THE STORY: A quartet of black women spanning four generations makes up this heartwarming dramatic comedy. The four, plus the white woman friend of the youngest, come together to celebrate the matriarch's ninetieth birthday. It's a wild party, one t

The House of the Cylinder Jars details the archaeological excavations led by Patricia L. Crown at Pueblo Bonito’s famed Room 28 in Chaco Canyon in 2013. Originally excavated in 1896 by the Hyde Exploring Expedition, Room 28 gained notoriety for its incredible assemblage of 174 whole ceramic vessels. Crown and her team reopened Room 28 after she and Jeffrey Hurst discovered residues of chocolate in cylinder jar fragments from Pueblo Bonito in 2009. Their research revealed the first evidence of chocolate north of the US-Mexico border and possibly linked Chacoan rituals surrounding cacao use to Mesoamerica. The House of the Cylinder Jars documents the re-excavation of Room 28, and places it within the context of other rooms at Pueblo Bonito, and describes the ritual termination by fire of the materials stored in the room. The contributors also offer a modern interpretation of the construction and depositional histories of surrounding spaces at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon.

"The information, interpretations, and conclusions presented in this volume represent only one small portion of the outpouring of new ideas that have been produced by Dr. Timothy Pauketat's analysis of the Tract 15A and Dunham Tract archaeological remains. His research, which began in 1988, quickly produced a dissertation entitled The Dynamics of Pre-state Political Centralization in the North American Midcontinent followed by a theoretically oriented monograph, The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America, and numerous articles on the Cahokian sphere. Up until now, however, the structural and artifactual basis for Pauketat's innovative interpretations and new understanding of Cahokia have not been available to a wide audience. As Pauketat himself notes in his introduction, "significant advances in understanding past large-scale human organizations... require large archaeological samples" and additional advances demand that this information be made available to as wide an audience of fellow scholars as possible. This volume represents such a contribution to the present and future study of the great Cahokian center" -- From the publisher.

In this new volume, the results of Rex E. Gerald’s 1957 excavations at the Davis Ranch Site in southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro River Valley are reported in their entirety for the first time. Annotations to Gerald’s original manuscript in the archives of the Amerind Museum and newly written material place Gerald’s work in the context of what is currently known regarding the late thirteenth-century Kayenta diaspora and the relationship between Kayenta immigrants and the Salado phenomenon. Data presented by Gerald and other contributors identify the site as having been inhabited by people from the Kayenta region of northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah. The results of Gerald’s excavations and Archaeology Southwest’s San Pedro Preservation Project (1990–2001) indicate that the people of the Davis Ranch Site were part of a network of dispersed immigrant enclaves responsible for the origin and spread of Roosevelt Red Ware pottery, the key material marker of the Salado phenomenon. A companion volume to Charles Di Peso’s 1958 publication on the nearby Reeve Ruin, archaeologists working in the U.S. Southwest and other researchers interested in ancient population movements and their consequences will consider this work an essential case study.

For 60 years Qumran research has been focused on epigraphy, exegesis, and the historical sources of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The manuscripts are now published and accessible, and research is turning in a positive way to the archaeology of the site and its context. The time has come to provide researchers with a complete documentation. The excavator, Roland de Vaux, had given preliminary reports and a valuable interpretation made in the immediate aftermath of the excavations. Since considerable progress has been made in the archeology of Hellenistic and Roman Palestine, however, Qumran has to be reassessed and the interpretation objectively verified.Volume IIIA presents an up-to-date archaeological reconsideration: a shorter and more precise chronology, in which the earthquake of 31 BC is deleted; the concept of an Essene community is challenged, owing to the lack of a suitable infrastructure; the cemetery itself is connected with a Jewish diaspora scattered around the Dead Sea. Other facilities strengthen the Jewish character of the site, however. The function of Qumran fits better with the rites of a pilgrimage on the occasion of the festivals of Passover and Pentecost.In the second part, the peripheral Essene facilities, expanded around an earlier Hellenistic center, are analyzed and described. The essay seeks to outline their internal consistency and to determine their function. The restoration of a stratigraphy, by cross-checking the excavation archives, leads to a redistribution of pottery in four levels in a more precise chronology.The reconsideration makes use of anthropology, which opens up the archaeological field and throws additional light on the manuscripts.