Download or read book Early Mesoamerican Social Transformations written by Richard G. Lesure and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 3500 and 500 bc, the social landscape of ancient Mesoamerica was completely transformed. At the beginning of this period, the mobile lifeways of a sparse population were oriented toward hunting and gathering. Three millennia later, protourban communities teemed with people. These essays by leading Mesoamerican archaeologists examine developments of the era as they unfolded in the Soconusco region along the Pacific coast of Mexico and Guatemala, a region that has emerged as crucial for understanding the rise of ancient civilizations in Mesoamerica. The contributors explore topics including the gendered division of labor, changes in subsistence, the character of ceremonialism, the emergence of social inequality, and large-scale patterns of population distribution and social change. Together, they demonstrate the contribution of Soconusco to cultural evolution in Mesoamerica and challenge what we thought we knew about the path toward social complexity.

Download or read book Coastal Foragers of the Gran Desierto written by Douglas R. Mitchell and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The result of nearly twenty years of interdisciplinary research, this volume contributes to the archaeological and paleoenvironmental knowledge of an important but lightly investigated hyperarid coastline at the heart of the Sonoran Desert. Focused on the coast near Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico, Coastal Foragers of the Gran Desierto examines the diverse groups occupying the coast for salt, abundant food sources, and shells for ornament manufacturing. The archaeological patterns demonstrated by the data gathered lead to the conclusion that, since ancient times, this coastal landscape was not a marginal zone but rather an important source of food and trade goods, and a pilgrimage destination that influenced broad and diverse communities across the Sonoran Desert and beyond. Contributors Jenny L. Adams Karen R. Adams Thomas Bowen Tessa L. Branyan Bill Broyles Richard C. Brusca David L. Dettman Michael S. Foster Gary Huckleberry Jonathan B. Mabry Natalia Martínez-Tagüeña Richard J. Martynec Douglas R. Mitchell Kirsten Rowell Melissa R. Schwan M. Steven Shackley R. J. Sliva Kayla B. Worthey

Download or read book Coastal Collectors in the Holocene written by Barbara Voorhies and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the only full-scale archaeological study of the ancient Mesoamericans who lived in a coastal habitat immediately prior to the onset of an agricultural way of life. Known as the last hunter-gatherer-fishers of the south Pacific coast of Mexico, the Chantuto people lived between 7,500 and 3,500 years ago, during the Middle and Late Archaic periods. They were the last people in the region to rely principally upon wild plants and animals. Because their successors were primarily farmers, the lives of the Chantuto people span the transition from foraging to farming--when permanent villages came to replace a nomadic existence--in a hot, humid environment. Working with thirty years of data from shell mounds and other site types in Pacific coastal Chiapas, the contributors to this important investigation present information on past and present environments, local geological processes, and detailed accounts of technical analyses of recovered food and artifactual remains. These data form the basis for inferences about the settlement system and economic lifeways of the ancient Chantuto people.Since the 1960s, when a trail-blazing study revealed how prehistoric inhabitants of an upland Mexican valley became increasingly dependent on only a few plants, archaeologists have sought comparable information for the tropical lowlands. This book supplies it in depth, exploring the surviving material culture of the Chantuto people and their ecological relationships to their biophysical environment. The archaeological sites are dated by means of radiocarbon assays and the methods of data recovery and interpretation range from replication experiments to ethnographic analogy.Especially useful for specialists in hunter-gatherer studies, this work makes an important contribution to the debate about the origins of agriculture. It will be invaluable for archaeologists interested in an up-to-date, comprehensive summary of a transitional society in the tropical lowlands of Mesoamerica.

Download or read book An Archaic Mexican Shellmound and Its Entombed Floors written by Barbara Voorhies and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2015-12-31 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tlacuachero is the site of an Archaic-period shellmound located in the wetlands of the outer coast of southwest Mexico. This book presents investigations of several floors that are within the site's shell deposits that formed over a 600-800 year interval during the Archaic period (ca. 8000-2000 BCE), a crucial timespan in Mesoamerican prehistory when people were transitioning from full-blown dependency on wild resources to the use of domesticated crops. The floors are now deeply buried in an limited area below the summit of the shellmound. The authors explore what activities were carried out on their surfaces, discussing the floors' patterns of cultural features, sediment color, density and types of embedded microrefuse and phytoliths, as well as chemical signatures of organic remains. The studies conducted at Tlacuachero are especially significant in light of the fact that data-rich lowland sites from the Archaic period are extraordinarily rare; the wealth of information gleaned from the floors of the Tlacuachero shellmound can now be widely appreciated.

Download or read book Polity and Ecology in Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca written by Arthur A. Joyce and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encapsulating two decades of research, Polity and Ecology in Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca is the first major treatment of the lower Río Verde region of Oaxaca, investigating its social, political, and ecological history. Tracing Formative period developments from the earliest known evidence of human presence to the collapse of Río Viejo (the region's first centralized polity), the volume synthesizes the archaeological and paleoecological evidence from the valley. This period saw the earliest agricultural settlements in the region as well as the origins of sedentism and social complexity, and witnessed major changes in floodplain and coastal environments that expanded the productivity of subsistence resources. The book addresses theoretically significant questions of broad relevance such as the origins and spread of agriculture, the social negotiation of complex political formations, the effects of long-distance trade and interaction, the macroregional effects of landscape change, and prehispanic ideology and political power. Focusing on questions of interregional interaction, environmental change, and political centralization, Polity and Ecology in Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca provides a comprehensive understanding of the Formative period archaeology of this important and long neglected region of Oaxaca.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology written by Deborah L. Nichols and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-18 with total page 996 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current and comprehensive guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this Handbook also includes coverage of important new work by archaeologists on the Colonial and Republican periods. Unique among recent works, the text brings together in a single volume article-length regional syntheses and topical overviews written by active scholars in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology. The first section of the Handbook provides an overview of recent history and trends of Mesoamerica and articles on national archaeology programs and practice in Central America and Mexico written by archaeologists from these countries. These are followed regional syntheses organized by time period, beginning with early hunter-gatherer societies and the first farmers of Mesoamerica and concluding with a discussion of the Spanish Conquest and frontiers and peripheries of Mesoamerica. Topical and comparative articles comprise the remainder of Handbook. They cover important dimensions of prehispanic societies—from ecology, economy, and environment to social and political relations—and discuss significant methodological contributions, such as geo-chemical source studies, as well as new theories and diverse theoretical perspectives. The Handbook concludes with a section on the archaeology of the Spanish conquest and the Colonial and Republican periods to connect the prehispanic, proto-historic, and historic periods. This volume will be a must-read for students and professional archaeologists, as well as other scholars including historians, art historians, geographers, and ethnographers with an interest in Mesoamerica.

Download or read book Preceramic Mesoamerica written by Jon C. Lohse and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preceramic Mesoamerica delivers cutting-edge research on the Mesoamerican Paleoindian and Archaic periods. The chapters address a series of fundamental questions in American archaeology including the peopling of the Americas, human adaptations to late glacial landscapes, the Neolithic transition, and the origins of sedentism and early village life. This volume presents innovative and previously unpublished research on the Paleoindian and Archaic periods and evaluates current models in light of new findings. Examples include breakthroughs in dating Mesoamerica’s earliest sites and their implications for models of hemispheric colonization; the transition to postglacial patterns of settlement and subsistence; divergent pathways to initial sedentism; the possibility of Archaic-period monumentality; changing patterns of interregional exchange and interaction; and debates surrounding the origins of agriculture, ceramics, and full-time village life. The volume provides a new perspective on the Mesoamerican Preceramic for students and scholars in archaeology, anthropology, and history. Readers will come to understand how the Preceramic contributed to the emergence of the cultural traditions that anthropologists recognize as Mesoamerica.

Download or read book Early Hunter Gatherers of the California Coast written by Jon M. Erlandson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on detailed excavation data, the author reconstructs the paleography of the Santa Barbara coast ca. 8500 years ago, makes comparisons to other early California sites, and applies his findings to current theories of hunter-gatherers and coastal environments. With an emphasis on paleographic reconstructions, site formation processes, chronological studies, and integrated faunal analyses, the work will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working in shell middens, hunter-gatherer ecology, geoarchaeology, and coatal or aquatic adaptations.

Download or read book PREHISTORY OF THE OREGON COAST written by R Lee Lyman and published by Left Coast Press. This book was released on 2009-08-15 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first synthesis of the prehistory of the coast of Oregon. It analyzes the artifacts and mammalian faunal remains of three representative sites on the coast. A model of the evolution of cultural adaptational strategies is presented and tested, from which it creates a model of coastal cultural development. On a methodological level, the volume examines the overriding importance and effects of various sampling techniques.

Download or read book Sea level research a manual for the collection and evaluation of data written by O. van de Plassche and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-12-20 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An editorial by Wanless (1982), entitled "Sea level is rising - so what?", tells the case of an executive editor of a major city newspaper, who, when confronted with evi dence for a recent sea-level rise, replied: "That just means the ocean is six inches deeper, doesn't it?". Whether his "so what?" attitude was real or put on to dike a threat of sensation, there is at present a wide and deepening interest in ongoing and future global sea-level change. This interest has grown along with the concern over global warming due to increasing levels of C02 and trace gases. A stage has been reached where investigators of climat- sea-level relationships call for long-term measurement programmes for ice-volume changes (using satellite altimetry) and changes in temperature and salinity of the oceans (ther mal expansion). This manual, however, is primarily concerned with sea level changes in the past, mainly since the end of the last glaciation. Its major objective is to help answer the ques tion: "how?", which, of course, is little else but to assist in the gathering of fuel for the burning question: "why?" Good fuel, hopefully, for the less smoke and ashes, and the more heat and light produced by that fire, the better scientists are enabled to develop a quantitative under standing of past, and hence of future, sea-level changes on different spatial and temporal scales.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Central American History written by Robert Holden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis / Robert H. Holden -- Land and Climate: Natural Constraints and Socio-Environmental Transformations / Anthony Goebel McDermott -- Regaining Ground: Indigenous Populations and Territories / Peter H. Herlihy, Matthew L. Fahrenbruch, Taylor A. Tappan -- The Ancient Civilizations / William R. Fowler -- Marginalization, Assimilation, and Resurgence: The Indigenous Peoples since Independence / Wolfgang Gabbert -- The Spanish Conquest? / Laura E. Matthew -- Spanish Colonial Rule / Stephen Webre -- The Kingdom of Guatemala as a Cultural Crossroads / Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara -- From Kingdom to Republics, 1808-1840 / Aaron Pollack -- The Political Economy / Robert G. Williams -- State Making and Nation Building / David Díaz Arias -- Central America and the United States / Michel Gobat -- The Cold War: Authoritarianism, Empire, and Social Revolution / Joaquín M. Chávez -- Central America since the 1990s: Crime, Violence, and the Pursuit of Democracy / Christine J. Wade -- The Rise and Retreat of the Armed Forces / Orlando J. Pérez and Randy Pestana -- Religion, Politics, and the State / Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval -- Women and Citizenship: Feminist and Suffragist Movements, 1880-1957 / Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz -- Literature, Society, and Politics / Werner Mackenbach -- Guatemala / David Carey Jr. -- Honduras / Dario A. Euraque -- El Salvador / Erik Ching -- Nicaragua / Julie A. Charlip -- Costa Rica / Iván Molina -- Panama / Michael E. Donoghue -- Belize / Mark Moberg.

Download or read book The Beginnings of Mesoamerican Civilization written by Robert M. Rosenswig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosenswig proposes that we understand Early Formative Mesoamerica as an archipelago of complex societies.

Download or read book California Oregon and Washington Archaeological Resource Study written by and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book California Oregon and Washington Archaeological Resource Study Prehistory written by and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Handbook of Sea Level Research written by Ian Shennan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Measuring sea-level change – be that rise or fall – is one of the most pressing scientific goals of our time and requires robust scientific approaches and techniques. This Handbook aims to provide a practical guide to readers interested in this challenge, from the initial design of research approaches through to the practical issues of data collection and interpretation from a diverse range of coastal environments. Building on thirty years of international research, the Handbook comprises 38 chapters that are authored by leading experts from around the world. The Handbook will be an important resource to scientists interested and involved in understanding sea-level changes across a broad range of disciplines, policy makers wanting to appreciate our current state of knowledge of sea-level change over different timescales, and many teachers at the university level, as well as advanced-level undergraduates and postgraduate research students, wanting to learn more about sea-level change. Additional resources for this book can be found at: www.wiley.com\go\shennan\sealevel

Download or read book The Southern Maya in the Late Preclassic written by Michael Love and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 400 BC to AD 250, the southern Maya region was one of the most remarkable civilizations of the ancient Americas. Filled with great cities linked by flourishing long-distance trade, shared elite ideologies, and a vibrant material culture, this region was pivotal not only for the Maya but for Mesoamerica as a whole. Although it has been of great interest to scholars, gaps in the knowledge have led to debate on the most vital questions about the southern region. Recent research has provided a wealth of broadly based new data that have expanded the understanding of this region and its influence on greater Mesoamerica. In The Southern Maya in the Late Preclassic, prominent contributors debate whether the southern region was indeed "Maya" or instead a region of intense multiethnic interaction, with speakers of many languages and many sources of identity. The chapters address a host of advanced developments to which this area can lay claim--urbanism and city-states, the earliest Maya writing, and the origin of the Maya calendar--as well as additional issues including the construction of social and cultural identities, economic networks of early complex societies, relationships between the Maya and the Olmec, and a comprehensive discussion of the ancient city of Kaminaljuyu and its relationship to other cities in the region.

Download or read book Living on the edge interdisciplinary perspectives on coastal and marine ecosystems in human prehistory written by Manuel Will and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-06-07 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: