Search

This volume brings together a range of contributors with different and hybrid academic backgrounds to explore, through bioarchaeology, the past human experience in the territories that span Mesoamerica.This handbook provides systematic bioarchaeological coverage of skeletal research in the ancient Mesoamericas. It offers an integrated collection of engrained, bioculturally embedded explorations of relevant and timely topics, such as population shifts, lifestyles, body concepts, beauty, gender, health, foodways, social inequality, and violence. The additional treatment of new methodologies, local cultural settings, and theoretic frames rounds out the scope of this handbook. The selection of 36 chapter contributions invites readers to engage with the human condition in ancient and not-so-ancient Mesoamerica and beyond.The Routledge Handbook of Mesoamerican Bioarchaeology is addressed to an audience of Mesoamericanists, students, and researchers in bioarchaeology and related fields. It serves as a comprehensive reference for courses on Mesoamerica, bioarchaeology, and Native American studies.

Archaeology: The Science of the Human Past provides students with a thorough understanding of what archaeology is and how it operates and familiarizes them with fundamental archaeological concepts and methods.This volume introduces the basic components of archaeology, including sites, artifacts, ecofacts, remote sensing, and excavation. It discusses how archaeologists obtain and classify information and how they analyze this information to formulate and test models of what happened in the past. Cultural resource management and the laws and regulations that deal with archaeology around the world are described. Archaeology is placed in the context of contemporary issues, from environmental problems to issues affecting Indigenous populations. The sixth edition has been updated and simplified to create a more streamlined volume to meet the needs of the students and teachers for whom it is designed, reflecting the latest developments in archaeological techniques and approaches.Allowing students to understand the theoretical and scientific aspects of archaeology and how various archaeological perspectives and techniques help us understand how and what we know about the past, Archaeology: The Science of the Human Past is an ideal introduction to archaeology.

What can we learn about the ancient landscapes of our world, and how can those lessons improve our future in the landscapes that we all inhabit? Those questions are addressed in this book, through a practical framework of concepts and methods, combined with detailed case studies around the world.The chapters explore the range of physical and social attributes that have shaped and re-shaped our landscapes through time. International authors contributed the latest results of investigating ancient landscapes (or'palaeolandscapes') in diverse settings of tropical forests, deserts, river deltas, remote islands, coastal zones, and continental interiors. The case studies embrace a broadly accommodating approach of combining archaeological evidence with other avenues of research in earth sciences, biology, and social relations. Individually and in concert, the chapters offer new perspectives on what the world's palaeolandscapes looked like, how people lived in these places, and how communities have engaged with long-term change in their natural and cultural environments through successive centuries and millennia. The lessons are paramount for building responsible strategies and policies today and into the future, noting that many of these issues from the past have gained more urgency today.This book reaches across archaeology, ecology, geography, and other studies of human-environment relations that will appeal to general readers. Specialists and students in these fields will find extra value in the primary datasets and in the new ideas and perspectives. Furthermore, this book provides unique examples from the past, toward understanding the workings of sustainable landscape systems.

Bioarchaeology covers the history and general theory of the field plus the recovery and laboratory treatment of human remains.Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains in context from an archaeological and anthropological perspective. The book explores, through numerous case studies, how the ways a society deals with their dead can reveal a great deal about that society, including its religious, political, economic, and social organizations. It details recovery methods and how, once recovered, human remains can be analyzed to reveal details about the funerary system of the subject society and inform on a variety of other issues, such as health, demography, disease, workloads, mobility, sex and gender, and migration. Finally, the book highlights how bioarchaeological techniques can be used in contemporary forensic settings and in investigations of genocide and war crimes.In Bioarchaeology, theories, principles, and scientific techniques are laid out in a clear, understandable way, and students of archaeology at undergraduate and graduate levels will find this an excellent guide to the field.

From the bestselling author of 1177 B.C., an accessible primer to the archaeologist's craftAn archaeologist with more than thirty seasons of excavation experience, Eric H. Cline has conducted fieldwork around the world, from Greece and Crete to Egypt, Israel, and Jordan. In Digging Deeper, Cline answers the questions archaeologists are most frequently asked, such as: How do you know where to dig? How are excavations actually done? How do you know how old something is? Who gets to keep what is found? How do you know what people from the past ate, wore, and looked like? Adapted from Cline's acclaimed book Three Stones Make a Wall, this lively little volume is brimming with insights and practical advice about how archaeology really works. Whether you are an armchair archaeologist or embarking on your first excavation, Digging Deeper is an essential primer on the art of the dig.

The Arctic rim of North America presents one of the most daunting environments for humans. Cold and austere, it is lacking in plants but rich in marine mammals-primarily the ringed seal, walrus, and bowhead whale. In this book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series, the authors track the history of cultural innovations in the Arctic and Subarctic for the past 12,000 years, including the development of sophisticated architecture, watercraft, fur clothing, hunting technology, and worldviews. Climate change is linked to many of the successes and failures of its inhabitants; warming or cooling periods led to periods of resource abundance or collapse, and in several instances to long-distance migrations. At its western and eastern margins, the Arctic also experienced the impact of Asian and European world systems, from that of the Norse in the East to the Russians in the Bering Strait.

With cultural remains dated unequivocally to 13,000 calendar years ago, Dry Creek assumed major importance upon its excavation and study by W. Roger Powers. The site was the first to conclusively demonstrate a human presence that could be dated to the same time as the Bering Land Bridge. As Powers and his team studied the site, their work verified initial expectations. Unfortunately, the research was never fully published.Dry Creek: The Archaeology and Paleoecology of a Late Pleistocene Alaskan Hunting Camp is ready to take its rightful place in the ongoing research into the peopling of the Americas. Containing the original research, this book also updates and reconsiders Dry Creek in light of more recent discoveries and analysis.

This volume seeks to foreground a “borderless” history and geography of South, Southeast, and East Asian littoral zones that would be maritime-focused, and thereby explore the ancient connections and dynamics of interaction that favoured the encounters among the cultures found throughout the region stretching from the Indian Ocean littorals to the Western Pacific, from the early historical period to the present. Transcending the artificial boundaries of macro-regions and nation-states, and trying to bridge the arbitrary divide between (inherently cosmopolitan) “high” cultures (e.g. Sanskritic, Sinitic, or Islamicate) and “local” or “indigenous” cultures, this multidisciplinary volume explores the metaphor of Monsoon Asia as a vast geo-environmental area inhabited by speakers of numerous language phyla, which for millennia has formed an integrated system of littorals where crops, goods, ideas, cosmologies, and ritual practices circulated on the sea-routes governed by the seasonal monsoon winds. The collective body of work presented in the volume describes Monsoon Asia as an ideal theatre for circulatory dynamics of cultural transfer, interaction, acceptance, selection, and avoidance, and argues that, despite the rich ethnic, linguistic and sociocultural diversity, a shared pattern of values, norms, and cultural models is discernible throughout the region.

Resistance to malaria. Blue eyes. Lactose tolerance. What do all of these traits have in common? Every one of them has emerged in the last 10,000 years. Scientists have long believed that the'great leap forward'that occurred some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago in Europe marked end of significant biological evolution in humans. In this stunningly original account of our evolutionary history, top scholars Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending reject this conventional wisdom and reveal that the human species has undergone a storm of genetic change much more recently. Human evolution in fact accelerated after civilization arose, they contend, and these ongoing changes have played a pivotal role in human history. They argue that biology explains the expansion of the Indo-Europeans, the European conquest of the Americas, and European Jews'rise to intellectual prominence. In each of these cases, the key was recent genetic change: adult milk tolerance in the early Indo-Europeans that allowed for a new way of life, increased disease resistance among the Europeans settling America, and new versions of neurological genes among European Jews. Ranging across subjects as diverse as human domestication, Neanderthal hybridization, and IQ tests, Cochran and Harpending's analysis demonstrates convincingly that human genetics have changed and can continue to change much more rapidly than scientists have previously believed. A provocative and fascinating new look at human evolution that turns conventional wisdom on its head, The 10,000 Year Explosion reveals the ongoing interplay between culture and biology in the making of the human race.