Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, University of Michigan
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.
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.
This richly illustrated volume examines the remarkable Kashmiri shawls of the Walter Koelz Collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology.
More than 1200 of Dean C. Worcester’s 4000+ infamous photographs are reproduced on this CD-ROM for the first time. Also published for the first time is Worcester’s descriptive catalog of photos, put into modern database form and linked to photos.
In this ethnographic study of the Agta, hunter-gatherers in the tropical rain forest of northeastern Luzon in the Philippines, Navin K. Rai documents a traditional society struggling to survive as their forest home is destroyed by outside forces. Foreword by Karl L. Hutterer.
Protohistoric Yamato presents settlement data from Yamato, an ancient province that corresponds to present-day Nara Basin and the center of early Japanese civilization. Barnes also discusses urbanization, economic specialization, and state formation in protohistoric Japanese society.
In the 1970s, A. Terry Rambo conducted fieldwork in Peninsular Malaysia with a group of Semang people. The community he studied had a seminomadic lifestyle: at times they stayed in houses or lean-tos in a village, and at other times they foraged in the surrounding rain forest for food. Rambo’s goal was to assess this group’s impact on the local environment.
In this volume, author Gary W. Crawford presents archaeological data he gathered on plant utilization by Jomon populations in southwestern Hokkaido. Using this data, he examines the adaptations of the Initial through Middle Jomon (a period from 8000 BP to 4000 BP). He also considers the success of the Jomon adaptation in northeastern Japan in general.
During 1968 and 1969, Alan G. Fix conducted an anthropological and genetic study among the Semai Senoi of Malaysia. His goal was to measure the amount of genetic exchange between local populations and document the effects of that exchange. This work combines results from that study with data from a 1965 census of aborigines and an expanded analysis.
The Yomut Turkmen of Central Asia are a nomadic people who migrate seasonally with their flocks. They live in the region where northern Iran, Afghanistan, and southern Turkmenistan meet, east of the Caspian Sea. In this monograph, William Irons describes the Yomut Turkmen’s political structure, kinship system, and social organization.
Kamer Aga-Oglu was curator of the Museum’s Asian collections from 1945 to 1974. An extraordinary scholar, Aga-Oglu singlehandedly transformed the study of Asian ceramics, focusing particularly on understudied Asian trade wares in the Museum’s collections. A specialist in Far Eastern art history, she devoted her life’s work to researching the division’s outstanding collection of Asian ceramics. Throughout her entire tenure at the Museum, Kamer Aga-Oglu was the Museum’s only woman curator. Her catalogs of the Williams Collection contain dozens of photographs and detailed descriptions of the pieces.
In this work, anthropologist Robert Leroy Canfield discusses several powerful social systems in central Afghanistan and their impact on the geographical distribution of religious sects in the area. Territorial groups, the kinship network, and community fission all play a part in why people live where they do. Canfield did his fieldwork among the residents of the province of Bamian during the years 1966 to 1968.
Kamer Aga-Oglu was curator of the Museum’s Asian collections from 1945 to 1974. An extraordinary scholar, Aga-Oglu singlehandedly transformed the study of Asian ceramics, focusing particularly on understudied Asian trade wares in the Museum’s collections. She described for the first time a whole new range of East Asian ceramics that until then were unknown, even among specialists, and she documented the pre-European movement of these ceramics throughout the Pacific and as far as Turkey and East Africa. Her catalogs of the Williams Collection contain dozens of photographs and detailed descriptions of the pieces.
Edward Norbeck offers a translation of folk tales of the Atayal, a tribe from the island of Taiwan. Norbeck presents the possibility that these tales are related to the mythology of other Indonesian and southeast Asian groups, especially the mountain tribes of Luzon, in the Philippines.
The fourth book in the Museum’s Occasional Contributions series is Harley Harris Bartlett’s work on sacred structures in the Batak region of Sumatra. Contains 31 black and white photographs of structures, sculptures, altars, and other holy places from the early 1900s.