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Jon Gibson confronts the intriguing mystery of Poverty Point, the ruins of a large prehistoric Indian settlement that was home to one of the most fascinating ancient cultures in eastern North America.

Tracing evidence of mind-altering substances across a diverse range of ancient cultures, this collection explores how and why past civilizations harvested, manufactured, and consumed drugs. Case studies examine the use of stimulants, narcotics, and depressants by hunter-gatherers who roamed Africa and Eurasia, prehistoric communities in North and South America, and Maya kings and queens.

In The Ancient Urban Maya, Scott Hutson examines ancient Maya cities and argues that, despite the hazards of urban life, these places continued to lure people for many centuries. 

This volume highlights the diversity and complexity of western Mexico’s pre-Hispanic cultures and argues that the region was more similar than many researchers have believed to the rest of the Mesoamerican world.

Andean Ontologies is a fascinating interdisciplinary investigation of how ancient Andean people understood their world and the nature of being. Exploring pre-Hispanic ideas of time, space, and the human body, these essays highlight a range of beliefs across the region’s different cultures, emphasizing the relational aspects of identity in Andean worldviews.

This book recreates the eighteenth-century Florida exploration of botanist André Michaux, retracing his routes and including in full documentary form all the plants he collected and observed.

In this revised and expanded edition of Anna Kingsley’s remarkable life story, Daniel Schafer draws on new discoveries to prove true the longstanding rumors that Anna Madgigine Jai was originally a princess from the royal family of Jolof in Senegal. Captured from her homeland in 1806, she became first an American slave, later a slaveowner, and eventually a central figure in a free black community. Anna Kingsley’s story adds a dramatic chapter to the history of the South, the state of Florida, and the African diaspora.

When scientist JLB Smith published Old Fourlegs: The Story of the Coelacanth in 1956, he created an international sensation. A dramatic account of the discovery of a creature thought to have been extinct for 65 million years, the book brought science into the living rooms of thousands. It was published in six English editions and translated into ten foreign languages. The Annotated Old Fourlegs brings this incredible story back to life for today’s readers.