This edited volume integrates a remarkable body of new data representing current issues and methodologies in the archaeology of hilltop sites, known as cerros de trincheras, in the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico.

Rethinking the Aztec Economy brings together leading scholars from multiple disciplines to thoroughly synthesize and examine the nature of goods and their movements across rural and urban landscapes in Mesoamerica. In so doing, they provide a new way of understanding society and economy in the Aztec empire.

Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America challenges the hypothesis that the massive depopulation of the New World was primarily caused by diseases brought by Europeans, which scholars used for decades to explain the decimation of the indigenous peoples of North America. Contributors expertly argue that blaming germs downplays the active role of Europeans in inciting wars, destroying livelihoods, and erasing identities.

Bringing together both up-and-coming and well-known scholars of Chaco Canyon, Chaco Revisited provides readers with refreshing and updated analyses of research collected over the course of a century. Addressing age-old questions surrounding the canyon using new methods, contributors prove that Chaco Canyon was even more complex and fascinating than previously understood.

Archaeological research is uniquely positioned to show how native history and native culture affected the course of colonial interaction, but to do so it must transcend colonialist ideas about Native American technological and social change. This book applies that insight to five hundred years of native history. Using data from a wide variety of geographical, temporal, and cultural settings, the contributors examine economic, social, and political stability and transformation in indigenous societies before and after the advent of Europeans and document the diversity of native colonial experiences. The book’s case studies range widely, from sixteenth-century Florida, to the Great Plains, to nineteenth-century coastal Alaska.

Sixteen scholars on both sides of the border present recent research on the economy, history, religion, and far-reaching influence of Casas Grandes. Macaw feathers, copper, shells, ritual mounds, and ball fields all reveal the secrets of Casas Grandes, a massive town whose trading network extended from the Chihuahua Desert up through the American Southwest.

Transformation by Fire offers a current assessment of the archaeological research on the widespread social practice of cremation. Editors Ian Kuijt, Colin P. Quinn, and Gabriel Cooney chart a path for the development of interpretive archaeology surrounding this complex social process.

Warfare is a constant in human history. Contributors to this book contend that agency and culture, inherited values and dispositions (such as religion and other cultural practices), beliefs, and institutions are always woven into the conduct of war. Using archaeological and ethnohistorical data from various parts of the world, the contributors explore the multiple avenues for the cultural study of warfare that these ideas make possible. Contributions focus on cultural aspects of warfare in Mesoamerica, South America, North America, and Southeast Asia.

Combining the latest empirical studies of archaeological practice with the latest conceptual tools of anthropological and historical theory, this volume seeks to set a new course for hunter-gatherer archaeology.