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After nearly two decades of investigations at Fort St. Joseph, historical archaeologists have revealed the contours of everyday life at one of the most important French colonial outposts in the western Great Lakes region. Initially founded as a mission along the St. Joseph River in the 1680s, the French soon established a settlement amidst their Miami and Potawatomi allies, and the site became a strategic stronghold before it was abandoned in 1781. For many years, the site eluded archaeological discovery, until 1998 when Western Michigan University archaeologists identified material evidence of the long-lost Fort. In 2002, after a century of searching for the Fort, subsurface testing revealed undisturbed archaeological deposits in the form of fireplaces, pits, and trash middens—definitive material evidence of Fort St. Joseph. Under the auspices of the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project, subsequent fieldwork and analysis have focused on examining the materiality of the Fort and the relationships between the Fort residents and local native populations. Fort St. Joseph Revealed employs archaeological and documentary sources to examine the history and culture of a fur trade society on the frontier of New France. This collection of papers is the first compilation of analyses derived from documents, cultural features, plant and animal remains, and various artifacts both to explore the importance of Fort St. Joseph in the past and in the present and to synthesize data on the colonial frontier from the perspective of a single place in the western Great Lakes region.

Contributors to Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature consider the multiplicity and instability of identity in medieval French literature, examining the ways in which literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Moreover, it is possible to take one’s place in a group while remaining foreign to it. Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal provides the perfect example of the latter. The tale opens with Perceval hunting alone in the forest, absorbed in his own pursuits, world, and thoughts. His “alone-ness” and self-absorption are evident as he moves toward an integration into a society from which he emerges both accepted and yet even more “different.” The ability to exist simultaneously inside and outside of a community serves as the focal point for the volume, which illustrates the breadth of perspectives from which one may view the “Other Within.” The chapters study identity through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of religious difference and of voice and naming. The works analyzed span genres—chanson de geste, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography—and historical periods, ranging from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. In so doing, they highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, underscoring both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they may initially appear.

The archaeological study of prostitution in nineteenth-century American contexts grew out of the discovery of brothels in the 1990s during large urban projects done in compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act. This book provides an overview of many of those projects as well as detailed discussions of a brothel found at Five Points in New York City and several parlor houses found in Washington, D.C. The large artifact assemblages recovered in combination with detailed primary and secondary historical research have produced a complex picture of commercial sex, which the book discusses in both nineteenth-century and twenty-first century perspectives. Agency theory is used to link the practice of prostitution with other forms of clandestine behavior that have come to light through archaeology. Issues of gender, class, and race run through the archaeological study of clandestine behavior, which includes acts of resistance in public—from drinking on the job to piracy—and acts in private—from hiding caches of artifacts in vulnerable places to scratching inscrutable designs on ceramic pots. The book ends with questions that touch on the age-old conundrum of passing judgment. Should prostitution be decriminalized? Should the efficacy of spiritual practices be questioned? The value of anomalous artifacts and their interpretation is stressed as crucial to recognizing brothels and evidence of clandestine pursuits.

Historical Archaeology of the Revolutionary War Encampments of Washington’s Army presents archaeological and ethno-historic research concerning Washington’s Army’s encampments, trails, and support structures during the American Revolution. Important sites and preserves that the following chapters discuss include Valley Forge in Pennsylvania; Putnam Park and General Parson’s Preserve in Redding, Connecticut; Morristown National Historic Park in New Jersey; and Rochambeau’s marching trail through Connecticut. Topics pursued by contributors to the volume are the military discipline and training of soldiers; the routine activities of soldiers and officers; the special accommodations at George Washington’s headquarters at Valley Forge; the layouts and organizations of encampments; the participation of African descendants, Native peoples, and women in the war; and the historic technology used by soldiers to construct their winter quarters. The goals of this book are to demonstrate the usefulness of archaeology and ethno-history for scholarly research of the American Revolution, to provoke interest in the subject, and to convey the importance of protecting important cultural and historic resources. Additionally, the book demonstrates how creatively exploring new questions while applying advances in technology, methodology, and theory continues to provide new scholarly insights into both how the war was fought and what it meant to its participants. To all scholars interested in pursuing research into America’s Revolution, the book should also demonstrate that public outreach and information sharing is the real significance of any ongoing investigations, such as those presented here.

Andean Ontologies is a fascinating interdisciplinary investigation of how ancient Andean people understood their world and the nature of being. Exploring pre-Hispanic ideas of time, space, and the human body, these essays highlight a range of beliefs across the region’s different cultures, emphasizing the relational aspects of identity in Andean worldviews. Studies included here show that Andeans physically interacted with their pasts through recurring ceremonies in their ritual calendar and that Andean bodies were believed to be changeable entities with the ability to interact with nonhuman and spiritual worlds. A survey of rock art describes Andeans’ changing relationships with places and things over time. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence reveals head hair was believed to be a conduit for the flow of spiritual power, and bioarchaeological remains offer evidence of Andean perceptions of age and wellness. Andean Ontologies breaks new ground by bringing together an array of renowned specialists including anthropologists, bioarchaeologists, historians, linguists, ethnohistorians, and art historians to evaluate ancient Amerindian ideologies through different interpretive lenses. Many are local researchers from South American countries such as Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, and this volume makes their work available to North American readers for the first time. Their essays are highly contextualized according to the territories and time periods studied. Instead of taking an external, outside-in approach, they prioritize internal and localized views that incorporate insights from today’s indigenous societies. This cutting-edge collection demonstrates the value of a multifaceted, holistic, inside-out approach to studying the pre-Columbian world.

The Archaeology of Removal in North America examines the material implications of human dislocation, focusing on the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries. This book shows how archaeologists are investigating the catalysts, dynamics, and meanings of removal. The contributors to this edited volume illustrate the diverse factors that uproot humans and their material culture. They also explain peoples’ roles in removal, their responses to dislocation, and the consequences of being uprooted. A variety of themes are examined, such as forced migration, dispossession, social engineering, value, agrarian labor, class, memory, forgetting, landscapes, racialization, capitalism, violence, government intervention, preservation, neighborhoods, identity, cultural transformation, networks, and social confinement.

United States Reconstruction across the Americas explores how emancipation, nationhood and nationalism, and the spread of market capitalism—all central to United States Reconstruction—were interwoven with patterns of post–Civil War global, political, social, and economic developments. The chapters answer these questions: How can an internationalization of US Reconstruction—through a consideration of national history as part of a process involving several state actors—enhance our understanding of this period? How did the American Civil War reshape the US’s relationship to the world, both regionally and internationally? And in what respects did international developments affect the US South’s transition from a slave to a free society?

Across the Near East, major changes in the commemoration of death and the formation of identity amongst the living took place at the beginning of the Neolithic. However, these investigations have largely focused on a narrow geographic expanse, including the Levant and Egypt, where processes of death and dying have been extensively documented. Much less is known about death and burial in the Near East, outside of the Levant. In recent years, however, interest in the mortuary landscapes of Arabia has steadily grown, and the potential for using death to reconstruct the lifestyles of once-living communities are becoming more fully realized. Mortuary and Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Bronze Age Arabia brings together an international consortium of archaeologists and bioarchaeologists, who are at the forefront of mortuary archaeology work across Arabia, to examine continuity and change in death and remembrance. While mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology contribute important perspectives to the interpretation of life and death in ancient Arabia, these subdisciplines are rarely brought together in this region. Indeed, only recently have skeletal remains been recognized as a rich source of scientific data complementing burial context. Such joint collaboration highlights the novel, interdisciplinary perspective proposed in this volume, resulting in a synthesis of new ideas and interpretations that will undoubtedly guide future archaeological endeavors in Arabia and beyond.

The Guerrilla Legacy of the Cuban Revolution examines the way in which the guerrilla origins of the Cuban Revolution have shaped the beliefs and values that have underpinned it since 1959. It argues that these beliefs and values comprise a political culture in which the figure of the guerrillero (guerrilla fighter) is revered and the past struggles are presented in the revolutionary historical narrative as both unfinished and guerrilla in their nature. Drawing on extensive analysis of official discourse across six decades, the book outlines a consistent, conscious promotion of a guerrilla ethos throughout the Revolution’s trajectory. On the one hand, it demonstrates how this promotion has contributed to garnering legitimacy for the decades-long political authority of former guerrilleros, even long after the end of the armed struggle that brought them to power. On the other hand, it reveals how, as part of the Revolution’s many mobilization drives since 1959, Cuban citizens have been encouraged to emulate the attributes embodied by guerrilleros heroicos such as Che Guevara and Antonio Maceo. Ultimately, the book proposes that it is this guerrilla discourse that holds the key to understanding not only the survival of the Revolution but also the longevity of its leadership.

New Directions in the Search for the First Floridians had its genesis in research and ideas focused on the state and future of Paleoindian studies in Florida but also reaching into the Early Archaic period and the greater Southeast as far as Texas. Although the focus is still on Paleoindians in Florida, several chapters place the Florida-specific works in larger spatial (the greater Southeast and the now-drowned Gulf and Atlantic shelfs from Virginia to Texas) and temporal (Early Archaic period) contexts. We have organized the book into three sections: The Past, Present, and Future of the Archaeology of Early Floridians; Early Floridian Studies in a Broader Context; and Technological Advances in the Study of Early Floridians.