Archaeology

Postcolonial Archaeologies in Africa features some of the foremost archaeologists from Africa and the United States and presents cutting-edge proposals for how archaeology in Africa today can be made more relevant to the needs of local communities.

Following two decades of excavations and research at the NAN Ranch Ruin in southwest New Mexico, Harry Shafer offers new information and interpretations of the rise and disappearance of the ancient Mimbres culture that thrived in the area from about AD 600 to 1140.

According to archaeologist Stephen H. Lekson, much of what we think we know about the Southwest has been compressed into conventions and classifications and orthodoxies. This book challenges and reconfigures these accepted notions by telling two parallel stories, one about the development, personalities, and institutions of Southwestern archaeology and the other about interpretations of what actually happened in the ancient past.

Sylvanus G. Morley was the most influential Mayan archaeologist of his generation and perhaps the greatest American spy of WWI. Harris and Sadler document for the first time Morley's dual career as a scholar and a spy. Working for the Office of Naval Intelligence, he proved an invaluable source of information about German and anti-American activity in Mexico and Central America.

Stuart's accessible stories of the ancient peoples and sites of the American Southwest have been updated with recent discoveries on Chaco Canyon, Bandelier, and Mesa Verde.

Fire and light, and their impacts on our earliest human ancestor, are the subjects of this innovative study of the development of the species.

Artist Katherine Wells's life story starts with an early interest in Native art and the petroglyphs of the Southwest that drew her to New Mexico and led to a major effort to preserve the iconic images she found on her own land.

Conquest and Catastrophe is a multifaceted reinterpretation of the Pueblo losses of settlements and population from 1540 until after reconquest at the end of the 1600s.

The stunning imagery created at Piedras Negras was produced for cultural and ceremonial purposes, but Maya expert Clancy argues that its enduring artistic value cannot be ignored.

This multidisciplinary study analyzes the visual, linguistic, and cultural significance of the imagery used by the Moche in their ceramics and murals.