Massacres, raiding parties, ambush, pillage, scalping, captive taking: the things we know and sometimes dread to admit occur during times of war all happened in the prehistoric Southwest--and there is ample archaeological evidence. Not only did it occur, but the history of the ancient Southwest cannot be understood without noting the intensity and ......
Casas Grandes, or PaquimE, in northern Chihuahua, Mexico, was home to a religious system that swept across northern Mexico and what is now the southern United States between AD 1200 and 1450. To commemorate this religion the people of Casas Grandes created striking polychrome pots with black and red geometric and naturalistic designs on ......
The publication in 1962 of Lew Binford's paper "Archaeology as Anthropology" is generally considered to mark the birth of processualism--a critical turning point in American archaeology. In the hands of Binford and other young University of Chicago graduates of the 1960s, this "new" archaeology became the mainstream approach in the U.S. The ......
Ethnoarchaeology among the Gamo of Southwest Ethiopia
Although plastic and metal vessels offer significant advantages and have almost universally supplanted ceramics throughout the world, pottery fragments are one of the most ubiquitous artifacts in the archaeological record. The southwestern region of Ethiopia is one of the few places in the world where locally made pottery is still the dominant ......
Archaeology provides an ideal avenue for examining long-term processes and interrelationships between human behavior and environmental stability, variation, and change. The American Southwest is particularly well suited for such 'deep-time' investigations because of its comprehensive archaeological record, rich ethnographic and historical data on ......
When the Spanish conquistadors first encountered the great commercial markets of central Mexico they were amazed by the richness and the diversity of products, as well as the level of organization. Ruling elites nurtured and supervised these markets, which were based on a complex division of labor within society, including a diversity of highly ......
Tree Ring dating and the Development of NA Archaeology 1914 to 1950
Dendrochronology, the science of assigning precise calendar dates to annual growth rings in trees, provided accurate dates at a time when North American archaeologists had no absolute dating techniques available to guide their analyses. Time, Trees, and Prehistory examines the growth, development, application, and interpretive implications of ......
University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 125 Camels Back Cave is in an isolated limestone ridge on the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert. Recent archaeological investigations there have exposed a series of stratified deposits spanning the entire Holocene era (10,000 BP-present), deposits that show intermittent human occupations ......
Mesoamerican Ingluence in the Greater Southwest, A.D 1200-1500
For decades archaeologists insisted that southwestern cultures such as the Anasazi, Hohokam, and Mogollon had little or no relation to peoples south of the 'border'' Now American archaeology is beginning to take seriously the notion that goods, gods, and even humans may have passed with some frequency between the high cultures of Mexico and the ......
