University of Florida Press

Abnormal burial practices have long been a source of fascination and debate within the fields of mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology. The Odd, the Unusual, and the Strange investigates an unparalleled geographic and temporal range of burials that differ from the usual customs of their broader societies, emphasizing the importance of a holistic, context-driven approach to these intriguing cases.  

In Wild Capital, Barbara Jones demonstrates that looking at nature through the lens of the marketplace is a surprisingly effective approach to protecting the environment. Showing that policy-makers and developers rarely associate wild places with monetary values, Jones argues that nature should be viewed as a capital asset like any other in order for environmental preservation to be a competitive alternative to construction projects.  

This book is the first detailed investigation of the important archaeological site of Parchman Place in the Mississippi Delta, a defining area for understanding the Mississippian culture that spanned much of what is now the United States Southeast and Midwest before the fifteenth century.

While previous research on household archaeology in the colonial Caribbean has drawn heavily on artifact analysis, this volume provides the first in-depth examination of the architecture of slave housing during this period. It examines the considerations that went into constructing and inhabiting living spaces for the enslaved and reveals the diversity of people and practices in these settings.  

Encompassing works by Cubans on the island, in exile, and born in America, this volume delves into defining moments in Cuban art across three centuries, offering a kaleidoscopic view of the island’s people, culture, and history.  

Set against the sweeping backdrop of one of the most dramatic refugee crises of the twentieth century, The Mariel Boatlift presents the stories of Cuban immigrants to the United States who overcame frightening circumstances to build new lives for themselves and flourish in their adopted country.  

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.     

This beautifully illustrated volume details how South Asian art has been acquired by public and private collectors in Europe and North America from the mid-nineteenth century onward. It highlights the various journeys and colonial legacies of artwork from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

This volume brings together experts in archaeology and bioarchaeology to examine continuity and change in ancient Arabian mortuary practices. While most previous investigations have been limited geographically to Egypt and the Levant, this volume focuses on the lesser-studied southeastern Arabian Peninsula, showing what death and burial can reveal about the lifestyles of the region’s prehistoric communities.  

In this extensively researched book, Anna Clayfield challenges contemporary Western views on the militarization of Cuba. She argues that, while the pervasiveness of armed forces in revolutionary Cuba is hard to refute, it is the guerrilla legacy, ethos, and image—guerrillerismo—that has helped the Cuban revolutionary project survive. The veneration of the guerrilla fighter has been crucial to the political culture’s underdog mentality.