Between AD 900-1600, the native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States conceived and executed one of the greatest artistic traditions of the Precolumbian Americas. Created in the media of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood, and incised or carved with a complex set of symbols and motifs, this seven-hundred-year-old artistic tradition functioned within a multiethnic landscape centered on communities dominated by earthen mounds and plazas. Previous researchers have referred to this material as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC). This groundbreaking volume brings together ten essays by leading anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians, who analyze the iconography of Mississippian art in order to reconstruct the ritual activities, cosmological vision, and ideology of these ancient precursors to several groups of contemporary Native Americans. Significantly, the authors correlate archaeological, ethnographic, and art historical data that illustrate the stylistic differences within Mississippian art as well as the numerous changes that occur through time. The research also demonstrates the inadequacy of the SECC label, since Mississippian art is not limited to the Southeast and reflects stylistic changes over time among several linked but distinct religious traditions. The term Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS) more adequately describes the corpus of this Mississippian art. Most important, the authors illustrate the overarching nature of the ancient Native American religious system, as a creation unique to the native American cultures of the eastern United States.

Kentucky's rich archaeological heritage spans thousands of years, and the Commonwealth remains fertile ground for study of the people who inhabited the midcontinent before, during, and after European settlement. This long-awaited volume brings together the most recent research on Kentucky's prehistory and early history, presenting both an accurate descriptive and an authoritative interpretation of Kentucky's past. The book is arranged chronologically—from the Ice Age to modern times, when issues of preservation and conservation have overtaken questions of identification and classification. For each time slice of Kentucky's past, the contributors describe typical communities and settlement patterns, major changes from previous cultural periods, the nature of the economy and subsistence, artifacts, the general health and characteristics of the people, and regional cultural differences. Sites discussed include the Green River shell mounds, the Central Kentucky Adena mounds and enclosures, Eastern Kentucky rockshelters, the important Wickliffe site at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Fort Ancient culture villages, and the fortified towns of the Mississippian period in Western Kentucky. The authors draw from a wealth of unpublished material and offer the detailed insights and perspectives of specialists who have focused much of their professional careers on the scientific investigation of Kentucky's prehistory. The book's many graphic elements—maps, artifact drawings, photographs, and village plans—combined with a straightforward and readable text, provide a format that will appeal to the general reader as well as to students and specialists in other fields who wish to learn more about Kentucky's archaeology.

Key writings of Alice Beck Kehoe provide students and scholars of anthropology an overview of methodological and ethical issues in Americanist archaeology over the last thirty years.

Hunter-gatherer research has played a historically central role in the development of anthropological and evolutionary theory. Today, research in this traditional and enduringly vital field blurs lines of distinction between archaeology and ethnology, and seeks instead to develop perspectives and theories broadly applicable to anthropology and its many sub disciplines. In the groundbreaking first edition of Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological and Evolutionary Theory (1991), Robert Bettinger presented an integrative perspective on hunter-gatherer research and advanced a theoretical approach compatible with both traditional anthropological and contemporary evolutionary theories. Hunter-Gatherers remains a well-respected and much-cited text, now over 20 years since initial publication. Yet, as in other vibrant fields of study, the last two decades have seen important empirical and theoretical advances. In this second edition of Hunter-Gatherers, co-authors Robert Bettinger, Raven Garvey, and Shannon Tushingham offer a revised and expanded version of the classic text, which includes a succinct and provocative critical synthesis of hunter-gatherer and evolutionary theory, from the Enlightenment to the present. New and expanded sections relate and react to recent developments—some of them the authors’ own—particularly in the realms of optimal foraging and cultural transmission theories. An exceptionally informative and ambitious volume on cultural evolutionary theory, Hunter-Gatherers, second edition, is an essential addition to the libraries of anthropologists, archaeologists, and human ecologists alike.

The archaeologies of food and warfare have independently developed over the past several decades. This volume aims to provide concrete linkages between these research topics through the examination of case studies worldwide. Topics considered within the book include: the impacts of warfare on the daily food quest, warfare and nutritional health, ritual foodways and violence, the provisioning of warriors and armies, status-based changes in diet during times of war, logistical constraints on military campaigns, and violent competition over subsistence resources. The diversity of perspectives included in this volume may be a product of new ways of conceptualizing violence—not simply as an isolated component of a society, nor as an attribute of a particular societal type—but instead as a transformative process that is lived and irrevocably alters social, economic, and political organization and relationships. This book highlights this transformative process by presenting a cross-cultural perspective on the connection between war and food through the inclusion of case studies from several continents.