“Compelling new evidence, careful documentation, and an artfully woven narrative make The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis a path-breaking book for sociocultural scholars as well as for general readers interested in the politics of identity, ethnicity, gender, and the colonial and U.S. Western history.”—Transforming Anthropology “Voss’s lucid explanations of method and theory make the book accessible to a broad range of audiences, from upper-level undergraduate and graduate students to professionals and lay audiences. . . . Its interdisciplinarity, indeed, may help to sell archaeology to audiences who do not typically consider archaeological evidence as an option for identity studies.”—Current Anthropology “The book reminds historians that other disciplines can offer fruitful methodological forays into well-trodden areas of study.”—Journal of American History “Those scholars studying various aspects of the Hispanic worldwide empire would be well advised to peruse Voss’s work.”—Historical Archaeology “[W]ell written, theoretically sophisticated, and unburdened by abstract concepts or hyper-qualified verbiage.”—H-Net Reviews “[E]ngaging. Overall, the text belongs in the library of every student of Spanish and Mexican Alta California. . . . The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis will become an anthropological standard.”—Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology “[A] must-read for all interested not only in colonial California, but for all historical archaeologists and to any archaeologist interested in the examination of identities.”—Cambridge Archaeological Journal “Shows how individuals negotiate ethnic identity through everyday objects and actions.”—SMRC Revista In this interdisciplinary study, Barbara Voss examines religious, environmental, cultural, and political differences at the Presidio of San Francisco, California, to reveal the development of social identities within the colony. Voss reconciles material culture with historical records, challenging widely held beliefs about ethnicity.

Winner (for best semi-popular book) of the 2008 Irene Levi-Sala Prize for publications on the archaeology of Israel. The emergence of Israel in Canaan is a central topic in biblical/Syro-Palestinian archaeology. However, the archaeology of ancient Israel has rarely been subject to in-depth anthropological analysis until now. 'Israel's Ethnogenesis' offers an anthropological framework to the archaeological data and textual sources. Examining archaeological finds from thousands of excavations, the book presents a theoretical approach to Israel's ethnogenesis that draws on the work of recent critics. The book examines Israelite ethnicity - ranging from meat consumption, decorated and imported pottery, Israelite houses, circumcision, and hierarchy - and traces the complex ethnic negotiations that accompanied Israel's ethnogenesis. Israel's Ethnogenesis is unique in its contribution to the archaeology of ethnicity, offering an anthropological study that will be of interest to students of history, Israelite culture and religion, and the evolution of ethnic groups.

In Ecology and Ethnogenesis Adam R. Hodge argues that the Eastern Shoshone tribe, now located on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, underwent a process of ethnogenesis through cultural attachment to its physical environment that proved integral to its survival and existence. He explores the intersection of environmental, indigenous, and gender history to illuminate the historic roots of the Eastern Shoshone bands that inhabited the intermountain West during the nineteenth century. Hodge presents an impressive longue durée narrative of Eastern Shoshone history from roughly 1000 CE to 1868, analyzing the major developments that influenced Shoshone culture and identity. Geographically spanning the Great Basin, Rocky Mountain, Columbia Plateau, and Great Plains regions, Ecology and Ethnogenesis engages environmental history to explore the synergistic relationship between the subsistence methods of indigenous people and the lands that they inhabited prior to the reservation era. In examining that history, Hodge treats Shoshones, other Native peoples, and Euroamericans as agents who, through their use of the environment, were major components of much broader ecosystems. The story of the Eastern Shoshones over eight hundred years is an epic story of ecological transformation, human agency, and cultural adaptation. Ecology and Ethnogenesis is a major contribution to environmental history, ethnohistory, and Native American history. It explores Eastern Shoshone ethnogenesis based on interdisciplinary research in history, archaeology, anthropology, and the natural sciences in devoting more attention to the dynamic and often traumatic history of “precontact” Native America and to how the deeper past profoundly influenced the “postcontact” era.

A bold and original examination of the relationships between ethnicity and political power in the ancient world.

This innovative work of historical archaeology illuminates the genesis of the Californios, a community of military settlers who forged a new identity on the northwest edge of Spanish North America. Since 1993, Barbara L. Voss has conducted archaeological excavations at the Presidio of San Francisco, founded by Spain during its colonization of California's central coast. Her research at the Presidio forms the basis for this rich study of cultural identity formation, or ethnogenesis, among the diverse peoples who came from widespread colonized populations to serve at the Presidio. Through a close investigation of the landscape, architecture, ceramics, clothing, and other aspects of material culture, she traces shifting contours of race and sexuality in colonial California.

Christopher Fennell offers a fresh perspective on ways that the earliest enslaved Africans preserved vital aspects of their traditions and identities in the New World. He also explores similar developments among European immigrants and the interactions of both groups with Native Americans. Focusing on extant artifacts left by displaced Africans, Fennell finds that material culture and religious ritual contributed to a variety of modes of survival in mainland North America as well as in the Caribbean and Brazil. Over time, new symbols of culture led to further changes in individual customs and beliefs as well as the creation of new social groups and new expressions of identity. Presenting insights from archaeology, history, and symbolic anthropology, this book traces the dynamic legacy of the trans-Atlantic diasporas over four centuries, and it challenges existing concepts of creolization and cultural retention. In the process, it examines some of the major cultural belief systems of west and west central Africa, specific symbols of the BaKongo and Yoruba cosmologies, development of prominent African-American religious expressions in the Americas, and the Christian and non-Christian spiritual traditions of German-speaking immigrants from central Europe.

"This study explores the theme of Batavian ethnicity and ethnogenesis in the context of the Early Roman empire. Its starting point is the current view in the social and historical sciences of ethnicity as a culturally determined, subjective construct that is shaped through interaction with an ethnic 'other'. The study analyses literary, epigraphic and archaeological sources relating to the Batavian image and self-image against the backdrop of Batavian integration into the Roman world. The Batavians were intensively exploited by the Roman authorities for the recruitment of auxiliary soldiers, with the result that their society developed into a full-blown military community."--Jacket.