School for Advanced Research Press

How should archaeologists and other social scientists tackle the big and little questions about change in socionatural systems? Although fieldwork is certainly the place to start, it alone is not enough to answer troublesome "how" or "why" questions. To make sense of what they find in the field, archaeologists build models-possible explanations for the data.

The long Cold War of the twentieth century has ended, but only now are the poisonous legacies of that “first nuclear age” coming to light. Activists and anthropologists, the authors of this volume reveal the devastating, complex, and long-term environmental health problems afflicting the people who worked in uranium mining and processing, lived in regions dedicated to the construction of nuclear weapons or participated, often unknowingly, in radiation experiments.

Delicious meals served in the School for Advanced Research's famed Douglas W. Schwartz Seminar House fuel the critical and creative thinking that goes into many of our books.

Every society must have a system for capturing, storing, and distributing water, a system encompassing both technology and a rationale for the division of this finite resource. Today, people around the world face severe and growing water scarcity, and everywhere this vital resource is ceasing to be a right and becoming a commodity.

Human beings may share 98 percent of their genetic makeup with their nonhuman primate cousins, but they have distinctive life histories. When and why did these uniquely human patterns evolve? To answer that question, this volume brings together specialists in hunter-gatherer behavioral ecology and demography, human growth, development, and nutrition, paleodemography, human paleontology, primatology, and the genomics of aging.

Painter Mateo Romero uses a bold, muscular style and thick, expressive paint to expose the fault lines and tragedies afflicting Native people today. At the same time, he offers a meditation on the difficult yet artistically stimulating process of cultural diaspora and return in which he and many other Native artists are engaged.

This deeply researched and sensitively rendered study raises troubling questions about the contradictions of anti-racist politics and the limits of multiculturalism in Guatemala and, by implication, other countries in the midst of similar reform projects.

The concept of "community" is ubiquitous in the way we talk and think about life in the twenty-first century. Political and economic projects from rain forest conservation to urban empowerment zones focus on "the community" as the appropriate vehicle and target of change.

The Mesa Verde World showcases new findings about the region’s prehistory, environment, and archaeological history, from newly discovered reservoir systems on Mesa Verde to astronomical alignments at Yellow Jacket Pueblo. Key topics include farming, settlement, sacred landscapes, cosmology and astronomy, rock art, warfare, migration, and contemporary Pueblo perspectives.

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.