Download or read book The Archaeology of Lower Central America written by Frederick W. Lange and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Archaeology of Ancient Mexico and Central America written by Susan Toby Evans and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2001 with total page 1322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reference is devoted to the pre-Columbian archaeology of the Mesoamerican culture area, one of the six cradles of early civilization. It features in-depth articles on the major cultural areas of ancient Mexico and Central America; coverage of important sites, including the world-renowned discoveries as well as many lesser-known locations; articles on day-to-day life of ancient peoples in these regions; and several bandw regional and site maps and photographs. Entries are arranged alphabetically and cover introductory archaeological facts (flora, fauna, human growth and development, nonorganic resources), chronologies of various periods (Paleoindian, Archaic, Formative, Classic and Postclassic, and Colonial), cultural features, Maya, regional summaries, research methods and resources, ethnohistorical methods and sources, and scholars and research history. Edited by archaeologists Evans and Webster, both of whom are associated with Pennsylvania State University. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Mesoamerican Animals written by Kitty F. Emery and published by Lockwood Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 809 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recognition of the role of animals in ancient diet, economy, politics, and ritual is vital to understanding ancient cultures fully, while following the clues available from animal remains in reconstructing environments is vital to understanding the ancient relationship between humans and the world around them. In response to the growing interest in the field of zooarchaeology, this volume presents current research from across the many cultures and regions of Mesoamerica, dealing specifically with the most current issues in zooarchaeological literature. Geographically, the essays collected here index the different aspects of animal use by the indigenous populations of the entire area between the northern borders of Mexico and the southern borders of lower Central America. This includes such diverse cultures as the north Mexican hunter-gatherers, the Olmec, Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Central American Indians. The time frame of the volume extends from the earliest human occupation, the Preclassic, Classic, Postclassic, and Colonial manifestations, to recent times. The book's chapters, written by experts in the field of Mesoamerican zooarchaeology, provide important general background on the domestic and ritual use of animals in early and classic Mesoamerica and Central America, but deal also with special aspects of human-animal relationships such as early domestication and symbolism of animals, and important yet otherwise poorly represented aspects of taphonomy and zooarchaeological methodology. Spanish-language version also available (ISBN 978-1-937040-12-3).
Download or read book Gordon R Willey and American Archaeology written by Jeremy A. Sabloff and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gauging the impact of one scholar's contributions to modern archaeology
Download or read book The Archaeology of the Caribbean written by Samuel M. Wilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-30 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Archaeology of the Caribbean is a comprehensive synthesis of Caribbean prehistory from the earliest settlement by humans more than 4000 years BC, to the time of European conquest of the islands, from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Samuel Wilson reviews the evidence for migration and cultural change throughout the archipelago, dealing in particular with periods of cultural interaction when groups with different cultures and histories were in contact.
Download or read book Paths to Central American Prehistory written by Frederick W. Lange and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark volume brings together contributions by some of the most distinguished pioneers of Central American archaeology as well as those of younger scholars from North America, Europe, and Central America. This ambitious work demonstrates the parallel ongoing needs to pursue theoretical and methodological advances while dedicating equal efforts to filling in the blank spaces in the archaeological map of Central America, where even the most basic surveys and chronological sequences are lacking. The contributions represent a range in specialties that include archaeology, precolumbian art history, new analytical techniques, and exploration of unknown geographical areas. Paths to Central American Prehistory covers El Salvador and Honduras through Panama, from the Paleoindian period to the time of the Spanish invasion. It will have wide appeal to Mesoamerican and Central American archaeologists as well as to general readers with a serious interest in the archaeology of the area.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Greater Nicoya written by Larry Steinbrenner and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Archaeology of Greater Nicoya is the first edited volume in a quarter century to provide an overview of this fascinating archaeological subarea of Mesoamerica, encompassing Pacific Nicaragua and northwestern Costa Rica. Inhabited by diverse peoples of Mesoamerican origin centuries before Spanish colonization, Greater Nicoya remains controversial in the twenty-first century as scholars struggle to achieve consensus on questions of geography, chronology, and cultural identity. Drawing on approaches ranging from ethnohistory to bioarchaeology to scientific and culture-historical archaeology, the book is organized into sections on redefining Greater Nicoya, projects and surveys, material culture, and mortuary practices. Individual chapters explore Indigenous groups and their origins, extensive summaries of the three largest scholarly archaeological projects completed in Pacific Nicaragua in the last quarter century, clear evidence of Mesoamerican connections from Costa Rica’s Bay of Culebra, detailed histories of lithic analysis and rock art studies in Nicaragua, new insights into mortuary and cultural practices based on osteological evidence, and reinterpretations of diagnostic ceramic types as products of related potting communities and the first definitive identification of production centers for these types. Drawing upon new 14C dates, this volume also provides the most substantial revision of the late pre-colonial chronology since the 1960s, a correction that has critical implications for understanding the prehistory of Greater Nicoya.
Download or read book Politics Economy and Society in Bourbon Central America 1759 1821 written by Jordana Dym and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759-1821 examines how the Spanish policies known broadly as the Bourbon Reforms affected Central American social, economic, and political institutions. Although historians have devoted significant attention to the purpose and impact of these reforms in Spain and some of Spain's other New World colonies, this book is the first to explore their impact on Central America. These reforms profoundly changed aspects of Central America's politics and society; however, these essays reveal that changes in the region were shaped both internally and externally and that they weakened the region's ties to metropolitan Spain as often as they reinforced them. Contributors focus on specific policy changes and their consequences as well as transformations throughout the region for which no direct Bourbon inspiration appears to be responsible. Together they demonstrate that whether or not the Crown achieved its primary goals of centralization and control, its policies nevertheless provided opportunities for evident, often subtle, and occasionally unintentional shifts in the colonial government's relationship to its constituent populations. Contributors include Christophe Belaubre, Michel Bertrand, Jordana Dym, Jorge H. González, Timothy Hawkins, Sajid Alfredo Herrera, Gustavo Palma, Eugenia Rodriguez, Doug Tompson, and Stephen Webre.
Download or read book The Maya and Their Central American Neighbors written by Geoffrey E Braswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-16 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Maya created one of the most studied and best-known civilizations of the Americas. Nevertheless, Maya civilization is often considered either within a vacuum, by sub-region and according to modern political borders, or with reference to the most important urban civilizations of central Mexico. Seldom if ever are the Maya and their Central American neighbors of El Salvador and Honduras considered together, despite the fact that they engaged in mutually beneficial trade, intermarried, and sometimes made war on each other. The Maya and Their Central American Neighbors seeks to fill this lacuna by presenting original research on the archaeology of the whole of the Maya area (from Yucatan to the Maya highlands of Guatemala), western Honduras, and El Salvador. With a focus on settlement pattern analyses, architectural studies, and ceramic analyses, this ground breaking book provides a broad view of this important relationship allowing readers to understand ancient perceptions about the natural and built environment, the role of power, the construction of historical narrative, trade and exchange, multiethnic interaction in pluralistic frontier zones, the origins of settled agricultural life, and the nature of systemic collapse.
Download or read book Settlement Archaeology at Quirigua Guatemala written by Wendy Ashmore and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph reports the results of the Quiriguá Project Site Periphery Program, five seasons (1975-1979) of archaeological survey and excavation in the 96 km2 immediately adjoining the classic Maya site of Quiriguá. Ashmore identifies and helps us understand where and how the people of Quiriguá lived. She presents detailed material evidence in two data catalogues, for the floodplain settlement adjoining Quiriguá and for sites in the wider periphery. The work situates Quiriguá settlement firmly in a regional context, benefiting from the extraordinary abundance of information amassed in southeastern Mesoamerica since 1979. It sheds new light on the political, economic, and social dynamics of the region including the sometimes-fractious interactions between Quiriguá, its overlords at Copan, and people elsewhere in the Lower Motagua Valley and beyond. Quiriguá Reports, IV
Download or read book Archaeology of the Rivas Region Nicaragua written by Paul Healy and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central America before the Spanish Conquest has often been considered by North American archaeologists as a “backwater” of peripheral importance located between the advanced ancient civilizations of South America and Mesoamerica (Mexican–Maya country). Recent archaeological research has revealed that this area played a much more significant role in New World cultural history than was previously thought. Healy’s study examines the archaeological record of one subarea of Southern Central America, the Rivas region of Pacific Nicaragua. The work gives a detailed analysis of excavations and of artifacts recovered at seven significant prehistoric sites. A critical pioneering effort, the monograph documents cultural changes occurring over a 2,000–year time period—changes in technology, material culture, settlement, subsistence, and socio–political organization.
Download or read book Archeology and Volcanism in Central America written by Payson D. Sheets and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists have long speculated on the impact of extreme natural catastrophes on human societies. Archeology and Volcanism in Central America provides dramatic evidence of the effects of several volcanic disasters on a major civilization of the Western Hemisphere, that of the Maya. During the past 2,000 years, four volcanic eruptions have taken place in the Zapotitán Valley of southern El Salvador. One, the devastating eruption of Ilopango around A.D. 300, forced a major migration, pushing the Mayan people north to the Yucatán Peninsula. Although later eruptions did not have long-range implications for cultural change, one of the subsequent eruptions preserved the Cerén site—a Mesoamerican Pompeii where the bodies of the villagers, the palm-thatched roofs of their houses, the pots of food in their pantries, even the corn plants in their fields were preserved with remarkable fidelity. Throughout 1978, a multidisciplinary team of anthropologists, archeologists, geologists, biologists, and others sponsored by the University of Colorado's Protoclassic Project researched and excavated the results of volcanism in the Zapotitan Valley—a key Mesoamerican site that contemporary political strife has since rendered inaccessible. The result is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the impact of volcanic eruptions on early Mayan civilization. These investigations clearly demonstrate that the Maya inhabited this volcanically hazardous valley in order to reap the short-term benefits that the volcanic ash produced—fertile soil, fine clays, and obsidian deposits.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas written by Bruce G. Trigger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Library holds volume 2, part 2 only.
Download or read book Amerindian Socio Cosmologies between the Andes Amazonia and Mesoamerica written by Ernst Halbmayer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new anthropological understanding of the socio-cosmological and ontological characteristics of the Isthmo–Colombian Area, beyond established theories for Amazonia, the Andes and Mesoamerica. It focuses on a core region that has been largely neglected by comparative anthropology in recent decades. Centering on relations between Chibchan groups and their neighbors, the contributions consider prevailing socio-cosmological principles and their relationship to Amazonian animism and Mesoamerican and Andean analogism. Classical notions of area homogeneity are reconsidered and the book formulates an overarching proposal for how to make sense of the heterogeneity of the region’s indigenous groups. Drawing on original fieldwork and comparative analysis, the volume provides a valuable anthropological addition to archaeological and linguistic knowledge of the Isthmo・Colombian Area.
Download or read book The Formation of Complex Society in Southeastern Mesoamerica written by William R. Fowler, Jr. and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 1991-08-06 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents discussions on the formation of complex society of Southeastern Mesoamerica throughout pre-Columbian times. These societies include ones from the Early Preclassic or Formative period to those encountered by the Spaniards when they arrived in the early 16th century. Diverse classes of data from archaeology, ethnography, and ethnohistory are utilized. The book provides wide spatial and temporal coverage, as well as a wide diversity of theoretical perspectives. Anyone interested in archeology or the evolution of prehistoric complex societies will find this book fascinating.
Download or read book Handbook of Middle American Indians Volume 4 written by Robert Wauchope and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeological Frontiers and External Connections is the fourth volume in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, published in cooperation with the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University under the general editorship of Robert Wauchope (1909–1979). Volume editors are Gordon R. Willey (1913–2002), Bowditch Professor of Mexican and Central American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and Gordon F. Ekholm (1909–1987), Associate Curator of Mexican Archaeology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This volume presents an intensive study of matters of significance in various areas: archaeology and ethnohistory of the Northern Sierra, Sonora, Lower California, and northeastern Mexico; external relations between Mesoamerica and the southwestern United States and eastern United States; archaeology and ethnohistory of El Salvador, western Honduras, and lower Central America; external relations between Mesoamerica and the Caribbean area, Ecuador, and the Andes; and the case for and against Old World pre-Columbian contacts via the Pacific. Many photographs accompany the text. The Handbook of Middle American Indians was assembled and edited at the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University with the assistance of grants from the National Science Foundation and under the sponsorship of the National Research Council Committee on Latin American Anthropology.
Download or read book Archaeology in Latin America written by Benjamin Alberti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-16 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering and comprehensive survey is the first overview of current themes in Latin American archaeology written solely by academics native to the region, and it makes their collected expertise available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. The contributors cover the most significant issues in the archaeology of Latin America, such as the domestication of camelids, the emergence of urban society in Mesoamerica, the frontier of the Inca empire, and the relatively little known archaeology of the Amazon basin. This book draws together key areas of research in Latin American archaeological thought into a coherent whole; no other volume on this area has ever dealt with such a diverse range of subjects, and some of the countries examined have never before been the subject of a regional study.
