In western culture, rock art has traditionally been viewed as ""primitive"" and properly belonging in the purview of anthropologists rather than art scholars and critics. This volume, featuring previously unpublished photographs of Utah's magnificent rock art by long-time rock art researcher Layne Miller and essays by former Utah state ......
Salmon, Aztec, and the Ascendancy of the Middle San Juan Region after AD 1100
In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the ancient pueblo sites of Aztec and Salmon in the Middle San Juan region rapidly emerged as population and political centers during the closing stages of Chaco's ascendancy. Some archaeologists have attributed the development of these centers to migration and colonization by people from Chaco ......
This impressive collection features the work of archaeologists who systematically explore the material and social consequences of new technological systems introduced after the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion in Mesoamerica. It is the first collection to present case studies that show how both commonplace and capital-intensive technologies were ......
Studies of Production and Exchange through Compositional Analysis
This cohesive edited volume showcases data collected from more than seven thousand ceramic artifacts including pottery, figurines, clay pipes, and other objects from sites across South America. Covering a time span from 900 BC to AD 1500, the essays by leading archaeologists working in South America illustrate the diversity of ceramic provenance ......
In this volume Steve Lekson argues that, for over a century, southwestern archaeology got the history of the ancient Southwest wrong. Instead, he advocates an entirely new approach-one that separates archaeological thought in the Southwest from its anthropological home and moves to more historical ways of thinking. Focusing on the enigmatic ......
Andean peoples recognize places as neither sacred nor profane, but rather in terms of the power they emanate and the identities they materialize and reproduce. This book argues that a careful consideration of Andean conceptions of powerful places is critical not only to understanding Andean political and religious history but to rethinking ......
Often overshadowed by the Ancestral Pueblo centers at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, the Middle San Juan is one of the most dynamic territories in the pre-Hispanic Southwest, interacting with Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde as well the surrounding regions. This ancient Puebloan heartland was instrumental in tying together Chaco and Mesa Verde cultures ......
Body Beliefs and Ritual in Ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes
The meanings of ritualized head treatments among ancient Mesoamerican and Andean peoples is the subject of this book, the first overarching coverage of an important subject. Heads are sources of power that protect, impersonate, emulate sacred forces, distinguish, or acquire identity within the native world. The essays in this book examine these ......
Archaeologists have long associated the development of agriculture with the rise of the state. But the archaeology of the Amazon Basin, revealing traces of agriculture but lacking evidence of statehood, confounds their assumptions. John H. Walker's innovative study of the Bolivian Amazon addresses this contradiction by examining the agricultural ......
