Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - General

In studying the animal bones from Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, Lang and Harris had an advantage unknown to most faunal analysts: a collection so large and a site so well dated that the bones could be divided chronologically into ordered samples. By comparing these samples, they could identify short-term changes in the natural environment and in human economic practices throughout Arroyo Hondo s history. This fifth volume presents the results of faunal analysis from the Arroyo Hondo excavations, covering the topics of prehistoric vegetation and climate; the importance of various animals in the...

"For much of the Southeast, a challenging question has long been what happened to the Indian nations described by members of de Soto s 1540 expedition?" Smith s study admirably bridges the history of interior Southeastern Indian nations between the Late Prehistoric and the eighteenth century."--Alice B. Kehoe, American Indian Quarterly

" Contributes] not only to a better understanding of the process of disintegration of chiefdoms, but to archaeological method necessary when dealing with the contact period. It argues for the introduction of European diseases as a major cause of...

As rush hour came to a close on the evening of May 25, 1950, one of Chicago s new fast, colorful, streamlined streetcars known as a Green Hornet slammed into a gas truck at State Street and 62nd Place. The Hornet s motorman allegedly failed to heed the warnings of a flagger attempting to route it around a flooded underpass, and the trolley, packed with commuters on their way home, barreled into eight thousand gallons of gasoline. The gas erupted into flames, poured onto State Street, and quickly engulfed the Hornet, shooting flames two hundred and fifty feet into the air. More than half of...

This book is about a place, the Great Basin of western North America, and about the lifeways of Native American people who lived there during the past 13,000 years. The authors highlight the ingenious solutions people devised to sustain themselves in a difficult environment. The Great Basin is a semiarid and often harsh land, but one with life-giving oases. As the weather fluctuated from year to year, and the climate from decade to decade or even from one millennium to the next, the availability of water, plants, and animals also fluctuated. Only people who learned the land intimately and...

People have called the mountains, rolling hills, wide valleys, and broad desert plains of southwestern New Mexico home for at least ten thousand years. When they began to farm a little more than two thousand years ago, they settled near the rich soils in the river flood plains. Then, around 900 CE, the people of this region burned all of their kivas and started gathering in large villages with small ritual spaces and open plazas. Between about 900 and 1100 CE, they also made the intricately painted geometric and figurative bowls in a style that is today called Mimbres, their best-known...

For a thousand years they flourished in the arid lands now part of Arizona. They built extensive waterworks, ballcourts, and platform mounds, made beautiful pottery and jewelry, and engaged in wide-ranging trade networks. Then, slowly, their civilization faded and transmuted into something no longer Hohokam. Are today's Tohono O'odham their heirs or their conquerors? The mystery and the beauty of Hohokam civilization are the subjects of the essays in this volume. Written by archaeologists who have led the effort to excavate, record, and preserve the remnants of this ancient culture, the...

The site of a great Ancestral Pueblo center in the 11th and 12th centuries AD, the ruins in Chaco Canyon look like a city to some archaeologists, a ceremonial center to others. Chaco and the people who created its monumental great houses, extensive roads, and network of outlying settlements remain an enigma in American archaeology. Two decades after the latest and largest program of field research at Chaco (the National Park Service's Chaco Project from 1971 to 1982) the original researchers and other leading Chaco scholars convened to evaluate what they now know about Chaco in light of...

In Becoming Indian, author Circe Sturm examines Cherokee identity politics and the phenomenon of racial shifting. Racial shifters, as described by Sturm, are people who have changed their racial self-identification from non-Indian to Indian on the US Census. Many racial shifters are people who, while looking for their roots, have recently discovered their Native American ancestry. Others have family stories of an Indian great-great-grandmother or grandfather they have not been able to document. Still others have long known they were of Native American descent, including their tribal...