This volume, the second in a series of studies on the archaeology of the Titicaca Basin, serves as an excellent springboard for broader discussions of the roles of ritual, authority, coercion, and the intensification of resources and trade for the development of archaic states worldwide.
Advances in Titicaca Basin Archaeology-I is the first in a series of edited volumes that reports on recent research in the south central Andes.
Reports on excavations at Little Pico Creek in San Luis Obispo County and assesses the temporal components and issues of cultural chronology, subsistence, mobility, and social structure.
Theory and Practice in Mediterranean Archaeology: Old World and New World Perspectives brings together leading scholars from the Old World and the Americas to discuss some of the most pressing issues facing archaeology today. These topics include archaeology and text, the future of large-scale archaeological fieldwork at individual sites, interpretation and preservation of archaeological sites and landscapes, past trajectories and new approaches to regional survey, and debates surrounding landscape and settlement archaeology.
The remains of the artful gateways, platforms, walls, and sculpture at Tiahuanaco, an important Middle Horizon site at the southern end of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, have for centuries sparked what has seemed like unanswerable questions about how they were made. The masons’ highly sophisticated knowledge of mathematics, geometry, and stonecraft is evident in the tight joints and perfectly sharp, right angles of these fine examples of Andean cut-stone architecture.
One of the most significant differences between the New World’s major areas of high culture is that Mesoamerica had no beasts of burden and wool, while the Andes had both. Four members of the camelid family—wild guanacos and vicuñas, and domestic llamas and alpacas—were native to the Andes.
This volume brings together the work of some of the most prominent archaeologists to document the impact of Jeffrey R. Parsons on contemporary archaeological method and theory. Parsons is a central figure in the development of settlement pattern archaeology, in which the goal is the study of whole social systems at the scale of regions.
The Soconusco region, a narrow strip of the Pacific coast of Mexico and Guatemala, is the location of some of the earliest pottery-using villages of ancient Mesoamerica. Mobile early inhabitants of the area harvested marsh clams in the estuaries, leaving behind vast mounds of shell. With the introduction of pottery and the establishment of permanent villages (from 1900 B.C.), use of the resource-rich estuary changed.
Occupied from around 7500 BC to 5700 BC, the large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia is composed entirely of domestic buildings; no public buildings have been identified. First excavated in the early 1960s, the site was left untouched until 1993. During the summers of 1997–2003 a team from the University of California at Berkeley (the BACH team) excavated an area at the northern end of the East Mound of Çatalhöyük. The houses there date predominantly to the late Aceramic and early Ceramic Neolithic, around 7000 BC.
Shortly after 800 B.C., a village was founded in the wetland and riverine habitat of northern Belize. Now called K’axob, this Maya community grew and prospered through Formative and Classic times.
