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The result of nearly twenty years of interdisciplinary research, this volume contributes to the archaeological and paleoenvironmental knowledge of an important but lightly investigated hyperarid coastline at the heart of the Sonoran Desert. Focused on the coast near Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico, Coastal Foragers of the Gran Desierto examines the diverse groups occupying the coast for salt, abundant food sources, and shells for ornament manufacturing. The archaeological patterns demonstrated by the data gathered lead to the conclusion that, since ancient times, this coastal landscape was not a marginal zone but rather an important source of food and trade goods, and a pilgrimage destination that influenced broad and diverse communities across the Sonoran Desert and beyond. Contributors Jenny L. Adams Karen R. Adams Thomas Bowen Tessa L. Branyan Bill Broyles Richard C. Brusca David L. Dettman Michael S. Foster Gary Huckleberry Jonathan B. Mabry Natalia Martínez-Tagüeña Richard J. Martynec Douglas R. Mitchell Kirsten Rowell Melissa R. Schwan M. Steven Shackley R. J. Sliva Kayla B. Worthey

Drawing on a mix of collaborative autoethnography, secondary literature, interviews with leading improvisers, and personal anecdotal material, Jamming the Classroom discusses the pedagogy of musical improvisation as a vehicle for teaching, learning, and enacting social justice. Heble and Stewart write that to “jam the classroom” is to argue for a renewed understanding of improvisation as both a musical and a social practice; to activate the knowledge and resources associated with improvisational practices in an expression of noncompliance with dominant orders of knowledge production; and to recognize in the musical practices of aggrieved communities something far from the reaches of conventional forms of institutionalized power, yet something equally powerful, urgent, and expansive. With this definition of jamming the classroom in mind, Heble and Stewart argue that even as improvisation gains recognition within mainstream institutions (including classrooms in universities), it needs to be understood as a critique of dominant institutionalized assumptions and epistemic orders. Suggesting a closer consideration of why musical improvisation has been largely expunged from dominant models of pedagogical inquiry in both classrooms and communities, this book asks what it means to theorize the pedagogy of improvised music in relation to public programs of action, debate, and critical practice.

For over 10,000 years, earth ovens (semi-subterranean, layered arrangements of heated rocks, packing material, and food stuffs capped by earth) have played important economic and social roles for Indigenous peoples living across the arid landscapes of western North America. From hunter-gatherers to formative horticulturalists, sedentary farmers, and contemporary Indigenous groups, earth ovens have been used to convert inedible plants into digestible food, fiber, and beverages. The remains of earth ovens range from tight, circular clusters of burned rocks, generally labeled “hearths” by archaeologists, to the massive accumulations of fire-cracked rock referred to as earth oven facilities, roasting pits, or burned rock middens. Remnants of these oven forms are common across the arid and semi-arid landscapes that stretch from Texas to California and south into Mexico. Despite the ubiquity of earth ovens from late Paleoindian times until today, and their broad spatial and cultural distribution, these features remain an under-studied aspect of Indigenous lifeways. This edited volume explores the longevity and diversity of earth oven baking and examines the subsistence strategies, technological paradigms, and social contexts within which earth ovens functioned. It is the first study to cover such a broad geographic area, reflecting an array of promising research that highlights ongoing efforts to understand the archaeological record of earth ovens.

University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 135 This volume is dedicated to studies of plainwares—the undecorated ceramics that make up the majority of prehistoric ceramic assemblages worldwide. Early analyses of ceramics focused on changes in decorative design elements to establish chronologies and cultural associations. With the development of archaeometric techniques that allow direct dating of potsherds and identification of their elemental composition and residues, plainwares now provide a new source of information about the timing, manufacture, distribution, and use of ceramics. This book investigates plainwares from the far west, stretching into the Great Basin and the northwestern and southwestern edges of Arizona. Contributors use and explain recent analytical methods, including neutron activation, electron microprobe analysis, and thin-section optical mineralogy. They examine native ceramic traditions and how they were influenced by the Spanish mission system, and they consider the pros and cons of past approaches to ware typology, presenting a vision of how plainware analysis can be improved by ignoring the traditional “typological” approach of early ceramicists working with decorated wares. This work provides a much-needed update to plainware studies, with new hypotheses and data that will help set the stage for future research.

In Art in the Pre-Hispanic Southwest: An Archaeology of Native American Cultures, Radosław Palonka reconstructs the development of pre-Hispanic Native American cultures and tribes in the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Palonka also examines the wider context through the lenses of settlement studies and social transformation, while paying close attention to the material manifestations of pre-Hispanic beliefs, including intricately decorated ceramics and rock art iconography in paintings and petroglyphs.

This approachable book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series is a comprehensive synthesis of Northwest Mexico from the US border to the Mesoamerican frontier. Filling a vital gap in the regional literature, it serves as an essential reference not only for those interested in the specific history of this area of Mexico but western North America writ large. A period-by-period review of approximately 14,000 years reveals the dynamic connections that knitted together societies inhabiting the Sea of Cortez coast, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, and the Sierra Madre Occidental. Networks of interaction spanned these diverse ecological, topographical, and cultural terrains in the millennia following the demise of the megafauna. The authors provide a fresh perspective that refutes depictions of the Northwest as a simple filter or conduit of happenings to the north or south, and they highlight the role local motivations and dynamics played in facilitating continental-scale processes.

The phrase'southwestern US/northwestern Mexico archaeology'tends to evoke images of multistoried villages and cliff dwellings. But on the eastern periphery of the Southwest, where mesas and mountains give way to vast grasslands, other types of villages once thrived. In this volume, archaeologists Jamie Clark and John Speth document the lives and lifeways of the people who inhabited two of these villages: Henderson and Bloom Mound. The villagers hunted bison on the plains and exchanged meat and hides with Puebloan peoples for pottery, turquoise, marine shells, and other goods. The origins of these close social and economic ties between bison hunters and village farmers, often referred to as “Plains-Pueblo interaction,” have intrigued anthropologists for generations. The excavations at Henderson and Bloom Mound provide fascinating new insights into when, how, and why these relationships came about. Summarizing results from eight seasons of research, Clark and Speth document human burials and associated grave offerings from the two sites. They discuss evidence for pathologies and trauma, raising questions about the nature and causes of violence that led to the demise of Henderson and Bloom Mound, and the abandonment of many other farming-hunting communities in the surrounding region.

This book, in two volumes, breathes fresh air empirically, methodologically, and theoretically into understanding the rich ceremonial lives, the philosophical-religious knowledge, and the impressive material feats and labor organization that distinguish Hopewell Indians of central Ohio and neighboring regions during the first centuries CE. The first volume defines cross-culturally, for the first time, the “ritual drama” as a genre of social performance. It reconstructs and compares parts of 14 such dramas that Hopewellian and other Woodland-period peoples performed in their ceremonial centers to help the soul-like essences of their deceased make the journey to an afterlife. The second volume builds and critiques ten formal cross-cultural models of “personhood” and the “self” and infers the nature of Scioto Hopewell people's ontology. Two facets of their ontology are found to have been instrumental in their creating the intercommunity alliances and cooperation and gathering the labor required to construct their huge, multicommunity ceremonial centers: a relational, collective concept of the self defined by the ethical quality of the relationships one has with other beings, and a concept of multiple soul-like essences that compose a human being and can be harnessed strategically to create familial-like ethical bonds of cooperation among individuals and communities. The archaeological reconstructions of Hopewellian ritual dramas and concepts of personhood and the self, and of Hopewell people's strategic uses of these, are informed by three large surveys of historic Woodland and Plains Indians'narratives, ideas, and rites about journeys to afterlives, the creatures who inhabit the cosmos, and the nature and functions of soul-like essences, coupled with rich contextual archaeological and bioarchaeological-taphonomic analyses. The bioarchaeological-taphonomic method of l'anthropologie de terrain, new to North American archaeology,is introduced and applied. In all, the research in this book vitalizes a vision of an anthropology committed to native logic and motivation and skeptical of the imposition of Western world views and categories onto native peoples.

Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing examines the ways in which the Akimel O'odham (“River People”) and their ancestors, the Huhugam, adapted to economic, political, and environmental constraints imposed by federal Indian policy, the Indian Bureau, and an encroaching settler population in Arizona's Gila River Valley. Fundamental to O'odham resilience was their connection to their sense of peoplehood and their himdag (“lifeway”), which culminated in the restoration of their water rights and a revitalization of their Indigenous culture. Author Jennifer Bess examines the Akimel O'odham's worldview, which links their origins with a responsibility to farm the Gila River Valley and to honor their history of adaptation and obligations as “world-builders”—co-creators of an evermore life-sustaining environment and participants in flexible networks of economic exchange. Bess considers this worldview in context of the Huhugam–Akimel O'odham agricultural economy over more than a thousand years. Drawing directly on Akimel O'odham traditional ecological knowledge, innovations, and interpretive strategies in archives and interviews, Bess shows how the Akimel O'odham engaged in agricultural economy for the sake of their lifeways, collective identity, enduring future, and actualization of the values modeled in their sacred stories. Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing highlights the values of adaptation, innovation, and co-creation fundamental to Akimel O'odham lifeways and chronicles the contributions the Akimel O'odham have made to American history and to the history of agriculture. The book will be of interest to scholars of Indigenous, American Southwestern, and agricultural history.

Provides diverse content covering the gamut of law subjects, including current information on nearly 5,000 legal topics.

This second edition of the multi-volume work goes beyond the comprehensive and systematic coverage of archaeology that appears in the first edition. The field of archaeology continues to grow and the collaborations between archaeologists and researchers in other areas - environmental studies, landscape studies, art history, demography, biomedicine, chemistry, museum specialists, etc. - continues to grow. This second edition builds on the massive collection of information and research from the first edition by adding new entries as well as updating the existing entries.The entries in this encyclopedia range from succinct summaries of specific sites and the scientific aspects of archaeological enquiry to detailed discussions of archaeological concepts, theories and methods, and from investigations into the social, ethical and political dimensions of archaeological practice to biographies of leading archaeologists from throughout the world. The different forms of archaeology are explored, along with the techniques used for each and the challenges, concerns and issues that face archaeologists today.This compendium is both a print reference and an online reference work. One of the encyclopedia's major innovations is that it harnesses the capabilities of an online environment, enhancing both the presentation and dissemination of information. Most particularly, the continuous updating allowed by an online environment should ensure that the Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology is a definitive reference work for archaeology and archaeologists.

Ancient Southwestern Mortuary Practices chronicles the modal patterns, diversity, and change of ancient mortuary practices from across the US Southwest and northwest Mexico over four thousand years of Prehispanic occupation. The volume summarizes new methodological approaches and theoretical issues concerning the meaning and importance of burial practices to different peoples at different times throughout the ancient Greater Southwest. Chapters focus on normative mortuary patterns, the range of variability of mortuary patterns, how the contexts of burials reflect temporal shifts in ideology, and the ways in which mortuary rituals, behaviors, and funerary treatments fulfill specific societal needs and reflect societal beliefs. Contributors analyze extensive datasets—archived and accessible on the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR)—from various subregions, structurally standardized and integrated with respect to biological and cultural data. Ancient Southwestern Mortuary Practices, together with the full datasets preserved in tDAR, is a rich resource for comparative research on mortuary ritual for indigenous descendant groups, cultural resource managers, and archaeologists and bioarchaeologists in the Greater Southwest and other regions. Contributors: Nancy J. Akins, Jessica I. Cerezo-Román, Mona C. Charles, Patricia A. Gilman, Lynne Goldstein, Alison K. Livesay, Dawn Mulhern, Ann Stodder, M. Scott Thompson, Sharon Wester, Catrina Banks Whitley

Abnormal burial practices have long been a source of fascination and debate within the fields of mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology. The Odd, the Unusual, and the Strange investigates an unparalleled geographic and temporal range of burials that differ from the usual customs of their broader societies, emphasizing the importance of a holistic, context-driven approach to these intriguing cases. From an Andean burial dating to 3500 BC to mummified bodies interred in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily, during the twentieth century, the studies in this volume cross the globe and span millennia. The unusual cases explored here include Native American cemeteries in Illinois, “vampire” burials in medieval Poland, and a mass grave of decapitated soldiers in ancient China. Moving away from the simplistic assumption that these burials represent people who were considered deviant in society, contributors demonstrate the importance of an integrated biocultural approach in determining why an individual was buried in an unusual way. Drawing on historical, sociocultural, archaeological, and biological data, this volume critically evaluates the binary of “typical” versus “atypical” burials. It expands our understanding of the continuum of variation within mortuary practices, helping researchers better interpret burial evidence to learn about the people and cultures of the past. A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen

Color attracts attention, evokes emotions, conveys information, carries complex meanings, and makes things beautiful. Color is so meaningful, in fact, that research on the color choices of Ancestral Pueblo people has the potential to deepen our understanding of religious, social, and economic change in the ancient Southwest. This volume explores museum collections and more than a century of archaeological research to create the first systematic understanding of the many ways Ancestral Pueblo people chose specific colors through time and space to add meaning and visual appeal to their lives. Beginning with the technical and practical concerns of acquiring pigments and using them to create paints, the authors explore how connections to landscapes and sacred places are embodied by many colorful materials. Contributors examine the development of polychromes and their juxtaposition with black-on-white vessels; document how color was used in rock paintings and architecture; and consider the inherent properties of materials, arguing that shell, minerals, and stone were valued not only for color but for other visual properties as well. The book concludes by considering the technological, economic, social, and ideological factors at play and demonstrates the significant role color played in aesthetic choices.

Considers the Native American abandonment of the South Carolina coast A prevailing enigma in American archaeology is why vast swaths of land in the Southeast and Southwest were abandoned between AD 1200 and 1500. The most well-known abandonments occurred in the Four Corners and Mimbres areas of the Southwest and the central Mississippi valley in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in southern Arizona and the Ohio Valley during the fifteenth century. In Megadrought in the Carolinas: The Archaeology of Mississippian Collapse, Abandonment, and Coalescence, John S. Cable demonstrates through the application of innovative ceramic analysis that yet another fifteenth-century abandonment event took place across an area of some 34.5 million acres centered on the South Carolina coast. Most would agree that these sweeping changes were at least in part the consequence of prolonged droughts associated with a period of global warming known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly. Cable strengthens this inference by showing that these events correspond exactly with the timing of two different geographic patterns of megadrought as defined by modern climate models. Cable extends his study by testing the proposition that the former residents of the coastal zone migrated to surrounding interior regions where the effects of drought were less severe. Abundant support for this expectation is found in the archaeology of these regions, including evidence of accelerated population growth, crowding, and increased regional hostilities. Another important implication of immigration is the eventual coalescence of ethnic and/or culturally different social groups and the ultimate transformation of societies into new cultural syntheses. Evidence for this process is not yet well documented in the Southeast, but Cable draws on his familiarity with the drought-related Puebloan intrusions into the Hohokam Core Area of southern Arizona during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to suggest strategies for examining coalescence in the Southeast. The narrative concludes by addressing the broad implications of late prehistoric societal collapse for today's human-propelled global warming era that portends similar but much more long-lasting consequences.

Based on a study of more than 200 burials at the US site of La Ciudad (725 AD to 1100 AD), this is an exploration of the meaning of burials as statements on the nature of power relations and social structure. Focusing on the inequalities between the distribution of grave goods and other aspects of material culture, the author argues against trying

The American Southwest is one of the most important archaeological regions in the world, with many of the best-studied examples of hunter-gatherer and village-based societies. Research has been carried out in the region for well over a century, and during this time the Southwest has repeatedly stood at the forefront of the development of new archaeological methods and theories. Moreover, research in the Southwest has long been a key site of collaboration between archaeologists, ethnographers, historians, linguists, biological anthropologists, and indigenous intellectuals. This volume marks the most ambitious effort to take stock of the empirical evidence, theoretical orientations, and historical reconstructions of the American Southwest. Over seventy top scholars have joined forces to produce an unparalleled survey of state of archaeological knowledge in the region. Themed chapters on particular methods and theories are accompanied by comprehensive overviews of the culture histories of particular archaeological sequences, from the initial Paleoindian occupation, to the rise of a major ritual center in Chaco Canyon, to the onset of the Spanish and American imperial projects. The result is an essential volume for any researcher working in the region as well as any archaeologist looking to take the pulse of contemporary trends in this key research tradition.

Life beyond the Boundaries explores identity formation on the edges of the ancient Southwest. Focusing on some of the more poorly understood regions, including the Jornada Mogollon, the Gallina, and the Pimería Alta, the authors use methods drawn from material culture science, anthropology, and history to investigate themes related to the construction of social identity along the perimeters of the American Southwest. Through an archaeological lens, the volume examines the social experiences of people who lived in edge regions. Through mobility and the development of extensive social networks, people living in these areas were introduced to the ideas and practices of other cultural groups. As their spatial distances from core areas increased, the degree to which they participated in the economic, social, political, and ritual practices of ancestral core areas increasingly varied. As a result, the social identities of people living in edge zones were often—though not always—fluid and situational. Drawing on an increase of available information and bringing new attention to understudied areas, the book will be of interest to scholars of Southwestern archaeology and other researchers interested in the archaeology of low-populated and decentralized regions and identity formation. Life beyond the Boundaries considers the various roles that edge regions played in local and regional trajectories of the prehistoric and protohistoric Southwest and how place influenced the development of social identity. Contributors: Lewis Borck, Dale S. Brenneman, Jeffery J. Clark, Severin Fowles, Patricia A. Gilman, Lauren E. Jelinek, Myles R. Miller, Barbara J. Mills, Matthew A. Peeples, Kellam Throgmorton, James T. Watson