A linguistic analysis supporting a new model of the colonization of the Antilles before 1492 This work formulates a testable hypothesis of the origins and migration patterns of the aboriginal peoples of the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico), the Lucayan Islands (the Commonwealth of the Bahamas and the Crown Colony of the Turks and Caicos), the Virgin Islands, and the northernmost of the Leeward Islands, prior to European contact. Using archaeological data as corroboration, the authors synthesize evidence that has been available in scattered locales for more than 500 years but which has never before been correlated and critically examined. Within any well-defined geographical area (such as these islands), the linguistic expectation and norm is that people speaking the same or closely related language will intermarry, and, by participating in a common gene pool, will show similar socioeconomic and cultural traits, as well as common artifact preferences. From an archaeological perspective, the converse is deducible: artifact inventories of a well-defined sociogeographical area are likely to have been created by speakers of the same or closely related language or languages. Languages of the Pre-Columbian Antilles presents information based on these assumptions. The data is scant—scattered words and phrases in Spanish explorers' journals, local place names written on maps or in missionary records—but the collaboration of the authors, one a linguist and the other an archaeologist, has tied the linguistics to the ground wherever possible and allowed the construction of a framework with which to understand the relationships, movements, and settlement patterns of Caribbean peoples before Columbus arrived.

Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.

The Indigenous Languages of the Americas is a comprehensive assessment of what is known about their history and classification. It identifies gaps in knowledge and resolves controversial issues while making new contributions of its own. The book deals with the major themes involving these languages: classification and history of the Indigenous languages of the Americas; issues involving language names; origins of the languages of the New World; unclassified and spurious languages; hypotheses of distant linguistic relationships; linguistic areas; contact languages (pidgins, lingua francas, mixed languages); and loanwords and neologisms.

In South America indigenous languages are extremely diverse. There are over one hundred language families in this region alone. Contributors from around the world explore the history and structure of these languages, combining insights from archaeology and genetics with innovative linguistic analysis. The book aims to uncover regional patterns and potential deeper genealogical relations between the languages. Based on a large-scale database of features from sixty languages, the book analyses major language families such as Tupian and Arawakan, as well as the Quechua/Aymara complex in the Andes, the Isthmo-Colombian region and the Andean foothills. It explores the effects of historical change in different grammatical systems and fills gaps in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) database, where South American languages are underrepresented. An important resource for students and researchers interested in linguistics, anthropology and language evolution.

How early did the Chinese explore the world? Did the Treasure Fleets, led by Admiral Zheng He, discover many parts of the world before Christopher Columbus? While it is known that Christopher Columbus discovered America and Europe ushered in the Age of Discovery, there is an ongoing debate on the 'unknown' areas depicted in Western maps from the period and earlier. There is agreement among scholars that certain areas seem to have been mapped out prior to the arrival of Western explorers.Chinese Global Exploration in the Pre-Columbian Era: Evidence from an Ancient World Map analyses the world's first modern map — known as Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (KWQ) 《坤輿萬國全圖》 in Chinese, translated as the 'Complete Geographical Map of All Kingdoms of the World' to demonstrate evidence of Chinese global exploration in the Pre-Columbian era. The map of concern was first printed by Italian missionary, Matteo Ricci in 1602, and has been purported to be of entirely European origin, based on Ricci's former maps which he had brought to China in 1582.This book, thus, seeks to be transformational in presenting essential new insights on Pre-Columbian world history and Chinese global exploration, moving away from the norm of the studies of geography and cartography by:

In South America indigenous languages are extremely diverse. There are over one hundred language families in this region alone. Contributors from around the world explore the history and structure of these languages, combining insights from archaeology and genetics with innovative linguistic analysis. The book aims to uncover regional patterns and potential deeper genealogical relations between the languages. Based on a large-scale database of features from sixty languages, the book analyses major language families such as Tupian and Arawakan, as well as the Quechua/Aymara complex in the Andes, the Isthmo-Colombian region and the Andean foothills. It explores the effects of historical change in different grammatical systems and fills gaps in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) database, where South American languages are underrepresented. An important resource for students and researchers interested in linguistics, anthropology and language evolution.

"Examines the largely unexplored topics in Caribbean archaeology of looting of heritage sites, artifact fraud, and illicit trade of archaeological materials"--

The Sourcebook for Political Communication Research will offer scholars, students, researchers, and other interested readers a comprehensive source for state-of-the-art/field research methods, measures, and analytical techniques in the field of political communication. The need for this Sourcebook stems from recent innovations in political communication involving the use of advanced statistical techniques, innovative conceptual frameworks, the rise of digital media as both a means by which to disseminate and study political communication, and methods recently adapted from other disciplines, particularly psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. Chapters will have a social-scientific orientation and will explain new methodologies and measures applicable to questions regarding media, politics, and civic life. The Sourcebook covers the major analytical techniques used in political communication research, including surveys (both original data collections and secondary analyses), experiments, content analysis, discourse analysis (focus groups and textual analysis), network and deliberation analysis, comparative study designs, statistical analysis, and measurement issues.

This book seeks to debunk eleven popular and prevalent myths about Caribbean history. Using archaeological evidence, it corrects many previous misconceptions promulgated by history books and oral tradition as they specifically relate to the pre-Colonial and European-contact periods. It informs popular audiences, as well as scholars, about the current state of archaeological/historical research in the Caribbean Basin and asserts the value of that research in fostering a better understanding of the region’s past. Contrary to popular belief, the history of the Caribbean did not begin with the arrival of Europeans in 1492. It actually started 7,000 years ago with the infusion of Archaic groups from South America and the successive migrations of other peoples from Central America for about 2,000 years thereafter. In addition to discussing this rich cultural diversity of the Antillean past, Myths and Realities of Caribbean History debates the misuse of terms such as “Arawak” and “Ciboneys,” and the validity of Carib cannibalism allegations.

This innovative book contributes to a paradigm shift in the study of creole languages, forging new empirical frameworks for understanding language and culture in sociohistorical contact. The authors bring together archival sources to challenge dominant linguistic theory and practice and engage issues of power, positioning marginalized indigenous peoples as the center of, and vital agents in, these languages’ formation and development. Students in language contact, pidgins and creoles, Caribbean studies, and postcolonial studies courses—and scholars across many disciplines—will benefit from this book and be convinced of the importance of understanding creoles and creolization.