Food and feasting are increasingly recognized as having played a prominent role in the emergence of social hierarchies and the negotiation of power. Given the culinary nature of feasts, the archaeological visibility of such events is increased by the use of containers for both food preparation and consumption. The papers in this volume examine the commensal politics of early states and empires and offer a comparative perspective on how food and feasting have figured in the political calculus of archaic states in both the Old and New Worlds.
The contributors provide important new insights...

Food and feasting are increasingly recognized as having played a prominent role in the emergence of social hierarchies and the negotiation of power. Given the culinary nature of feasts, the archaeological visibility of such events is increased by the use of containers for both food preparation and consumption. The papers in this volume examine the commensal politics of early states and empires and offer a comparative perspective on how food and feasting have figured in the political calculus of archaic states in both the Old and New Worlds.
The contributors provide important new insights...

Approaching precolumbian art in all of its various forms as the material expression of interlocking systems of visual communication opens a rich terrain upon which to further our insights into the cultural and symbolic lives of Andean peoples. For archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists interested in such studies, however, it is no simple matter to determine how the varied graphic, artifactual, architectural, and spatial systems of visual communication found in the precolumbian world can or should be interpreted. This volume focuses specifically on the various systems of visual...