Amy L. Young is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern Mississippi. ...

This distinctive book is the first to address the topic of landscape archaeology in early states from a truly global perspective. It provides an excellent introduction toÑand overview ofÑthe discipline today. The volume grew out of the Fifth Biennial Meeting of the Complex Societies Group, whose theme, States and the Landscape, paid tribute to the work of Robert McC. Adams. When Adams began publishing in the 1960s, the interdependence of cities and their countrysides, and the information revealed through the spatial patterning of communities, went largely unrecognized. Today, as this useful collection makes clear, these interpretive insights are fundamental to all archaeologists who investigate the roles of complex polities in their landscapes. Polities and Power features detailed studies from an intentionally disparate array of regions, including Mesoamerica, Andean South America, southwestern Asia, East Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. Each chapter or pair of chapters is followed by a critical commentary. In concert, these studies strive to infer social, political, and economic meaning from archaeologically discerned landscapes associated with societies that incorporate some expression of state authority. The contributions engage a variety of themes, including the significance of landscapes as they condition and reflect complex polities; the interplay of natural and cultural elements in defining landscapes of state; archaeological landscapes as ever-dynamic entities; and archaeological landscapes as recursive structures, reflected in palimpsests of human activity. Individually, many of these contributions are provocative, even controversial. Taken together, they reveal the contours of landscape archaeology at this particular evolutionary moment.

Past Landscapes presents theoretical and practical attempts of scholars and scientists, who were and are active within the Kiel Graduate School "Human Development in Landscapes" (GSHDL), in order to disentangle a wide scope of research efforts on past landscapes. Landscapes are understood as products of human-environmental interaction. At the same time, they are arenas, in which societal and cultural activities as well as receptions of environments and human developments take place. Thus, environmental processes are interwoven into human constraints and advances. This book presents theories, concepts, approaches and case studies dealing with human development in landscapes. On the one hand, it becomes evident that only an interdisciplinary approach can cover the manifold aspects of the topic. On the other hand, this also implies that the very different approaches cannot be reduced to a simplistic uniform definition of landscape. This shortcoming proves nevertheless to be an important strength. The umbrella term 'landscape' proves to be highly stimulating for a large variety of different approaches. The first part of our book deals with a number of theories and concepts, the second part is concerned with approaches to landscapes, whereas the third part introduces case studies for human development in landscapes. As intended by the GSHDL, the reader might follow our approach to delve into the multi-faceted theories, concepts and practices on past landscapes: from events, processes and structures in environmental and produced spaces to theories, concepts and practices concerning past societies.

Featuring contributions by leading scholars, this book goes beyond conventional archaeological studies by placing the description and interpretation of specific sites in the wider context of the landscape that connects them to one another.

Building the Devil’s Empire is the first comprehensive history of New Orleans’s early years, tracing the town’s development from its origins in 1718 to its revolt against Spanish rule in 1768. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s picaresque account of New Orleans’s wild youth features a cast of strong-willed captives, thin-skinned nobles, sharp-tongued women, and carousing travelers. But she also widens her lens to reveal the port city’s global significance, examining its role in the French Empire and the Caribbean, and she concludes that by exemplifying a kind of rogue colonialism—where governments, outlaws, and capitalism become entwined—New Orleans should prompt us to reconsider our notions of how colonialism works. "[A] penetrating study of the colony's founding."—Nation “A brilliant and spirited reinterpretation of the emergence of French New Orleans. Dawdy leads us deep into the daily life of the city, and along the many paths that connected it to France, the North American interior, and the Greater Caribbean. A major contribution to our understanding of the history of the Americas and of the French Atlantic, the work is also a model of interdisciplinary research and analysis, skillfully bringing together archival research, archaeology, and literary analysis.”—Laurent Dubois, Duke University

An archaeological study of the growth of Manhattan during the colonial period, this book documents the emergence of Manhattan as the center of class-structured capitalist commercialism in the new nation-state. A new introduction by the author updates her analysis in light of subsequent excavations at urban sites (both in New York and elsewhere) and theoretical advances in the understanding of urban public space. From the reviews "This is the first major publication to integrate New York City archaeological data into a broader context . . . . [A]t once a long overdue reference for the student of New York City history while at the same time a point of departure for broader studies of urban development." Valerie DeCarlo in American Antiquity "This work is a building block. It raises important questions and proposes a methodology . . . that make sense for the analysis of archeological data and the creation of historical ethnography." Barbara J. Little in Science "[A]n impressive view of New York's colonial development oriented toward the interaction between wealth and ethnicity, with insights into urban structure. . . . This book should be of interest to students of cities and urban studies and of New York specifically." Stanley South in American Anthropologist "[A] welcome addition to the impoverished (quantitatively speaking) or deliciously rich (qualitatively speaking) 1980's monographs written by historical archaeologists. . . . It is an admirable piece of work that builds on 15 years of experience with urban resources." Anne Yentsch in Historical Archaeology