This book offers readers an informative text organized around central topics and debates within the discipline
that are illustrated by case studies from different regions and time periods. Based on the lives of real people
and the historical changes that they have experienced, these case studies emphasize human agency, cultural practice,
the body, issues of inequality, and the politics of archaeological practice.
Table of Contents
1 Alternative histories and North American archaeology 1
2 Peopling of North America 30
3 Tempo and scale in the evolution of social complexity in Western North America : four case studies 56
4 Structure and practice in the archaic Southeast 79
5 The enigmatic hopewell of the Eastern woodlands 108
6 Farming and social complexity in the Northeast 138
7 The evolution of the Plains village tradition 161
8 The forgotten history of the Mississippians 187
9 Beyond the mold : questions of inequality in Southwest villages 212
10 Chaco and Paquime : complexity, history, landscape 235
11 Social and physical landscapes of contact 273
12 Creolization in French and Spanish colonies 297
13 Before the revolution : archaeology and the African diaspora on the Atlantic seaboard 319
14 Representing and repatriating the past 337
15 Labor and class in the American West 359
