A photographic and multidisciplinary study of one of America’s last undeveloped—and most endangered—landscapes, edited by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. A vast expanse of rock formations, sand dunes, and sagebrush in central and southwest Wyoming, the little-known Red Desert is one of the last undeveloped landscapes in the United States, as well as one of the most endangered. It is a last refuge for many species of wildlife. Sitting atop one of North America's largest untapped reservoirs of natural gas, the Red Desert is a magnet for energy producers who are damaging its complex and fragile ecosystem in a headlong race to open a new domestic source of energy and reap the profits. To capture and preserve what makes the Red Desert both valuable and scientifically and historically interesting, writer Annie Proulx and photographer Martin Stupich enlisted a team of scientists and scholars to join them in exploring the Red Desert through many disciplines: geology, hydrology, paleontology, ornithology, zoology, entomology, botany, climatology, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and history. Their essays reveal many fascinating, often previously unknown facts about the Red Desert—everything from the rich pocket habitats that support an amazing diversity of life to engrossing stories of the transcontinental migrations that began in prehistory and continue today on I-80—which bisects the Red Desert. Complemented by Martin Stupich’s photo-essay, which portrays both the beauty and the devastation that characterize the region today, Red Desert bears eloquent witness to a unique landscape in its final years as a wild place./

A comprehensive revision of the classic prehistory of the North American high plains.

Plains Indian biographic rock art can be “read” by those knowledgeable in its lexicon. Presented is a lexicon of imagery, conventions, and symbols used by Plains Indians to communicate their warfare and social narratives. The reader is introduced to Plains Indian “warrior” art in all media, biographic art as picture writing is explained, and the lexicon is described, providing a pictographic “dictionary,” and explains conventions and connotations. Finally, it illustrates four key examples of how these narratives are read by the observer. Familiarity with the lexicon will enable interested scholars and laypersons to understand what are otherwise enigmatic rock art drawings found from Calgary, Alberta through ten U.S. states, and into the Mexican state of Coahuila.

The Great Plains has been central to academic and popular visions of Native American warfare, largely because the region’s well-documented violence was so central to the expansion of Euroamerican settlement. However, social violence has deep roots on the Plains beyond this post-Contact perception, and these roots have not been systematically examined through archaeology before. War was part, and perhaps an important part, of the process of ethnogenesis that helped to define tribal societies in the region, and it affected many other aspects of human lives there. In Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains, anthropologists who study sites across the Plains critically examine regional themes of warfare from pre-Contact and post-Contact periods and assess how war shaped human societies of the region. Contributors to this volume offer a bird’s-eye view of warfare on the Great Plains, consider artistic evidence of the role of war in the lives of indigenous hunter-gatherers on the Plains prior to and during the period of Euroamerican expansion, provide archaeological discussions of fortification design and its implications, and offer archaeological and other information on the larger implications of war in human history. Bringing together research from across the region, this volume provides unprecedented evidence of the effects of war on tribal societies. Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains is a valuable primer for regional warfare studies and the archaeology of the Great Plains as a whole. Contributors: Peter Bleed, Richard R. Drass, David H. Dye, John Greer, Mavis Greer, Eric Hollinger, Ashley Kendell, James D. Keyser, Albert M. LeBeau III, Mark D. Mitchell, Stephen M. Perkins, Bryon Schroeder, Douglas Scott, Linea Sundstrom, Susan C. Vehik