Browse by Subject: Archaeology

Blending elements of geography, archaeology, and ethnography, this readable, illustrated history offers a fascinating portrait of all aspects of Caymanian nautical traditions and describes how an intrepid and independent group of islanders flourished on the frontiers of the sea.

This volume describes the ways Native American populations accommodated and resisted the encroachment of European powers in southeastern North America from the arrival of Spaniards in the sixteenth century to the first decades of the American Republic. Tracing changes to the region’s natural, cultural, social, and political environments, Charles Cobb provides an unprecedented survey of the landscape histories of Indigenous groups across this critically important area and time period.

Using archaeology as a tool for understanding long-term ecological and climatic change, this volume synthesizes current knowledge about the ways Native Americans interacted with their environments along the Atlantic Coast of North America over the past 10,000 years.  

Bringing the often-neglected topic of migration to the forefront of ancient Mesoamerican studies, this volume uses an illuminating multidisciplinary approach to address the role of population movements in Mexico and Central America from AD 500 to 1500, the tumultuous centuries before European contact.  

Fourteen in-depth case studies incorporate empirical data with theoretical concepts such as ritual, aggregation, and place-making, highlighting the variability and common themes in the relationships between people, landscapes, and the built environment that characterize this period of North American native life in the Southeast.

Essays in this volume examine borderland settings in cultural contexts that include Roman Egypt, Iron Age Italy, eleventh-century Iceland, and the precontact American Great Basin and Southwest. Contributors look at isotope data, skeletal stress markers, craniometric and dental metric information, mortuary arrangements, and other evidence to examine how frontier life can affect health and socioeconomic status. Illustrating the many meanings and definitions of frontiers and borderlands, they question assumptions about the relationships between people, place, and identity.     

The troubled chain of events involving Captain Kidd’s capture of Quedagh Merchant and his eventual execution for piracy in 1701 are well known, but the exact location of the much sought-after ship remained a mystery for more than 300 years. In 2010, a team of underwater archaeologists confirmed that the sunken remains of Quedagh Merchant had finally been found off the coast of the Dominican Republic.

Fort St. Joseph Revealed is the first synthesis of archaeological and documentary data on one of the most important French colonial outposts in the western Great Lakes region. Located in what is now Michigan, Fort St. Joseph was home to a flourishing fur trade society from the 1680s to 1781. The site—lost for centuries—was discovered in 1998 by volume editor Michael Nassaney and his colleagues, who summarize their extensive excavations at the fort and surrounding areas in these essays.  

This timely volume explores past, current, and future policies and trends concerning the sales of antiquities from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, which are among the most popular items on the international antiquities market.        

The Archaeology of Prostitution and Clandestine Pursuits synthesizes case studies from various nineteenth-century sites where material culture reveals evidence of prostitution, including a brothel in Five Points, New York City’s most notorious neighborhood, and parlor houses a few blocks  from the White House and Capitol Hill.