The field of forensic anthropology has become increasingly important to other forensic scientists and to the public since the 1970s. 
Compiled from a symposium organized by the Mountain, Desert, and Coastal Forensic Anthropologists, this is one of the few book-length works devoted entirely to the determination of racial affiliation from skeletal remains. It is valuable for its graphic images of variation in skull and face form and covers a wide range of techniques for determining ancestry in unknown individuals. This is a great book for students of forensic anthropology.

Skeletal Attribution of Race: Methods for Forensic Anthropology

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico

The work of thirteen outstanding New Mexico folk artists and their families is highlighted in this handsome bilingual book. These santeros (literally, saint makers) work in an ancient tradition but develop distinctive individual styles. Some use hand tools that date back to the colonial period, others use power tools. Several of the artists use commercial paints and acrylics, while others collect and process natural pigments and make homemade gesso from pulverized gypsum and rabbit-skin glue. They create santos for museums, for sale, and, of course, for devotional purposes, both for their own homes and for churches.
This lavishly illustrated book includes background information on the santero traditions of New Mexico, pictures of the artists and their work accompanied by their own comments, and essays by six scholars on various aspects of the history, iconography, and marketing of these increasingly popular woodcarvings and paintings.

Cuando hablan los santos

Salvador, Mari Lyn C.

Religion & Spirituality

Zuni pueblo in western New Mexico is renowned for its small carved stone animal figurines, or fetishes. A fetish is an object, natural or manmade, in which a spirit is thought to reside and which can be used to effect either good or evil. According to legend, when a man finds a rock that resembles an animal, he has in his possession one of the original animals turned to stone by the children of the Sun Father. Such a fetish has the soul or breath of the animal inside. 
In recent years the market demand for fetishes from Zuni has spurred an increase in the number of carvers. Published in 1995 and now available from UNM Press, The Fetish Carvers of Zuni studies both the history of fetishes and Zuni's major contemporary fetish carvers, their art, aesthetics, and business.

The Fetish Carvers of Zuni

Arts & Photography

Ostler, James

Rodee, Marian

History & Criticism

Pecos Pueblo, a prehistoric site that is now a National Monument just a few miles from Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been a focus of archaeological interest throughout the twentieth century, in part because the Pecos area offers the possibility of a combined ethnographic, archaeological, and historical study. Rowe ruin, about a mile from Pecos Pueblo, was first excavated in 1917 by Carl Guthe but not studied systematically for some sixty years thereafter. The 1980s excavations reported in this book were undertaken by University of New Mexico archaeologists in an effort to learn the relationship between social complexity and environmental conditions.This report comprises a discussion of Rowe ruin including summaries of the environment both today and in prehistoric times, the history of research at the site, and a commentary on the process of site aggregation in the Pecos area in comparison with other localities in the northern Rio Grande valley. Also included are a transcription of the 1917 field notes of Carl Guthe, as well as technical reports on botanical, faunal, and ceramic remains and site surveys. Professional and amateur archaeologists with an interest in Puebloan societies will welcome the appearance of this long-awaited volume.

Before Pecos: Settlement Aggregation at Rowe, New Mexico

History

Cordell, Linda S.

Americas

This cross-cultural study of the response by human groups to major environmental disruption brings together archaeological experts on Mediterranean Europe, Asia, Eurasia, Peru, Mexico, and the U.S. desert Southwest. Using the school of geographical analysis known as Hazard Research to identify the key attributes of natural disasters and the human social systems that respond to them, researchers consider environmental variables such as the magnitude, speed, and extent of the disaster as well as social variables such as population density, wealth distribution, and political complexity to analyze and assess the damage potential of various types of natural disasters. Such analyses can be useful in generating hypotheses about human response to disaster and in evaluating catastrophic models of sociopolitical collapse. The research in this book tends to show that social collapse is an unusual outcome of environmental disaster. The authors hope to identify general patterns of human response to such disasters, and the chapters cover major themes such as timing and human agency.

Environmental Disaster and the Archaeology of Human Response (Maxwell Museum of Anthropology Anthropological Papers, No. 7)

Social Sciences

The recurrent collapse of human societies is a topic that is at once both fascinating and potentially troubling, and this edited volume offers some new thoughts on this important subject. The introduction discusses the topic at a theoretical level, and references a variety of cases (both past and present) from around the globe to illustrate various conditions and circumstances under which collapse and transformation occur. Nine chapters present specific studies from Iron Age central Europe, the Nilgiri Hills of south India, the early Bronze Age of north-central China, Maori New Zealand, Peru (Moche, Nasca, and the Chiribaya chiefdom of the south coast), late prehistoric and early historic Amazonia and the Caribbean, and the Cahokia chiefdom of eastern North America. With its global scope and diversity of case studies, the book expands our understanding of the various dimensions and historical circumstances faced by human societies that ultimately failed.

Global Perspectives on the Collapse of Complex Systems (Maxwell Museum of Anthropology Anthropological Papers, No. 8)

Historical Study & Educational Resources

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