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Using evidence of historical changes in landscape, community life, and material culture from a coal mining company town in the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeast Pennsylvania, Michael Roller introduces an archaeological approach to the structural violence on workers, citizens, and consumers that developed across the twentieth century. The study begins with an analysis of a moment of explicit violence at the end of the nineteenth century, an event known as the Lattimer Massacre, in which as many as nineteen immigrant miners were shot by a posse of local businessmen. From this touchstone, material history and theoretical contexts across the twentieth century are documented in a manner both locally specific and broadly generalizable. Historical archaeology is used strategically, opportunistically, and dialectically, supported, amplified, and illuminated by archival and ethnographic research, spatial analysis, and social theory. In the process, attention is brought to contradictions, ironies, and absences in our understandings of this formative era in labor history. This study illuminates the development of systematized violence and soft forms of social control enacted by the collusion of state and capital through materialities such as infrastructure, urban redevelopment, mass consumerism, governmentality, biopolitics, and the shifting boundaries of sovereign power. Varied in its use of sources, the study returns again and again to the material life and the shifting landscapes of the company towns and shanty enclaves of the region, as well as the violence of the Massacre. This archaeology of the recent past shows us the unconscious material foundations for present social troubles.

The emergence of village-communities profoundly transformed social organization in every part of the world where such societies developed. Contributors to The Archaeology of Villages in Eastern North America employ archaeological and historical evidence to explore the development of villages among eastern North American indigenous societies of the deep and recent past. Rich data sets from archaeology and contemporary social theory are employed to document the physical attributes of villages, the structural organization and aggregation of such entities, what it means to be a villager, cosmological and ritual systems, and how villages were entangled with one another in regional networks. The result is a volume which highlights the similarities and differences in the historical trajectories of village formation and development in eastern North America, as well as the larger processes by which villages have the power to affect large-scale social transformations.

Bioarchaeology of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica presents work from both Mesoamerican-based and U.S.-based researchers who use a combination of cultural ethnohistorical, (bio)archaeological, dental, and chemical data in an interdisciplinary approach to research population history in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The goals for such a project are threefold: 1) to encourage more cross-fertilization of work between fields and subfields, in order to more appropriately address large regional questions of population history; 2) to explicitly address the theoretical and methodological challenges and rewards of interdisciplinary research; and 3) to introduce a larger audience to the state of interdisciplinary work in Mesoamerica. The volume is organized into three primary sections. First, the editors discuss the theory and methods of interdisciplinary research, with a particular focus on bioarchaeological research. Then, we present authored case studies using interdisciplinary methods to analyze the population dynamics of migration and mobility (section two) and explore reconstructions of ethnicity and social identity (section three). A concluding chapter integrates these studies and places them into a broader research framework to guide future research.

Ceramics of Ancient America analyzes ceramics specifically from ancient America to add new layers to our understanding by emphasizing new perspectives and a multidisciplinary approach from the fields of archaeology, art history, and anthropology. Scholars have studied ceramic objects in these disciplines using various methodologies. So far, however, no publication has combined these different scholarly approaches to analyze Pre-Columbian ceramics to understand aspects of many different ancient societies across the Americas. This book thus will provide a much-needed compendium, survey, and synthesis of current scholarship of New World ceramics by drawing on a combination of three different disciplines. This volume will help students and scholars alike better understand and appreciate ceramics as one of the vital forms of communication within small social units, and across cultural and political boundaries. Although three different disciplines have approached the study of ceramics using different methodologies, this book will be the first to utilize them in a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary way to contribute to a more complete picture of Pre-Columbian ceramics and their place in society. The study of ceramics has already been recognized as a fundamental tool for understanding Pre-Columbian beliefs about daily life, reconstructing social systems, and assessing inter- and intra- cultural political relationships. The contributors to this book, however, explore social implications, iconography, trade, variations of regional style, innovation, ritual, and political meanings from numerous cultures in North, Central, and South America that are relevant to the study of ceramics anywhere, but particularly in ancient America.

Bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology offer unique perspectives on studies of mass violence and present opportunities to interpret human skeletal remains in a broader cultural context. Massacres and other forms of large-scale violence have been documented in many different ancient and modern contexts. Moving the analysis from the victims to the broader political and cultural context necessitates using social theories about the nature of mass violence. Massacres can be seen as a process, that is, as the unfolding of nonrandom patterns or chains of events that precede the events and continue long after. Mass violence has a cultural logic of its own that is shaped by social and historical dynamics. Massacres can have varying aims, including subjugation or total eradication of a group based on status, ethnicity, or religion. The goal of this edited volume is to present case studies that integrate the evidence from human remains within the broader cultural and historical contexts through the utilization of social theory to provide a framework for interpretation. This volume highlights case studies of massacres across time and space that stress innovative theoretical models that help make sense of this unique form of violence. The primary focus will be on how massacres are used as a strategy of violence across time and cultural/geopolitical landscapes.