The Archaeology of Ancient North America

This volume surveys the archaeology of Native North Americans from their arrival on the continent 15,000 years ago up to contact with European colonizers. Offering rich descriptions of monumental structures, domestic architecture, vibrant objects, and spiritual forces, Timothy R. Pauketat and Kenneth E. Sassaman show how indigenous people shaped both their history and North America's many varied environments. They place the student in the past as they trace how Native Americans dealt with challenges such as climate change, the rise of social hierarchies and political power, and ethnic conflict. Written in a clear and engaging style with a compelling narrative, The Archaeology of Ancient North America presents the grand historical themes and intimate stories of ancient Americans in full, living color.

Politics & Social Sciences

Sassaman, Kenneth E.

Pauketat, Timothy R.

Archaeology

Cambridge University Press

This volume surveys the archaeology of Native North Americans from their arrival on the continent 15,000 years ago up to contact with European colonizers. Offering rich descriptions of monumental structures, domestic architecture, vibrant objects, and spiritual forces, Timothy R. Pauketat and Kenneth E. Sassaman show how indigenous people shaped both their history and North America's many varied environments. They place the student in the past as they trace how Native Americans dealt with challenges such as climate change, the rise of social hierarchies and political power, and ethnic conflict. Written in a clear and engaging style with a compelling narrative, The Archaeology of Ancient North America presents the grand historical themes and intimate stories of ancient Americans in full, living color.\nBook Description\nUnlike extant texts, this textbook treats pre-Columbian Native Americans as history makers who yet matter in our contemporary world.

History

Americas

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective on the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight millennia of hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For many decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has been dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships between humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that Archaic people routinely associated with other groups throughout eastern North America and expressed themselves materially in ways that reveal historical links to other places and times. Starting with the colonization of eastern North America by two distinct ancestral lines, the Eastern Archaic was an era of migrations, ethnogenesis, and coalescence―an 8,200-year era of making histories through interactions and expressing them culturally in ritual and performance.

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized (Issues in Eastern Woodlands Archaeology)

AltaMira Press

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective on the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight millennia of hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For many decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has been dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships between humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that Archaic people routinely associated with other groups throughout eastern North America and expressed themselves materially in ways that reveal historical links to other places and times. Starting with the colonization of eastern North America by two distinct ancestral lines, the Eastern Archaic was an era of migrations, ethnogenesis, and coalescence―an 8,200-year era of making histories through interactions and expressing them culturally in ritual and performance.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Even for ancient hunter-gatherers, everyday life included adventure, personal relationships, and economic hardship. Interpreting and humanizing the experience of one group of pre-Columbian people, Kenneth Sassaman describes the mysterious rise and fall of the Stallings Culture and the research that brought its story to light. Known best for their innovations in making pottery, these prehistoric foragers occupied the middle Savannah River valley of Georgia and South Carolina some 4,000 years ago. Sassaman offers several controversial theories about the Stallings people, arguing that they arose from interactions between two distinctive ethnic groups, organized themselves around clusters of related women, not men, established permanent villages like their counterparts on the coast, and abandoned the middle Savannah River valley when the social costs of traditional living became intolerable. Basing this work on 12 years of field research, he presents fascinating new findings about the Stallings way of life, including details about ritual, marriage alliances, community organization, and food economy. Without violating the strictures of scientific practice, Sassaman tells this story in a style that engages the imagination and pushes the limits of archaeological interpretation in novel directions. Written for the general reader as well as the professional, the book relates lessons from the past to present-day issues and shows how knowledge about the ancient past is constructed within the context of modern experiences.

People of the Shoals: Stallings Culture of the Savannah River Valley (Native Peoples, Cultures, and Places of the Southeastern United States)

Anthropology

University Press of Florida

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Among southeastern Indians pottery was an innovation that enhanced the economic value of native foods and the efficiency of food preparation. But even though pottery was available in the Southeast as early as 4,500 years ago, it took nearly two millenia before it was widely used. Why would an innovation of such economic value take so long to be adopted?
The answer lies in the social and political contexts of traditional cooking technology. Sassaman's book questions the value of using technological traits alone to mark temporal and spatial boundaries of prehistoric cultures and shows how social process shapes the prehistoric archaeological record.

Early Pottery in the Southeast: Tradition and Innovation in Cooking Technology (A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication)

Arts & Photography

Sculpture

University Alabama Press

Scholarly description of the Archaic Period in Pennsylvania. Contributors include: J.M. Adovasio, Kurt Carr, Paul Raber, Sarah Neusius and others.

The Archaic Period in Pennsylvania: Hunter-Gatherers of the Early and Middle Holocene (Recent Research in Pennsylvania Archaeology)

Adovasio, J.M.

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission

Neusius, Sarah M.

Koetje, Todd A.

Bergman, Christopher

Carr, Kurt William

Pennsylvania Historical &

Despite the advances made in archaeology over the past generation, the Northeast remains the most misunderstood of all the archaeological regions of North America. With a complex environmental history shaped by ice sheets from the last glaciation, and highly acidic soils characteristic of the area, the kinds of organic artifacts found in other areas have been destroyed in the Northeast. The result is a sometimes evasive, particularly complicated, and always fragmentary archaeological record. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the Northeast is a region that inspires the development of innovative research designs and thoughtful and relevant questions. Each author has been a graduate student of Dena Dincauze, who has done much to foster understanding of the prehistory of Northeastern North America.

The Archaeological Northeast

Levine, Mary Ann

Nassaney, Michael

Praeger

Sassaman, Kenneth S.

Yellow highlighting sporadically through book. No bent or torn pages.

Recent Developments in Southeastern Archaeology: From Colonization to Complexity by David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman (2012) Paperback (SAA Current Perspectives)

Anderson, David G.

Society for American Archaeology

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