Based on either written or oral interviews with a dozen prominent environmental writers, What's Nature Worth? explores how the art of storytelling might bring new perspectives and insights to economic and policy discussions regarding the "value" of nature and the environment. The diverse points of view explored, and the writers' insistence on ......
Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies explores past societies that are characterized by hierarchical organization where the production and circulation of goods transcend domestic units. Based on contributions to the biennial Foundations of Archaeological Inquiry Roundtable, Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas bring together twelve leaders ......
Any overview of prehispanic society in the Americas would identify its obsidian core-blade production as a unique and highly inventive technology. Normally termed prismatic blades, these long, parallel-sided flakes are among the sharpest cutting tools ever produced by humans. Their standardized form permitted interchangeable use, and such blades ......
Not since Edward Abbey has one writer spoken so passionately about the desert places of the American West as has Terry Tempest Williams. In this first book of criticism to address the work of one of the West's finest daughters, Katherine Chandler and Melissa Goldthwaite collect the work of sixteen respected scholars who each examine some aspect of ......
"Our God Tscorenci was our Father and created the sun, which is like a mirror. He sees us from up on high and makes photographs of our reflection. When we die the photograph disappears. Many have been lost." -Kenchori, an AshAninka from Peruvian Amazonia, when asked to tell a story concerning cameras (From W. Baker, Backward: An Essay on Indians, ......
Cladistics is a method used in biology and paleobiology to establish phylogeny: what produced what and in what order. It is a very specific method, developed in Germany in the 1950s and currently the primary phylogenetic method in the world. Cladistics has also been applied to such fields as historical linguistics and manuscript history. If things ......
Mesoamerican archaeologists have long been interested in the collapse of political systems or civilizations but have been slow to undertake detailed abandonment analyses of specific settlements. The Archaeology of Settlement Abandonment in Middle America explores some of the old questions in Middle American archaeology in light of the newer ......
Debitage, the by-product flakes and chips from stone tool production, is the most abundant artifact type in prehistoric archaeological sites. For much of the period in which archaeology has employed scientific methodology, debitage has been discarded or ignored as debris. Now archaeologists have begun to recognize its potential to provide ......
In The Kachina and the Cross, Carroll Riley weaves elements of archaeology, anthropology, and history to tell a dramatic story of conflict between the Pueblo Indians and Franciscan missionaries in the seventeenth-century Spanish colony of New Mexico. Until now, histories of the early Southwest have tended to concentrate on the Spanish presence, ......
