Browse by Subject: Anthropology and Archaeology

Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed represents a new generation of contact and colonialism studies, expanding upon a traditional focus on the health of conquered peoples toward how extraordinary biological and political transformations are incorporated into the human body, reflecting behavior, identity, and adaptation. These globally diverse case studies demonstrate that the effects of conquest reach farther than was ever thought before--to both the colonized and the colonizers.

Using two case studies from different frontier regions in nineteenth-century America, this book reveals how marginalized ethnic and racial communities resisted the attempts of governing officials and investors to control them through capitalist economic and government frameworks.

Examining ceramics from eighteenth-century household sites in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, and St. Augustine, Florida, Setting the Table opens up new interpretations of cultural exchange and identity in the early modern Spanish empire.

Costume can reveal a wealth of information about an individual’s identity within society. Dressing the Part looks at the ways individuals in the ancient Americas used clothing, hairstyle, and personal ornaments to express status and power, gender identity, and group affiliations, even from the grave.

Provides a fascinating case study to investigate the consumption of luxury goods in the pre-industrial era and the role tobacco played in an emerging capitalist world system and global economy.

Caribbean plantations and the forces that shaped them--slavery, sugar, capitalism, and the tropical, sometimes deadly environment--have been studied extensively. This volume turns the focus to the places and times where the rules of the plantation system did not always apply, including the interstitial spaces that linked enslaved Africans with their neighbors at other plantations.

In this volume, Lawrence Waldron focuses on the cultural significance of nearly two dozen animal and bird representations found in Saladoid-era ceramics, surveying zoomorphic iconography in over twenty major collections.

Focusing on sites ringing the bay such as Cerro Maya, Oxtankah, and Santa Rita Corozal, the contributors to this volume explore how the bay and its feeder rivers affected all aspects of Maya culture from settlement, food production, and the production and use of special goods to political relationships and social organization.

A culmination of Vogel's sixteen-year study of Casma culture, this book helps us understand the relationships between polities of the ancient world, how they built connections to other towns or cities outside and within their own boundaries, and demonstrates the importance of cities and urbanism in the development and collapse of complex societies.

In this volume, Ivan Roksandic and an international team of researchers trace population movement throughout the Caribbean, specifically to Cuba. Through analysis of early agriculture, burial customs, dental modification, pottery production, dietary patterns, and more, they present a new theory of mainland migration to Cuba and the Greater Antilles.