Cotsen Advanced Seminar

Emanating from a colloquium in pre-Columbian art and archaeology held at the University of Chile in Santiago, Images in Action presents interpretations of a large corpus of art and iconography from the Southern and South-Central Andes, bringing together some of the most esteemed scholars in the field. More than thirty authors, all with extensive experience in the Southern Andes, examine artifacts, artworks, textiles, archaeology and architecture to develop creative new insights on the cultural interactions between people in prehistoric western South America.

Scholars from Aristotle to Marx and beyond have been fascinated by the question of what constitutes value. The Construction of Value in the Ancient World makes a significant contribution to this ongoing inquiry, bringing together in one comprehensive volume the perspectives of leading anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, philologists, and sociologists on how value was created, defined, and expressed in a number of ancient societies around the world.

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.

This volume brings together a diverse set of new studies--archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic—that focus on agricultural intensification and hydraulic systems around the world. Fifteen chapters—written by many of the world's leading experts—combine extensive regional overviews of agricultural histories with in-depth case studies. In this volume are chapters on agriculture in the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, Oceania, Mesoamerica, and South America.

This book is the fruit of the third Cotsen Advanced Seminar conducted at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA.

A majority of laymen, politicians and scholars consciously or subconsciously understand settled living as the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder.