Archaic Societies

This volume is dedicated to examining the role and impact of gender relations during socio-environmental transformation processes as well as matters of gender equality in archaeological academia across the globe.

Essential overview of American Indian societies during the Archaic period across central North America.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Examines gift exchanges as a foundational notion both in anthropology and in debates about international economic governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Why and when human societies shifted from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture engages the interest of scholars around the world. One of the most fruitful areas in which to study this issue is the North American Southwest, where Late Archaic inhabitants of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts of Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico turned to farming while their counterparts in Trans-Pecos and South Texas continued to forage. By investigating the environmental, biological, and cultural factors that led to these differing patterns of development, we can identify some of the necessary conditions for the rise of agriculture and the corresponding evolution of village life. The twelve papers in this volume synthesize previous and ongoing research and offer new theoretical models to provide the most up-to-date picture of life during the Late Archaic (from 3,000 to 1,500 years ago) across the entire North American Borderlands. Some of the papers focus on specific research topics such as stone tool technology and mobility patterns. Others study the development of agriculture across whole regions within the Borderlands. The two concluding papers trace pan-regional patterns in the adoption of farming and also link them to the growth of agriculture in other parts of the world.

From the North Atlantic to the Persian Gulf and from Peru to the Near East, this book illustrates different studies on the interfluve of environments and societies in landscapes and describes certain historical moments and processes in which the interplay of ecological and societal factors is entangled.

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective on the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight millennia of hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For many decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has been dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships between humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that Archaic people routinely associated with other groups throughout eastern North America and expressed themselves materially in ways that reveal historical links to other places and times. Starting with the colonization of eastern North America by two distinct ancestral lines, the Eastern Archaic was an era of migrations, ethnogenesis, and coalescence—an 8,200-year era of making histories through interactions and expressing them culturally in ritual and performance.

This book explores the role of formal knowledge systems in small-scale oral cultures in both historic and archaeological contexts.