despite living in a place with very little water and extremes of heat and cold. Exploiting the mulching properties of volcanic cinders blasted out of Sunset Crater, the Hisat'sinom grew corn and cotton, made and traded fine cotton cloth and decorated ceramics, and imported exotic goods like turquoise and macaws from hundreds--even thousands--of miles away. From clues as small as the tiny fingerprints left on children's toys, post holes in the floors of old houses, and widely scattered corn fields, archaeologists have pieced together an intriguing portrait of what childhood was like, the importance of weaving cotton cloth, and how farmers managed risk in a harsh environment. At its peak in the late 1100s, Wupatki stood as the region's largest and tallest town, a cultural center for people throughout the surrounding region. It was a gathering place, a trading center, a treasury of exotic goods, a landmark, and a place of sacred ritual and ceremony. Then, after 1200, people moved away and the pueblo sank into ruin.
“Anyone who doubts the power of history to inform the present should read this closely argued and sweeping survey. This is rich, timely, and sobering historical fare written in a measured, non-sensationalist style by a master of his craft. One only hopes (almost certainly vainly) that today’s policymakers take its lessons to heart.”—Brian Fagan, Los Angeles Times Published in 2002, Deforesting the Earth was a landmark study of the history and geography of deforestation. Now available as an abridgment, this edition retains the breadth of the original while rendering its arguments accessible to a general readership. Deforestation—the thinning, changing, and wholesale clearing of forests for fuel, shelter, and agriculture—is among the most important ways humans have transformed the environment. Surveying ten thousand years to trace human-induced deforestation’s effect on economies, societies, and landscapes around the world, Deforesting the Earth is the preeminent history of this process and its consequences. Beginning with the return of the forests after the ice age to Europe, North America, and the tropics, Michael Williams traces the impact of human-set fires for gathering and hunting, land clearing for agriculture, and other activities from the Paleolithic age through the classical world and the medieval period. He then focuses on forest clearing both within Europe and by European imperialists and industrialists abroad, from the 1500s to the early 1900s, in such places as the New World, India, and Latin America, and considers indigenous clearing in India, China, and Japan. Finally, he covers the current alarming escalation of deforestation, with our ever-increasing human population placing a potentially unsupportable burden on the world’s forests.
This volume describes the geography and environments of Oman, its rich copper ore deposits and the ancient mining and smelting techniques, and it also includes an overview of the physical properties of the different metals exploited in antiquity and of the analytical techniques used in archaeometallurgy.
