Download or read book Geochemical Evidence for Long Distance Exchange written by Michael D. Glascock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-12-30 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of prehistoric exchange of goods provide information about the types of economic interaction, social organization, or political structures in which prehistoric peoples were engaged. Long-distance exchange is a special situation where the materials exchanged crossed significant boundaries, whether they were geographic, social, political, or otherwise. By examining the types and quantities of goods exchanged, along with the directions and distances they moved, archaeologists are able to examine the dynamic properties of exchange systems, i.e., how they operate and why they undergo change. The purpose of this volume is to present a number of case studies of long-distance exchange from around the world which demonstrate the use of geochemical analysis of artifacts to find evidence of exchange. More important than the use of analytical technique employed or the types of artifacts studied are the interpretations themselves which illustrate that exchange studies are maturing and helping archaeologists to develop more accurate models of exchange.
Download or read book Perspectives on Prehistoric Trade and Exchange in California and the Great Basin written by Richard E. Hughes and published by University of Utah Press. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the circumstances and conditions under which trade/exchange, direct access, and/or mobility best account for material conveyance across varying distances at different times in the past.
Download or read book X Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry XRF in Geoarchaeology written by M. Steven Shackley and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-10-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1960s, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF), both wavelength and energy-dispersive have served as the workhorse for non-destructive and destructive analyses of archaeological materials. Recently eclipsed by other instrumentation such as LA-ICP-MS, XRF remains the mainstay of non-destructive chemical analyses in archaeology, particularly for volcanic rocks, and most particularly for obsidian. In a world where heritage and repatriation issues drive archaeological method and theory, XRF remains an important tool for understanding the human past, and will remain so for decades to come. Currently, there is no comprehensive book in XRF applications in archaeology at a time when the applications of portable XRF and desktop XRF instrumentation are exploding particularly in anthropology and archaeology departments worldwide. The contributors to this volume are the experts in the field, and most are at the forefront of the newest applications of XRF to archaeological problems. It covers all relevant aspects of the field for those using the newest XRF technologies to deal with very current issues in archaeology.
Download or read book Stone Tools in the Ancient Near East and Egypt written by Andrea Squitieri and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focusses on ground stone tools, stone vessels, and devices carved into rock across the Near East and Egypt from prehistory to the later periods. The aim is to explore all aspects of these tools and stimulate a debate about new methodologies to approach this material.
Download or read book Trade and Exchange written by Carolyn D. Dillian and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-12-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Archaeology of Pacific Oceania written by Mike T. Carson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book integrates a region-wide chronological narrative of the archaeology of Pacific Oceania. How and why did this vast sea of islands, covering nearly one-third of the world’s surface, come to be inhabited over the last several millennia, transcending significant change in ecology, demography, and society? What can any or all of the thousands of islands offer as ideal model systems toward comprehending globally significant issues of human-environment relations and coping with changing circumstances of natural and cultural history? A new synthesis of Pacific Oceanic archaeology addresses these questions, based largely on the author’s investigations throughout the diverse region.
Download or read book On the Road of the Winds written by Patrick Vinton Kirch and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : defining Oceania -- Discovering the Oceanic past -- The Pacific islands as a human environment -- Sahul and the prehistory of "old" Melanesia -- Lapita and the Austronesian expansion -- The prehistory of "new" Melanesia -- Micronesia : in the "sea of little islands"--Polynesia : origins and dispersals -- Polynesian chiefdoms and archaic states -- Big structures and large processes in Oceanic prehistory
Download or read book Landscapes of Social Transformation in the Salinas Province and the Eastern Pueblo World written by Katherine A. Spielmann and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1100s most Pueblo peoples lived in small, dispersed settlements and moved frequently, but by the mid-1400s they had aggregated into large villages. The majority of these villages were still occupied at Spanish contact and conquest, by which time most Pueblo peoples had completely transformed their perception and experience of village life. Other changes were taking place on a broader regional scale, and the migrations from the Colorado Plateau and the transformation of Chaco initiated myriad changes in ritual organization and practice. Landscapes of Social Transformation in the Salinas Province and the Eastern Pueblo World investigates relationships between diverse regional and local changes in the Rio Grande and Salinas areas from 1100 to 1500 C.E. The contributing authors draw on the results of sixteen seasons of archaeological survey and excavation in the Salinas Province of central New Mexico. The chapters offer cross-scale analyses to compare broad perspectives in well-researched southwestern culture changes to the finer details of stability and transformation in Salinas. This stability—which was unusual in the Pueblo Southwest—from the 1100s until its abandonment in the 1670s provides an interesting contrast to migration-based transformations studied elsewhere in the Rio Grande region. CONTRIBUTORS Patricia Capone Matthew Chamberlin Tiffany C. Clark William M. Graves Cynthia L. Herhahn Deborah Huntley Keith Kintigh Ann Kinzig Jeannette L. Mobley-Tanaka Alison E. Rautman Jonathan Sandor Grant Snitker Julie Solometo Katherine A. Spielmann Colleen Strawhacker Maryann Wasiolek
Download or read book The Bounty from the Beach written by Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bounty from the Beach is a collection of cross-disciplinary essays, capitalising on a widely shared fascination for the Bounty story in order to draw scholarly attention to Oceania. It aims to reorient the Bounty focus away from the West, where most Bountynarratives and studies have emerged, to the Pacific, where most of the original events unfolded. It investigates the Bounty heritage from the standpoint of the beach, Greg Dening’s metaphor for culture contact and conflict in the Pacific Islands: this liminal place that transforms Islanders and voyagers, islands and ships, each time it is crossed. It analyses the way newcomers create new islands, and how these changes may occasionally impact the world. This volume examines the ‘little people’, to use another of Dening’s expressions, who stand ‘on both sides of the beach’: they are Polynesian or European or, as beaches are crossed and remade, no longer one without the other, but bound together in processes of change. Among these people are Bounty sailors, beachcombers, Pitcairners and indigenous Pacific Islanders of the past and the present. This collection also explores the works of some renowned Western writers and actors who, turning mutineers after their own fashion and in their own times, themselves crossed the beach and attempted to illuminate the ‘little people’ involved in the Bounty narratives. These prominent writers and actors put the spotlight on characters who were silenced on account of race, class or geographical distance from the dominant centres of power. Inspired by Dening’s empowering voice, our purpose is to fill that silence. Just as it criss-crosses the ocean, progressing with the ship through time and space, TheBounty from the Beach ranges far and wide across disciplines, methodologies and scholarly styles. Its multidisciplinary course contributes to illuminate the multiple ways in which the Bounty heritage embraces diverse horizons. It throws light on the colonial discourse that undertook to stifle Pacific Islander agency, and the neocolonial policies that have been applied to Oceania, and still are: hegemonic moves that have led to global environmental, nuclear and ecological hazards. As a whole, the collection contends that what unfolds in this vast ocean matters: the stakes are high for the whole human community.
Download or read book Cultural Life at the Abyss written by B. L. Molyneaux and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideology dominates social research, encouraged by rejections of nature and the past, and often ignores the direct experience of actual people. This archaeological study takes a different approach, grounding concepts of culture, landscape and art in ecological relations that embrace all of life. An ecological approach considers that life exists in the interactions of people with the environment surrounding them. This theoretical grounding therefore supports research at a local scale and validates the analysis of individual effort. The case studies explore individual perception, action and expression in a startlingly diverse set of objects and features from the past: natural and constructed monuments, ancient and recent rock paintings, petroglyphs, fresco paintings and impressionist landscape art. While traditional cultural approaches render ordinary people as proxies, these individuals, as members of families and communities, do the actual work of society, using their senses, bodies and minds. The analysis here therefore turns away from traditional speculations about the meanings of cultural things to look for evidence of the personal choices of travelers, inhabitants, pilgrims and artists as they acted, and attempt to gain insights from these decisions about the past as lived. The book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and advanced students in culture and society who may be restless in theatres of discourse dominated by self-affirming narratives, who wish to consider the fields of possibility in an environmental perspective that integrates culture with nature and humans with other beings in a singular, physical world.
Download or read book The Ancient Maya Marketplace written by Eleanor M. King and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trading was the favorite occupation of the Maya, according to early Spanish observers such as Fray Diego de Landa (1566). Yet scholars of the Maya have long dismissed trade—specifically, market exchange—as unimportant. They argue that the Maya subsisted primarily on agriculture, with long-distance trade playing a minor role in a largely non-commercialized economy. The Ancient Maya Marketplace reviews the debate on Maya markets and offers compelling new evidence for the existence and identification of ancient marketplaces in the Maya Lowlands. Its authors rethink the prevailing views about Maya economic organization and offer new perspectives. They attribute the dearth of Maya market research to two factors: persistent assumptions that Maya society and its rainforest environment lacked complexity, and an absence of physical evidence for marketplaces—a problem that plagues market research around the world. Many Mayanists now agree that no site was self-sufficient, and that from the earliest times robust local and regional exchange existed alongside long-distance trade. Contributors to this volume suggest that marketplaces, the physical spaces signifying the presence of a market economy, did not exist for purely economic reasons but served to exchange information and create social ties as well. The Ancient Maya Marketplace offers concrete links between Maya archaeology, ethnohistory, and contemporary cultures. Its in-depth review of current research will help future investigators to recognize and document marketplaces as a long-standing Maya cultural practice. The volume also provides detailed comparative data for premodern societies elsewhere in the world.
Download or read book Continuities and Changes in Maya Archaeology written by Charles Golden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the current state of Maya archaeology by focusing on the history of the field for the last 100 years, present day research, and forward looking prescription for the direction of the field.
Download or read book The Archaeology of the Caddo written by Timothy K. Perttula and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark volume provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the prehistory and archaeology of the Caddo peoples. The Caddos lived in the Southeastern Woodlands for more than 900 years beginning around A.D. 800–900, before being forced to relocate to Oklahoma in 1859. They left behind a spectacular archaeological record, including the famous Spiro Mound site in Oklahoma as well as many other mound centers, plazas, farmsteads, villages, and cemeteries. The Archaeology of the Caddo examines new advances in studying the history of the Caddo peoples, including ceramic analysis, reconstructions of settlement and regional histories of different Caddo communities, Geographic Information Systems and geophysical landscape studies at several spatial scales, the cosmological significance of mound and structure placements, and better ways to understand mortuary practices. Findings from major sites and drainages such as the Crenshaw site, mounds in the Arkansas River basin, Spiro Mound, the Oak Hill Village site, the George C. Davis site, the Willow Chute Bayou Locality, the Hughes site, Big Cypress Creek basin, and the McClelland and Joe Clark sites are also summarized and interpreted. This volume reintroduces the Caddos’ heritage, creativity, and political and religious complexity.
Download or read book The Production and Distribution of Mimbres Pottery written by Darrell G. Creel and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2022-10-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The famous and highly sought-after Mimbres painted pottery in southwestern New Mexico continues to fascinate people today as much as it did when it first became known more than a century ago. Despite several publications promoting Mimbres archaeology and innumerable analyses of style, dating, iconography, meaning, identity, use wear, and trade and travel implications, however, there had been little interest in the actual production of Mimbres pottery. This changed with the professional investigations of the 1970s when petrographic analysis began, and then again, in the late 1980s and 1990s, when Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) was first employed in the study of Mimbres pottery production and distribution. The Production and Distribution of Mimbres Pottery assesses a much-expanded INAA data set and presents a new and more-informed interpretation of ceramic production and distribution in the Mimbres region. The results should guide future research in the region and will also serve as an example of how INAA data can help students and scholars understand many other interrelated aspects of prehistoric Mimbres society in addition to Mimbres pottery production.
Download or read book Caddo Connections written by Jeffrey S. Girard and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the latest archaeological fieldwork, Caddo Connections looks at the highly dynamic cultural landscape of the Caddo Area and its complex interconnections and exchanges with surrounding regions. The authors employ a multiscalar approach to examine cultural diversity through time and across space within the Caddo Area. They explore how and why this diversity developed, consider what allowed it to stabilize during the Mississippian period, and analyze changes following contact between historic Caddo peoples and Europeans. Looking beyond individual river valleys to the broader macroregion, they also address the linkages connecting the Caddo Area with the Southeast, southern Plains, and Southwest.
Download or read book Handheld XRF for Art and Archaeology written by Aaron N. Shugar and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses specifically on the applications, possibilities, and limitations of handheld X-ray fluorescence devices in art conservation and archaeology.
Download or read book Ancient Maya Commerce written by Scott R. Hutson and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Maya Commerce presents nearly two decades of multidisciplinary research at Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico—a thriving Classic period Maya center organized around commercial exchange rather than agriculture. An urban center without a king and unable to sustain agrarian independence, Chunchucmil is a rare example of a Maya city in which economics, not political rituals, served as the engine of growth. Trade was the raison d’être of the city itself. Using a variety of evidence—archaeological, botanical, geomorphological, and soil-based—contributors show how the city was a major center for both short- and long-distance trade, integrating the Guatemalan highlands, the Gulf of Mexico, and the interior of the northern Maya lowlands. By placing Chunchucmil into the broader context of emerging research at other Maya cities, the book reorients the understanding of ancient Maya economies. The book is accompanied by a highly detailed digital map that reveals the dense population of the city and the hundreds of streets its inhabitants constructed to make the city navigable, shifting the knowledge of urbanism among the ancient Maya. Ancient Maya Commerce is a pioneering, thoroughly documented case study of a premodern market center and makes a strong case for the importance of early market economies in the Maya region. It will be a valuable addition to the literature for Mayanists, Mesoamericanists, economic anthropologists, and environmental archaeologists. Contributors: Anthony P. Andrews, Traci Ardren, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Timothy Beach, Chelsea Blackmore, Tara Bond-Freeman, Bruce H. Dahlin, Patrice Farrell, David Hixson, Socorro Jimenez, Justin Lowry, Aline Magnoni, Eugenia Mansell, Daniel E. Mazeau, Travis Stanton, Ryan V. Sweetwood, Richard E. Terry
