Native Peoples of the Americas – serie

Archaeology at El Perú-Waka' is the first book to summarize long-term research at this major Maya site. The results of fieldwork and subsequent analyses conducted by members of the El Perú-Waka' Regional Archaeological Project are coupled with theoretical approaches treating the topics of ritual, memory, and power as deciphered through material remains discovered at Waka'. The book is site-centered, yet the fifteen wide-ranging contributions offer readers greater insight to the richness and complexity of Classic-period Maya culture, as well as to the ways in which archaeologists believe ancient peoples negotiated their ritual lives and comprehended their own pasts.El Perú-Waka' is an ancient Maya city located in present-day northwestern Petén, Guatemala. Rediscovered by petroleum exploration workers in the mid-1960s, it is the largest known archaeological site in the Laguna del Tigre National Park in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. The El Perú-Waka' Regional Archaeological Project initiated scientific investigations in 2003, and through excavation and survey, researchers established that Waka' was a key political and economic center well-integrated into Classic-period lowland Maya civilization, and reconstructed many aspects of Maya life and ritual activity in this ancient community. The research detailed in this volume provides a wealth of new, substantive, and scientifically excavated data, which contributors approach with fresh theoretical insights. In the process, they lay out sound strategies for understanding the ritual manipulation of monuments, landscapes, buildings, objects, and memories, as well as related topics encompassing the performance and negotiation of power throughout the city's extensive sociopolitical history

In this provocative new book, Margaret M. Bruchac, an Indigenous anthropologist, turns the word savage on its head. Savage Kin explores the nature of the relationships between Indigenous informants, such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan), Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), and George Hunt (Tlingit), and early twentieth-century anthropological collectors, such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas.This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era, Savage Kin features some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac’s decolonizing efforts include “reverse ethnography”—painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes—to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today.Savage Kin also contains unexpected narratives of human and other-­than-human encounters—brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies—that will move Native and non-Native readers alike.

Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, this volume provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites.This volume introduces readers to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)--sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Our Hidden Landscapes presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation.In this book, Native American authors provide perspectives on the cultural meaning and significance of CSLs and their characteristics, while professional archaeologists and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving them. The chapters present overwhelming evidence in the form of oral tradition, historic documentation, ethnographies, and archaeological research that these important sites created and used by Indigenous peoples are deserving of protection.This work enables archaeologists, historians, conservationists, foresters, and members of the general public to recognize these important ritual sites.ContributorsNohham Rolf Cachat-SchillingRobert DeFossesJames GageMary GageDoug HarrisJulia A. KingLucianne LavinJohannes (Jannie) H. N. LoubserFrederick W. MartinNorman MullerCharity Moore NortonPaul A. RobinsonLaurie W. RushScott M. StricklandElaine ThomasKathleen Patricia ThraneMatthew Victor Weiss

Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, this volume provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites.This volume introduces readers to eastern North America's Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs) - sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Our Hidden Landscapes presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation.In this book, Native American authors provide perspectives on the cultural meaning and significance of CSLs and their characteristics, while professional archaeologists and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving them. The chapters present overwhelming evidence in the form of oral tradition, historic documentation, ethnographies, and archaeological research that these important sites created and used by Indigenous peoples are deserving of protection.This work enables archaeologists, historians, conservationists, foresters, and members of the general public to recognize these important ritual sites.ContributorsNohham Rolf Cachat-SchillingRobert DeFossesJames GageMary GageDoug HarrisJulia A. KingLucianne LavinJohannes (Jannie) H. N. LoubserFrederick W. MartinNorman MullerCharity Moore NortonPaul A. RobinsonLaurie W. RushScott M. StricklandElaine ThomasKathleen Patricia ThraneMatthew Victor Weiss

Despite the advances made in archaeology over the past generation, the Northeast remains the most misunderstood of all the archaeological regions of North America. With a complex environmental history shaped by ice sheets from the last glaciation, and highly acidic soils characteristic of the area, the kinds of organic artifacts found in other areas have been destroyed in the Northeast. The result is a sometimes evasive, particularly complicated, and always fragmentary archaeological record. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the Northeast is a region that inspires the development of innovative research designs and thoughtful and relevant questions. Each author has been a graduate student of Dena Dincauze, who has done much to foster understanding of the prehistory of Northeastern North America.