“Tres Zapotes has long been recognized as a major Olmec site. Surveys by Pool and colleagues now provide more systematic context.”
— Antiquity, 2005
The obsidian prismatic blade is one of the sharpest cutting implements ever produced in the prehistoric world. This volume explores the social and economic processes involved in its manufacture in ancient Mesoamerica.
This volume presents the results of the first three years (1983-1985) of a five-year excavation at Pacatnamu, Peru, combining archaeological excavation with physical anthropology, botany, zoology, textile analysis, ethnography, and ethnohistory. Focuses on the period of Lambayeque occupation. Bilingual in English and Spanish.
Moche civilization flourished on the north coast of Peru between approximately AD 100 and 800.
Moche civilization flourished on the north coast of Peru from AD 200 to 800. Although the Moche had no writing system, they left a vivid artistic record of their beliefs and activities on intricately painted ceramic vessels, several thousand of which are scattered in museums and private collections throughout the world today.
Although the Cuzco Valley of Peru is renowned for being the heartland of the Incas, little is known concerning its pre-Inca inhabitants. Until recently it was widely believed that the first inhabitants of the Cuzco Valley were farmers who lived in scattered villages along the valley floor (ca. 1000 BC) and that there were no Archaic Period remains in the region. This perspective was challenged during a systematic survey of the valley, when numerous preceramic sites were found.
Information and Its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands explores the question of how information, broadly conceived, is acquired, stored, circulated, and utilized in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, or bands. Given the nature of this question, the volume brings together a group of scholars from multiple disciplines, including archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and evolutionary ecology. Each of these specialties deals with the question of information in different ways and with different sets of data given different primacy.
The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey has been world famous since the 1960s, when excavations revealed the large size and dense occupation of the settlement, as well as the spectacular wall paintings and reliefs uncovered inside the houses. Since 1993, an international team of archaeologists, led by Ian Hodder, has been carrying out new excavations and research, in order toshed more light on the people who inhabited the site.
“What was Tiwanaku?” This question was posed to a select group of scholars that gathered for an intensive two-day conference at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. For over half a millennium, the megalithic ruins in the highlands of the Andes mountains have stood as proxy for the desires and ambitions of various empires and political agendas; in the last hundred years, scholars have attempted to answer this question by interpreting the shattered remains from a distant preliterate past.