The Archaeology of Ancient North America

This volume surveys the archaeology of Native North Americans from their arrival on the continent 15,000 years ago up to contact with European colonizers. Offering rich descriptions of monumental structures, domestic architecture, vibrant objects, and spiritual forces, Timothy R. Pauketat and Kenneth E. Sassaman show how indigenous people shaped both their history and North America's many varied environments. They place the student in the past as they trace how Native Americans dealt with challenges such as climate change, the rise of social hierarchies and political power, and ethnic conflict. Written in a clear and engaging style with a compelling narrative, The Archaeology of Ancient North America presents the grand historical themes and intimate stories of ancient Americans in full, living color.

1. Envisioning North America; 2. A social history of North American archaeologists and Native Americans; 3. Contact, colonialism, and convergence; 4. Ancient immigrants; 5. Sea change, see change; 6. Gender, kinship, and the commune: the Great Basin and greater Western Archaic; 7. Identity, ethnicity, and inequality: Holocene hunter-gatherers east of the Mississippi; 8. Animism, shamanism, and technology: life in the Arctic; 9. Building mounds, communities, histories; 10. The momentous late Woodland-Mississippian millennium; 11. Two worlds on the Great Plains; 12. The final centuries of the Northeast; 13. Divergence in the Far West; 14. Order and chaos in the Southwest: the Hohokam and Puebloan worlds; 15. Pots, peripheries, and Paquimé: the Southwest inside out; 16. 1984 BCE.

Timothy R. Pauketat is an archaeologist and professor of anthropology and medieval studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books, with research interests that span the Americas.
Kenneth E. Sassaman is the Hyatt and Cici Brown Professor of Florida Archaeology at the University of Florida. His research centers on the culture history of ancient hunter-gatherers of the Archaic Period (c.11,000–3000 years ago). Both Sassaman and Pauketat are previous winners of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference's C. B. Moore Award in Southeastern Archaeology.