Backlist

Honoring Jane Buikstra’s pioneering work in the development of archaeobiological research, the essays in this volume stem from a symposium held at an annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Buikstra’s redefinition of the term “bioarchaeology” to focus specifically on human skeletal data in historical and anthropological contexts, and the impact of her mentorship on developing scholars in the field, are acknowledged and celebrated by the wide-ranging contributions in The Dead Tell Tales. 

Winner of the 2014 Society of American Archaeology Book Award in the Scholarly Category

There are few places in Europe as remote as the Shala Valley of northern Albania. The inhabitants appear lost in time, cut off from the outside world, a people apart. But this careful interdisciplinary study of their past and way of life tells a very different tale, overturning much of what we thought we knew about Shala and “persistent” peoples everywhere. 

For more than four thousand years, empires have been geographically the largest polities on Earth, shaping in many respects the human past and present in different epochsand on different continents. 

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.

“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.

The transition to the Formative in the relatively high-altitude study region of Tlaxcala, Mexico is later than it was in choice regions for early agriculture elsewhere in Mesoamerica. From 900 BCE, however, population growth and sociopolitical development were rapid. A central claim in the research presented here is that a macroregional perspective is essential for understanding the local Formative sequence.

This volume discusses general themes that have emerged in interpretation of the results of the 2000–2008 excavations, synthesizing the results of research described in other volumes in the same series. Subsistence analysis and the examination of human remains yielded data on landscape use and mobility, and the storage and sharing of food. The ways in which houses were constructed, lived in, and abandoned leads to a broad discussion of settlement and social organization at Çatalhöyük, and of change over time. 

“This two volume report is not only an outstanding benchmark for integrating the wide range of high tech anthropological tools now available to the excavator, it also strongly affirms the important role that ancient texts, such as the Hebrew Bible, fulfill when interpreting artifacts and data from an Levantine site.”
  — Jeffrey P. Hudon, Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin, 2015

“The largely American team have worked closely with Albanians (both senior scholars and students), demonstrated great sensitivity to local history, politics and culture, and they have expended considerable time and effort on the conservation of finds, the analysis of local environment and survey, a summary in Albanian, and heritage management issues.”
  — James Whitley, Antiquity, 2016

Tlacuachero is the site of an Archaic-period shellmound located in the wetlands of the outer coast of southwest Mexico. This book presents investigations of several floors that are within the site's shell deposits that formed over a 600-800 year interval during the Archaic period (ca. 8000-2000 BCE), a crucial timespan in Mesoamerican prehistory when people were transitioning from full blown dependency on wild resources to the use of domesticated crops.