Books and Articles / Libros y Artículos

Preceramic Mesoamerica

The chapters address a series of fundamental questions in American archaeology including the peopling of the Americas, human adaptations to late glacial landscapes, the Neolithic transition, and the origins of sedentism and early village life. This volume presents innovative and previously unpublished research on the Paleoindian and Archaic periods and evaluates current models in light of new findings. Examples include breakthroughs in dating Mesoamerica’s earliest sites and their implications for models of hemispheric colonization; the transition to postglacial patterns of settlement and subsistence; divergent pathways to initial sedentism; the possibility of Archaic-period monumentality; changing patterns of interregional exchange and interaction; and debates surrounding the origins of agriculture, ceramics, and full-time village life.

The volume provides a new perspective on the Mesoamerican Preceramic for students and scholars in archaeology, anthropology, and history. Readers will come to understand how the Preceramic contributed to the emergence of the cultural traditions that anthropologists recognize as Mesoamerica.

Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas

This exciting collection explores the interplay of religion and politics in the precolumbian Americas. Each thought-provoking contribution positions religion as a primary factor influencing political innovations in this period, reinterpreting major changes through an examination of how religion both facilitated and constrained transformations in political organization and status relations. Offering unparalleled geographic and temporal coverage of this subject, Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americasspans the entire precolumbian period, from Preceramic Peru to the Contact period in eastern North America, with case studies from North, Middle, and South America. 

Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas considers the ways in which religion itself generated political innovation and thus enabled political centralization to occur. It moves beyond a "Great Tradition" focus on elite religion to understand how local political authority was negotiated, contested, bolstered, and undermined within diverse constituencies, demonstrating how religion has transformed non-Western societies. As well as offering readers fresh perspectives on specific archaeological cases, this book breaks new ground in the archaeological examination of religion and society.

Polity and Ecology

Encapsulating two decades of research, Polity and Ecology in Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca is the first major treatment of the lower Río Verde region of Oaxaca, investigating its social, political, and ecological history. Tracing Formative period developments from the earliest known evidence of human presence to the collapse of Río Viejo (the region's first centralized polity), the volume synthesizes the archaeological and paleoecological evidence from the valley.

This period saw the earliest agricultural settlements in the region as well as the origins of sedentism and social complexity, and witnessed major changes in floodplain and coastal environments that expanded the productivity of subsistence resources. The book addresses theoretically significant questions of broad relevance such as the origins and spread of agriculture, the social negotiation of complex political formations, the effects of long-distance trade and interaction, the macroregional effects of landscape change, and prehispanic ideology and political power.

Focusing on questions of interregional interaction, environmental change, and political centralization, Polity and Ecology in Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca provides a comprehensive understanding of the Formative period archaeology of this important and long neglected region of Oaxaca.

Mixteccs, Zapotecs, and Chatinos

Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Chatinos: Ancient Peoples of Southern Mexico examines the origins, history, and interrelationships of the civilizations that arose and flourished in Oaxaca.

  • Provides an up-to-date summary of the current state of research findings and archaeological evidence
  • Uses contemporary social theory to address many key problems relating to archaeology of the Americas, including the dynamics of social life and the rise and fall of civilizations
  • Adds clarity to ongoing debates over cultural change and interregional interactions in ancient Mesoamerican societies
  • Supplemented with compelling illustrations, photographs, and line drawings of various archaeological sites and artifacts

El Pueblo de la Tierra Del Cielo

A summary of the knowledge to date about the ancient past of the Lower Verde River Valley based on archaeological fieldwork, early colonial period records, and studies of the ancient writing and imagery of the Mixteca de la Costa people. In Spanish.

Arqueología de las Costa de Oaxaca

Report on ceramic chronology in the lower Río Verde Valley of the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca and on excavations at the sites of Cerro de la Cruz and Río Viejo, placed in the context of an evaluation of the impact of environmental change and regional relationships on prehispanic social change. In Spanish.

Published: Dec. 3, 2015