Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains

by Scheiber, Laura L.

• ISBN13: 9780870819315
• ISBN10: 0870819313
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-30
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Colorado

Summary

This book combines history, anthropology, archaeology, and geography to take a closer look at the relationships between land and people in this unique North American region. Focusing on long-term change, this book considers ethnographic literature, archaeological evidence, and environmental data spanning thousands of years of human presence to understand human perception and construction of landscape. The contributors offer cohesive and synthetic studies emphasising hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers. Using landscape as both reality and metaphor, the book explores the different and changing ways that people interacted with place in this transitional zone between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern prairies. The contemporary archaeologists working in this small area have chosen diverse approaches to understand the past and its relationship to the present. Through these ten case studies, this variety is highlighted but leads to a common theme--that the High Plains contains important locales to which people, over generations or millennia, return. Providing both data and theory on a region that has not previously received much attention from archaeologists, especially compared with other regions in North America, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature. Contributors: Paul Burnett; Oskar Burger; Minette C Church; Philip Duke; Kevin Gilmore; Eileen Johnson; Mark D Mitchell; Michael R Peterson; Lawrence Todd.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
List of Tables	p. xiii
A Sloping Land: An Introduction to Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains	p. 1
Intersecting Landscapes in Northeastern Colorado: A Case Study from the Donovan Site	p. 17
Making Places: Burned Rock Middens, Feasting, and Changing Land Use in the Upper Arkansas River Basin	p. 41
Ritual Landscapes, Population, and Changing Sense of Place during the Late Prehistoric Transition in Eastern Colorado	p. 71
Landscapes and Peoples of the Llano Estacado	p. 115
The Details of Home: Landscape Continuity in the High Plains	p. 157
Purgatorio, Purgatoire, or Picketwire: Negotiating Local, National, and Transnational Identities along the Purgatoire River in Nineteenth-Century Colorado	p. 173
The Behavior of Surface Artifacts: Building a Landscape Taphonomy on the High Plains	p. 203
Prehistoric Settlement Patterns on the High Plains of Western Nebraska and the Use of Geographic Information Systems for Landscape Analyses	p. 237
Places in the Heartland: Landscape Archaeology on the Plains	p. 277
About the Contributors	p. 287
Index	p. 291
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

I was delighted to read this book. The landscape approaches presented here are far overdue for an undertheorized yet rich archaeological region.

-Mark P. Muñiz, Journal of Archaeological Research