The Cultural Foundations of Early South American Societies examines the remarkable transformation of the Central Andes and the tropical Amazon beginning around 7000 BCE, when the Indigenous inhabitants began to develop food production, permanent settlements, monumental architecture, and complex social organizations. Moving beyond traditional chronological categories of “Archaic” and “Formative,” the fourteen essays in this volume reveal how early South American societies followed ...

Anthropological histories and historical geographies of colonialism both have examined the material and discursive processes of colonization and have identified the opportunities for different kinds of relationships to emerge between Europeans and the indigenous people they encountered and in different ways colonized. These studies have revealed complex, differentiated, colonializing and colonialized identities, shifting and ambiguous political relations, social pluralities, and mutating a...

Archeologists have always considered the beginnings of Andean civilization from c.13,000 to 6,000 years ago to be important in terms of the appearance of domesticated plants and animals, social differentiation, and a sedentary lifestyle, but there is more to this period than just these developments. During this period, the spread of crop production and other technologies, kinship-based labor projects, mound-building, and population aggregation formed ever-changing conditions across the And...

Huaca Prieta—one the world’s best-known, yet least understood, early maritime mound sites—and other Preceramic sites on the north coast of Peru bear witness to the beginnings of civilization in the Americas. Across more than fourteen millennia of human occupation, the coalescence of maritime, agricultural, and pastoral economies in the north coast settlements set in motion long-term biological and cultural transformations that led to increased social complexity and food production, and lat...

This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the latest thinking about archaeological theory. The authors provide a comprehensive picture of the theoretical foundations by which archaeologists contextualize and analyze their archaeological data. Student readers will also gain a sense of the immense power that theory has for building interpretations of the past, while recognizing the wonderful archaeological traditions that created it. An ext...

This volume provides an up-to-date and in-depth summary and analysis of the political practices of pre-Columbian communities of the Araucanians or Mapuche of south-central Chile and adjacent regions. This synthesis draws upon the empirical record documented in original research, as well as a critical examination of previous studies. By applying both archaeological and ethnohistorical approaches, the latter including ethnography, this volume distinguishes itself from many other studies that...