A reconsideration of the seminal projectile point typology In the 1964 landmark publication The Formative Cultures of the Carolina Piedmont, Joffre Coe established a projectile point typology and chronology that, for the first time, allowed archaeologists to identify the relative age of a site or site deposit based on the point types recovered there. Consistent with the cultural-historical paradigm of the day, the “Coe axiom” stipulated that only one point type was produced at one moment in time in a particular location. Moreover, Coe identified periods of “cultural continuity” and “discontinuity” in the chronology based on perceived similarities and differences in point styles through time. In Time, Typology, and Point Traditions in North Carolina Archaeology: Formative Cultures Reconsidered, I. Randolph Daniel Jr. reevaluates the Coe typology and sequence, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. Daniel reviews the history of the projectile point type concept in the Southeast and revisits both Coe’s axiom and his notions regarding cultural continuity and change based on point types. In addition, Daniel updates Coe’s typology by clarifying or revising existing types and including types unrecognized in Coe’s monograph. Daniel also adopts a practice-centered approach to interpreting types and organizes them into several technological traditions that trace ancestral- descendent communities of practice that relate to our current understanding of North Carolina prehistory. Appealing to professional and avocational archaeologists, Daniel provides ample illustrations of points in the book as well as color versions on a dedicated website. Daniel dedicates a final chapter to a discussion of the ethical issues related to professional archaeologists using private artifact collections. He calls for greater collaboration between professional and avocational communities, noting the scientific value of some private collections.

Five centuries before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, indigenous North Americans had already built a vast urban center on the banks of the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. This is the story of North America's largest archaeological site, told through the lives, personalities, and conflicts of the men and women who excavated and studied it. At its height the metropolis of Cahokia had twenty thousand inhabitants in the city center with another ten thousand in the outskirts. Cahokia was a precisely planned community with a fortified central city and surrounding suburbs. Its entire plan reflected the Cahokian's concept of the cosmos. Its centerpiece, Monk's Mound, ten stories tall, is the largest pre-Columbian structure in North America, with a base circumference larger than that of either the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt or the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico. Nineteenth-century observers maintained that the mounds, too sophisticated for primitive Native American cultures, had to have been created by a superior, non-Indian race, perhaps even by survivors of the lost continent of Atlantis. Melvin Fowler, the "dean" of Cahokia archaeologists, and Biloine Whiting Young tell an engrossing story of the struggle to protect the site from the encroachment of interstate highways and urban sprawl. Now identified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and protected by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Cahokia serves as a reminder that the indigenous North Americans had a past of complexity and great achievement.

These widely acclaimed essays from the author of Infinite Jest -- on television, tennis, cruise ships, and more -- established David Foster Wallace as one of the preeminent essayists of his generation. In this exuberantly praised book -- a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner -- David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.

Essential overview of American Indian societies during the Archaic period across central North America.

Annotation In this revision of her dissertation, Pitblado (anthropology, Utah State U.) presents a substantial analysis based on a regional comparison of 589 late Paleoindian projectile points from the Rockies, Plains, Colorado Plateau, and Great Basin areas of Colorado and Utah. Her analysis considers the land use strategies employed by people in the southern Rockies region 10,000-7,500 years ago. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The Marias River canyon in north-central Montana served during late Holocene time as a locus of human activity in an ecologically and geologically dynamic landscape. This volume presents the results of interdisciplinary research, synergistically combining geologic, ecologic, and archaeologic approaches focused on examining the ways that Late Precontact peoples depended upon the animal (bison) and plant resources of a changing landscape subject to erosion and sediment transport as dominant surficial processes. Connections between erosion and deposition, plant community distribution, large mammal niches, and native peoples' place in the Marias River canyon geoecosystem, as well as the role of tributary-junction alluvial fans as repositories of archaeological materials and vertebrate faunal remains are emphasized.

Over 80 archaeologists from four continents create a benchmark volume of the ideas and practices of landscape archaeology, covering the theoretical and the practical, the research and conservation, and encasing the term in a global framework.

"In this magnificent book, Oliver Schuchard provides more than sixty-five exquisite black-and-white photographs spanning his thirty-eight years of photography. In addition, he explains the aesthetic rationale and techniques he used in order to produce these photographs, emphasizing the profound differences between, yet necessary interdependence of, craft and content. Although Schuchard believes that craft is important, he maintains that the idea behind the photograph and the emotional content of the image are equally vital and are, in fact, functions of one another. The author also shares components of his life experience that he believes helped shape his development as an artist and a teacher. He chose the splendid photographs included in this book from among nearly 5,000 negatives that had been exposed all over the world, from Missouri to Maine, California, Alaska, Colorado, France, Newfoundland, and Hawaii, among many other locations. Approximately 250 negatives survived the initial review, and each of those was printed before a final decision was made on which photographs were to be featured in the book. The final choices are representative of Schuchard's work and serve to substantiate his belief that craft, concept, and self must be fully understood and carefully melded for a good photograph to occur. This amazing work by award-winning photographer Oliver Schuchard will be treasured by professional and amateur photographers alike, as well as by anyone who simply enjoys superb photography."--Publishers website.