Stone temples rising above the rainforest canopy and elaborate hieroglyphs carved onto stone monuments give silent testimony to the high culture of the Maya ancestors of the indigenous peoples of Central America. They have inspired generations of archaeologists, professional and avocational, to take to the field in search of the past.
One such archaeologist is Heather McKillop, who in 1979 first visited the coast of Belize in search of a little-known aspect of ancient Maya life: the sea trade that helped move salt, obsidian, coral, and other goods around the interior of the empire. In...

Stone temples rising above the rainforest canopy and elaborate hieroglyphs carved onto stone monuments give silent testimony to the high culture of the Maya ancestors of the indigenous peoples of Central America. They have inspired generations of archaeologists, professional and avocational, to take to the field in search of the past.
One such archaeologist is Heather McKillop, who in 1979 first visited the coast of Belize in search of a little-known aspect of ancient Maya life: the sea trade that helped move salt, obsidian, coral, and other goods around the interior of the empire. In...

Most archaeologists and bioarchaeologists receive little or no training in the recognition of skeletal remains of fetuses, infants, and children. Yet many research sites may contain such materials. Without a framework for identifying the bones or the excavation techniques suited to their recovery, archaeologists may often overlook subadult skeletal remains or even confuse them with animal bones.
"The Osteology of Infants and Children" fills the need for a field and lab manual on this important topic and provides a supplemental textbook for human osteology courses. Focusing on juvenile...

Most archaeologists and bioarchaeologists receive little or no training in the recognition of skeletal remains of fetuses, infants, and children. Yet many research sites may contain such materials. Without a framework for identifying the bones or the excavation techniques suited to their recovery, archaeologists may often overlook subadult skeletal remains or even confuse them with animal bones.
"The Osteology of Infants and Children" fills the need for a field and lab manual on this important topic and provides a supplemental textbook for human osteology courses. Focusing on juvenile...

For more than a century, scientists have returned time and again to the issue of modern human emergence-the when and where of the evolutionary process and the human behavioral and biological dynamics involved.The 2003 discovery of a human partial skeleton at Tianyuandong (Tianyuan Cave) excited worldwide interest. The first human skeleton from the region to be directly radiocarbon-dated (to 40,000 years before present), its geological age places it close to the time period during which modern humans became permanently established across the Old World (between 50,000 and 35,000 years...

In the fourteenth century, a culture arose in and around the Edwards Plateau of Central Texas that represents the last prehistoric peoples before the cultural upheaval introduced by European explorers. This culture has been labeled the Toyah phase, characterized by a distinctive tool kit and a bone-tempered pottery tradition.?Spanish documents, some translated decades ago, offer glimpses of these mobile people. Archaeological excavations, some quite recent, offer other views of this culture, whose homeland covered much of Central and South Texas. For the first time in a single volume, this...

Offering a field-tested analytic method for identifying faunal remains, along with helpful references, images, and examples of the most commonly encountered North American species, "Identifying and Interpreting Animal Bones: A Manual" provides an important new reference for students, avocational archaeologists, and even naturalists and wildlife enthusiasts. Using the basic principles outlined here, the bones of any vertebrate animal, including humans, can be identified and their relevance to common research questions can be better understood.
Because the interpretation of archaeological...

Four thousand years ago bands of hunter-gatherers lived in and traveled through the challenging terrain of what is now southwest Texas and northern Mexico. Today travelers to that land can view large art panels they left behind on the rock walls of Rattlesnake Canyon, White Shaman Cave, Panther Cave, Mystic Shelter, and Cedar Springs. Messages from a distant past, they are now interpreted for modern readers by artist-archaeologist Carolyn Boyd.
It has been thought that the meaning of this ancient art was lost with the artists who produced it. However, thanks to research breakthroughs,...

The Neandertal site at Sima de las Palomas del Cabezo Gordo, located in Murcia in southeastern Spain, is unique in several respects. Its most important contribution to the field of study, however, may be the fact that it consists of the remains of multiple individuals, adding appreciable breadth to the available data for a greater understanding of Neandertals. Further, its location in the Iberian Peninsula south of the Pyrenees suggests potential for studying a population that may have been somewhat isolated from contemporaneous groups of early humans.
This comprehensive analysis...