Anthropology & Archaeology

A Pueblo Social History explores the intersection of archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnology. Ware argues that all of the key Pueblo social, ceremonial, and political institutions--and their relative importance across the Pueblo world--can only be explained in terms of indigenous social history stretching back nearly two millennia. He shows that the principal community organizations of the Pueblos emerged for the first time nearly thirteen hundred years ago, and that the interaction of these organizations would forge most of the unique social practices and institutions described in the historical Pueblo ethnographies. A Pueblo Social History offers new perspectives on the pithouse to pueblo transition, Chaco phenomenon, evolution of Rio Grande moieties, Western Pueblo lineages and clans, Katsina cult, great kivas, dynamics of village aggregation in the late prehistoric period, and much more. In the tradition of classic anthropological writings, this book focuses on the details of a particular case as it carries general lessons to the discipline. In the words of Timothy Earle, "A Pueblo Social History contains a subtle call to reconceive an anthropology grounded in the principles that made our discipline distinctive."

Southwestern archaeology represents the intersection of countless peoples, interests, ideas, and events. Much as archaeologists working in the Southwest have shaped the lives and histories of Native Americans, so too have Native peoples and traditions shaped archaeological practice. Grappling straightforwardly with tangled political and cultural relationships, Living Histories unpacks the archaeological record of the Southwest by engaging intensively with contemporary Native Americans and Native American issues as both the subject and object of historical research.

Carved from cliffs and canyons, buried in desert rock and sand are pieces of the ancient past that beckon thousands of visitors every year to the American Southwest. Whether Montezuma Castle or a chunk of pottery, these traces of prehistory also bring archaeologists from all over the world, and their work gives us fresh insight and information on an almost day-to-day basis.Who hasn't dreamed of boarding a time machine for a trip into the past? This book invites us to step into a Hohokam village with its sounds of barking dogs, children's laughter, and the ever-present grinding of mano on metate to produce the daily bread. Here, too, readers will marvel at the skills of Clovis elephant hunters and touch the lives of other ancestral people known as Mogollon, Anasazi, Sinagua, and Salado.Descriptions of long-ago people are balanced with tales about the archaeologists who have devoted their lives to learning more about "those who came before." Trekking through the desert with the famed Emil Haury, readers will stumble upon Ventana Cave, his "answer to a prayer." With amateur archaeologist Richard Wetherill, they will sense the peril of crossing the flooded San Juan River on the way to Chaco Canyon. Others profiled in the book are A. V. Kidder, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, Julian Hayden, Harold S. Gladwin, and many more names synonymous with the continuing saga of southwestern archaeology.This book is an open invitation to general readers to join in solving the great archaeological puzzles of this part of the world. Moreover, it is the only up-to-date summary of a field advancing so rapidly that much of the material is new even to professional archaeologists. Lively and fast paced, the book will appeal to anyone who finds magic in a broken bowl or pueblo wall touched by human hands hundreds of years ago. For all readers, these pages offer a sense of adventure, that "you are there" stir of excitement that comes only with making new discoveries about the distant past.

Located in the mountains of east-central Arizona, Grasshopper Pueblo is a prehistoric ruin that has been excavated and interpreted more thoroughly than most sites in the Southwest: more than 100 rooms have been unearthed here, and artifacts of remarkable quantity and quality have been discovered. Thanks to these findings, we know more about ancient life at Grasshopper than at most other pueblos. Now two archaeologists who have devoted more than two decades to investigations at Grasshopper reconstruct the life and times of this fourteenth-century Mogollon community. Written for general readers--and for the White Mountain Apache, on whose land Grasshopper Pueblo is located and who have participated in the excavations there--the book conveys the simple joys and typical problems of an ancient way of life as inferred from its material remains. Reid and Whittlesey's account reveals much about the human capacity for living under what must strike modern readers as adverse conditions. They describe the environment with which the people had to cope; hunting, gathering, and farming methods; uses of tools, pottery, baskets, and textiles; types of rooms and households; and the functioning of social groups. They also reconstruct the sacred world of Grasshopper as interpreted through mortuary ritual and sacred objects and discuss the relationship of Grasshopper residents with neighbors and with those who preceded and followed them. Grasshopper Pueblo not only thoroughly reconstructs this past life at a mountain village, it also offers readers an appreciation of life at the field school and an understanding of how excavations have proceeded there through the years. For anyone enchanted by mysteries of the past, it reveals significant features of human culture and spirit and the ultimate value of archaeology to contemporary society.

Prehistoric burial practices provide an unparalleled opportunity for understanding and reconstructing ancient civilizations and for identifying the influences that helped shape them.

With an estimated 10,000 ancient rock art sites, Nine Mile Canyon has long captivated people the world over. The 45-mile-long canyon, dubbed the "World's Longest Art Gallery," hosts what is believed to be the largest concentration of rock art in North America. But rock art is only part of the amazing archaeological fabric that scholars have been struggling to explain for more than a century. Jerry D. Spangler takes the reader on a journey into Nine Mile Canyon through the eyes of the generations of archaeologists who have gone there only to leave bewildered by what it all means. The early visitors in the 1890s were determined to recover collections for museums but never much cared to understand the people who left the artifacts. Then came a cadre of young scientists--the first to be trained specifically in archaeology--who found Nine Mile Canyon to be an intriguing laboratory that yielded more questions than answers. Scholars such as Noel Morss, Donald Scott, Julian Steward, John Gillin, and John Otis Brew all left their boot prints there. Today, archaeological research is experiencing another renaissance--a new generation of university-trained archaeologists is determined to unravel the mystery of Nine Mile Canyon using scientific tools and techniques that were unavailable to past generations. Through the words and thoughts of the archaeologists, as well as the more than 150 photos, readers will come to see Nine Mile Canyon as an American treasure unlike any other. As the first book that is devoted exclusively to the archaeology of this unique place, Nine Mile Canyon will evoke fascination among scholars and the general public alike. Winner of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award.

"Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest "is a compilation of papers by friends and colleagues that honor Don D. Fowler. The volume encompasses the breadth and depth of Fowler s work in archaeology and sister disciplines with original scholarship on the human past of the arid west. Included are theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers that synthesize and present fresh perspectives on Great Basin and Southwest archaeology and cover a sweep of topics from Paleoindian research to collaboration with Native Americans. Fowler has continually reminded scholars that to understand the past we must know how the local and specific is regionally and transculturally contextualized, how what we know came to be recognized, studied, and interpreted in short, how the past still affects the present and how regional and topical archaeology is part of a disciplinary endeavor that is as concerned with rigorous and inclusive knowledge production as it is with site description and cultural syntheses. Readers will learn about the nature of archaeological careers, how archaeology has been conceptualized and conducted, the strengths and limitations of past and present approaches, and the institution building and political processes in which archaeologists engage. Contributors posit new thoughts designed to stimulate new lines of research and reflect on the state of our current knowledge about a wealth of topics. Each paper asks four questions about what Great Basin and southwestern archaeologists currently know: Where have we been? Where are we now? What do we still need to learn? Where are we going? This comprehensive volume will be of interest to those practicing or teaching archaeology and to students seeking to understand the intricacies of Great Basin and Southwest archaeology. "

In a groundbreaking book that challenges familiar narratives of discontinuity, disease-based demographic collapse, and acculturation, Michael V. Wilcox upends many deeply held assumptions about native peoples in North America. His provocative book poses the question, What if we attempted to explain their presence in contemporary society five hundred years after Columbus instead of their disappearance or marginalization? Wilcox looks in particular at the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in colonial New Mexico, the most successful indigenous rebellion in the Americas, as a case study for dismantling the mythology of the perpetually vanishing Indian. Bringing recent archaeological findings to bear on traditional historical accounts, Wilcox suggests that a more profitable direction for understanding the history of Native cultures should involve analyses of issues such as violence, slavery, and the creative responses they generated.