In the Beginning describes the basic methods and theoretical approaches of archaeology. This is a book about fundamental principles written in a clear, flowing style, with minimal use of technical jargon, which approaches archaeology from a global perspective. Starting with a broad-based introduction to the field, this book surveys the highlights of archaeology’s colorful history, then covers the basics of preservation, dating the past, and the context of archaeological finds. Descriptions of field surveys, including the latest remote-sensing methods, excavation, and artifact analysis lead into the study of ancient environments, landscapes and settlement patterns, and the people of the past. Two chapters cover cultural resource management, public archaeology, and the important role of archaeology in contemporary society. There is also a chapter on archaeology as a potential career. In the Beginning takes the reader on an evenly balanced journey through today’s archaeology. This well-illustrated account, with its numerous boxes and sidebars, is laced with interesting, and sometimes entertaining, examples of archaeological research from all parts of the world. This classic textbook of archaeological method and theory has been in print for nearly 50 years and is used in many countries around the world. It is aimed at introductory students in archaeology and anthropology taking survey courses on archaeology, as well as more advanced readers.

Paleoindians first arrived in Texas more than eleven thousand years ago, although relatively few sites of such early peoples have been discovered. Texas has a substantial post-Paleoindian record, however, and there are more than fifty thousand prehistoric archaeological sites identified across the state. This comprehensive volume explores in detail the varied experience of native peoples who lived on this land in prehistoric times. Chapters on each of the regions offer cutting-edge research, the culmination of years of work by dozens of the most knowledgeable experts. Based on the archaeological record, the discussion of the earliest inhabitants includes a reclassification of all known Paleoindian projectile point types and establishes a chronology for the various occupations. The archaeological data from across the state of Texas also allow authors to trace technological changes over time, the development of intensive fishing and shellfish collecting, funerary customs and the belief systems they represented, long-term changes in settlement mobility and character, landscape use, and the eventual development of agricultural societies. The studies bring the prehistory of Texas Indians all the way up through the Late Prehistoric period (ca. a.d. 700–1600). The extensively illustrated chapters are broadly cultural-historical in nature but stay strongly focused on important current research problems. Taken together, they present careful and exhaustive considerations of the full archaeological (and paleoenvironmental) record of Texas.

The Texas Landscape Project explores conservation and ecology in Texas by presenting a highly visual and deeply researched view of the widespread changes that have affected the state as its population and economy have boomed and as Texans have worked ever harder to safeguard its bountiful but limited natural resources. Covering the entire state, from Pineywoods bottomlands and Panhandle playas to Hill Country springs and Big Bend canyons, the project examines a host of familiar and not so familiar environmental issues. A companion volume to The Texas Legacy Project, this book tracks specific environmental changes that have occurred in Texas using more than 300 color maps, expertly crafted by cartographer Jonathan Ogren, and over 100 photographs that coalesce to fashion a broad portrait of the modern Texas landscape. The rich data, compiled by author David Todd, are presented in clearly written yet marvelously detailed text that gives historical context and contemporary statistics for environmental trends connected to the land, water, air, energy, and built world of the second-largest and second-most populated state in the nation. An engaging read for any environmentalist or conscientious citizen, The Texas Landscape Project provides a true sense of the grand scope of the Lone Star State and the high stakes of protecting it. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

Field Methods in Archaeology has been the leading source for instructors and students in archaeology courses and field schools for 60 years since it was first authored in 1949 by the legendary Robert Heizer. Left Coast has arranged to put the most recent Seventh Edition back into print after a brief hiatus, making this classic textbook again available to the next generation of archaeology students. This comprehensive guide provides an authoritative overview of the variety of methods used in field archaeology, from research design, to survey and excavation strategies, to conservation of artifacts and record-keeping. Authored by three leading archaeologists, with specialized contributions by several other experts, this volume deals with current issues such as cultural resource management, relations with indigenous peoples, and database management as well as standard methods of archaeological data collection and analysis.

Useful for academic and recreational archaeologists alike, this book identifies and describes over 200 projectile points and stone tools used by prehistoric Native American Indians in Texas. This third edition boasts twice as many illustrations—all drawn from actual specimens—and still includes charts, geographic distribution maps and reliable age-dating information. The authors also demonstrate how factors such as environment, locale and type of artifact combine to produce a portrait of theses ancient cultures.

Pecos River style pictographs are one of the most complex forms of rock art worldwide. The dramatic prehistoric pictographs on the limestone overhangs of the lower Pecos and Devils Rivers in West Texas have been the subject of preservation and study since the 1930s, and dedicated research continues to this day. The medium is large-scale, polychrome pictographs in open rock shelter settings, emphasizing the animistic/shamanistic religion practiced by the local aboriginal peoples. Creating large-scale rock murals required intelligence, skill, and knowledge. These enigmatic images, some dating to 4,500 years ago and possibly earlier, depict strange, vaguely human and animal shapes and various geometric forms. While full understanding of the meaning of these images is abstruse, archaeologists and other scholars have identified what they believe to be patterns and religious themes, mixed with what could be figures and objects from everyday life in the local hunter-gatherer culture as it existed in the region centuries before the arrival of colonizing Europeans. Although interpretation of these pictographs remains controversial, in Pecos River Style Rock Art: A Prehistoric Iconography, James Burr Harrison Macrae contributes to the beginnings of a syntactic “grammar” for these images that can be applied in diverse contexts without direct reference to any particular interpretation. “The strength of structural-iconographic analysis,” Macrae writes, “is that it relies on repetitive patterns rather than idiosyncratic information, such as trying to make broad inferences from one or only a few sites.” Pecos River Style Rock Art offers the framework of an empirical methodology for understanding these ancient artworks.