Carved from cliffs and canyons, buried in desert rock and sand are pieces of the ancient past that beckon thousands of visitors every year to the American Southwest. Whether Montezuma Castle or a chunk of pottery, these traces of prehistory also bring archaeologists from all over the world, and their work gives us fresh insight and information on an almost day-to-day basis. Who hasn't dreamed of boarding a time machine for a trip into the past? This book invites us to step into a Hohokam village with its sounds of barking dogs, children's laughter, and the ever-present grinding of mano on metate to produce the daily bread. Here, too, readers will marvel at the skills of Clovis elephant hunters and touch the lives of other ancestral people known as Mogollon, Anasazi, Sinagua, and Salado. Descriptions of long-ago people are balanced with tales about the archaeologists who have devoted their lives to learning more about "those who came before." Trekking through the desert with the famed Emil Haury, readers will stumble upon Ventana Cave, his "answer to a prayer." With amateur archaeologist Richard Wetherill, they will sense the peril of crossing the flooded San Juan River on the way to Chaco Canyon. Others profiled in the book are A. V. Kidder, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, Julian Hayden, Harold S. Gladwin, and many more names synonymous with the continuing saga of southwestern archaeology. This book is an open invitation to general readers to join in solving the great archaeological puzzles of this part of the world. Moreover, it is the only up-to-date summary of a field advancing so rapidly that much of the material is new even to professional archaeologists. Lively and fast paced, the book will appeal to anyone who finds magic in a broken bowl or pueblo wall touched by human hands hundreds of years ago. For all readers, these pages offer a sense of adventure, that "you are there" stir of excitement that comes only with making new discoveries about the distant past.

Carved from cliffs and canyons, buried in desert rock and sand are pieces of the ancient past that beckon thousands of visitors every year to the American Southwest. Whether Montezuma Castle or a chunk of pottery, these traces of prehistory also bring archaeologists from all over the world, and their work gives us fresh insight and information on an almost day-to-day basis. Who hasn't dreamed of boarding a time machine for a trip into the past? This book invites us to step into a Hohokam village with its sounds of barking dogs, children's laughter, and the ever-present grinding of mano on metate to produce the daily bread. Here, too, readers will marvel at the skills of Clovis elephant hunters and touch the lives of other ancestral people known as Mogollon, Anasazi, Sinagua, and Salado. Descriptions of long-ago people are balanced with tales about the archaeologists who have devoted their lives to learning more about "those who came before." Trekking through the desert with the famed Emil Haury, readers will stumble upon Ventana Cave, his "answer to a prayer." With amateur archaeologist Richard Wetherill, they will sense the peril of crossing the flooded San Juan River on the way to Chaco Canyon. Others profiled in the book are A. V. Kidder, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, Julian Hayden, Harold S. Gladwin, and many more names synonymous with the continuing saga of southwestern archaeology. This book is an open invitation to general readers to join in solving the great archaeological puzzles of this part of the world. Moreover, it is the only up-to-date summary of a field advancing so rapidly that much of the material is new even to professional archaeologists. Lively and fast paced, the book will appeal to anyone who finds magic in a broken bowl or pueblo wall touched by human hands hundreds of years ago. For all readers, these pages offer a sense of adventure, that "you are there" stir of excitement that comes only with making new discoveries about the distant past.

"As an Indigenous scholar researching the history and archaeology of his own tribe, Tsim D. Schneider provides a unique and timely contribution to the growing field of Indigenous archaeology and offers a new perspective on the primary role and relevance of Indigenous places and homelands in the study of colonial encounters"--

Located in the mountains of east-central Arizona, Grasshopper Pueblo is a prehistoric ruin that has been excavated and interpreted more thoroughly than most sites in the Southwest: more than 100 rooms have been unearthed here, and artifacts of remarkable quantity and quality have been discovered. Thanks to these findings, we know more about ancient life at Grasshopper than at most other pueblos. Now two archaeologists who have devoted more than two decades to investigations at Grasshopper reconstruct the life and times of this fourteenth-century Mogollon community. Written for general readers—and for the White Mountain Apache, on whose land Grasshopper Pueblo is located and who have participated in the excavations there—the book conveys the simple joys and typical problems of an ancient way of life as inferred from its material remains. Reid and Whittlesey's account reveals much about the human capacity for living under what must strike modern readers as adverse conditions. They describe the environment with which the people had to cope; hunting, gathering, and farming methods; uses of tools, pottery, baskets, and textiles; types of rooms and households; and the functioning of social groups. They also reconstruct the sacred world of Grasshopper as interpreted through mortuary ritual and sacred objects and discuss the relationship of Grasshopper residents with neighbors and with those who preceded and followed them. Grasshopper Pueblo not only thoroughly reconstructs this past life at a mountain village, it also offers readers an appreciation of life at the field school and an understanding of how excavations have proceeded there through the years. For anyone enchanted by mysteries of the past, it reveals significant features of human culture and spirit and the ultimate value of archaeology to contemporary society.

For centuries, the goal of archaeologists was to document and describe material artifacts, and at best to make inferences about the origins and evolution of human culture and about prehistoric and historic societies. During the 1960s, however, a number of young, primarily American archaeologists, including William Longacre, rebelled against this simplistic approach. Wanting to do more than just describe, Longacre and others believed that genuine explanations could be achieved by changing the direction, scope, and methodology of the field. What resulted was the New Archaeology, which blended scientific method and anthropology. It urged those working in the field to formulate hypotheses, derive conclusions deductively and, most important, to test them. While, over time the New Archaeology has had its critics, one point remains irrefutable: archaeology will never return to what has since been called its Òstate of innocence.Ó In this collection of twelve new chapters, four generations of Longacre protŽgŽs show how they are building upon and developing but also modifying the theoretical paradigm that remains at the core of Americanist archaeology. The contributions focus on six themes prominent in LongacreÕs career: the intellectual history of the field in the late twentieth century, archaeological methodology, analogical inference, ethnoarchaeology, cultural evolution, and reconstructing ancient society. More than a comprehensive overview of the ideas developed by one of the most influential scholars in the field, however, Archaeological Anthropology makes stimulating contributions to contemporary research. The contributors do not unequivocally endorse LongacreÕs ideas; they challenge them and expand beyond them, making this volume a fitting tribute to a man whose robust research and teaching career continues to resonate.

Field Man is the captivating memoir of renowned southwestern archaeologist Julian Dodge Hayden, a man who held no professional degree or faculty position but who camped and argued with a who's who of the discipline, including Emil Haury, Malcolm Rogers, Paul Ezell, and Norman Tindale. This is the personal story of a blue-collar scholar who bucked the conventional thinking on the antiquity of man in the New World, who brought a formidable pragmatism and "hand sense" to the identification of stone tools, and who is remembered as the leading authority on the prehistory of the Sierra Pinacate in northwestern Mexico. But Field Man is also an evocative recollection of a bygone time and place, a time when archaeological trips to the Southwest were "expeditions," when a man might run a Civilian Conservation Corps crew by day and study the artifacts of ancient peoples by night, when one could honeymoon by a still-full Gila River, and when a Model T pickup needed extra transmissions to tackle the back roads of Arizona. To say that Julian Hayden led an eventful life would be an understatement. He accompanied his father, a Harvard-trained archaeologist, on influential excavations, became a crew chief in his own right, taught himself silversmithing, married a "city girl," helped build the Yuma Air Field, worked as a civilian safety officer, and was a friend and mentor to countless students. He also crossed paths with leading figures in other fields. Barry Goldwater and even Frank Lloyd Wright turn up in this wide-ranging narrative of a "desert rat" who was at once a throwback and--as he only half-jokingly suggests--ahead of his time. Field Man is the product of years of interviews with Hayden conducted by his colleagues and friends Bill Broyles and Diane Boyer. It is introduced by noted southwestern anthropologist J. Jefferson Reid, and contains an epilogue by Steve Hayden, one of Julian's sons.

New insights into how and why social identities formed and changed in the prehistoric past--Provided by publisher.

In this book, a diverse collection of case studies reveal how archaeology can contribute to a better understanding of humans' relation to the environment. The Archaeology of Environmental Change shows that the environmental challenges facing humanity today can be better approached through an attempt to understand how past societies dealt with similar circumstances.

Although history and archaeology each seek to elucidate the past, both sets of data are incomplete and ambiguous and thus open to multiple readings that invite contradictory interpretations of human activity. This is particularly true when scholars of each field ignore or fail to understand research in the other discipline. Excavating Asian History contains case studies and theoretical articles that show how archaeologists have been investigating historical, social, and economic organizations and that explore the relationship between history and archaeology in the study of pre-modern Asia. These contributions consider biases in both historical and archaeological data that have occasioned rival claims to knowledge in the two disciplines. Ranging widely across the region from the Levant to China and from the third millennium BC to the second millennium AD, they demonstrate that archaeological and historical studies can complement each other and should be used in tandem. The contributors are leading historians and archaeologists of Asia who present data, issues, and debates revolving around the most recent research on the ancient Near East, early Islam, India, China, and Southeast Asian states. Their chapters illustrate the benefits of interdisciplinary investigations and show in particular how archaeology is changing our understanding of history. Commentary chapters by Miriam Stark and Philip Kohl add new perspectives to the findings. By showing the evolving relationship between those who study archaeological material and those who investigate textual data, Excavating Asian History offers practical demonstrations of how research has been and must continue to be structured.

Colonialism may have significantly changed the history of North America, but its impact on Native Americans has been greatly misunderstood. In this book, Neal Ferris offers alternative explanations of colonial encounters that emphasize continuity as well as change affecting Native behaviors. He examines how communities from three aboriginal nations in what is now southwestern Ontario negotiated the changes that accompanied the arrival of Europeans and maintained a cultural continuity with their pasts that has been too often overlooked in conventional Òmaster narrativeÓ histories of contact. In reconsidering Native adaptation and resistance to colonial British rule, Ferris reviews five centuries of interaction that are usually read as a single event viewed through the lens of historical bias. He first examines patterns of traditional lifeway continuity among the Ojibwa, demonstrating their ability to maintain seasonal mobility up to the mid-nineteenth century and their adaptive response to its loss. He then looks at the experience of refugee Delawares, who settled among the Ojibwa as a missionary-sponsored community yet managed to maintain an identity distinct from missionary influences. And he shows how the archaeological history of the Six Nations Iroquois reflected patterns of negotiating emergent colonialism when they returned to the region in the 1780s, exploring how families managed tradition and the contemporary colonial world to develop innovative ways of revising and maintaining identity. The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism convincingly utilizes historical archaeology to link the Native experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the deeper history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century interactions and with pre-European times. It shows how these Native communities succeeded in retaining cohesiveness through centuries of foreign influence and material innovations by maintaining ancient, adaptive social processes that both incorporated European ideas and reinforced historically understood notions of self and community.