Browse

Archaeologists often approach ancient dwellings as straightforward reflections of specific cultural and social projects, cultural traditions, household wealth and status, and residence groups. This book calls for a fundamental reassessment of the archaeology of houses and households, employing a multidimensional, “triangulating” investigation regarding how ancient dwellings were made, inhabited, and studied. This requires several intersecting considerations. Part I, Making Andean Houses, explores how dwellings are made, repaired, abandoned, and recycled, distinct processes for different kinds of domestic buildings and associated roofs. These variations produce distinct archaeological signatures more complex than simply “decay.” Part II, Inhabiting Andean Houses, explores how social behaviors and cultural meanings are enacted, encoded, and re-created in different Andean dwellings. Comparative case studies identify several common tropes—such as the existence of gendered spaces and the significance of houses as places of ritual—while documenting significant variations in habitat and habitus that archaeologists must investigate rather than assume. Part III, Studying Andean Houses, is a critical assessment of archaeological approaches to studying Andean domestic architecture but with broader implications. This includes a critical history of the development of archaeological investigations on the North Coast of Peru, an assessment of current studies that argue that “house size” is an accurate proxy for “household wealth and status” and the emergence of inequality, and an alternative model in which aspiring elites may co-opt social practices originally based on reciprocity, subverting social practices, and instantiating social differences in the construction of chiefly houses

This volume brings together archaeologists working in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia to construct a new prehistory of the Upper Amazon, outlining cultural developments from the late third millennium B.C. to the Inca Empire of the sixteenth century A.D. Encompassing the forested tropical slopes of the eastern Andes as well as Andean drainage systems that connect to the Amazon River basin, this vast region has been unevenly studied due to the restrictions of national borders, remote site locations, and limited interpretive models. The Archaeology of the Upper Amazon unites and builds on recent field investigations that have found evidence of extensive interaction networks along the major rivers—Santiago, Marañon, Huallaga, and Ucayali. Chapters detail how these rivers facilitated the movement of people, resources, and ideas between the Andean highlands and the Amazonian lowlands. Contributors demonstrate that the Upper Amazon was not a peripheral zone but a locus for complex societal developments. Reaching across geographical, cultural, and political boundaries, this volume shows that the trajectory of Andean civilization cannot be fully understood without a nuanced perspective on the region’s diverse patterns of interaction with the Upper Amazon.

Methods, Mounds, and Missions offers innovative ways of looking at existing data, as well as compelling new information, about Florida’s past. Diverse in scale, topic, time, and region, the volume’s contributions span the late Archaic through historic periods and cover much of the state’s panhandle and peninsula, with forays into the larger Southeast and circum-Caribbean area. Subjects explored in this volume include coastal ring middens, chiefly power and social interaction in mound-building societies, pottery design and production, faunal evidence of mollusk harvesting, missions and missionaries, European iron celts or chisels, Hernando de Soto’s sixteenth-century expedition, and an early nineteenth-century Seminole settlement. The essays incorporate previously underexplored markers of culture histories such as clay sources and non-chert lithic tools and address complex issues such as the entanglement of utilitarian artifacts with sociocultural and ritual realms. Experts in their topical specializations, this volume’s contributors build on the research methods and interpretive approaches of influential anthropologist Jerald Milanich. They update current archaeological interpretations of Florida history, developing and demonstrating the use of new and improved tools to answer broader and larger questions.

In this book, various scholars explore how stylistic and iconographic analyses of Mississippian imagery provide new perspectives on the beliefs, narratives, public ceremonies, ritual regimes, and expression of power in Mississippian communities. Their work advances through well-contextualized case studies that build on Vernon James Knight’s Iconographic Method in New World Prehistory. It is organized into three sections:(1) the use of style in Mississippian iconographic studies, (2) interpreting Mississippian imagery, and (3) situating and historicizing Mississippian symbols. Semon addresses regional variation in Late Mississippian complicated stamped ceramic assemblages of the filfot-cross motif along the Georgia coast. Stauffer investigates Mississippian spider-themed imagery, which are carved on marine shell, copper, stone, and wood media. Scarry presents a preliminary assessment of Pensacola ceramic vessels from Choctawhatchee Bay, Florida. Lankford examines how comparative mythology and the analysis of historic-geographic patterns can have a recursive relationship with iconographic analyses. Dye delves into how owl effigy vessels are a materialization of witchcraft in Mississippian societies and how elites employed witchcraft accusations for political aggrandizement. Giles considers how the imagery on certain Pecan Point headpots materializes a layered cosmos and might typify (mnemonic) parallelism. Nowak employs a Peircean approach to consider the agential properties of Early Caddo bottles and how they might have functioned as Native American bundles. Lambert traces how Caddo pottery and motifs moved through two diverse areas and how these movements resulted in the transformation of iconographic meanings. Knight provides an extension of his perspective on iconographic analysis and its relationship to Mississippian archaeology.