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 ......
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 ......
Darwin's theory of evolutionary descent with modification rests in part on the notion that there is heritable continuity affected by transmission between ancestor and descendant. It is precisely this continuity that allows one to trace hylogenetic histories between fossil taxa of various ages and recent taxa. Darwin was clear that were an analyst ......
A classic, available again. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) was trained as a lawyer, but in the second part of his life he focused his attention on the emerging science of ethnography. Covering areas of North and Central America, Morgan's last book, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines was the first to regard a set of problems that is ......
Five Finger Ridge is the largest Fremont community excavated thus far in the Fremont area. The site contained multiple pit and adobe walled storage structures, massive quantities of Fremont material culture including ceramics, chipped and stone, worked bone tools, ornaments, and animal bone, all of which is reported in detail. The site dates to ......
Environmental law and philosophy assume the existence of a fundamental state of nature: Before the arrival of Columbus, the Americas were a wilderness untouched by human hand, teeming with wildlife and almost void of native peoples. In Wilderness and Political Ecology Charles Kay and Randy Simmons state that this "natural" view of pre-European ......
The Virtual Mummy is a thoroughly readable introduction to the nondestructive techniques used by contemporary researchers to analyze the artifacts and culture of ancient Egypt. It tells the captivating story of the virtual unwrapping of an Egyptian mummy and the interdisciplinary project that allowed researchers at the University of Illinois at ......
Expanding Archaeology is the first attempt to define behavioral archaeology comprehensively and to establish its place among competing theoretical frameworks. Among other objectives, this volume demonstrates that a behavioral approach - the study of material objects regardless of time or space to describe and explain human behavior - provides a ......
