As the foundations of the modern world were being laid at the beginning of the 19th century, Annapolis, Maryland, identified itself as the Ancient City. This unusual appellation has served Annapolis into the present as a city that has consistently defined and redefined for itself what being ancient means. The process of historical recognition and preservation that has played out in Annapolis provides valuable insights into the way modern Americans in general have come to know and use the past. Though often conceived to be in opposition, modernity and tradition can be paired as cultural strategies that allow the modern world to be articulated with the tradition it hoped to replace. The multiple histories and historic landscapes derived from archaeological investigations in Annapolis are presented to show that the physical world below the surface of the city has been defined by constructions of modernity in tandem with the survival of certain traditions.

Arizona’s San Pedro Valley is a natural corridor through which generations of native peoples have traveled for more than 12,000 years, and today many tribes consider it to be part of their ancestral homeland. This book explores the multiple cultural meanings, historical interpretations, and cosmological values of this extraordinary region by combining archaeological and historical sources with the ethnographic perspectives of four contemporary tribes: Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Zuni, and San Carlos Apache. Previous research in the San Pedro Valley has focused on scientific archaeology and documentary history, with a conspicuous absence of indigenous voices, yet Native Americans maintain oral traditions that provide an anthropological context for interpreting the history and archaeology of the valley. The San Pedro Ethnohistory Project was designed to redress this situation by visiting archaeological sites, studying museum collections, and interviewing tribal members to collect traditional histories. The information it gathered is arrayed in this book along with archaeological and documentary data to interpret the histories of Native American occupation of the San Pedro Valley. This work provides an example of the kind of interdisciplinary and politically conscious work made possible when Native Americans and archaeologists collaborate to study the past. As a methodological case study, it clearly articulates how scholars can work with Native American stakeholders to move beyond confrontations over who “owns” the past, yielding a more nuanced, multilayered, and relevant archaeology.

"Using Anderson Mesa and Homol'ovi as case studies, Bernardini presents architectural and demographic data suggesting that the fourteenth century occupation of these regions was characterized by population flux and diversity consistent with the serial migration model." "Bernardini's work clearly demonstrates that studies of cultural affiliation must take into account the fluid nature of population movements and identity in the prehistoric landscape. It takes a decisive step toward better understanding the major demographic change that occurred on the Colorado Plateau from 1275 to 1400 and presents a strategy for improving the reconstruction of cultural identity in the past."--BOOK JACKET.

"At last, southeastern archaeology as history of people, not just 'cultures'."--Patricia Galloway, Mississippi Department of Archives and History Rich with the objects of the day-to-day lives of illiterate or common people in the southeastern United States, this book offers an archaeological reevaluation of history itself: where it is, what it is, and how it came to be. Through clothing, cooking, eating, tool making, and other mundane forms of social expression and production, traditions were altered daily in encounters between missionaries and natives, between planters and slaves, and between native leaders and native followers. As this work demonstrates, these "unwritten texts" proved to be potent ingredients in the larger-scale social and political events that shaped how peoples, cultures, and institutions came into being. These developments point to a common social process whereby men and women negotiated about their views of the world and--whether slaves, natives, or Europeans--created history. Bridging the pre-Columbian and colonial past, this book incorporates current theories that cut across disciplines to appeal to anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists. CONTENTS 1. A New Tradition in Archaeology, by Timothy R. Pauketat 2. African-American Tradition and Community in the Antebellum South, by Brian W. Thomas 3. Resistance and Accommodation in Apalachee Province, by John F. Scarry 4. Manipulating Bodies and Emerging Traditions at the Los Adaes Presidio, by Diana DiPaolo Loren 5. Negotiated Tradition? Native American Pottery in the Mission Period in La Florida, by Rebecca Saunders 6. Creek and Pre-Creek Revisited, by Cameron B. Wesson 7. Gender, Tradition, and the Negotiation of Power Relationships in Southern Appalachian Chiefdoms, by Lynne P. Sullivan and Christopher B. Rodning 8. Historical Science or Silence? Toward a Historical Anthropology of Mississippian Political Culture, by Mark A. Rees 9. Cahokian Change and the Authority of Tradition, by Susan M. Alt 10. The Historical-Processual Development of Late Woodland Societies, by Michael S. Nassaney 11. A Tradition of Discontinuity: American Bottom Early and Middle Woodland Culture History Reexamined, by Andrew C. Fortier 12. Interpreting Discontinuity and Historical Process in Midcontinental Late Archaic and Early Woodland Societies, by Thomas E. Emerson and Dale L. McElrath 13. Hunter-Gatherers and Traditions of Resistance, by Kenneth E. Sassaman 14. Traditions as Cultural Production: Implications for Contemporary Archaeological Research, by Kent G. Lightfoot 15. Concluding Thoughts on Tradition, History, and Archaeology, by Timothy R. Pauketat Timothy R. Pauketat, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana, is the author of The Ascent of Chiefs and coeditor of Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World.

The first text to address the contentious issues raised by the pursuit of anthropology and archaeology in the world today. Calls into question the traditional, sometimes difficult relationship between western scholars and the contemporary cultures and peoples they study and can easily disturb.

This book examines knowledge traditions that held together the fluid and overlapping maritime worlds of the Indian Ocean in the premodern period, as evident in the material and archaeological record. It breaks new ground by shifting the focus from studying cross-pollination of ideas from textual sources to identifying this exchange of ideas in archaeological and historical documentation. The themes covered in the book include conceptualization of the seas and maritime landscapes in Sanskrit, Arabic and Chinese narratives; materiality of knowledge production as indicated in the archaeological record of communities where writing on stone first appears; and anchoring the coasts, not only through an understanding of littoral shrines and ritual landscapes, but also by an analysis of religious imagery on coins, more so at the time of the introduction of new religions such as Islam in the Indian Ocean around the eighth century. This volume will be of great interest to researchers and scholars of archaeology, anthropology, museum and heritage studies, Indian Ocean studies, maritime studies, South and Southeast Asian studies, religious studies and cultural studies.

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University Ruins are as central to the image of the American Southwest as are its mountains and deserts, and antiquity is a key element of modern southwestern heritage. Yet prior to the mid-nineteenth century this rich legacy was largely unknown to the outside world. While military expeditions first brought word of enigmatic relics to the eastern United States, the new intellectual frontier was seized by archaeologists, who used the results of their southwestern explorations to build a foundation for the scientific study of the American past. In Ruins and Rivals, James Snead helps us understand the historical development of archaeology in the Southwest from the 1890s to the 1920s and its relationship with the popular conception of the region. He examines two major research traditions: expeditions dispatched from the major eastern museums and those supported by archaeological societies based in the Southwest itself. By comparing the projects of New York's American Museum of Natural History with those of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles and the Santa Fe-based School of American Archaeology, he illustrates the way that competition for status and prestige shaped the way that archaeological remains were explored and interpreted. The decades-long competition between institutions and their advocates ultimately created an agenda for Southwest archaeology that has survived into modern times. Snead takes us back to the days when the field was populated by relic hunters and eastern "museum men" who formed uneasy alliances among themselves and with western boosters who used archaeology to advance their own causes. Richard Wetherill, Frederic Ward Putnam, Charles Lummis, and other colorful characters all promoted their own archaeological endeavors before an audience that included wealthy patrons, museum administrators, and other cultural figures. The resulting competition between scholarly and public interests shifted among museum halls, legislative chambers, and the drawing rooms of Victorian America but always returned to the enigmatic ruins of Chaco Canyon, Bandelier, and Mesa Verde. Ruins and Rivals contains a wealth of anecdotal material that conveys the flavor of digs and discoveries, scholars and scoundrels, tracing the origins of everything from national monuments to "Santa Fe Style." It rekindles the excitement of discovery, illustrating the role that archaeology played in creating the southwestern "past" and how that image of antiquity continues to exert its influence today.