Museum of Anthropological Archaeology
Cerro Azul, a pre-Inca fishing community in the Kingdom of Huarco, Peru, stood at the interface between a rich marine ecosystem and an irrigated coastal plain. Under the direction of its noble families, Cerro Azul dried millions of fish for shipment to inland communities, from which it received agricultural products and dried llama meat.
San José Mogote is a 60-70 ha Formative site in the northern Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, which was occupied for a thousand years before the city of Monte Albán was founded. Filling 432 pages and utilizing more than 400 photographs and line drawings, this book describes in detail more than 35 public buildings, including men’s houses, one-room temples, a performance platform, two-room state temples, a ballcourt, and two types of palaces.
Bringing together American and Canadian scholars of Great Lakes prehistory to provide a holistic picture of caribou hunters, this volume covers such diverse topics as paleoenvironmental reconstruction, ethnographic surveys of hunting features with Native informants in Canada, and underwater archaeological research, and presents a synthetic model of ancient caribou hunters in the Great Lakes region.
This landmark book synthesizes the results of more than a decade of fieldwork in southern Peru—where Stanish and his team systematically surveyed more than 1000 square kilometers in the northern Titicaca Basin—and it details several hundred new sites in the Huancané-Putina River valley.
The Cuzco region of highland Peru was the heartland of the Inca empire, the largest native state to develop in the Americas.
In the fall of 1932, University of Michigan naturalist Walter N. Koelz traveled to northwest India to lead a scientific collecting expedition in the rugged Himalayan regions of Western Tibet.
Monte Albán was the capital of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, ca. 500 B.C.–A.D. 600, but once its control began to wane, other sites filled the political vacuum.
This monograph is based on six months of systematic regional survey in the Wanka Region of Peru’s sierra central, carried out in two field seasons in 1975–1976 by the Junin Archaeological Research Project (JASP) under the co-direction of Jeffrey R. Parsons (University of Michigan) and Ramiro Matos Mendieta (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos).
This volume explores culture change and persistence within a late seventeenth-century Cherokee community in eastern Tennessee.
The focus of this volume is the northern Titicaca Basin, an area once belonging to the quarter of the Inka Empire called Collasuyu. The original settlers around the lake had to adapt to living at more than 12,000 feet, but as this volume shows so well, this high-altitude environment supported a very long developmental sequence.
The crown jewel of the Inka Empire was their capital, Cusco. So celebrated was the Cusco of Inka times that we sometimes forget how little we know of earlier times in the region.
This monograph provides a detailed description and analysis of the Crowfield Early (fluted point associated) Paleoindian site, excavated in 1981 and 1982.
This monograph offers the first major synthesis of the Meadowood phenomenon, one of the earliest and largest interaction spheres in northeastern North America. This volume breathes new life into our understanding of the Early Woodland phenomenon (3000–2400 BP).
The Deh Luran Plain, nestled in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains close to the modern border between Iraq and Iran, had a long and rich prehistory, beginning with the local development of villages dependent upon rainfall farming and herding in the 8th millennium BC. This volume continues the account of the plain from the later 3rd millennium BC to the middle of the 1st millennium BC. It contains detailed site maps and descriptions, aerial and satellite images of major sites, statistics and drawings of ceramics, and discussions of the historical sources.
With major differences in size, urban plans, and population density, the capitals of New World states had large heterogeneous societies, sometimes multiethnic and highly specialized, making these cities amazing backdrops for complex interactions.
This monograph presents data from a systematic regional archaeological survey carried out over an area of ca. 600 square kilometers during May through December 1973 by the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology.
In this volume, R. Alan Covey and Donato Amado González present an archaeological and historical introduction to the Yucay Valley, as well as the complete transcription of the first volume of documents in the Betancur Collection.
Distant Madagascar, the island at the end of the world, has many lessons to teach. The ancestors of the Malagasy people established themselves at least 1500 years ago. Again and again since their arrival, the Malagasy have created new kinds of political communities. This study concerns archaeological survey and excavations in the indigenous state of Imerina in the central highlands.
This volume, part of a series on the prehistory and human ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, focuses on Cerro Tilcajete, a secondary administrative center below Monte Albán, the capital of the prehispanic Zapotec state.
Vijayanagara, the “City of Victory,” was the capital of South India’s largest and most successful pre-colonial empire from c. AD 1330-1565. This richly illustrated volume reports on the results of a ten-year systematic regional archaeological survey in the hinterland or “metropolitan region” of this vast and well-preserved urban site.
San José Mogote, an early village and chiefly center in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley, was excavated over a fifteen-year period. This volume reports in detail on every Early and Middle Formative house recovered, including a complete inventory of artifacts, features, plants, animal bones, and craft raw materials by house, with extensive piece-plotting of items on house floors and dooryards.
Focusing on an area of coastline particularly known for vessel strandings, this volume includes histories of more than 50 lost vessels; a description of the remains of vessels and wreckage documented during archaeological research; an analysis of shoreline change in the last 150 years; and a model for matching wreckage to lost ships. This book will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, and anyone who loves the Great Lakes.
The Itza’ Maya of the Petén in Guatemala preside over a unique rainforest biosphere in danger of disappearing. Equally at risk is their own botanical knowledge, from taxonomy to medicinal uses. This volume contains a history of the Petén Itza’ Maya; explanation of Itza’ taxonomy; tables and keys to plant usage; common names in English, Spanish, and several indigenous languages; and much more.
Dramatic economic changes transformed an isolated 13th-century village of farmer-hunters in the arid grasslands of southeastern New Mexico into a community heavily engaged in long-distance bison hunting and intense exchange with the Puebloan world to the west.
Balkansky’s full-coverage survey of the Sola Valley, 65 km southwest of Oaxaca City, documents 120 sites. By combining his data with that of 13 other regions of Oaxaca, he produces a model for Zapotec state expansion that integrates colonization, diplomacy, and military conquest.
