Any overview of prehispanic society in the Americas would identify its obsidian core-blade production as a unique and highly inventive technology. Normally termed prismatic blades, these long, parallel-sided flakes are among the sharpest cutting tools ever produced by humans. Their standardized form permitted interchangeable use, and such blades ......
"Our God Tscorenci was our Father and created the sun, which is like a mirror. He sees us from up on high and makes photographs of our reflection. When we die the photograph disappears. Many have been lost." -Kenchori, an AshAninka from Peruvian Amazonia, when asked to tell a story concerning cameras (From W. Baker, Backward: An Essay on Indians, ......
Cladistics is a method used in biology and paleobiology to establish phylogeny: what produced what and in what order. It is a very specific method, developed in Germany in the 1950s and currently the primary phylogenetic method in the world. Cladistics has also been applied to such fields as historical linguistics and manuscript history. If things ......
Mesoamerican archaeologists have long been interested in the collapse of political systems or civilizations but have been slow to undertake detailed abandonment analyses of specific settlements. The Archaeology of Settlement Abandonment in Middle America explores some of the old questions in Middle American archaeology in light of the newer ......
Taking students out of the classroom and into a variety of settings, ranging from remote wilderness sites to urban or built environments is now recognized as a valuable means of teaching ecological concepts and environmental values. But field studies are also a way of encouraging explorations across the curriculum, enhancing the teaching of life ......
Debitage, the by-product flakes and chips from stone tool production, is the most abundant artifact type in prehistoric archaeological sites. For much of the period in which archaeology has employed scientific methodology, debitage has been discarded or ignored as debris. Now archaeologists have begun to recognize its potential to provide ......
In The Kachina and the Cross, Carroll Riley weaves elements of archaeology, anthropology, and history to tell a dramatic story of conflict between the Pueblo Indians and Franciscan missionaries in the seventeenth-century Spanish colony of New Mexico. Until now, histories of the early Southwest have tended to concentrate on the Spanish presence, ......
This book is an primary text for the Shoshoni language that provides basic information on the phonology and grammar of the language. While the book emphasizes the Fort Hall dialect, it also addresses other dialects. Primarily conceived as a college or high school-level textbook, it is also an accessible introduction for anyone interested in the ......
"The desert may seem timeless from within the Yellow Circle tonight, but the permanence of the surrounding landscape is only an illusion. Even the land is alive here, constantly changing and evolving as do all living things. Nothing here is 'finished.' Everything around us--the plants, the animals, the rocks, and the terrain itself--is in the ......
