Browse by Subject: Anthropology and Archaeology

This valuable study conceptualizes Cusco as a system including the urban core, the heartland, and the imperial provinces from northwest Argentina to southern Colombia. Its unique approach and expansive findings reveal the sophisticated nature of Inka planning.

This book explores the ways in which the dynamics of political power shaped the lives and landscape of the Maya and how this information can be used to look at other complex societies.

Now back in print and for the first time in paperback,Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture is a foundational piece in bioarchaeological literature and a central source of information regarding the impact of early farming on socioeconomic evolution. It remains a highly cited reference for archaeologists and physical anthropologists.

A multidisciplinary--indeed, transdisciplinary--combination of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research reveals how the Andean people of southern Peru's Colca Valley experienced and responded to successive waves of colonial rule by the Inka and Spanish empires from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.

Serves both as a valuable resource for archaeologists involved in pottery classification, analysis, and interpretation and as an illuminating exploration of ancient Mayan culture.

Most research into humans' impact on the environment has focused on large-scale societies; a corollary assumption has been that small scale economies are sustainable and in harmony with nature. The contributors to this volume challenge this notion, revealing how such communities shaped their environment--and not always in a positive way.

In this fascinating book, eminent expert José Luis de Rojas presents an accessible yet authoritative exploration of this famous city--interweaving glimpses into its inhabitants’ daily lives with the broader stories of urbanization, culture, and the rise and fall of the Aztec empire.

While mortuary ruins have long fascinated archaeologists and art historians interested in the cultures of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean, the human skeletal remains contained in the tombs of this region have garnered less attention. In Bioarchaeology and Behavior, Megan Perry presents a collection of essays that aim a spotlight on the investigation of the ancient inhabitants of the circum-Mediterranean area.

By presenting a coherent interdisciplinary body of archaeological and environmental data, this volume offers an intensely deep, focused investigation of the various models of the ancient Maya political and economic systems.

Experts on a wide range of ancient societies highlight the meaning and motivation of past uses of violence, revealing how violence often plays an important role in maintaining and suppressing the challenges to the status quo, and how it is frequently a performance meant to be witnessed by others.