Growing unease with grand theories of modernization and global integration brought twelve scholars from four disciplines to the School for Advanced Research for an experiment with the research genre known as microhistory. These authors now call for a return to narrative, detailed analysis on a small scale, and the search for unforeseen meanings embedded in cases. The essential feature of this perspective is a search for significance in the microcosm, the large lessons discovered in small worlds. Urging the recognition of potential commonalities among archaeology, history, sociology, and anthropology, the authors propose that historical interpretation should move freely across disciplines, historical study should be held up to the present, and individual lives should be understood as the intersection of biography and history. The authors develop these themes in a kaleidoscope of places and periods--West Africa, the Yucatan peninsula, Italy, Argentina, California, Brazil, Virginia, and Boston, among others.They illuminate discrete places, people, and processes through which both the intimacy of lived experience and the more distant forces that shaped their days can be viewed simultaneously.

This book is about a place, the Great Basin of western North America, and about the lifeways of Native American people who lived there during the past 13,000 years. The authors highlight the ingenious solutions people devised to sustain themselves in a difficult environment. The Great Basin is a semiarid and often harsh land, but one with life-giving oases. As the weather fluctuated from year to year, and the climate from decade to decade or even from one millennium to the next, the availability of water, plants, and animals also fluctuated. Only people who learned the land intimately and could read the many signs of its changing moods were successful. The evidence of their success is often subtle and difficult to interpret from the few and fragile remains left behind for archaeologists to discover. These ancient fragments of food and baskets, hats and hunting decoys, traps and rock art and the lifeways they reflect are the subject of this well-illustrated book.

Growing unease with grand theories of modernization and global integration brought twelve scholars from four disciplines to the School for Advanced Research for an experiment with the research genre known as microhistory. These authors now call for a return to narrative, detailed analysis on a small scale, and the search for unforeseen meanings embedded in cases. The essential feature of this perspective is a search for significance in the microcosm, the large lessons discovered in small worlds. Urging the recognition of potential commonalities among archaeology, history, sociology, and anthropology, the authors propose that historical interpretation should move freely across disciplines, historical study should be held up to the present, and individual lives should be understood as the intersection of biography and history. The authors develop these themes in a kaleidoscope of places and periods--West Africa, the Yucatan peninsula, Italy, Argentina, California, Brazil, Virginia, and Boston, among others.They illuminate discrete places, people, and processes through which both the intimacy of lived experience and the more distant forces that shaped their days can be viewed simultaneously.

This book is about a place, the Great Basin of western North America, and about the lifeways of Native American people who lived there during the past 13,000 years. The authors highlight the ingenious solutions people devised to sustain themselves in a difficult environment. The Great Basin is a semiarid and often harsh land, but one with life-giving oases. As the weather fluctuated from year to year, and the climate from decade to decade or even from one millennium to the next, the availability of water, plants, and animals also fluctuated. Only people who learned the land intimately and could read the many signs of its changing moods were successful. The evidence of their success is often subtle and difficult to interpret from the few and fragile remains left behind for archaeologists to discover. These ancient fragments of food and baskets, hats and hunting decoys, traps and rock art and the lifeways they reflect are the subject of this well-illustrated book.