One of the great technological achievements of the ancient Maya, Maya Blue is one the world’s most unusual ancient pigments. In Maya Blue, Dean E. Arnold offers a comprehensive history of its study for almost a century, filled with personal anecdotes drawn from his decades of work uncovering the Maya knowledge of its constituents, its ancient sources, and how it was made—including previously unknown methods. The book presents a fresh holistic perspective that documents these disco...

Troublesome Ground presents an ethnographic account of the relationship between land and Irish upland farmers in north County Cork, Ireland. Amid the colliding influences of agricultural professionalization, forestry expansion, a global environmental crisis, and the subsequent implementation and rotation of various politically motivated projects meant to spur economic growth and simultaneously better the environment, Asselin tells the story of challenges farmers in one region face...

Critical Data Storytelling in the Composition Classroom provides a timely and essential framework for integrating data literacy into multimodal composition pedagogy. Angela Laflen demonstrates that in an era dominated by big data and AI, the need to understand how to work with data is no longer limited to scientists and mathematicians. Instead, data literacy has become a crucial skill for participating in democratic society.At the heart of Laflen’s approach is critical dat...

Ceremonial Lithics in Classic Mesoamerica explores how and why ceremonial lithic artifacts were made in ancient Mesoamerica’s Classic period, focusing on their implications for economic and sociopolitical organization. Technological analyses of unique examples are interpreted to understand the processes of lithic production and how chipped stone was ritualized across Mesoamerica.Investigations of ritualized lithics also draw on iconography, epigraphy, and ethnohistory to u...

Toward a Small Data Archaeology presents an interpretive and methodological framework—a “small data” archaeology—elucidated through a case study at Xaltocan, Mexico. Aligned closely with Indigenous feminist principles by engaging directly with descendant communities that resist abstract, large-scale syntheses and instead emphasize deep, localized understanding of ancestral lives intertwined with their landscapes, this framework repositions archaeological inquiry by focusing on ind...

Fit for America is at once an intellectual biography of Major John L. Griffith, one of the preeminent intercollegiate athletics administrators of the twentieth century, and an in-depth look at how athletics shaped national military preparedness in a time of war and anticommunist sentiment.Lindaman traces Griffith’s forty-year career, one that spanned both world wars and included his appointment as the first Big Ten commissioner from 1922 until 1945. Griffith also served as...

Irish folklore is replete with images of transforming women. The wailing banshee, the alluring mermaid, the unsettling changeling and others recur throughout folktales and have become well-known through contemporary depictions in texts and films. In the wake of recent feminist thinking, online movements, and revelations of gender-based violence in state institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries, Irish women writers have found fresh ways to adapt this folklore, addressing the underlying ...

Empathy and the Other: Difference, Connection, and the Teaching of Writing focuses on the theoretical basis for empathy as a pedagogical concern,adding to important conversations happening in writing studies about how to foster empathetic understanding and practices for teachers and students. It offers ways for higher education classrooms to become sites for the cultivation of a critical form of empathy that can help address the most important challenges of our time.Drawin...

Angalkut/Shamans in Yup’ik Oral Tradition collects over thirty years’ worth of shaman stories, told as part of gatherings organized by Calista Education and Culture to document Yup’ik traditional knowledge. These conversations highlight the critical role angalkut played in Yup’ik life—healing the sick, interpreting dreams and unusual experiences, requesting future abundance through masked dances and other ceremonies, protecting the lives of young children, and dealing wit...

At a time when Yemen has been ravaged by a decade of war and subject to myriad political and military interventions, the essays in this collection serve as a timely reminder of the need for grounded anthropological study in even the harshest of circumstances. From tribesmen to refugees, revolutionaries to farmers, state workers to charity workers, intellectuals to the unemployed and the destitute, we learn of the everyday political languages through which people in the country live their l...

While humanitarian organizations and media outlets often reduce Syrian refugees to statistics or brief anecdotes, the real story of displacement unfolds in the intimate spaces of family life. Through the interwoven narratives of five middle-aged sisters from Damascus, Lines of Flight, Assemblages of Home reveals how Syrian women navigate war, exile, and the profound transformation of their families and identities.Drawing on extensive interviews conducted between 2015 and 2...

Writing Groups in the Writing Center presents an empirical, qualitative study that examines collaborative practices in multidisciplinary writing groups, arguing that these collaborations offer rich expansions of writing center praxis. Using three case studies—undergraduate grant proposal writers, undergraduate thesis writers, and doctoral dissertation writers—the book explores how participants negotiate authority, navigate disciplinary boundaries, perform emotional labor, and deve...