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Historic plantation sites continue to struggle with the legacy of slavery and black heritage, particularly concerning their relevance in American life. Although slavery and black history are erased from the contemporary landscape of Carroll Park in Baltimore, Maryland, the historical and archaeological record preserves their importance to the Carroll family and the plantation called Georgia or Mount Clare. Enslaved blacks held essential roles in every aspect of Mount Clare from circa 1730 to 1817. They became culturally American at the intersection of race and status, not only through the practice of their own cultural beliefs and values, but those of elite whites as well. In freedom, formerly enslaved individuals and families became part of the growing middle class of Baltimore. Until recently, the story of the people who experienced slavery and freedom went untold, disabling contemporary peoples from their right to access their heritage. Plantations can further social justice and enable all people’s right to access their heritage when underrepresented historical groups are integrated into interpretations of historical house museums and landscapes. Focus on white ancestors reveals only part of the history of Mount Clare: blacks’ own achievements cannot be ignored.

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

Within a challenging tropical environment, a remarkable urban tradition developed and flourished as an element of ancient Maya culture. This book is about the cities of the eastern lowlands, a small but geographically diverse part of the homeland of the Maya. Using data collected by many different archaeological projects and researchers, the author presents detailed descriptions of 14 Classic period (ca. 250 to 900 CE) cities from five geographical areas of the modern nation of Belize, discussing the setting, the history of investigations, the site plan and urban features, culture history, and political history of each. For many of the cities discussed, this is the first time all of this information has been presented together. The data are viewed through the analytical lenses of site planning and the built environment. The final chapters consider the 14 cities as a group to examine urban planning and look for meaning, construed broadly here to encompass all the things that contributed to the final design of a place including mundane things like where water drains to esoteric things like worldview and cosmology. What the data in this book show are remarkable and nuanced variations in architectural assemblages across space and time, varied levels of political control over suburban landscapes, shared planning concepts combined with wildly different ideas about how to build a Maya city, and intriguing hints at possible relationships between cities based on planning principles. Flexibility in city design emerges from this study as a hallmark of ancient Maya urbanism.

This book is meant to show how archaeologists worldwide understand and reconstruct ancient political systems, and more specifically, how Maya archaeologists have reconstructed political power, institutions, and dynamics among ancient Maya states during the Classic period in the first millennium A.D. The book engages with the theoretical literature in political anthropology, the debates and history of how archaeologists have reconstructed ancient politics, and then describes specific cases of archaeological projects that focus on political questions across the world, and more specifically, in the Maya civilization of the Classic period. It summarizes studies of Maya political organization, again by highlighting the debates, issues involved, manners in which the questions are approached, and specific projects that have focused on political questions. The author’s investigations at Motul de San José are used to highlight some of the main points of these current debates. Politics dominate today’s public arena, and this book will provide a window into how archaeologists reconstruct and understand ancient politics and their dynamics. This exploration of ancient Maya politics tries to answer the question of why the political landscape was so dynamic during the apogee of Maya civilization in the first millennium A.D. by focusing on political analysis at three levels: the macro level of polity and inter-polity relations, the middle level of political organization and dynamics within each polity, and the micro level of individuals, households, communities, and power blocs within each polity.

Pottery sherds are the most abundant artifacts recovered from ancient Maya sites. Analyzed correctly, they reveal much about artistic expression, religious ritual, economic systems, cooking traditions, and cultural exchange in Maya society. Today, nearly every Maya archaeologist uses the type-variety classificatory framework for studying sherd collections. Ancient Maya Pottery brings together many of the archaeologists signally involved in the analysis and interpretation of ancient Maya ceramics and offers new findings and state-of-the-art thinking. The result is a book that serves both as a valuable resource for archaeologists involved in pottery classification, analysis, and interpretation and as an illuminating exploration of ancient Maya culture.

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.

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.

Traditional treatments of marriage among indigenous people focus on what people say about whom one should marry and on rules that anthropologists induce from those statements. This volume is a cultural and social anthropological examination of the ways the indigenous peoples of lowland South America/Amazonia actually choose whom they marry. Detailed ethnography shows that they select spouses to meet their economic and political goals, their emotional desires, and their social aspirations, as well as to honor their commitments to exogamic prescriptions and the exchange of women. These decisions often require playing fast and loose with what the anthropologist and the peoples themselves declare to be the regulations they obey. Inevitably then, this volume is about agency and individual choice in the context of social institutions and cultural rules. There is another theme running through this book—the way in which globalization is subverting traditional hierarchies, altering identities, and eroding ancestral marital norms and values—how the forces of modernization alter both structure and practice. The main body of the book is given over to eleven chapters based on previously unpublished ethnographic material collected by the contributors. It is divided into three sections. The first collects essays that describe the motives behind breaking the marriage rules, the second describes how the marriage rules are bent or broken, and the third gathers chapters on the effects of globalization and recent changes on the marriage rules.

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.

Presenting studies in Andean archaeology and iconography by leading specialists in the field, this volume tackles the question of how researchers can come to understand the intangible, intellectual worlds of ancient peoples. Archaeological Interpretations is a fascinating ontological journey through Andean cultures from the fourth millennium BC to the sixteenth century AD. Through evidence-based case studies, theoretical models, and methodological reflections, contributors discuss the various interpretations that can be derived from the traces of ritual activity that remain in the material record. They discuss how to accurately comprehend the social significance of artifacts beyond their practical use and how to decode the symbolism of sacred images. Addressing topics including the earliest evidence of shamanism in Ecuador, the meaning of masks among the Mochicas in Peru, the value of metal in the Recuay culture, and ceremonies of voluntary abandonment among the Incas, contributors propose original and innovative ways of interpreting the rich Andean archaeological heritage.

This collection offers a new understanding of communities of French heritage in the New World, drawing on archaeological and historical evidence from both colonial and post-Conquest settings. It counters the prevailing but mistaken notion that the French role in New World histories was confined largely to Québec and New Orleans and lasted only through the French and Indian War. Some chapters in the volume reveal new insights into French colonial communities, while others concern the post-Conquest Francophone communities that thrived under British, Spanish, or American control, long after France relinquished its colonies in the New World. The authors in this collection engage in a dialogue about what it meant to be ethnic French or a French descendant, Métis, Native American, enslaved, or a free person of color in French areas of North America, the Caribbean, and South America from the late 1600s until the late 1800s. The authors combine archaeological remains (from artifacts to food remains to cultural landscapes) with a rich body of historical records to help reveal the roots of present-day New World societies. This volume makes clear that, along with Spanish, British, and early American colonial influences, French colonists and their descendant communities played an important role in New World histories, and continue to do so.

Archaeologies of Listening provides a fresh and bold look at how archaeologists and heritage managers may enhance their capacity to interpret and understand material culture and heritage values. By listening closely to indigenous voices and to those who have long-term relationships with the landscape, deeper empirical understandings are brought to interpretations. Drawing on the founding principles of anthropology, Archaeologies of Listening demonstrates the value of cultural apprenticeship, an almost forgotten part of archaeological practice. The authors argue that epistemic humility is central to creating relationships of equality and mutuality, critical components in an anthropological archaeology that overcomes a narrowly scientific approach. By embracing a humanistic perspective with people-centric practice and ethics, this volume points the way to reawakening the core principles of anthropology in community archaeology and heritage studies.

All parts of the Caribbean were shaped by similar forces, including race-based chattel slavery, sugar, capitalism, and the tropical and sometimes deadly natural environment. Within these commonalities, however, is also a great deal of diversity. Large sugar plantations populated by hundreds of enslaved Africans rightfully receive a great deal of attention from archaeologists, historians, and the public. The authors in this volume, however, use innovative techniques and perspectives to reveal the stories of places and times where the rules of this system did not always apply. Collectively, the chapters focus on the spaces in-between, alternate views of plantation landscapes, and the complex dynamics at play in the days following slavery. The authors assess these threads through the analysis of lesser known contexts, such as Dominica, St. Lucia, and the Dominican Republic, and the reexamination of more familiar places, like Jamaica and Barbados. Despite grueling work regimes, and the social and economic restrictions of slavery, people held in bondage carved out places at the margins of plantation societies. In similar fashion, the lives of poor whites, soldiers, and free people of color demonstrate that binary models of black slaves and white planters do not fully encompass the diverse landscape of Caribbean identities before and after Emancipation. The studies in this volume employ innovative research tools to integrate data from a variety of historical and archaeological sources to better understand these alternate stories within and beyond the sprawling sugar estates.

The purpose of this book is to engender ideas and discussion regarding broader issues related to historical ecology. The unifying topic of the case studies presented in this volume is that they deal with groups that are pursuing small-scale economies. Small-scale economies in this context refer to groups primarily making their living by hunting, gathering, fishing, or limited agricultural endeavors. The volume is divided into two sections. Part I consists of historical ecology case studies of small-scale economies from various regions around the world, including Denmark, California's Channel Islands, Japan, the Georgia Coast, Mexico and American Southwest, Coastal Brazil, and the mountains of Montana. The case studies span a wide variety of climates and encompass a temporal scale that begins in the late Pleistocene and extends to modern-day groups. In Part II, researchers from multiple disciplines, including anthropology and ecology, offer their thoughts and perspectives on the themes explored in the volume as a whole and the theoretical future of historical ecology. All the contributors to this volume consider the relevance of such inquiry with respect to modern society's interaction with the environment.

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.

An Archaeology of Abundance focuses on the archaeology and historical ecology of a series of islands located off the Pacific Coast of Alta and Baja California, from the Channel Islands to Cedros Island. Compared to the adjacent mainland, these islands have long been considered marginal habitats for ancient hunter-gatherers, beginning with accounts of early Spanish explorers and by later naturalists, scientists, and government agents, as well as the anthropologists and archaeologists who followed. This perception of marginality has greatly influenced our interpretation of a variety of archaeological issues including the antiquity of first settlement; the productivity of island floras, freshwater, and mineral resources; human population density; and the nature of regional exchange, wealth, and power networks. Recent advances in archaeological and historical ecological research, combined with field observations of recovering ecosystems suggest that the California Islands may not have been the marginal habitats they once appeared to be. Severe overgrazing and overfishing during historic times heavily impacted local ecosystems, which are now recovering under modern management, conservation, and restoration practices. While older models developed through the perspective of island marginality may hold true for certain resources or islands, it is important to reconsider our interpretations of past and present archaeological data, and reevaluate long-held assumptions, given these new insights. Ultimately, a reexamination of the effects of perceived marginality on the history of archaeological interpretations on California's islands may have broad implications for other island archipelagos worldwide.

Ancestor veneration is a common practice cross-culturally, and since the 1990s archaeologists have started to explore ancestor veneration in the past. The usual explanation for ancient ancestors is that people in past societies used them and their material correlates (architecture, iconography, tombs, and cemeteries) to validate their rights to land and resources. Yet ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of ancestor veneration around the world indicate that ancestors are about much more than just land and resources: they referee domestic problems; advertise wealth; validate authority; materialize identity; and negotiate power and status relationships. The Archaeology of Ancestors explores these dimensions of ancestor worship, as well as the more traditional association of ancestors with resource rights. In addition to providing an alternative to the usual approach to ancestors in the past, this volume includes a comprehensive, authoritative overview of the anthropology of ancestors, exploring its historical roots, discussing key ethnographic sources, and summarizing the ways that ancestors have been identified archaeologically. The Archaeology of Ancestors provides world-wide archaeological coverage of the topic, treating the traditional “core” areas of East Asia and Africa as well as Central and South America, Greece, and central Europe. Contributors approach the issue of ancestors in the past using several lines of archaeological evidence, including human remains, art and iconography, structured (e.g., ritual) deposits, architecture, and historical documents.

This book is about how displacement associated with long-distance population movements and the relationships migrants maintain with both home and host societies shape their consumer habits and the formation of collective diasporic identities. These themes are addressed using an interpretive framework rooted in interdisciplinary literature on transnationalism, diaspora, and material consumption and are developed through an archaeological study of the everyday lives of Chinese and Japanese immigrant laborers at a turn-of-the-twentieth century industrial salmon cannery in British Columbia. Results demonstrate that migrant consumption patterns draw on traditions from the homeland but are influenced by a range of factors at the local, regional, and international levels. Furthermore, diasporic identities are as much a product of the migration process as of homeland traditions, and consumer goods play an important role in how they are constructed and maintained. Overall, this study accomplishes three things: (1) it paints a portrait of the contextual factors affecting how migrant consumers maintain some homeland practices and adapt others from the host society; (2) it develops a model of ethnicity that is shaped and transformed as cultural traditions from home and host societies come together; and (3) it outlines a framework for how migrant communities use consumer goods and practices to maintain a sense of diasporic identity in the face of displacement and associated culture change. This research is one of the first in-depth studies in historical archaeology on overseas Japanese migration and the first detailed comparison of archaeological material from Chinese and Japanese sites.

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.

Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean examines the diversity of living environments that the enslaved inhabitants of the colonial Caribbean by analyzing archaeological evidence collected from a wide variety of sites across the region. Archaeological investigations of domestic architecture and artifacts illuminate the nature of household organization; fundamental changes in settlement patterns; and the manner in which power was invariably linked with the material arrangements of space among the enslaved living and working in a variety of contexts throughout the region, including plantations, fortifications, and urban centers. While research in the region has provided a considerable amount of data at the household-level, much of this work is biased towards artifact analysis, resulting in unfamiliarity with the considerations that went into constructing and inhabiting households. The chapters in this book provide detailed reconstructions of the built environments associated with slavery and account for the cultural behaviors and social arrangements that shaped these spaces. It brings together case studies of Caribbean slave settlements through historical archaeology as a means of exposing the diversity of people and practices in these various landscapes, across the British, French, Dutch, and Danish colonies in both the Greater and Lesser Antilles as well as the Bahamian archipelago.