Once thought of as Indian hunting grounds with no permanent inhabitants, West Virginia is teeming with evidence of a thriving early native population. Today's farmers can hardly plow their fields without uncovering ancient artifacts, evidence of at least ten thousand years of occupation. Members of the Fort Ancient culture resided along the rich bottomlands of southern West Virginia during the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric periods. Lost to time and rediscovered in the 1880s, Fort Ancient sites dot the West Virginia landscape. This volume explores sixteen of these sites, including Buffalo, Logan and Orchard. Archaeologist Darla Spencer excavates the fascinating lives of some of the Mountain State's earliest inhabitants in search of who these people were, what languages they spoke and who their descendants may be.

Spent cartridges. The pieces of an original Tabasco Pepper Sauce bottle. Shards of a ceramic pot, stained red. For archaeologists each of the thousands of artifacts uncovered at a site tells a story. For noted Comstock authority Ronald M. James, it is a story resulting from decades of research and excavation at one of the largest National Historic Landmarks in America, the Nevada town that, with the discovery of the Comstock Lode, became a boomtown microcosm of the American West. Drawing on the work of hundreds of volunteers, students, and professional archaeologists, Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past shows how every detail—from unearthed artifacts to reports of local saloons to plans for the cemetery to surviving nineteenth-century buildings—adds to our view of Virginia City when it was one of the richest places on earth. James recreates this unlikely epitome of frontier industry and cosmopolitan living, the thriving hub of corporate executives, middle-class families, miners, prostitutes, and barkeepers—and more foreign-born residents per capita than anywhere else in the country—in a spot that had begun its life a few years earlier as the mining camp of several lucky guys. An excavation of the history of Virginia City, a window on the heyday of the American frontier, James’s book is also an enlightening look at how archaeology brings the story of the past to life.

The book includes six chapters that cover Virginia history from initial settlement through the 20th century plus one that deals with the important role of underwater archaeology. Written by prominent archaeologists with research experience in their respective topic areas, the chapters consider important issues of Virginia history and consider how the discipline of historic archaeology has addressed them and needs to address them . Changes in research strategy over time are discussed , and recommendations are made concerning the need to recognize the diverse and often differing roles and impacts that characterized the different regions of Virginia over the course of its historic past. Significant issues in Virginia history needing greater study are identified.

The recent work of anthropologists, historians, and historical archaeologists has changed the very essence of military history. While once preoccupied with great battles and the generals who commanded the armies and employed the tactics, military history has begun to emphasize the importance of the “common man” for interpreting events. As a result, military historians have begun to see military forces and the people serving in them from different perspectives. The Historical Archaeology of Military Sites has encouraged efforts to understand armies as human communities and to address the lives of those who composed them. Tying a group of combatants to the successes and failures of their military commanders leads to a failure to understand such groups as distinct social units and, in some instances, self-supporting societies: structured around a defined social and political hierarchy; regulated by law; needing to be supplied and nurtured; and often at odds with the human community whose lands they occupied, be they those of friend or foe. The Historical Archaeology of Military Sites will afford students, professionals dealing with military sites, and the interested public examples of the latest techniques and proven field methods to aid understanding and conservation of these vital pieces of the world’s heritage.

"Boomtown Saloons also offers an equally vivid portrait of the modern historical archaeologist who combines time-honored digging, reconstruction, and analysis methods with such cutting-edge technology as DNA analysis of saliva traces on a 150-year-old pipestem and chemical analysis of the residue in discarded condiment bottles. Dixon's sparkling text and thoughtful interpretation of both physical and documentary evidence reveal a hitherto unknown aspect of material life and culture in one of the West's most storied boomtowns and demonstrate the vital, complex social role that the traditional western saloon served in its community."--BOOK JACKET.