This volume investigates the circumstances and conditions under which trade/exchange, direct access, and/or mobility best account for material conveyance across varying distances at different times in the past.

This volume highlights the latest research on the foundations of sociopolitical complexity in coastal California. The populous maritime societies of southern California, particularly the groups known collectively as the Chumash, have gone largely unrecognized as prototypical complex hunter-gatherers, only recently beginning to emerge from the shadow of their more celebrated counterparts on the Northwest Coast of North America. While Northwest cultures are renowned for such complex institutions as ceremonial potlatches, slavery, cedar plank-house villages, and rich artistic traditions, the Chumash are increasingly recognized as complex hunter-gatherers with a different set of organizational characteristics: ascribed chiefly leadership, a strong maritime economy based on oceangoing canoes, an integrative ceremonial system, and intensive and highly specialized craft production activities. Chumash sites provide some of the most robust data on these subjects available in the Americas. Contributors present stimulating new analyses of household and village organization, ceremonial specialists, craft specializations and settlement data, cultural transmission processes, bead manufacturing practices, watercraft, and the acquisition of prized marine species.

“California’s Ancient Past is an excellent introduction and overview of the archaeology and ancient peoples of this diverse and dynamic part of North America. Written in a concise and approachable format, the book provides an excellent foundation for students, the general public, and scholars working in other regions around the world. This book will be an important source of information on California’s ancient past for years to come.” —Torben C. Rick, Smithsonian Institution "California's Ancient Past is a well written, highly informative, and thought-provoking book; it will make a significant contribution to California archaeology. It is highly readable—the text and materials covered are suitable for both scholars and interested lay people. The book is well organized...with discussions about the culture history and theoretical perspectives of California archaeology and . . . the latest and most relevant references." —Kent Lightfoot, University of California, Berkeley “With California’s Ancient Past, Arnold and Walsh [offer] a well-written, interesting, and succinct archaeological summary of California from the terminal Pleistocene to historic contact.” —David S. Whitley, Journal of Anthropological Research

The Encyclopedia of Prehistory represents temporal dimension. Major traditions are an attempt to provide basic information also defined by a somewhat different set of on all archaeologically known cultures, sociocultural characteristics than are eth covering the entire globe and the entire nological cultures. Major traditions are prehistory of humankind. It is designed as defined based on common subsistence a tool to assist in doing comparative practices, sociopolitical organization, and research on the peoples of the past. Most material industries, but language, ideology, of the entries are written by the world's and kinship ties play little or no part in foremost experts on the particular areas their definition because they are virtually and time periods. unrecoverable from archaeological con The Encyclopedia is organized accord texts. In contrast, language, ideology, and ing to major traditions. A major tradition kinship ties are central to defining ethno is defined as a group of populations sharing logical cultures.

In this book, internationally distinguished contributors consider hot topics in turn-of-the-millennium archaeology and chart an ambitious agenda for the future.

"Kennett explores trends in demography, dietary expansion, economic intensification, and increasing sociopolitical sophistication evident in the archaeological record. By combining empirical findings based on new archaeological and paleoclimatic work and a thorough synthesis of earlier studies, Kennett argues that the social and political complexity evident among the island Chumash historically was ultimately a product of individual responses to demographic expansion, human impact on marine habitats, and periods of rapid climatic change."--BOOK JACKET.

Using a study of stone adzes of the precontact period on the island of Hawai'i, Lass examines the role of a material resource in the development of cultural complexity. Archaeological evidence is used to analyze the hypotheses that embrace the adaptationist and political approaches to increased complexity.

Since the late 1970s, household archaeology has become a key theoretical and methodological framework for research on the development of permanent social inequality and complexity, as well as for understanding the social, political and economic organization of chiefdoms and states. This volume is the cumulative result of more than a decade of research focusing on household archaeology as a means to gain understanding of the evolution of social complexity, regardless of underlying economy.