Discover early Native American food traditions through the eyes and experiences of those who lived it.

Indianapolis Monthly is the Circle City’s essential chronicle and guide, an indispensable authority on what’s new and what’s news. Through coverage of politics, crime, dining, style, business, sports, and arts and entertainment, each issue offers compelling narrative stories and lively, urbane coverage of Indy’s cultural landscape.

In this book, Brian Hayden provides the first comprehensive, theoretical work on the history of feasting in pre-industrial societies. As an important barometer of cultural change, feasting is at the forefront of theoretical developments in archaeology. The Power of Feasts chronicles the evolution of the practice from its first perceptible prehistoric presence to modern industrial times. This study explores recurring patterns in the dynamics of feasts as well as linkages to other aspects of culture such as food, personhood, cognition, power, politics, and economics. Analyzing detailed ethnographic and archaeological observations from a wide variety of cultures, including Oceania and Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Eurasia, Hayden illuminates the role of feasts as an invaluable insight into the social and political structures of past societies.

“Lyricism with a punk rock edge.” —Mary Helen Specht, author of Migratory Animals When tragedy strikes, Cassidy, a cam girl living in Southern California, must return to the small West Virginia town she left behind. Cassidy likes her job getting naked for men on camera, though she prefers sex with women. She never came out to her family or friends back in her home state—not about her sexuality and certainly not about her sex work. Now, she must figure out how to hold on to the life she’s built for herself while picking up the pieces of her fractured family. As Cassidy's story unfolds, we glimpse into the lives of the strong, complicated women who came before her: Jane, the sheltered daughter of farmers, escapes West Virginia for Washington, DC to work as a Government Girl for the FBI during World War II, until a fateful mistake threatens her future. Paloma, a Fulbright Scholar, journeys to newly Westernized Prague—only to fall for an idealistic but safe man from West Virginia. Though worlds and generations apart, all three search for meaning as they face impending motherhood and the pull to return home to rural Appalachia.

The contributors to this book introduce new ways to study shell-matrix sites, ranging from the geochemical analysis of shellfish to the interpretation of human remains buried within. Drawing upon examples from around the world, this is one of the only books to offer a global perspective on the archaeology of shell-matrix sites.