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

Archaeologists investigating sites of craft and industrial enterprise often puzzle over a domain of bewildering ruins. Locations of remarkable energy, tumult, and creativity now stand silent. This book provides an overview of the archaeology of American craft and industrial enterprises, outlines developments in theories, research questions, and interpretative frameworks, and presents case studies from a wide range of subjects. Research focused on industrial enterprises traverses a spectrum of perspectives. Some limit their efforts to recording, mapping, and studying the mechanics of a site. Others examine comparative questions of changes of technologies over time and space. Many analysts look away from the buildings and equipment of the workplace and focus instead on the workers, their families, residences, lifeways, and health experiences. With many sites presenting standing ruins, historians and archaeologists often encounter local stakeholder groups who wish to promote heritage themes and tourism potentials. All of these perspectives can be pursued with significant advances in research and curation methods. Investigations often range from microscopic analysis of product constituents to large-scale, three-dimensional recording of locations and features with high-resolution laser technologies. Past debates questioned whether primary emphasis should be on heritage recording or on archaeological research questions. More recent trends focus on collaborations across interest groups.

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.

The discipline of historical archaeology owes much of its development and prominence to work begun nearly a century ago and continuing to the present at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. This edited volume chronicles only a few of the lessons learned on behalf of the discipline, growing out of the 2014 Society for Historical Archaeology symposium “Discovering What Counts in Archaeology and Reconstruction: Lessons from Colonial Williamsburg.” It includes case studies based on exemplary approaches and methodologies that undoubtedly will continue to make Williamsburg meaningful to historical archaeology in the twenty-first century and beyond this episodic period.

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.

This book contributes to global conversations about the nature and practice of public history and heritage studies, as well as heritage scholarship in Latin America and the Caribbean. Drawing from the context of Belize and two rural African-descendant Kriol communities, this book demonstrates the many means by which people construct values, meanings, and practices related to heritage. These meanings have wide-ranging influences on peoples’ cultural identity, daily practices, and engagements with tangible and intangible culture. The author demonstrates that since the late nineteenth century, Belizean colonial and national institutions have constructed and used heritage places and ideologies to manage difference, govern citizens, and reinforce economic and social development agendas, particularly through archaeology and formal education. Institutional heritage practices have resulted in marginalized pasts and enduring racial and ethnic inequalities, especially in regards to Kriol cultural heritage. However, this book also details how Belizean teachers and children resisted and responded to persistent colonial and state legacies through vernacular heritage practices. The book’s methodology is innovative as it combines British imperial archival sources with years of ethnographic observations and interviews with government officials, teachers, and young people. A major contribution of the book is historicizing heritage by identifying connections between colonial and state cultural politics and global heritage trends over time. Another significant contribution is demonstrating how education and archaeology are interconnected social institutions through which official and vernacular heritage forms and practices are constructed, controlled, negotiated, and contested.

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.

This volume presents new data and interpretations from research at Florida’s Spanish missions, outposts established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to strengthen the colonizing empire and convert Indigenous groups to Christianity. In these chapters, archaeologists, historians, and ethnomusicologists draw on the past thirty years of work at sites from St. Augustine to the panhandle. Contributors explore the lived experiences of the Indigenous people, Franciscan friars, and Spanish laypeople who lived in La Florida’s mission communities. In the process, they address missionization, ethnogenesis, settlement, foodways, conflict, and warfare. One study reconstructs the sonic history of Mission San Luis with soundscape compositions. The volume also sheds light on the destruction of the Apalachee-Spanish missions by the English. The recent investigations highlighted here significantly change earlier understandings by emphasizing the kind and degree of social, economic, and ideological relationships that existed between Apalachee and Timucuan communities and the Spanish. Unearthing the Missions of Spanish Florida updates and rewrites the history of the Spanish mission effort in the region.