In this volume, Douglas B. Bamforth offers an archaeological overview of the Great Plains, the vast, open grassland bordered by forests and mountain ranges situated in the heart of North America. Synthesizing a century of scholarship and new archaeological evidence, he focuses on changes in resource use, continental trade connections, social formations, and warfare over a period of 15,000 years. Bamforth investigates how foragers harvested the grasslands more intensively over time, ultimately turning to maize farming, and examines the persistence of industrial mobile bison hunters in much of the region as farmers lived in communities ranging from hamlets to towns with thousands of occupants. He also explores how social groups formed and changed, migrations of peoples in and out of the Plains, and the conflicts that occurred over time and space. Significantly, Bamforth's volume demonstrates how archaeology can be used as the basis for telling long-term, problem-oriented human history.

A survey of Native American earthlodge research from across the Great Plains. This collection explores current research in the ethnography and archaeology of Plains earthlodges, and considers a variety of Plains tribes, including the Mandan, Hidatsa, Cheyenne, and their late prehistoric period predecessors.

Status, age and gender have long been accepted aspects of archaeological enquiry, yet it is only recently that archaeologists have started seriously to consider the role of sex and sexuality in their studies. Archaeologies of Sexuality is a timely and pioneering work. It presents a strong, diverse body of scholarship which draws on locations as varied as medieval England, the ancient Maya kingdoms, New Kingdom Egypt, prehistoric Europe, and convict-era Australia, demonstrating the challenges and rewards of integrating the study of sex and sexuality within archaeology. This volume, with contributions by many leading archaeologists, will serve both as an essential introduction and a valuable reference tool for students and academics.

In Crafting History in the Northern Plains Mark D. Mitchell shows the crucial role archaeological methods and archaeological data can play in producing trans-Columbian histories. Mitchell provides a regional synthesis of communities located at the confluence of the Heart and Missouri rivers, home to the Mandan people for more than five centuries.

Written by an international team of experts, the Handbook makes accessible a full range of theoretical and applied approaches to the study of material culture, and the place of materiality in social theory, presenting current thinking about material culture from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies.