David G. Anderson

Steven D. Smith

Allows scholars to more easily examine the record of human activity over the past 13,000 or more years in this part of western Louisiana and adjacent portions of east Texas

Research at Fort Polk, 1972-2002

Archaeology, History, and Predictive Modeling

This volume documents healing traditions in Eastern Siberia in an area extending from Lake Baikal to the Arctic Ocean. The region shows an interesting unity in healing traditions across a wide range of landscape types and culture areas: from the taiga-steppe borderlands influenced by Tibetan and Russian practices in the south, to the north where regional shamanic traditions prevail. There are broad similarities in using unrefined natural materials for healing, as well as in a concern over the 'spiritual' foundations of health, with an accent upon the land as an important dimension. Due to this diversity, this region provides a strong point of comparison to ecologies in other parts of the circumpolar North. The chapters document a blossoming of autonomous healing traditions in post-Soviet Siberia resulting from a social crisis in the aftermath of the collapse of the previous centralized health system. It is a type of 'medical pluralism' marked by a popularity of alternate, non-clinical treatments. But, the sudden upsurge in autonomous cures also speaks to the silent survival of these knowledge traditions in a context where the official medical practice dominated the public sphere for seventy years.

The Healing Landscapes of Central and Southeastern Siberia

Kirk Maasch

Daniel H. Sandweiss

The Middle Holocene epoch (8,000 to 3,000 years ago) was a time of dramatic changes in the physical world and in human cultures. Across this span, climatic conditions changed rapidly, with cooling in the high to mid-latitudes and drying in the tropics. In many parts of the world, human groups became more complex, with early horticultural systems replaced by intensive agriculture and small-scale societies being replaced by larger, more hierarchial organizations. Climate Change and Cultural Dynamics explores the cause and effect relationship between climatic change and cultural transformations across the mid-Holocene (c. 4000 B.C.). Explores the role of climatic change on the development of society around the world Chapters detail diverse geographical regions Co-written by noted archaeologists and paleoclimatologists for non-specialists

A Global Perspective on Mid-Holocene Transitions

Climate Change and Cultural Dynamics

Eeva Berglund

Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of "primitiveness" and "pristine nature" so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate.

Environmentalism and the Distribution of Privilege

Ethnographies of Conservation

Robert C. Mainfort

This collection presents, for the first time, a much-needed synthesis of the major research themes and findings that characterize the Woodland Period in the southeastern United States. The Woodland Period (ca. 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1000) has been the subject of a great deal of archaeological research over the past 25 years. Researchers have learned that in this approximately 2000-year era the peoples of the Southeast experienced increasing sedentism, population growth, and organizational complexity. At the beginning of the period, people are assumed to have been living in small groups, loosely bound by collective burial rituals. But by the first millennium A.D., some parts of the region had densely packed civic ceremonial centers ruled by hereditary elites. Maize was now the primary food crop. Perhaps most importantly, the ancient animal-focused and hunting-based religion and cosmology were being replaced by solar and warfare iconography, consistent with societies dependent on agriculture, and whose elites were increasingly in competition with one another. This volume synthesizes the research on what happened during this era and how these changes came about while analyzing the period's archaeological record. In gathering the latest research available on the Woodland Period, the editors have included contributions from the full range of specialists working in the field, highlighted major themes, and directed readers to the proper primary sources. Of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, both professional and amateur, this will be a valuable reference work essential to understanding the Woodland Period in the Southeast.

The Woodland Southeast

Mark Nuttall

In the last two decades, there has been an increased awareness of the traditions and issues that link aboriginal people across the circumpolar North. One of the key aspects of the lives of circumpolar peoples, be they in Scandinavia, Alaska, Russia, or Canada, is their relationship to the wild animals that support them. Although divided for most of the 20th Century by various national trading blocks, and the Cold War, aboriginal people in each region share common stories about the various capitalist and socialist states that claimed control over their lands and animals. Now, aboriginal peoples throughout the region are reclaiming their rights. This volume is the first to give a well-rounded portrait of wildlife management, aboriginal rights, and politics in the circumpolar north. The book reveals unexpected continuities between socialist and capitalist ecological styles, as well as addressing the problems facing a new era of cultural exchanges between aboriginal peoples in each region.

Knowing and Managing Animals in the Circumpolar North

Cultivating Arctic Landscapes

Cultural Resources Overview

Francis Marion National Forest

John E. Cornelison

Sarah C. Sherwood

1999-2004

Archeological Investigations at Shiloh Indian Mounds National Historic Landmark (40HR7)

In 1926/27 the Soviet Central Statistical Administration initiated several yearlong expeditions to gather primary data on the whereabouts, economy and living conditions of all rural peoples living in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at the end of the Russian civil war. Due partly to the enthusiasm of local geographers and ethnographers, the Polar Census grew into a massive ethnological exercise, gathering not only basic demographic and economic data on every household but also a rich archive of photographs, maps, kinship charts, narrative transcripts and museum artifacts. To this day, it remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of a rural population anywhere. The contributors to this volume – all noted scholars in their region – have conducted long-term fieldwork with the descendants of the people surveyed in 1926/27. This volume is the culmination of eight years’ work with the primary record cards and was supported by a number of national scholarly funding agencies in the UK, Canada and Norway. It is a unique historical, ethnographical analysis and of immense value to scholars familiar with these communities’ contemporary cultural dynamics and legacy.

The 1926/27 Soviet Polar Census Expeditions

Robert P. Wishart

Virginie Vaté

Due to changing climates and demographics, questions of policy in the circumpolar north have focused attention on the very structures that people call home. Dwellings lie at the heart of many forms of negotiation. Based on years of in-depth research, this book presents and analyzes how the people of the circumpolar regions conceive, build, memorialize, and live in their dwellings. This book seeks to set a new standard for interdisciplinary work within the humanities and social sciences and includes anthropological work on vernacular architecture, environmental anthropology, household archaeology and demographics.

Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North

About the Hearth

Sergei S. Alymov

Dmitry V. Arzyutov

The idea of etnos came into being over a hundred years ago as a way of understanding the collective identities of people with a common language and shared traditions. In the twentieth century, the concept came to be associated with Soviet state-building, and it fell sharply out of favour. Yet outside the academy, etnos-style arguments not only persist, but are a vibrant part of regional anthropological traditions. Life Histories of Etnos Theory in Russia and Beyond makes a powerful argument for reconsidering the importance of etnos in our understanding of ethnicity and national identity across Eurasia. The collection brings to life a rich archive of previously unpublished letters, fieldnotes, and photographic collections of the theory’s early proponents. Using contemporary fieldwork and case studies, the volume shows how the ideas of these ethnographers continue to impact and shape identities in various regional theatres from Ukraine to the Russian North to the Manchurian steppes of what is now China. Through writing a life history of these collectivist concepts, the contributors to this volume unveil a world where the assumptions of liberal individualism do not hold. In doing so, they demonstrate how notions of belonging are not fleeting but persistent, multi-generational, and bio-social. This collection is essential reading for anyone interested in Russian and Chinese area studies. It will also appeal to historians and students of anthropology and ethnography more generally.

David G. Anderson

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