Download or read book Leadership and Polity in Mississippian Society written by Brian M. Butler and published by Center for Archaeological Investigations. This book was released on 2006 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume argue for a much richer view of variation in Mississippian leadership structures-including variation in gender relations, economic structure, political institutions, and religious organization--than the often dichotomized view of "simple" vs. "complex" chiefdoms.
Download or read book The Mississippian Emergence written by Bruce D. Smith and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2007-10-07 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection, addressing a topic of ongoing interest and debate in American archaeology, examines the evolution of ranked chiefdoms in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States during the period A.D. 700–1200. The volume brings together a broad range of professionals engaged in the fieldwork that has vitalized the theoretical debates on the development of Mississippi Valley cultures. The initial chapter provides a general discussion of various explanations for the rise of these distinctive ranked societies in the eastern United States (A.D. 750-1050) and sets the stage for the interdisciplinary analysis from multiple viewpoints that follows. The first section discusses a cluster of individual sites in the Midwest and Southeast and reveals the parallel—and occasionally divergent—paths followed by the inhabitants as they transitioned from Late Woodland into Mississippian lifeways. The chapters in the second half discuss by region the emergence of ranked agricultural societies and examine how these networks played a role in the large-scale and roughly contemporaneous socio-political development. Contributors: C. Clifford Boyd Jr. James A. Brown R. P. Stephen Davis Jr. John House John E. Kelly Richard A. Kerber Dan F. Morse Phyllis Morse Martha Ann Rolingson Gerald F. Schroedl Bruce D. Smith Paul D. Welch Howard D. Winters
Download or read book Mississippian Polity and Politics on the Gulf Coastal Plain written by Patrick C. Livingood and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using research at the Pevey (22Lw510) and Lowe-Steen (22Lw511) mound sites on the Pearl River in Lawrence County, Mississippi, this book explores the social and political mechanisms by which these polities may have interacted with each other and the geographic limit to the effects of inter-polity competition.
Download or read book The Making of Mississippian Tradition written by Christina M. Friberg and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Christina Friberg investigates the influence of Cahokia, the largest city of North America’s Mississippian culture between AD 1050 and 1350, on smaller communities throughout the midcontinent. Using evidence from recent excavations at the Audrey-North site in the Lower Illinois River Valley, Friberg examines the cultural give-and-take Audrey inhabitants experienced between new Cahokian customs and old Woodland ways of life. Comparing the architecture, pottery, and lithics uncovered here with data from thirty-five other sites across five different regions, Friberg reveals how the social, economic, and political influence of Cahokia shaped the ways Audrey inhabitants negotiated identities and made new traditions. Friberg’s broad interregional analysis also provides evidence that these diverse groups of people were engaged in a network of interaction and exchange outside Cahokia’s control. The Making of Mississippian Tradition offers a fascinating glimpse into the dynamics of cultural exchange in precolonial settlements, and its detailed reconstruction of Audrey society offers a new, more nuanced interpretation of how and why Mississippian lifeways developed. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
Download or read book Mississippian Beginnings written by Gregory D. Wilson and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using fresh evidence and nontraditional ideas, the contributing authors of Mississippian Beginnings reconsider the origins of the Mississippian culture of the North American Midwest and Southeast (A.D. 1000–1600). Challenging the decades-old opinion that this culture evolved similarly across isolated Woodland popu¬lations, they discuss signs of migrations, missionization, pilgrimages, violent conflicts, long-distance exchange, and other far-flung entanglements that now appear to have shaped the early Mississippian past. Presenting recent fieldwork from a wide array of sites including Cahokia and the American Bottom, archival studies, and new investigations of legacy collections, the contributors interpret results through contemporary perspectives that emphasize agency and historical contingency. They track the various ways disparate cultures across a sizeable swath of the continent experienced Mississippianization and came to share simi¬lar architecture, pottery, subsistence strategies, sociopolitical organization, iconography, and religion. Together, these essays provide the most comprehensive examination of early Mississippian culture in over thirty years. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
Download or read book The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies written by Michael E. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-05 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of a resurgence in the comparative study of ancient societies, this book presents a variety of methods and approaches to comparative analysis through the examination of wide-ranging case studies. Each chapter is a comparative study, and the diverse topics and regions covered in the book contribute to the growing understanding of variation and change in ancient complex societies. The authors explore themes ranging from urbanization and settlement patterns, to the political strategies of kings and chiefs, to the economic choices of individuals and households. The case studies cover an array of geographical settings, from the Andes to Southeast Asia. The authors are leading archaeologists whose research on early empires, states, and chiefdoms is at the cutting edge of scientific archaeology.
Download or read book Following the Mississippian Spread written by Robert A. Cook and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-29 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to specifically trace the movement of Mississippian maize farmers throughout the US Midwest and Southeast. By providing a backdrop of shifting climatic conditions during the period, this volume also investigates the relationship between farmers and their environments. Detailed regional overviews of key locations in the Mississippi Valley, the Ohio Valley, and the peripheries of the Mississippian culture area reveal patterns and variation in the expression of Mississippian culture and interactions between migrants and local communities. Methodologically, the case studies highlight the strengths of integrating a variety of data sets to identify migration. The volume provides a broader case study of the links between climate change, migration, and the spread of agriculture that is relevant to archaeologists and anthropologists studying early agricultural societies throughout the world. Key patterns of adaptation to and mitigation of the effects of droughts, for example, provide a framework for understanding the options available to societies in the face of climate change afforded by the time-depth of an archaeological perspective.
Download or read book Globalizations and the Ancient World written by Justin Jennings and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-08 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Justin Jennings argues that globalization is not just a phenomenon limited to modern times. Instead he contends that the globalization of today is just the latest in a series of globalizing movements in human history. Using the Uruk, Mississippian, and Wari civilizations as case studies, Jennings examines how the growth of the world's first great cities radically transformed their respective areas. The cities required unprecedented exchange networks, creating long-distance flows of ideas, people, and goods. These flows created cascades of interregional interaction that eroded local behavioral norms and social structures. New, hybrid cultures emerged within these globalized regions. Although these networks did not span the whole globe, people in these areas developed globalized cultures as they interacted with one another. Jennings explores how understanding globalization as a recurring event can help in the understanding of both the past and the present.
Download or read book New Materialisms Ancient Urbanisms written by Susan M. Alt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future of humanity is urban, and knowledge of urbanism’s deep past is critical for us all to navigate that future. The time has come for archaeologists to rethink this global phenomenon by asking what urbanism is and, more to the point, was. Can we truly understand ancient urbanism by only asking after the human element, or are the properties and qualities of landscapes, materials, and atmospheres equally causal? The nine authors of New Materialisms Ancient Urbanisms seek less anthropocentric answers to questions about the historical relationships between urbanism and humanity in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. They analyze the movements and flows of materials, things, phenomena, and beings—human and otherwise—as these were assembled to produce the kinds of complex, dense, and stratified relationships that we today label urban. In so doing, the book emerges as a work of both theory and historical anthropology. It breaks new ground in the archaeology of urbanism, building on the latest ‘New Materialist’, ‘relational-ontological’, and ‘realist’ trends in social theory. This book challenges a new generation of students to think outside the box, and provides scholars of urbanism, archaeology, and anthropology with a fresh perspective on the development of urban society.
Download or read book War Peace and Human Nature written by Douglas P. Fry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-02 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The chapters in this book [posit] that humans clearly have the capacity to make war, but since war is absent in some cultures, it cannot be viewed as a human universal. And counter to frequent presumption, the actual archaeological record reveals the recent emergence of war. It does not typify the ancestral type of human society, the nomadic forager band, and contrary to widespread assumptions, there is little support for the idea that war is ancient or an evolved adaptation. Views of human nature as inherently warlike stem not from the facts but from cultural views embedded in Western thinking"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book Recent Developments in Southeastern Archaeology written by David G. Anderson and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series represents a period-by-period synthesis of southeastern prehistory designed for high school and college students, avocational archaeologists, and interested members of the general public. It also serves as a basic reference for professional archaeologists worldwide on the record of a remarkable region.
Download or read book Mound Excavations at Moundville written by Vernon James Knight and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010-06-09 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a state-of-the-art, data-rich study of excavations undertaken at the Moundville site in west central Alabama, one of the largest and most complex of the mound sites of pre-contact North America.
Download or read book Killing Civilization written by Justin Jennings and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Killing Civilization uses case studies from across the modern and ancient world to develop a new model of incipient urbanism and its consequences.
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 Cahokia Mounds written by William Iseminger and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2010-03-03 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About one thousand years ago, a phenomenon occurred in a fertile tract of Mississippi River flood plain known today as the "American Bottom." This phenomenon came to be called Cahokia Mounds, America's first city. Interpreting the rich heritage of a site like Cahokia Mounds is a balancing act; the interpreter must speak as a scholar to the general public on behalf of an entirely different civilization. Since even those three groups are splintered into myriad dialects of perspective, sometimes it is hard to know what language to use. But William Iseminger's work at the site has given him nearly four decades of practice in Cahokia Conversation 101, and he tells the story of the place and its ancient culture (as well as its place in contemporary culture) with the clarity and confidence of a native speaker.
Download or read book War Paths Peace Paths written by David H. Dye and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2009 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeologists, ethnohistorians, osteologists, and cultural anthropologists have only recently begun to address seriously the issue of Native American war and peace in the eastern United States. New methods for identifying prehistoric cooperation and conflict in the archaeological record are now helping to advance our knowledge of their existence and importance. Focusing on four major issues in prehistoric warfare studies--settlement patterns, skeletal trauma, weaponry, and iconography--David H. Dye presents a new interpretation of ancient war and peace east of the Mississippi. He considers evidence for raiding and more organized forms of warfare, accounts of native warfare witnessed by sixteenth-century Europeans, and the various causes of warfare, such as revenge, competition for resources, and ideology. War Paths, Peace Paths offers an innovative analysis of cooperation and conflict in the prehistoric eastern United States.
Download or read book Cremation and the Archaeology of Death written by Jessica Cerezo-Román and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-14 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fiery transformation of the dead is replete in our popular culture and Western modernity's death ways, and yet it is increasingly evident how little this disposal method is understood by archaeologists and students of cognate disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In this regard, the archaeological study of cremation has much to offer. Cremation is a fascinating and widespread theme and entry-point in the exploration of the variability of mortuary practices among past societies. Seeking to challenge simplistic narratives of cremation in the past and present, the studies in this volume seek to confront and explore the challenges of interpreting the variability of cremation by contending with complex networks of modern allusions and imaginings of cremations past and present and ongoing debates regarding how we identify and interpret cremation in the archaeological record. Using a series of original case studies, the book investigates the archaeological traces of cremation in a varied selection of prehistoric and historic contexts from the Mesolithic to the present in order to explore cremation from a practice-oriented and historically situated perspective.
