Download or read book The Archaeology of Downtown Cahokia written by Timothy R. Pauketat and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The information, interpretations, and conclusions presented in this volume represent only one small portion of the outpouring of new ideas that have been produced by Dr. Timothy Pauketat's analysis of the Tract 15A and Dunham Tract archaeological remains. His research, which began in 1988, quickly produced a dissertation entitled The Dynamics of Pre-state Political Centralization in the North American Midcontinent followed by a theoretically oriented monograph, The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America, and numerous articles on the Cahokian sphere. Up until now, however, the structural and artifactual basis for Pauketat's innovative interpretations and new understanding of Cahokia have not been available to a wide audience. As Pauketat himself notes in his introduction, "significant advances in understanding past large-scale human organizations... require large archaeological samples" and additional advances demand that this information be made available to as wide an audience of fellow scholars as possible. This volume represents such a contribution to the present and future study of the great Cahokian center" -- From the publisher.
Download or read book Revealing Greater Cahokia North America s First Native City written by Thomas E. Emerson and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Land of Water City of the Dead written by Sarah E. Baires and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the embodiment of religion in the Cahokia land and how places create, make meaningful, and transform practices and beliefs Cahokia, the largest city of the Mississippian mound cultures, lies outside present-day East St. Louis. Land of Water, City of the Dead reconceptualizes Cahokia’s emergence and expansion (ca. 1050–1200), focusing on understanding a newly imagined religion and complexity through a non-Western lens. Sarah E. Baires argues that this system of beliefs was a dynamic, lived component, based on a broader ontology, with roots in other mound societies. This religion was realized through novel mortuary practices and burial mounds as well as through the careful planning and development of this early city’s urban landscape. Baires analyzes the organization and alignment of the precinct of downtown Cahokia with a specific focus on the newly discovered and excavated Rattlesnake Causeway and the ridge-top mortuary mounds located along the site axes. Land of Water, City of the Dead also presents new data from the 1954 excavations of the ridge-top mortuary Wilson Mound and a complete analysis of the associated human remains. Through this skeletal analysis, Baires discusses the ways that Cahokians processed and buried their ancestors, identifying unique mortuary practices that include the intentional dismemberment of human bodies and burial with marine shell beads and other materials.
Download or read book The Cahokia Atlas written by Melvin Leo Fowler and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cahokia written by Timothy R. Pauketat and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-07-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating story of a lost city and an unprecedented American civilization located in modern day Illinois near St. Louis While Mayan and Aztec civilizations are widely known and documented, relatively few people are familiar with the largest prehistoric Native American city north of Mexico-a site that expert Timothy Pauketat brings vividly to life in this groundbreaking book. Almost a thousand years ago, a city flourished along the Mississippi River near what is now St. Louis. Built around a sprawling central plaza and known as Cahokia, the site has drawn the attention of generations of archaeologists, whose work produced evidence of complex celestial timepieces, feasts big enough to feed thousands, and disturbing signs of human sacrifice. Drawing on these fascinating finds, Cahokia presents a lively and astonishing narrative of prehistoric America.
Download or read book Buried Beneath Us written by Anthony Aveni and published by Roaring Brook Press. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully illustrated look at the forces that help cities grow—and eventually cause their destruction—told through the stories of the great civilizations of ancient America. You may think you know all of the American cities. But did you know that long before New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Boston ever appeared on the map—thousands of years before Europeans first colonized North America—other cities were here? They grew up, fourished, and eventually disappeared in the same places that modern cities like St. Louis and Mexico City would later appear. In the pages of this book, you'll find the astonishing story of how they grew from small settlements to booming city centers—and then crumbled into ruins.
Download or read book Four Lost Cities A Secret History of the Urban Age written by Annalee Newitz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.
Download or read book Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians written by Timothy R. Pauketat and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a wealth of archaeological evidence, this book outlines the development of Mississippian civilization.
Download or read book An Archaeology of the Cosmos written by Timothy R. Pauketat and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Archaeology of the Cosmos seeks answers to two fundamental questions of humanity and human history. The first question concerns that which some use as a defining element of humanity: religious beliefs. Why do so many people believe in supreme beings and holy spirits? The second question concerns changes in those beliefs. What causes beliefs to change? Using archaeological evidence gathered from ancient America, especially case material from the Great Plains and the pre-Columbian American Indian city of Cahokia, Timothy Pauketat explores the logical consequences of these two fundamental questions. Religious beliefs are not more resilient than other aspects of culture and society, and people are not the only causes of historical change. An Archaeology of the Cosmos examines the intimate association of agency and religion by studying how relationships between people, places, and things were bundled together and positioned in ways that constituted the fields of human experience. This rethinking theories of agency and religion provides readers with challenging and thought provoking conclusions that will lead them to reassess the way they approach the past.
Download or read book Contemporary Archaeology in Theory written by Robert W. Preucel and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: The New Pragmatism, has been thoroughly updated and revised, and features top scholars who redefine the theoretical and political agendas of the field, and challenge the usual distinctions between time, space, processes, and people. Defines the relevance of archaeology and the social sciences more generally to the modern world Challenges the traditional boundaries between prehistoric and historical archaeologies Discusses how archaeology articulates such contemporary topics and issues as landscape and natures; agency, meaning and practice; sexuality, embodiment and personhood; race, class, and ethnicity; materiality, memory, and historical silence; colonialism, nationalism, and empire; heritage, patrimony, and social justice; media, museums, and publics Examines the influence of American pragmatism on archaeology Offers 32 new chapters by leading archaeologists and cultural anthropologists
Download or read book Prehistoric Native Americans and Ecological Change written by Paul A. Delcourt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-29 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows that Holocene human ecosystems are complex adaptive systems in which humans interacted with their environment in a nested series of spatial and temporal scales. Using panarchy theory, it integrates paleoecological and archaeological research from the Eastern Woodlands of North America providing a paradigm to help resolve long-standing disagreements between ecologists and archaeologists about the importance of prehistoric Native Americans as agents for ecological change. The authors present the concept of a panarchy of complex adaptive cycles as applied to the development of increasingly complex human ecosystems through time. They explore examples of ecological interactions at the level of gene, population, community, landscape and regional hierarchical scales, emphasizing the ecological pattern and process involving the development of human ecosystems. Finally, they offer a perspective on the implications of the legacy of Native Americans as agents of change for conservation and ecological restoration efforts today.
Download or read book Plaquemine Archaeology written by Mark A. Rees and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First major work to deal solely with the Plaquemine societies. Plaquemine, Louisiana, about 10 miles south of Baton Rouge on the banks of the Mississippi River, seems an unassuming southern community for which to designate an entire culture. Archaeological research conducted in the region between 1938 and 1941, however, revealed distinctive cultural materials that provided the basis for distinguishing a unique cultural manifestation in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Plaquemine was first cited in the archaeological literature by James Ford and Gordon Willey in their 1941 synthesis of eastern U.S. prehistory. Lower Valley researchers have subsequently grappled with where to place this culture in the local chronology based on its ceramics, earthen mounds, and habitations. Plaquemine cultural materials share some characteristics with other local cultures but differ significantly from Coles Creek and Mississippian cultures of the Southeast. Plaquemine has consequently received the dubious distinction of being defined by the characteristics it lacks, rather than by those it possesses. The current volume brings together eleven leading scholars devoted to shedding new light on Plaquemine and providing a clearer understanding of its relationship to other Native American cultures. The authors provide a thorough yet focused review of previous research, recent revelations, and directions for future research. They present pertinent new data on cultural variability and connections in the Lower Mississippi Valley and interpret the implications for similar cultures and cultural relationships. This volume finally places Plaquemine on the map, incontrovertibly demonstrating the accomplishments and importance of Plaquemine peoples in the long history of native North America.
Download or read book Ten Thousand Years of Inequality written by Timothy A. Kohler and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is wealth inequality a universal feature of human societies, or did early peoples live an egalitarian existence? How did inequality develop before the modern era? Did inequalities in wealth increase as people settled into a way of life dominated by farming and herding? Why in general do such disparities increase, and how recent are the high levels of wealth inequality now experienced in many developed nations? How can archaeologists tell? Ten Thousand Years of Inequality addresses these and other questions by presenting the first set of consistent quantitative measurements of ancient wealth inequality. The authors are archaeologists who have adapted the Gini index, a statistical measure of wealth distribution often used by economists to measure contemporary inequality, and applied it to house-size distributions over time and around the world. Clear descriptions of methods and assumptions serve as a model for other archaeologists and historians who want to document past patterns of wealth disparity. The chapters cover a variety of ancient cases, including early hunter-gatherers, farmer villages, and agrarian states and empires. The final chapter synthesizes and compares the results. Among the new and notable outcomes, the authors report a systematic difference between higher levels of inequality in ancient Old World societies and lower levels in their New World counterparts. For the first time, archaeology allows humanity’s deep past to provide an account of the early manifestations of wealth inequality around the world. Contributors Nicholas Ames Alleen Betzenhauser Amy Bogaard Samuel Bowles Meredith S. Chesson Abhijit Dandekar Timothy J. Dennehy Robert D. Drennan Laura J. Ellyson Deniz Enverova Ronald K. Faulseit Gary M. Feinman Mattia Fochesato Thomas A. Foor Vishwas D. Gogte Timothy A. Kohler Ian Kuijt Chapurukha M. Kusimba Mary-Margaret Murphy Linda M. Nicholas Rahul C. Oka Matthew Pailes Christian E. Peterson Anna Marie Prentiss Michael E. Smith Elizabeth C. Stone Amy Styring Jade Whitlam
Download or read book Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas written by Melissa R. Baltus and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas, Melissa R. Baltus and Sarah E. Baires critically examine the current understanding of relationality in the Americas, covering a diverse range of topics from Indigenous cosmologies to the life-world of the Inuit dog. The contributors to this wide-ranging edited collection interrogate and discuss the multiple natures of relational ontologies, touching on the ever-changing, fluid, and varied ways that people, both alive and dead, relate and related to their surrounding world. While the case studies presented in this collection all stem from the New World, the Indigenous histories and archaeological interpretations vary widely and the boundaries of relational theory challenge current preconceptions about earlier ways of life in the Indigenous Americas.
Download or read book Archaeology of Communities written by Marcello-Andrea Canuto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Archaeology of Communities develops a critical evaluation of community and shows that it represents more than a mere aggregation of households. This collection bridges the gap between studies of ancient societies and ancient households. The community is taken to represent more than a mere aggregation of households, it exists in part through shared identities, as well as frequent interaction and inter-household integration. Drawing on case studies which range in location from the Mississippi Valley to New Mexico, from the Southern Andes to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Madison County, Virginia, the book explores and discusses communities from a whole range of periods, from Pre-Columbian to the late Classic. Discussions of actual communities are reinforced by strong debate on, for example, the distinction between 'Imagined Community' and 'Natural Community.'
Download or read book Cahokia s Complexities written by Susan M. Alt and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical new discoveries and archaeological patterns increase understanding of early Mississippian culture and society The reasons for the rise and fall of early cities and ceremonial centers around the world have been sought for centuries. In the United States, Cahokia has been the focus of intense archaeological work to explain its mysteries. Cahokia was the first and exponentially the largest of the Mississippian centers that appeared across the Midwest and Southeast after AD 1000. Located near present-day East St. Louis, Illinois, the central complex of Cahokia spanned more than 12 square kilometers and encompassed more than 120 earthen mounds. As one of the foremost experts on Cahokia, Susan M. Alt addresses long-standing considerations of eastern Woodlands archaeology—the beginnings, character, and ending of Mississippian culture (AD 1050–1600)—from a novel theoretical and empirical vantage point. Through this case study on farmers’ immigration and resettling, Alt’s narrative reanalyzes the relationship between administration and diversity, incorporating critical new discoveries and archaeological patterns from outside of Cahokia. Alt examines the cultural landscape of the Cahokia flood plain and the layout of one extraordinary upland site, Grossman, as an administrative settlement where local farmers might have seen or participated in Cahokian rituals and ceremonies involving a web of ancestors, powers, and places. Alt argues that a farming district outside the center provides definitive evidences of the attempted centralized administration of a rural hinterland.
Download or read book Cahokia in Context written by Charles H. McNutt and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Impressive. Provides perspective on the interconnectedness of Cahokia with regional cultures, the evidence for (or against) this connection in specific areas, and the hows and whys of Cahokian influence on shaping regional cultures. There is no other comparable work.”—Lynne P. Sullivan, coeditor of Mississippian Mortuary Practices: Beyond Hierarchy and the Representationist Perspective “This volume synthesizes information regarding possible contacts—direct or indirect—with Cahokia and offers several hypotheses about how those contacts may have occurred and what evidence the archaeological record offers.”—Mary Vermilion, Saint Louis University At its height between AD 1050 and 1275, the city of Cahokia was the largest settlement of the Mississippian culture, acting as an important trade center and pilgrimage site. While the influence of Cahokian culture on the development of monumental architecture, maize-based subsistence practices, and economic complexity throughout North America is undisputed, new research in this volume reveals a landscape of influence of the regions that had and may not have had a relationship with Cahokia. Contributors find evidence for Cahokia’s hegemony—its social, cultural, ideological, and economic influence—in artifacts, burial practices, and religious iconography uncovered at far-flung sites across the Eastern Woodlands. Case studies include Kinkaid in the Ohio River Valley, Schild in the Illinois River Valley, Shiloh in Tennessee, and Aztalan in Wisconsin. These essays also show how, with Cahokia’s abandonment, the diaspora occurred via the Mississippi River and extended the culture’s impact southward. Cahokia in Context demonstrates that the city’s cultural developments during its heyday and the impact of its demise produced profound and lasting effects on many regional cultures. This close look at Cahokia’s influence offers new insights into the movement of people and ideas in prehistoric America, and it honors the final contributions of Charles McNutt, one of the most respected scholars in southeastern archaeology. Charles H. McNutt (1928‒2017) was professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Memphis and the editor of Prehistory of the Central Mississippi Valley. Ryan M. Parish is assistant professor of archaeology at the University of Memphis. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
