The formative years of American anthropology were characterized by intellectual energy and excitement, the identification of key interpretive issues, and the beginnings of a prodigious amount of fieldwork and recording. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) was born as anthropology emerged as a formal discipline with specialized subfields; fieldwork among Native communities proliferated across North America, yielding a wealth of ethnographic information that began to surface in the flagship journal, the American Anthropologist; and researchers increasingly debated and probed deeper into the roots and significance of ritual, myth, language, social organization, and the physical make-up and prehistory of Native Americans. The fifty-five selections in this volume represent the interests of and accomplishments in American anthropology from the establishment of the American Anthropologist through World War I. The articles in their entirety showcase the state of the subfields of anthropology?archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology?as they were imagined and practiced at the dawn of the twentieth century. Examples of important ethnographic accounts and interpretive debates are also included. Introducing this collection is a historical overview of the beginnings of American anthropology by A. Irving Hallowell, a former president of the AAA.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492—from “a remarkably engaging writer” (The New York Times Book Review). Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

Established in 1895 as the first U.S. scholarly journal in its field, AJS remains a leading voice for analysis and research in the social sciences, presenting work on the theory, methods, practice, and history of sociology. AJS also seeks the application of perspectives from other social sciences and publishes papers by psychologists, anthropologists, statisticians, economists, educators, historians, and political scientists.