A History of Archaeological Dating in North America
Archaeologists with expertise in stratigraphy, ceramic dating, obsidian hydration, and luminescence dating present historical and nontechnical reviews of the growth, development, and application of their techniques.
From the alleged swaddling clothes of Jesus to pieces from the crown of thorns, this title shows how little proof there is that these objects are real and how obviously they are used as a means of taking advantage of the gullible. It brings the story of investigating relics.
An assembly of rhetoric on the tension between archaeology and cultural anthropology, the former often considered merely a sub-field of the latter, and an examination of the degree to which the relationship between the two studies may have actually inhibited archaeological investigations.
One idiosyncrasy of archaeology in North America is that it is considered a sub-field of cultural anthropology. To explore the dimensions of this situation, editor Alan P. Sullivan assembled a group of practicing archaeologists, each with different expertise, to analyze problems with the current disciplinary arrangement and to recommend ......
The View from Archaeology, Art History, Ethnohistory, and Contemporary Ethnography
Ethnicity has long been a central concern of Mesoamerican ethnography, but for methodological reasons has received less attention in the archaeological, historical, and art historical literature. Using the disciplines of archaeology, art history, ethnohistory, and ethnography, Ethnic Identity in Nahua Mesoamerica provides a unique ......
Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World
Much attention has been devoted in recent years to Christian asceticism in Late Antiquity. But Christianity did not introduce asceticism to the ancient world. An underlying theme of this fascinating study of pagan asceticism is that much of the work on Christian "holy men" has ignored earlier manifestations of asceticism in Antiquity ......
Great Basin Human Ecology at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition
Were the earliest inhabitants of the Great Basin 'Paleoindians' in the traditional sense? Were they highly mobile foragers? Did they hunt large, now extinct animals like mammoth, horse, and camel? Great Basin archaeologists have argued that the earliest inhabitants possessed an organization strategy of mixed 'Paleoindian' and 'Archaic' lifeways, ......
The study of craft production is a complex and challenging one that illuminates key aspects of the material, organizational, and ideological interests, values, and capacities of a given culture. Many crafts are treated as separate, but are actually practiced concurrently and in close proximity to each other, facilitating crucial interaction. ......
Unlike traditional archaeology, which studies the human past and examines issues of scholarly and popular interest, disaster archaeology is about the aftermath of mass-fatality events and deals with urgent needs such as victim identification and scene investigation. In this context, archaeological skills are an instrument of recovery for the ......
