University of California Press, 2015. — 312 p. Orderly Anarchy delivers a provocative and innovative reexamination of sociopolitical evolution among Native American groups in California, a region known for its wealth of prehistoric languages, populations, and cultural adaptations. Scholars have tended to emphasize the development of social complexity and inequality to explain...
AltaMira Press, 2011. — 380 p. The possibility that Polynesian seafarers made landfall and interacted with the native people of the New World before Columbus has been the topic of academic discussion for well over a century, although American archaeologists have considered the idea verboten since the 1970s. Fresh discoveries made with the aid of new technologies along with...
University of Nebraska Press, 2019. — 240 p. In Clues to Lower Mississippi Valley Histories David V. Kaufman offers a stunning relational analysis of social, cultural, and linguistic change in the Lower Mississippi Valley from 500 to 1700. He charts how linguistic evidence aids the understanding of earlier cultural and social patterns, traces the diaspora of indigenous peoples,...
AltaMira Press, 2009. — 220 p. — (Archaeology of Religion, Book 8). Ancestors and Elites examines prehispanic ritual behaviors characteristic of the Casas Grandes region of Chihuahua, Mexico. Gordon Rakita analyzes the archaeological data from the site with respect to broader anthropological theories regarding both religious practices and the rise of complex societies. This...
Westview Press, 1996. — 284 p. Cultural behavior exhibits many of the features of complex adaptive systems, but is in some ways distinctive. Cultural complexity is enigmatic, improbable, and difficult to maintain. It constrains behavior, limits understanding of processes, and imposes economic burdens. The advantages of complexity are modified by human cognition and limited by...
University of Nebraska Press, 2007. — 345 p. These essays cast new light on Paleoindians, the first settlers of North America. Recent research strongly suggests that big-game hunting was but one of the subsistence strategies the first humans in the New World employed and that they also relied on foraging and fishing. Written in an accessible, engaging style, these essays...
University of Nebraska Press, 1985. — 143 p. This book goes back roughly fourteen thousand years to introduce the first people to live in present South Dakota. They left behind a fascinating record that Larry Zimmerman has made accessible to the general reader as well as the specialist. Peoples of Prehistoric South Dakota spans the time from the mammoth hunters to the coming of...
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