Due to changing climates and demographics, questions of policy in the circumpolar north have focused attention on the very structures that people call home. Dwellings lie at the heart of many forms of negotiation. Based on years of in-depth research, this book presents and analyzes how the people of the circumpolar regions conceive, build, memorialize, and live in their dwellings. This book seeks to set a new standard for interdisciplinary work within the humanities and social sciences and includes anthropological work on vernacular architecture, environmental anthropology, household archaeology and demographics.

In 1926/27 the Soviet Central Statistical Administration initiated several yearlong expeditions to gather primary data on the whereabouts, economy and living conditions of all rural peoples living in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at the end of the Russian civil war. Due partly to the enthusiasm of local geographers and ethnographers, the Polar Census grew into a massive ethnological exercise, gathering not only basic demographic and economic data on every household but also a rich archive of photographs, maps, kinship charts, narrative transcripts and museum artifacts. To this day, it remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of a rural population anywhere. The contributors to this volume OCo all noted scholars in their region OCo have conducted long-term fieldwork with the descendants of the people surveyed in 1926/27. This volume is the culmination of eight yearsOCO work with the primary record cards and was supported by a number of national scholarly funding agencies in the UK, Canada and Norway. It is a unique historical, ethnographical analysis and of immense value to scholars familiar with these communitiesOCO contemporary cultural dynamics and legacy."

"This is an excellent collection of articles. . . . All are clearly written and any of them could be used in undergraduate teaching. Moreover, the range of case studies is impressively global. . . . The articles all exhibit a good capacity to provoke. . . . The result is an enjoyable book that is likely to be useful to teachers, students and practitioners of environmentalism." - Anthropological Forum Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of "primitiveness" and "pristine nature" so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate. David G. Anderson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Eeva Berglund was Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College from 1998 to 2002 and has written on the anthropology and history of environmental politics.

In the last two decades, there has been an increased awareness of the traditions and issues that link aboriginal people across the circumpolar North. One of the key aspects of the lives of circumpolar peoples, be they in Scandinavia, Alaska, Russia, or Canada, is their relationship to the wild animals that support them. Although divided for most of the 20th Century by various national trading blocks, and the Cold War, aboriginal people in each region share common stories about the various capitalist and socialist states that claimed control over their lands and animals. Now, aboriginal peoples throughout the region are reclaiming their rights. This volume is the first to give a well-rounded portrait of wildlife management, aboriginal rights, and politics in the circumpolar north. The book reveals unexpected continuities between socialist and capitalist ecological styles, as well as addressing the problems facing a new era of cultural exchanges between aboriginal peoples in each region.

Due to changing climates and demographics, questions of policy in the circumpolar north have focused attention on the very structures that people call home. Dwellings lie at the heart of many forms of negotiation. Based on years of in-depth research, this book presents and analyzes how the people of the circumpolar regions conceive, build, memorialize, and live in their dwellings. This book seeks to set a new standard for interdisciplinary work within the humanities and social sciences and includes anthropological work on vernacular architecture, environmental anthropology, household archaeology and demographics.

David G. Anderson is Professor of Anthropology and Chair in Anthropology of the North at the University of Aberdeen. He was the leader of the collaborative research project entitled BOREAS Homes, Hearths and Households in the Circumpolar North and is presently the PI of an ERC-funded advanced grant entitled Arctic Domestication: Emplacing Human-Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North. He is the author of a monograph on Taimyr Evenkis and Dolgans, and the editor or co-editor of several collections published by Berghahn Books, most recently, "The 1926/27 Soviet Polar Census Expeditions" (2011).

Robert P. Wishart is Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. his ethnographic work has been on the Gwich'in-Dene of the Mackenzie Delta in Northern Canada, with the Ojibwe of Ontario, and with Scottish fishers. He led an associated project on vernacular architecture in the Gwich'in settlement area for the HHH research consortium.

Virginie Vate is an anthropologist and a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. Since 1994, she has been doing research in Chukotka (Northeastern Siberia) and, since 2011, in Alaska. Within the ESF/BOREAS collaborative framework, she led an associated project on conversion to Christianity in Chukotka for the research program NEWREL (New Religious Movements in the Russian North). She is a co-editor of the NEWREL volume, currently in preparation.

"This a much-welcome addition to the modern English-language reference library on Siberian indigenous people and the first book-size effort to address their plight and status from the perspective of the Russian archival statistical and documentary records of the early 1900s. It is an outcome of a monumental collaborative project." . Igor Krupnik, Smithsonian Institution

In 1926/27 the Soviet Central Statistical Administration initiated several yearlong expeditions to gather primary data on the whereabouts, economy and living conditions of all rural peoples living in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at the end of the Russian civil war. Due partly to the enthusiasm of local geographers and ethnographers, the Polar Census grew into a massive ethnological exercise, gathering not only basic demographic and economic data on every household but also a rich archive of photographs, maps, kinship charts, narrative transcripts and museum artifacts. To this day, it remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of a rural population anywhere. The contributors to this volume - all noted scholars in their region - have conducted long-term fieldwork with the descendants of the people surveyed in 1926/27. This volume is the culmination of eight years' work with the primary record cards and was supported by a number of national scholarly funding agencies in the UK, Canada and Norway. It is a unique historical, ethnographical analysis and of immense value to scholars familiar with these communities' contemporary cultural dynamics and legacy."

"The edited work contains one of the most interesting sets of northern papers to appear in a very long time . . . each paper is excellent . . . this book will hopefully provoke considerable thought. . . . This is a work that should be discussed in terms of the particulars of the various papers, but also for the overview it provides." - Polar Record In the last two decades, there has been an increased awareness of the traditions and issues that link aboriginal people across the circumpolar North. One of the key aspects of the lives of circumpolar peoples, be they in Scandinavia, Alaska, Russia, or Canada, is their relationship to the wild animals that support them. Although divided for most of the 20th Century by various national trading blocks, and the Cold War, aboriginal people in each region share common stories about the various capitalist and socialist states that claimed control over their lands and animals. Now, aboriginal peoples throughout the region are reclaiming their rights. This volume is the first to give a well-rounded portrait of wildlife management, aboriginal rights, and politics in the circumpolar north. The book reveals unexpected continuities between socialist and capitalist ecological styles, as well as addressing the problems facing a new era of cultural exchanges between aboriginal peoples in each region. David G. Anderson is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Mark Nuttall is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of "primitiveness" and "pristine nature" so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate.

The southeastern United States has one of the richest records of early human settlement of any area of North America. This book provides the first state-by-state summary of Paleoindian and Early Archaic research from the region, together with an appraisal of models developed to interpret the data. It summarizes what we know of the peoples who lived in the Southeast more than 8,000 years ago--when giant ice sheets covered the northern part of the continent, and such mammals as elephants, saber-toothed tigers, and ground sloths roamed the landscape. Extensively illustrated, this benchmark collection of essays on the state of Paleoindian and Early Archaic research in the Southeast will guide future studies on the subject of the region's first inhabitants for years to come.

Divided in three parts, the volume includes:

Part I: Modeling Paleoindian and Early Archaic Lifeways in the Southeast

Environmental and Chronological Considerations, David G. Anderson, Lisa D. O'Steen, and Kenneth E. Sassaman
Modeling Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast: A Historical Perspective, David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman

Models of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement in the Lower Southeast, David G. Anderson
Early Archaic Settlement in the South Carolina Coastal Plain, Kenneth E. Sassaman
Raw Material Availability and Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast, I. Randolph Daniel Jr.
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement along the Oconee Drainage, Lisa D. O'Steen
Haw River Revisited: Implications for Modeling Terminal Late Glacial and Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems in the Southeast, John S. Cable
Early Archiac Settlement and Technology: Lessons from Tellico, Larry R. Kimball
Paleoindians Near the Edge: A Virginia Perspective, Michael F. Johnson

Part II: The Regional Record

The Need for a Regional Perspective, Kenneth E. Sassaman and David G. Anderson
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in the South Carolina Area, David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman
The Taylor Site: An Early Occupation in Central South Carolina, James L. Michie
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in Tennessee, John B. Boster and Mark R. Norton
A Synopsis of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in Alabama, Eugene M. Futato
Statified Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Deposits at Dust Cave, Northwestern Alabama, Boyce N. Driskell
Bone and Ivory Tools from Submerged Paleoindian Sites in Florida, James S. Dunbar and S. David Webb
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Data from Mississippi, Samuel O. McGahey
Early and Middle Paleoindian Sites in the Northeastern Arkansas Region, J. Christopher Gillam

Part III: Commentary

A Framework for the Paleoindian/Early Archaic Transition, Joel Gunn
Modeling Communities and Other Thankless Tasks, Dena F. Dincauze
An Arkansas View, Dan F. Morse
Comments, Henry T. Wright

This is a first-hand account of a reindeer-herding collective in the remote Taimyr peninsula of Siberia. The author gives an intimate description of the day-to-day lives of a little-known group of Evenkis as they face both economic and ecological challenges. His study addresses questions of identity, nationalism, and ecological theory, as well as mapping the changes caused in the region by the formation of and the recent break-up of the Soviet Union.

This collection presents, for the first time, a much-needed synthesis of the major research themes and findings that characterize the Woodland Period in the southeastern United States.
The Woodland Period (ca. 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1000) has been the subject of a great deal of archaeological research over the past 25 years. Researchers have learned that in this approximately 2000-year era the peoples of the Southeast experienced increasing sedentism, population growth, and organizational complexity. At the beginning of the period, people are assumed to have been living in small groups, loosely bound by collective burial rituals. But by the first millennium A.D., some parts of the region had densely packed civic ceremonial centers ruled by hereditary elites. Maize was now the primary food crop. Perhaps most importantly, the ancient animal-focused and hunting-based religion and cosmology were being replaced by solar and warfare iconography, consistent with societies dependent on agriculture, and whose elites were increasingly in competition with one another. This volume synthesizes the research on what happened during this era and how these changes came about while analyzing the period's archaeological record.
In gathering the latest research available on the Woodland Period, the editors have included contributions from the full range of specialists working in the field, highlighted major themes, and directed readers to the proper primary sources. Of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, both professional and amateur, this will be a valuable reference work essential to understanding the Woodland Period in the Southeast.

From the foreword:
"With this important volume, the editors serve notice that old characterizations of the cultures of the Archaic period have been buried under the back dirt of new excavations and new interpretations. . . . It places the Archaic cultures squarely at the forefront of archaeological theory."

This volume summarizes our archaeological knowledge of natives who inhabited the American Southeast from 8,000 to 3,000 years ago and examines evidence of many of the native cultural expressions observed by early European explorers, including long-distance exchange, plant domestication, mound building, social ranking, and warfare.

Contents
Section I. Mid-Holocene Environments

1. Geoarchaeology and the Mid-Holocene Landscape History of the Greater Southeast, by Joseph Schuldenrein

2. Mid-Holocene Forest History of Florida and the Coastal Plain of Georgia and South Carolina, by William A. Watts, Eric C. Grimm, and T. C. Hussey

Section II. Technology

3. Changing Strategies of Lithic Technological Organization, by Daniel S. Amick and Philip J. Carr

4. Technological Innovations in Economic and Social Contexts, by Kenneth E. Sassaman

5. Middle and Late Archaic Architecture, by Kenneth E. Sassaman and R. Jerald Ledbetter

Section III. Subsistence and Health

6. The Paleoethnobotanical Record for the Mid-Holocene Southeast, by Kristen J. Gremillion

7. Mid-Holocene Faunal Exploitation in the Southeastern United States, by Bonnie W. Styles and Walter E. Klippel

8. Biocultural Inquiry into Archaic Period Populations of the Southeast: Trauma and Occupational Stress, by Maria O. Smith

Section IV. Regional Settlement Variation

9. Approaches to Modeling Regional Settlement in the Archaic Period Southeast, by David G. Anderson

10. Southeastern Mid-Holocene Coastal Settlements, by Michael Russo

11. Accounting for Submerged Mid-Holocene Archaeological Sites in the Southeast: A Case Study from the Chesapeake Bay Estuary, Virginia, by Dennis B. Blanton

Section V. Regional Integration and Organization

12. The Emergence of Long-Distance Exchange Networks in the Southeastern United States, by Richard W. Jefferies

13. A Consideration of the Social Organization of the Shell Mound Archaic, by Cheryl P. Claassen

14. Southeastern Archaic Mounds, by Michael Russo

15. Poverty Point and Greater Southeastern Prehistory: The Culture That Did Not Fit, by Jon L. Gibson

Kenneth E. Sassaman is archaeologist with the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, and instructor in the Department of History and Anthropology at Augusta College, Augusta, Georgia. He is the author of "Early Pottery in the Southeast: Tradition and Innovation in Cooking Technology." David G. Anderson is archaeologist with the Southeast Archaeological Center, National Park Service, Tallahassee, Florida. He is the author of "The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast." They are coeditors of "The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast."