Reprint of the original, first published in 1907.

Only a few years after the discovery in Europe in the late 1850s that humanity had roots predating history and the Biblical chronicles, and reaching deep into the Pleistocene, came the suggestion that North American prehistory might be just as old. And why not? There seemed to be an "exact synchronism [of geological strata] between Europe and America," and so by extension there ought to be a "parallelism as to the antiquity of man." That triggered an eager search for traces of the people who may have occupied North America in the recesses of the Ice Age. "The Great Paleolithic War "is the history of the longstanding and bitter dispute in North America over whether people had arrived here in Ice Age times.

Long before the advent of the global economy, foreign goods were transported, traded, and exchanged through myriad means, over short and long distances. Archaeological tools for identifying foreign objects, such as provenance studies, stylistic analyses, and economic documentary sources reveal non-local materials in historic and prehistoric assemblages. Trade and exchange represent more than mere production and consumption. Exchange of goods also led to an exchange of cultural and social experiences. Discoveries of the sources of alien objects surpass archaeological expectations of exchange and geographic distance, revealing important technological advances. With thirteen case studies from around the world, this comprehensive work provides a fresh perspective on material culture studies. Evidence of ongoing negotiation between individuals, villages, and nations provides insight into the impact of trade on the micro-, meso-, and macro-level. Covering a wide array of time periods and areas, this work will be of interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, and anyone working in cultural studies.

Excerpt from Archaeologia Nova Caesarea No It has been maintained that the term Archæology docs not I apply to North, Central or South America, but that this considerable portion of the earth's habitable surface was not a scene of human activity until Asia, Europe and Africa and the isles of the South Seas had been so long populated that humanity was an old and not very creditable story, and then about the dawn of what we know as the historic period some wandering unfortunates from other lands found some one of the three Americas, and finally drifted into the other two. According to these authors, and they are about all who have given attention to the subject, the history of America is about the heaviest, dreariest, most somnolent matter ever preserved in print, until Columbus made his discovery, or possibly from the supposed visit of the Norseman, four or five centuries earlier. All this may be true, but, happily for those archaeologically inclined, the probability of its so being is still an open question, and, despite the earnest, and we hope sincere, efforts of the ethnologists to modernize every phase of the subject, the thought will persist in coming to the fore, when fieldwork is in progress, can all this be within the range of history, or, at most, on the shadowy border of it, just prior to Columbus sighting land in the Antilles? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.