This book’s aim is to go beyond the limits of the contemporary scientific paradigm of “material culture” by presenting some of the issues confronting archaeology, as it attempts to approach the spirituality of the past. It brings together archaeologists from Western and Eastern Europe, and the USA who, more or less obviously, have used their experientiality to approach the world view and mystic experience of ancient peoples. The book intends to present several arguments in support of an archaeology of spirituality through a series of seven case studies. What method should we use to approach spirituality? Are we still dependent on quantitative methods? Is phenomenology an appropriate instrument? Can experientiality approach a spiritual experience? Is the emic approach efficient enough to approach the spiritual side of a studied phenomenon? Are the analogous ethnographic models suitable instruments for this task? How much of the spirituality of the past is still accessible today? Could we build artificial contexts that would allow the recreation of the phenomenological condition analogous to the originals? Archaeology Experiences Spirituality? goes beyond the archaeological study of material culture, offering a fascinating lecture for the reader of the twenty-first century.

The Cold War was one of the twentieth century's defining events, with long-lasting political, social, and material implications. It created a global landscape of culturally and politically significant artifacts and sites that are critical to understanding and preserving the history of that conflict. The stories of these artifacts and sites remain mostly untold, however, because so many of the facilities operated in secret. In this volume, Todd Hanson examines the Cold War's secret sites through three theoretical frameworks: conflict archaeology, the archaeology of the recent past, and the archaeology of science. He presents case studies of investigations conducted at some famous--and some not so famous--historic sites that were pivotal to the conflict, including Bikini Atoll, the Nevada Test Site, and the Cuban sites of the Soviet Missile Crisis. Hanson illustrates how, by examining nuclear weapons testing sites, missile silos, peace camps, fallout shelters, and more, archaeology can help strip away the Cold War's myths, secrets, and political rhetoric in order to better understand the conflict's formative role in the making of the contemporary American landscape. Addressing modern ramifications of the Cold War, Hanson also looks at the preservation of atomic heritage sites, the phenomenon of atomic tourism, and the struggles of America's atomic veterans. As the Cold War retreats into the annals of history, and its monuments fade away, so too do the opportunities to gain deeper insight into the successes--and the failures--of the era. Hanson suggests topics for future archaeological research and reflects on the implications of failing to study or preserve North America's Cold War heritage. A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney

From the early colonial period to the close of World War II, life in North America was predominantly agrarian and rural. Archaeological exploration of farmsteads unveils a surprising quantity of data about rural life, consumption patterns, and migrations across the continent. Mark Groover offers both case studies and an overview of current trends in farmstead archaeology in this exciting new work. He also proposes a research design and makes numerous suggestions for evaluating (and re-evaluating) the significance of farmsteads as an archaeological resource. His chronological survey of farmstead sites throughout numerous regions of North America provides fascinating insights to students, cultural resource management professionals, or general readers interested in learning more about what material culture remains can teach us about the American past. Farmstead archaeology is a rapidly expanding component of historical archaeology. This book offers important lessons and information as more sites become victims of ever-accelerating development and urbanization.

"Orser argues that race has not always been defined by skin color; through time its meaning has changed. The process of racialization has marked most groups who came to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in Historic America demonstrates ways that historical archaeology can contribute to understanding a fundamental element of the American immigrant experience."--BOOK JACKET.

Since the founding of the United States, the rights to citizenship have been carefully crafted and policed by the Europeans who originally settled and founded the country. Immigrants have been extended and denied citizenship in various legal and cultural ways. While the subject of citizenship has often been examined from a sociological, historical, or legal perspective, historical archaeologists have yet to fully explore the material aspects of these social boundaries. The Archaeology of Citizenship uses the material record to explore what it means to be an American. Using a late-nineteenth-century California resort as a case study, Stacey Camp discusses how the parameters of citizenship and national belonging have been defined and redefined since Europeans arrived on the continent. In a unique and powerful contribution to the field of historical archaeology, Camp uses the remnants of material culture to reveal how those in power sought to mold the composition of the United States and how those on the margins of American society carved out their own definitions of citizenship.

This book is an exciting new look at how archaeology has dealt with the bodily senses and offers an argument for how the discipline can offer a richer glimpse into the human sensory experience. Yannis Hamilakis shows how, despite its intensely physical engagement with the material traces of the past, archaeology has mostly neglected multi-sensory experience, instead prioritising isolated vision and relying on the Western hierarchy of the five senses. In place of this limited view of experience, Hamilakis proposes a sensorial archaeology that can unearth the lost, suppressed, and forgotten sensory and affective modalities of humans. Using Bronze Age Crete as a case study, Hamilakis shows how sensorial memory can help us rethink questions ranging from the production of ancestral heritage to large-scale social change, and the cultural significance of monuments. Hamilakis points the way to reconstituting archaeology as a sensorial and affective multi-temporal practice.

Dean Saitta examines archaeology's success in reconstructing collective social actions of the past - mass protests, labor strikes, slave uprisings on plantations - and considers the implications of such reconstructions for society today. Framing key issues and definitions in a clear and accessible style, Saitta reviews some of the progress archaeologists have made in illuminating race-, gender-, and class-based forms of collective action and how those actions have shaped the American experience. Saitta argues that archaeology is not only a source of historical truth but also a comment on the contemporary human condition.

"Highly readable but also innovative in its approach to a broad array of material from diverse colonial contexts."--Carolyn White, University of Nevada, Reno "Loren brings together a sampling of the extensive literature on the archaeology of clothing and adornment to argue that artifacts of the body acquire their meaning through cultural practice. She shows how dress serves as social discourse and a tool of identity negotiation."--Kathleen Deagan, Florida Museum of Natural History Dress has always been a social medium. Color, fabric, and fit of clothing, along with adornments, posture, and manners, convey information on personal status, occupation, religious beliefs, and even sexual preferences. Clothing and adornment are therefore important not only for their utility but also in their expressive properties and the ability of the wearer to manipulate those properties. Diana DiPaolo Loren investigates some ways in which colonial peoples chose to express their bodies and identities through clothing and adornment. She examines strategies of combining local-made and imported goods not simply to emulate European elites, but instead to create a language of new appearance by which to communicate in an often contentious colonial world. Through the lens of historical archaeology Loren highlights the active manipulation of the material culture of clothing and adornment by people in English, Dutch, French, and Spanish colonies, demonstrating that within Northern American dressing traditions, clothing and identity are inextricably linked.

From the Publisher: Through its complex history, alcohol has served many cultural functions, often constructive ones. For centuries it has been used as a valuable economic commodity, a medicinal tool, a focus of social gatherings, and a mechanism for psychological escape.

The study of American institutional confinement, its presumed successes, failures, and controversies, is incomplete without examining the remnants of relevant sites no longer standing. Asking what archaeological perspectives add to the understanding of such a provocative topic, Eleanor Conlin Casella describes multiple sites and identifies three distinct categories of confinement: places for punishment, for asylum, and for exile. Her discussion encompasses the multifunctional shelters of the colonial era, Civil War prison camps, Japanese-American relocation centers, and the maximum-security detention facilities of the twenty-firstcentury. Her analysis of the material world of confinement takes into account architecture and landscape, food, medicinal resources, clothing, recreation, human remains, and personal goods. Casella exposes the diversity of power relations that structure many of America's confinement institutions. Weaving together themes of punishment, involuntary labor, personal dignity, and social identity, The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement tells a profound story of endurance in one slice of society. It will illuminate and change contemporary notions of gender, race, class, infirmity, deviance, and antisocial behavior.