Cook demonstrates that we can better allow for affiliation of archaeological sites with living descendants by more fully examining the complexity of the past.

Roads through Mwinilunga provides a historical appraisal of social change in Northwest Zambia from 1750 until the present. By looking at agricultural production, mobility, consumption, and settlement patterns, existing explanations of social change are reassessed. Using a wide range of archival and oral history sources, Iva Peša shows the relevance of Mwinilunga to broader processes of colonialism, capitalism, and globalisation. Through a focus on daily life, this book complicates transitions from subsistence to market production and dichotomies between tradition and modernity. Roads through Mwinilunga is a crucial addition to debates on historical and social change in Central Africa.

From Tribute to Communal Sovereignty examines both continuity and change over the last five centuries for the indigenous peoples of central western Mexico, providing the first sweeping and comprehensive history of this important region in Mesoamerica. The continuities elucidated concern ancestral territorial claims that date back centuries and reflect the stable geographic locations occupied by core populations of indigenous language–speakers in or near their pre-Columbian territories since the Postclassical period, from the thirteenth to late fifteenth centuries. A common theme of this volume is the strong cohesive forces present, not only in the colonial construction of Christian village communities in Purhépecha and Nahuatl groups in Michoacán but also in the demographically less inclusive Huichol (Wixarika), Cora, and Tepehuan groups, whose territories were more extensive. The authors review a cluster of related themes: settlement patterns of the last five centuries in central western Mexico, language distribution, ritual representation of territoriality, processes of collective identity, and the forms of participation and resistance during different phases of Mexican state formation. From such research, the question arises: does the village community constitute a unique level of organization of the experience of the original peoples of central western Mexico? The chapters address this question in rich and complex ways by first focusing on the past configurations and changes in lifeways during the transition from pre-Columbian to Spanish rule in tributary empires, then examining the long-term postcolonial process of Mexican independence that introduced the emerging theme of the communal sovereignty.

2019 William L. Proctor Award from the Historic St. Augustine Research Institute The Yamasee Indians are best known for their involvement in the Indian slave trade and the eighteenth-century war (1715-54) that took their name. Yet, their significance in colonial history is far larger than that. Denise I. Bossy brings together archaeologists of South Carolina and Florida with historians of the Native South, Spanish Florida, and British Carolina for the first time to answer elusive questions about the Yamasees' identity, history, and fate. Until now scholarly works have rarely focused on the Yamasees themselves. In southern history, the Yamasees appear only sporadically outside of slave raiding or the Yamasee War. Their culture and political structures, the complexities of their many migrations, their kinship networks, and their survival remain largely uninvestigated. The Yamasees' relative obscurity in scholarship is partly a result of their geographic mobility. Reconstructing their past has posed a real challenge in light of their many, often overlapping, migrations. In addition, the campaigns waged by the British (and the Americans after them) in order to erase the Yamasees from the South forced Yamasee survivors to camouflage bit by bit their identities. The Yamasee Indians recovers the complex history of these peoples. In this critically important new volume, historians and archaeologists weave together the fractured narratives of the Yamasees through probing questions about their mobility, identity, and networks.

Tewa Worlds tells a history of eight centuries of the Tewa people, set among their ancestral homeland in northern New Mexico. Bounded by four sacred peaks and bisected by the Rio Grande, this is where the Tewa, after centuries of living across a vast territory, reunited and forged a unique type of village life. It later became an epicenter of colonialism, for within its boundaries are both the ruins of the first Spanish colonial capital and the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Yet through this dramatic change the Tewa have endured and today maintain deep connections with their villages and a landscape imbued with memory and meaning. Anthropologists have long trekked through Tewa country, but the literature remains deeply fractured among the present and the past, nuanced ethnographic description, and a growing body of archaeological research. Samuel Duwe bridges this divide by drawing from contemporary Pueblo philosophical and historical discourse to view the long arc of Tewa history as a continuous journey. The result is a unique history that gives weight to the deep past, colonial encounters, and modern challenges, with the understanding that the same concepts of continuity and change have guided the people in the past and present, and will continue to do so in the future. Focusing on a decade of fieldwork in the northern portion of the Tewa world—the Rio Chama Valley—Duwe explores how incorporating Pueblo concepts of time and space in archaeological interpretation critically reframes ideas of origins, ethnogenesis, and abandonment. It also allows archaeologists to appreciate something that the Tewa have always known: that there are strong and deep ties that extend beyond modern reservation boundaries.

General readers and undergraduate students who are interested in archaeology are often put off by the mass of detail they find in any but the most introductory account. Therefore, Carmean (anthropology and archaeology, Eastern Kentucky U.) offers an account of archaeological work and findings on the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona that discusses some difficult issues, but refers readers to other sources for the mass of underlying data. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The power of religion to preserve individual and group identity is perhaps nowhere more evident than among Native American peoples. In Becoming and Remaining a People, Howard Harrod shows how the oral traditions and ritual practices of Northern Plains Indians developed, how they were transformed at critical points in their history, and how they provided them with crucial means of establishing and maintaining their respective identities. This book offers a bold new interpretation of anthropological studies, demonstrating how religious traditions and ritual processes became sources of group and individual identity for many people. Harrod reconstructs the long religious development of two village peoples, the Mandans and the Hidatsas, describing how their oral traditions enabled them to reinterpret their experiences as circumstances changed. He then shows how these and other groups on the Northern Plains remained distinct peoples in the face of increased interactions with Euro-Americans, other Indians,.and the new religion of Christianity. Harrod proposes that other interpretations of culture change may fail to come to terms with the role that religion plays in motivating both cultural conservatism and social change. For Northern Plains peoples, religion was at the heart of social identity and thus resisted change, but religion was also the source of creative reinterpretation, which produced culture change. Viewed from within the group, such change often seemed natural and was understood as an elaboration of traditions having roots in a deeper shared past. In addition to demonstrating religious continuity and change among the Mandans and the Hidatsas, he also describes instances of religious and social transformation among the peoples who became the Crows and the Cheyennes. Becoming and Remaining a People adopts a challenging analytical approach that draws on the author's creative interpretations of rituals and oral traditions. By enabling us to understand the relation of religion both to the construction of social identity and to the interpretation of social change, it reveals the richness, depth, and cultural complexity of both past Native American people and their contemporary successors.

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The Great Plains has been central to academic and popular visions of Native American warfare, largely because the region’s well-documented violence was so central to the expansion of Euroamerican settlement. However, social violence has deep roots on the Plains beyond this post-Contact perception, and these roots have not been systematically examined through archaeology before. War was part, and perhaps an important part, of the process of ethnogenesis that helped to define tribal societies in the region, and it affected many other aspects of human lives there. In Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains, anthropologists who study sites across the Plains critically examine regional themes of warfare from pre-Contact and post-Contact periods and assess how war shaped human societies of the region. Contributors to this volume offer a bird’s-eye view of warfare on the Great Plains, consider artistic evidence of the role of war in the lives of indigenous hunter-gatherers on the Plains prior to and during the period of Euroamerican expansion, provide archaeological discussions of fortification design and its implications, and offer archaeological and other information on the larger implications of war in human history. Bringing together research from across the region, this volume provides unprecedented evidence of the effects of war on tribal societies. Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains is a valuable primer for regional warfare studies and the archaeology of the Great Plains as a whole. Contributors: Peter Bleed, Richard R. Drass, David H. Dye, John Greer, Mavis Greer, Eric Hollinger, Ashley Kendell, James D. Keyser, Albert M. LeBeau III, Mark D. Mitchell, Stephen M. Perkins, Bryon Schroeder, Douglas Scott, Linea Sundstrom, Susan C. Vehik

Bringing together 25 case studies from archaeological projects worldwide, Engaging Archaeology candidly explores personal experiences, successes, challenges, and even frustrations from established and senior archaeologists who share invaluable practical advice for students and early-career professionals engaged in planning and carrying out their own archaeological research. With engaging chapters, such as ‘How Not to Write a PhD Thesis on Neolithic Italy’ and ‘Accidentally Digging Central America's Earliest Village’, readers are transported to the desks, digs, and data-labs of the authors, learning the skills, tricks of the trade, and potential pit-falls of archaeological fieldwork and collections research. Case studies collectively span many regions, time periods, issues, methods, and materials. From the pre-Columbian Andes to Viking Age Iceland, North America to the Middle East, Medieval Ireland to remote north Australia, and Europe to Africa and India, Engaging Archaeology is packed with rich, first-hand source material. Unique and thoughtful, Stephen W. Silliman’s guide is an essential course book for early-stage researchers, advanced undergraduates, and new graduate students, as well as those teaching and mentoring. It will also be insightful and enjoyable reading for veteran archaeologists.