People have long been fascinated about times in human history when different cultures and societies first came into contact with each other, how they reacted to that contact, and why it sometimes occurred peacefully and at other times was violent or catastrophic. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick,seeks to define the role of culture contact in human history, to identify issues in the study of culture contact in archaeology, and to provide a critical overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of culture and contact. In this collection of essays, anthropologists and archaeologists working in Europe and the Americas consider three forms of culture contact—colonization, cultural entanglement, and symmetrical exchange. Part I provides a critical overview of theoretical approaches to the study of culture contact, offering assessments of older concepts in anthropology, such as acculturation, as well as more recently formed concepts, including world systems and center-periphery models of contact. Part II contains eleven case studies of specific contact situations and their relationships to the archaeological record, with times and places as varied as pre- and post-Hispanic Mexico, Iron Age France, Jamaican sugar plantations, European provinces in the Roman Empire, and the missions of Spanish Florida. Studies in Culture Contact provides an extensive review of the history of culture contact in anthropological studies and develops a broad framework for studying culture contact’s role, moving beyond a simple formulation of contact and change to a more complex understanding of the amalgam of change and continuity in contact situations.

"The first comprehensive, scholarly look at the artifactual evidence of real pirates, recovered at both shipwrecks and known pirate bases."--Archaeology Magazine "The reader unused to digesting professional publications will, pardon the pun, sail through this book as if it were a collection of novellas! Not only will he/she learn about the realities of trade in the Caribbean and politics in the time of pirates, but will be treated to the most interesting bits of ephemera such as an inventory of the legendary Captain Morgan''s estate. This is the definitive book on Pirates and the research being done to dispel all of the fables."--Dirtbrothers.org "Articles in X Marks the Spot cover a wide range of pirate wrecks and legacies from the Golden Age of Piracy, and give the reader a glimpse into what might be the reality of pirate life and death."--Archaeology.about.com "A serious attempt to determine, through examination of both terrestrial and shipwreck sites, if pirates left such unambiguous traces in the archaeological record that their presence can be recognized in future excavations. Fascinating!"--George F. Bass, founder, Institute of Nautical Archaeology "Piracy occupies an adaptive niche dating back to the very beginnings of maritime enterprise. This volume reclaims that predacious profession from the realm of the unusual and the unique and presents it afresh as a persistent subsystem of normal commerce."--Thomas N. Layton, San Jose State University "Piracy is one of the world''s oldest professions on the water. In this volume, a group of leading scholars literally digs into the subject to offer the first comprehensive archaeological look at pirates. . . . The definitive book on the archaeology of piracy."--James P. Delgado, executive director, Vancouver Maritime Museum "A most welcome contribution on the subject of piracy, one that has rarely been systematically addressed by archaeologists."--Barto Arnold, Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Texas A&M University This collection piques the imagination with historical evidence about the actual exploits of pirates as revealed in the archaeological record. The recent discovery of the wreck of Blackbeard''s Queen Anne''s Revenge, off Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, has provoked scientists to ask, What is a pirate? Were pirates sea-going terrorists, lawless rogues who plundered, smuggled, and illegally transported slaves, or legitimate corsairs and privateers? Highlighting such pirate vessels as the Speaker, which sailed in the Indian Ocean, and the Whydah, the first pirate ship discovered in North America (near the tip of Cape Cod), the contributors analyze what constitutes a pirate ship and how it is different from a contemporary merchant or naval vessel. Examining excavated underwater "treasure sites" and terrestrial pirate lairs found off the coast of Madagascar, throughout the Caribbean, and within the United States, the authors explore the romanticized "Golden Age of Piracy," a period brimming with the real-life exploits of Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, and the "gentleman pirate" Jean Lafitte. This book will appeal to the general public, with special interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and divers.

Archaeological research is uniquely positioned to show how native history and native culture affected the course of colonial interaction, but to do so it must transcend colonialist ideas about Native American technological and social change. This book applies that insight to five hundred years of native history. Using data from a wide variety of geographical, temporal, and cultural settings, the contributors examine economic, social, and political stability and transformation in indigenous societies before and after the advent of Europeans and document the diversity of native colonial experiences. The book’s case studies range widely, from sixteenth-century Florida, to the Great Plains, to nineteenth-century coastal Alaska. The contributors address a series of interlocking themes. Several consider the role of indigenous agency in the processes of colonial interaction, paying particular attention to gender and status. Others examine the ways long-standing native political economies affected, and were in turn affected by, colonial interaction. A third group explores colonial-period ethnogenesis, emphasizing the emergence of new native social identities and relations after 1500. The book also highlights tensions between the detailed study of local cases and the search for global processes, a recurrent theme in postcolonial research. If archaeologists are to bridge the artificial divide separating history from prehistory, they must overturn a whole range of colonial ideas about American Indians and their history. This book shows that empirical archaeological research can help replace long-standing models of indigenous culture change rooted in colonialist narratives with more nuanced, multilinear models of change—and play a major role in decolonizing knowledge about native peoples.