School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series

This book breaks new theoretical and methodological ground in the study of the African diaspora in the Atlantic world. Leading scholars of archaeology, linguistics, and socio-cultural anthropology draw upon extensive field experiences and archival investigations of black communities in North America, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa to challenge received paradigms in Afro-American anthropology.

The site of a great Ancestral Pueblo center in the 11th and 12th centuries AD, the ruins in Chaco Canyon look like a city to some archaeologists, a ceremonial center to others. Chaco and the people who created its monumental great houses, extensive roads, and network of outlying settlements remain an enigma in American archaeology.

In his thirty-four years as president of the School of American Research, Douglas W. Schwartz's far-reaching vision placed SAR on the intellectual edge of research about humans across the globe. Nowhere is this more evident than in his influence on the field of anthropological archaeology.

“Community” has long been a critical concept for social scientists, and never more so amid the growing economic inequity, natural and human disasters, and warfare of the opening years of the twenty-first century. In this volume, leading scholar-activists develop a conceptual framework for both the theory and practice of building communities.

This book is about crime and passion, life and death, lofty goals and squalid realities. It is a book about water. Global disparities in health and access to water are two major threats to world stability.

This volume collects leading scholarship on one of the most important archaeological complexes in the ancient Maya world. The authors-internationally renowned experts who participated in the long-running Copán Acropolis Archaeological Project-address enduring themes in Maya archaeology.

Colonialism and its legacies have emerged as one of the most important research topics in anthropology. Indeed, we now understand that colonialism gave rise to and shaped the discipline. However, the understanding of colonization in anthropology, history, and other fields derives largely from studies of European expansion.

Can we understand violence not as evidence of cultural rupture but as a form of cultural expression itself? Ten prominent scholars engage this question across geographies as diverse at their theoretical positions, in cases drawn from fieldwork in Indonesia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, South America, Sri Lanka, Spain, and the United States.

The very form and reach of the modern state are changing radically under the pressure of globalization. Featuring nine of the leading scholars in the field, this innovative exploration of these transformations develops an ethnographic methodology and theoretical apparatus to assess perceptions of power in three regions where state reform and violence have been particularly dramatic: Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.

This volume brings together eight Maya specialists and a prominent anthropological theorist as discussant to assess the contrasting historical circumstances and emerging cultural futures of Maya in Mexico and Guatemala.