The archaeologies of food and warfare have independently developed over the past several decades. This volume aims to provide concrete linkages between these research topics through the examination of case studies worldwide. Topics considered within the book include: the impacts of warfare on the daily food quest, warfare and nutritional health, ritual foodways and violence, the provisioning of warriors and armies, status-based changes in diet during times of war, logistical constraints on military campaigns, and violent competition over subsistence resources. The diversity of perspectives included in this volume may be a product of new ways of conceptualizing violence-not simply as an isolated component of a society, nor as an attribute of a particular societal type-but instead as a transformative process that is lived and irrevocably alters social, economic, and political organization and relationships. This book highlights this transformative process by presenting a cross-cultural perspective on the connection between war and food through the inclusion of case studies from several continents.

The archaeologies of food and warfare have independently developed over the past several decades. This volume aims to provide concrete linkages between these research topics through the examination of case studies worldwide. Topics considered within the book include: the impacts of warfare on the daily food quest, warfare and nutritional health, ritual foodways and violence, the provisioning of warriors and armies, status-based changes in diet during times of war, logistical constraints on military campaigns, and violent competition over subsistence resources. The diversity of perspectives included in this volume may be a product of new ways of conceptualizing violence-not simply as an isolated component of a society, nor as an attribute of a particular societal type-but instead as a transformative process that is lived and irrevocably alters social, economic, and political organization and relationships. This book highlights this transformative process by presenting a cross-cultural perspective on the connection between war and food through the inclusion of case studies from several continents.

Using fresh evidence and nontraditional ideas, the contributing authors of Mississippian Beginnings reconsider the origins of the Mississippian culture of the North American Midwest and Southeast (A.D. 1000-1600). Challenging the decades-old opinion that this culture evolved similarly across isolated Woodland populations, they discuss signs of migrations, pilgrimages, violent conflicts, and other far-flung entanglements that now appear to have shaped the early Mississippian past. Presenting recent fieldwork, archival studies, and new investigations of legacy collections, the essays in this volume interpret results through contemporary perspectives that emphasize agency and historical contingency. They track the various ways disparate cultures across a sizeable swath of the continent came to share similar architecture, pottery, subsistence strategies, sociopolitical organization, iconography, and religion. Together, they provide the most comprehensive examination of early Mississippian culture in nearly thirty years.

Using fresh evidence and nontraditional ideas, the contributing authors of Mississippian Beginnings reconsider the origins of the Mississippian culture of the North American Midwest and Southeast (A.D. 1000-1600). Challenging the decades-old opinion that this culture evolved similarly across isolated Woodland populations, they discuss signs of migrations, missionization, pilgrimages, violent conflicts, long-distance exchange, and other far-flung entanglements that now appear to have shaped the early Mississippian past. Presenting recent fieldwork from a wide array of sites including Cahokia and the American Bottom, archival studies, and new investigations of legacy collections, the contributors interpret results through contemporary perspectives that emphasize agency and historical contingency. They track the various ways disparate cultures across a sizeable swath of the continent experienced Mississippianization and came to share similar architecture, pottery, subsistence strategies, sociopolitical organization, iconography, and religion. Together, these essays provide the most comprehensive examination of early Mississippian culture in over thirty years.

Explores the archaeology of Mississippian communities and households using new data and advances in method and theory First published in 1995, Mississippian Communities and Households, edited by J. Daniel Rogers and Bruce D. Smith, was a foundational text that advanced southeastern archaeology in significant ways and brought household-level archaeology to the forefront of the field. The impressive breadth of case studies presented allowed archaeologists to grapple with the complexities of Mississippian social organization across the region. Reconsidering Mississippian Communitiesand Households revisits and builds on what has been learned in the years since the Rogers and Smith volume. Edited by Elizabeth Watts Malouchos and Alleen Betzenhauser, this new volume advances the field further with the diverse perspectives of current social theory and methods and big data as applied to communities in Native America from the AD 900s to 1700s and from northeast Florida to southwest Arkansas. The book is divided into four parts with overarching themes: articulating communities and households; coalescing and conflicting communities; community and cosmos; and movement, memory, and histories. Watts Malouchos and Betzenhauser bring together scholars researching diverse Mississippian Southeast and Midwest sites to investigate aspects of community and household construction, maintenance, and dissolution. By tacking back and forth between daily domestic practices and wider communal landscapes, contributors engage with communities and households as locations of daily social, political, economic, and religious negotiations. Thirteen original case studies prove that community can be enacted and expressed in various ways, including in feasting, pottery styles, war and conflict, and mortuary treatments.