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Ancient west Mexico has often been viewed as an isolated mishmash of cultures, separated from Mesoamerica “proper,” a region that lacked “civilization.” This volume argues against this vision by highlighting current archaeological research on the diverse and complex pre-Hispanic societies that developed in this area. Through the presentation of original data and interpretations, contributions provoke debate and advance understanding of regional complexity, chronology, and diversity, as well as the role of the west in broader, pan-Mesoamerican sociocultural processes. The volume illustrates the ways in which research and areal data from western Mesoamerica can meaningfully contribute to the construction of theoretical models applicable in multiple contexts and capable of enhancing archaeological descriptions and explanations of the dynamic diversity characteristic of all Mesoamerican societies. The volume also presents intriguing case studies from western Mesoamerica that illuminate alternative pathways to sociopolitical complexity in pre-Hispanic societies. In doing so, the volume seeks to contribute to contemporary anthropological and archaeological debates regarding the ways in which archaeologists describe and explain the material configurations that they encounter in the archaeological record, and how these configurations may explain, relate to, and enhance our understanding of the ancient lifeways of the diverse societies that inhabited the region.

Approaches to Monumental Landscapes of the Ancient Maya showcases interpretations and perspectives of landscape importance in the central Maya lowlands, Belize, and the northern and central Maya highlands with studies spanning over 10,000 years of human occupation in the region. Taking their cues from a robust scholarship on landscape archaeology, urban planning, political history, and settlement pattern studies in Maya research, the authors in this volume explore conceptions of monumentality and landscapes that are the products of long-term research and varied research agendas, falling into three broad conceptual categories: natural and built landscapes, political and economic landscapes, and ritual and sacred landscapes. The chapters explore the concept of monumentality in novel ways and approach the idea of landscape as not just the sum total of how a settlement’s local environs were plied and manipulated to conform to the Maya’s deep-seated and normative notions of sacred geography but also take note of how the lowland Maya actively constructed landscapes of power, meaning, and exchange, which rendered their social worlds imbricated, interdependent, and complex. Though varied in their approaches, the authors are all supported by the Alphawood Foundation, and this volume is a testament to the impact philanthropy can have on scientific research.

An Archaeology and History of a Caribbean Sugar Plantation on Antigua uses archaeological and documentary evidence to reconstruct daily life at Betty’s Hope plantation on the island of Antigua, one of the largest sugar plantations in the Caribbean. It demonstrates the rich information that the multidisciplinary approach of contemporary historical archaeology can offer when assessing the long-term impacts of sugarcane agriculture on the region and its people. Drawing on ten years of research at the 300-year-old site, the researchers uncover the plantation’s inner workings and its connections to broader historical developments in the Atlantic World. Excavations at the Great House reveal similarities to other British colonial sites, and historical records reveal the owners’ involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and in the trade of rum and other commodities. Artifacts uncovered from the slave quarters—ceramic tokens, repurposed bottle glass, and hundreds of Afro-Antiguan pottery sherds—speak to the agency of enslaved peoples in the face of harsh living conditions. Contributors also use ethnographic field data collected from interviews with contemporary farmers, as well as soil analysis to demonstrate how three centuries of sugarcane monocropping created a complicated legacy of soil depletion. Today tourism has long surpassed sugar as Antigua’s primary economic driver. Looking at visitor exhibits and new technologies for exploring and interpreting the site, the volume discusses best practices in cultural heritage management at Betty’s Hope and other locations that are home to contested historical narratives of a colonial past.

This book explores Mississippian communities in the 14th–15th century northern Yazoo Basin through an archaeological case study of Parchman Place, located in present day Coahoma County, Mississippi. Drawing on archaeological evidence for foodways, mound building, and the organization of community space, the book takes the position that community-building by Mississippian people was a process of placemaking that involved repeated re-creations of a distinct worldview in a particular place (or places). Much evidence points toward the tendency for Mississippian social relations to be strongly hierarchical. And yet, archaeological data from Parchman Place and elsewhere suggest that different Mississippian people practiced placemaking and world creation in different ways, through different media, and to achieve different goals. Despite the very visible outcomes of actions taken by powerful people (mound-top residences, palisades, community spatial organization, feasting refuse), community-building was decidedly not the exclusive purview of elite members of Mississippian communities. Rather, spatial and depositional practices indicate that leadership was routinely checked by those who wished to emphasize kin group autonomy and those who valued the maintenance of balance among distinct social groups.

Thanks to Irving Hallowell’s classic 1926 comparative ethnography on the special mythic status of bears in Subarctic cultures, anthropologists are generally aware that peoples throughout the northern hemisphere have treated bears as far more than a subsistence resource, something more akin to another kind of human or, to use Hallowell’s famous phrase, “other-than-human persons.” While Hallowell provided ample evidence of bear ceremonialism in northern latitudes, he found little evidence for the special treatment of bears elsewhere in Native North America. Archaeological and historical research over the last nine decades, however, has produced vast unsynthesized information about the roles of bears in Native American beliefs, rituals, and subsistence. This book is the first collective effort since Hallowell’s formative publication to consider how Native peoples viewed, treated, and used black bears (Ursus americanus) through time across Eastern North America. Contributors draw on zooarchaeological, ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and other evidence of bear hunting, consumption, and use, while contemplating the range of relationships that existed between bears and humans. They have reviewed thousands of pages of ethnohistorical and ethnographic documents and summarized and interpreted data on bear remains from nearly 300 archaeological sites from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Native peoples perceived and related to bears in remarkably diverse ways. Our authors explore the religious and economic significance of bears and bear products (meat, fat, oil, pelts, etc.), bear imagery in Native art and artifacts, and bears in Native worldviews, kinship systems, and cosmologies, along with their role as exported commodities in trans-Atlantic trade.

At its height between AD 1050 and 1275, the city of Cahokia was the largest settlement of the Mississippian culture, acting as an important trade center and pilgrimage site. While the influence of Cahokian culture on the development of monumental architecture, maize-based subsistence practices, and economic complexity throughout North America is undisputed, new research in this volume reveals a landscape of influence in the regions that had and may not have had a relationship with Cahokia. Contributors find evidence for Cahokia’s hegemony—its social, cultural, ideological, and economic influence—in artifacts, burial practices, and religious iconography uncovered at far-flung sites across the Eastern Woodlands. Case studies include Kincaid in the Ohio River Valley, Schild in the Illinois River Valley, Shiloh in Tennessee, and Aztalan in Wisconsin. These essays also show how, with Cahokia’s abandonment, the diaspora continued via the Mississippi River and extended the culture’s impact southward.

Chinese diaspora archaeology in North America is at a tipping point. On one hand, archaeologists have collected tremendous amounts of data and made significant contributions to our understanding of Chinese immigrant life; on the other, the field remains slow to move past outdated approaches that rely on dichotomies of continuity and change that essentialize Chinese immigrants. This volume will challenge tired approaches and provide models for future work by bringing together chapters from scholars working on new and more nuanced approaches for interpreting Chinese diaspora archaeological sites in North America. Chapters will address the conceptualization of the field (as diaspora, in relation to Asian American studies, etc.), highlight the diversity of Chinese contexts in North America (urban and rural Chinatowns, mining communities, railroad camps, etc.), foregrounding the understudied aspects of Chinese migrant life (entrepreneurialism, cross–cultural interaction, creativity, etc.). Rather than being a report on the state of the field, our goal is that this volume will instead actualize change and shape the future direction of the sub–discipline, as well as bring Chinese diaspora archaeology into broader discussions about topics such as race and migration.

Digital Humanities in Latin America performs a number of tasks: a re-definition of the nations’ symbolic territories, which implies their exploration as digital contexts, experiments, media products, or even as uneven battlefields; a re-examination of the role of transnational networks in the configuration of new identities and/or communities, as exemplified by the cases of the Andean, Latin, and Afro-Latin networks discussed in this book; and a highlighting of the importance of cases that complexify the interaction between national territories and transnational flows through the remixing of aesthetic and political codes. Cognizant of the risks implicit in hegemonic agency, its object is to serve as a vehicle of communication between the Latin American digital humanities and the English-speaking circles of this field in the US and the UK, while at the same time documenting the existence and viability of pertinent academic initiatives south of the border.

The relationship between humans and dogs has garnered considerable attention within archaeological research around the world. Investigations into the lived experiences of domestic dogs have proven to be an intellectually productive avenue for better understanding humanity in the past. This book examines the human-canine connection by moving beyond asking when, why, or how the dog was domesticated. While these questions are fundamental, beyond them lies a rich and textured history of humans maintaining a bond with another species through cooperation and companionship over thousands of years. Diverse techniques and theoretical approaches are used by authors in this volume to investigate the many ways dogs were conceptualized by their human counterparts in terms of both their value and social standing within a variety of human cultures across space and time. In this way, this book contributes a better understanding of the human-canine bond while also participating in broader anthropological discussions about how human interactions with domesticated animals shape their practices and worldviews.

This project explores age-based obsessions of the modern era, situating the charting and interrogation of age among modernity’s central preoccupations, with particular attention to the gendering of old age and the creation of intergenerational conflicts. While chronological considerations privileged the young and tended to exclude those past adulthood, much of modern literature interrogated the age-based forms of standardization rooted in the era’s understanding of personal development. By focusing on the ways that age was constructed so as to uphold the ideal of a coherent, stable self, this literature interrogates theories of development that were believed to govern life trajectories, and with them, ideals about progress, often to the point of envisioning aging as a form of unwelcome dissolution. The era’s literary texts, however, complicated such views by adding to familiar figures of the flapper and the young generation a host of others that broke age thresholds: the mature youth, the youthful adult, the young middle-aged, the rejuvenate, the child bride, the aged, and the ghost. All such figures invited an interrogation of youth’s supposed ascendancy by suggesting that modernity’s age-based privileges were more varied and more widely dispersed than they seemed. If youth appeared dominant in terms of bodily forms and youthful energies, the more mature are revealed as possessing resources, experiences, and strategies that counter the assets of the young, leading to scenarios where the outcomes of intergenerational conflicts were both volatile and unexpected.

The first comprehensive examination of early American economic thought in over a generation, The Emergence of Capitalism in Early America challenges the traditional narrative that Americans were born committed to the principles of Adam Smith. Americans are shown to have developed a distinct brand of hybrid capitalism, suited to the nation’s unique political, intellectual, cultural, and economic histories. Given America’s primary position in the history of capitalism, its economists were well situated to comment on market phenomenon. Covering a broad range of the period’s economic literature and offering close analyses of the antebellum reception of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, this book rescues America’s first economists from historical neglect. In thematically organized chapters, the intellectual cultures of American protectionism and free trade are examined. Protectionism exercised enormous influence in the discourse, constituting what rightly has been called an ‘American political economy.’ Henry Carey is highlighted as the central thinker in protectionist thought, providing an economic blueprint for the nation’s future industrial and commercial supremacy. Sharp regional divisions existed among the nation’s strongest proponents of free-trade ideology, namely Calhoun, Wayland, McVickar, Vethake, Cardozo, and Cooper, as well as important theoretical distinctions with Smithian-inspired laissez-faire. In a separate chapter, American conservative economists—among others, Fitzhugh and Holmes—are positioned alongside antebellum socialists—Skidmore and Byllesby—illustrating the rather awkward ideological arrangements attendant to emergent capitalism. Finally, the tricky relationship Americans have held with financial institutions is explored. Beginning with Hamilton, this book analyzes the financial literature as Americans learned to live with arguably the most complex and misunderstood manifestation of capitalism—finance.

The chapter authors detail local engagements with technology and the natural world in Latin America across time and reveal the social, political, and economic conditions that have led to the relative obscurity of such research in a world history of science. Comparative thinking is an important feature in this volume, as it helps situate the issue of Latin American scientific innovation within the global currents of science and understand the particular inequalities they produce and reproduce. The asymmetries that govern the global production of scientific knowledge have certainly affected the kind of science that is possible “at the periphery,” to use the term adopted by many Latin American historians of science. While examining a number of cases from the colonial times to the present, we propose a critical understanding of how such asymmetries have operated. To give an example, the history of science in Latin America has been bound up, since colonization, with that of Spain, sharing its peripheral status in the global history of science. This representation is now beginning to be challenged with greater attention to the “dynamic and multiple” exchanges that characterized the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge in the colonial era and to the particular forms taken by colonial science. A number of chapters in this volume contribute to this new thrust in scholarship on colonial Spanish and Latin American science.

Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism illuminates the idiosyncratic Jewish lexicon Gertrude Stein marshalled to associate modernism with Jewishness. Bridging modernist studies, Jewish studies, and the study of American literature, it establishes this inveterate experimenter as one of the premier Jewish modernists. Using archival research that radically changes our understanding of Stein’s oeuvre, Feinstein argues that an interest in Jewish nature was central to the many experiments in genre and style throughout Stein’s career. Although Stein explicitly discusses Jews in early scholastic writings and notebooks, she ceases to write openly about Jews in her first fictions and the epic novel The Making of Americans. Instead, melding tradition and innovation, her protagonists are figuratively Jewish and modern. Stein derived these solely metaphorical depictions of Jewish identity from Matthew Arnold’s notions of Hebraism and Hellenism, a debt never before recognized. Later, Stein returns to an explicit Jewish vocabulary in her enigmatic “voices” writings to examine marriage, diplomacy, and Zionism. Finally, in compositions written in Vichy France, where decrees were narrowly defining the parameters of French and Jewish identities, Stein rebelliously Judaizes the experience of occupation. The conclusion rebuts recent claims of Stein’s collaboration by examining her anti-Hitlerian writings and wartime contributions to journals of the intellectual resistance.

This multi-authored case study of three Nipmuc sites is an introductory archaeology text that includes a tribal member as one of the scholars. Collaboration between the authors over two decades is a key theme in the book, serving as a model for a primary topic of the book. Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration engages young scholars in archaeology and Native American history, teaching them about respecting and including indigenous knowledge and perspectives on colonization and indigenous identity. A key asset is access by indigenous peoples whose past is explored in this book. The case study offers an arena in which Nipmuc history continues to unfold, from the pre-Contact period up to the present, and stresses the strong relationships between Nipmuc people of the past and present to their land and related social and political conflicts over time. A double narrative approach (the authors sharing their experiences while exploring the stories of individuals from the past whose voices emerge through their work) explores key issues of continuity, commonality, authenticity and identity many Native people have confronted today and in the past. As a model of collaborative archaeology, the relationships that developed between the authors stress the critical role personal relationships play in the development and growth of scholarly collaborations. Beyond being “engaged,” indigenous peoples need to be integral to any research focused on their history and culture. Although not entirely a new concept, this book demonstrates how collaboration can move beyond engagement and consultation to true incorporation of indigenous knowledge and scholarship.

Historical Ecology and Archaeology in the Galápagos Islands explores human history in the Galápagos Islands, which is today one of the world’s premier nature attractions. From its early beginnings, the Galápagos National Park connected a dual vision of biological conservation with responsible tourism. However, despite its popular perception as a pristine nature park, the archipelago has experienced protracted interactions with humans at least since its accidental discovery in 1535. This book contextualizes six years of interdisciplinary archaeological and historical research on San Cristóbal, the easternmost island in the archipelago. It focuses on the interior highland community of El Progreso and specifically the preserved vestiges of a 19th-century sugar plantation, the Hacienda El Progreso, which left the most intensive historic footprint of human activity in the islands. It did not do this alone, as other islands, particularly those with potable water sources, were varyingly impacted by human encounters. Proceeding within a framework of Historical Ecology, the book integrates archaeological research with historical and ecological study and incorporates three interconnected perspectives: 1. globalization and the increasing integration of the islands into an expanding network of human interests; 2. anthropogenic transformation of distinctive island habitats into novel or emerging ecosystems; and, 3. changing popular and scientific perceptions of nature and ecotourism’s role in biological conservation, preservation, and restoration.

The Insubordination of Photography studies the documentary practices of photography devised by different collectives (relatives of the detained-disappeared, church organizations, visual artists, and photographers), organizations, and independent media, which resisted, defied, and participated in the downfall of the dictatorial regime in Chile. Given a milieu saturated by disinformation and cover-ups of all kinds and restricted by repression and censorship, how does one demand and make visible the truth about the (denied) crime of forced disappearances under Pinochet’s Chilean dictatorship? At a moment when resistance was gaining more prevalence on the streets and in the independent media, how could one ensure the safety of independent photographers and challenge censorship? How does one convey denunciation when images are prohibited? The objects studied in this book emerged as answers to these pressing questions. Different documentary practices of photography were devised to make visible the crime of forced disappearances in the public space (chapter one), to produce a credible visual record of forensic evidence in a paramount legal case (chapter two), to denounce and resist precarity and protect the work of independent photographers and reporters (chapter three), and to challenge—and ridicule—censorship and the limitations imposed on freedom of the press (chapter four). These practices not only changed the depth of field, which the dictatorship attempted to control by all necessary means, but also, and perhaps more importantly, strengthened the ideology and the public space of the opposition while expanding the photographic field.

Following the development of non-Euclidean geometries from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Euclid’s system came to be re-conceived as a language for describing reality rather than a set of transcendental laws. As Henri Poincaré famously put it, “[i]f several geometries are possible, is it certain that our geometry [...] is true?” By examining James Joyce’s linguistic play and conceptual engagement with ground-breaking geometric constructs in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, this book explores how his topographical writing of place encapsulates a common crisis between geometric and linguistic modes of representation within the context of modernity. More specifically, it investigates how Joyce presents Euclidean geometry and its topographical applications as languages, rather than ideally objective systems, for describing the visible world; and how, conversely, he employs language figuratively to emulate the systems by which the world is commonly visualized. With reference to his early readings of Giordano Bruno, Henri Poincaré, and other critics of the Euclidean tradition, it examines how Joyce’s obsession with measuring and mapping space throughout his works enters into his more developed reflections on the codification of visual signs in FinnegansWake. In particular, this book sheds new light on Joyce’s fascination with the “geometry of language” practiced by Bruno, whose massive influence on Joyce is often assumed to exist in Joyce studies yet is rarely explored in any detail.

This book reconstructs different images of modern femininities and their evolution during the 1920s and 1930s, showing that women were at the center of a public debate about modernity and its consequences on the emergence of an Argentine national identity. With a focus on competing media representations of womanhood, mainly proposed by male contemporaries, but also with attention to young women’s descriptions of their experiences, the book explores different images of modern femininities and what they reveal about how Argentines imagined themselves and their country during decades of cultural and social renewal. Based on an analysis of a wide range of consumer culture sources—including women’s and general interest magazines and daily newspapers, pulp fiction, advertising, popular music, and films—this book shows that the multifaceted figure of the modern girl embodied the hopes, tensions and anxieties associated with sociocultural transformations, while becoming the bearer of diverse assessments about the Argentine nation. While the young modern woman was sometimes invoked to symbolize fears of the country’s moral decadence and cultural loss, at other times she stood for an “advanced” nation in the media, and her image was a demonstration of national progress and civilization. By reconstructing the emergence and evolution of new female images and their connection to the conformation of different versions of Argentina’s national identity, this book not only unveils the dynamics of sociocultural change but also explores its gendered and nationalistic dimension.

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake abounds with prayers from all traditions, and their echoes and cadences may be found on almost every page. Bringing together thinkers from antiquity, the Middle Ages, early Enlightenment, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book argues that Joyce views prayer as theory of language. It gives Joyce a verbal strategy for discussing immaterial things from which he composes his book of the night: image, magic, dreams, and speech. Beginning with the second-century theologian Origen’s treatise On Prayer, as well as the eighteenth-century philosopher and rhetorician Giambattista Vico’s theories of the formation of language and culture, the book argues that Joyce’s use of language as prayer works progressively across the four sections of the novel, creating meaning from its otherwise discrete and associative arrangement. Since Plato, the culture has recognized that religious utterances possess unique characteristics, yet analytical philosophy and literary scholarship have not produced a focused study of prayer. And although brilliant and essential work in the field of genetic criticism shows us Joyce’s building blocks and methods of creation, no book suggests why Finnegans Wake follows the finished order it does. This work meets those needs.

Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human curates an important series of case studies of the posthuman imaginaries and nonhuman tropes employed in a broad range of Latin American cultural texts, from the narratives of Las Casas to new media and installation art in contemporary Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. The book’s introduction highlights the ways the figure of the “limit” has functioned as an important site of aesthetic, ontological, and political experimentation and reworking in Latin American cultural production, and underlines the potentialities and possible risks associated with the use of posthuman frameworks in the region. The different chapters examine the ways human borders and boundaries have been tested, undermined, and reformulated in relation to issues including dictatorial violence and drug war necropolitics, ecological storytelling, indigenous thought systems, gender, race, history, and new materialism. The book as a whole marshals a wide range of theoretical frameworks and points to the complex ways Latin American culture intersects with and departs from global formulations of humanism and the posthuman.