Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award. Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize. Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.

Serious interest in the evolution and dynamics of intermediate societies in their own right has grown by leaps and bounds during the past decade. The purpose of this volume is to suggest new ways to model the many stimuli and processes by which cultural complexity emerges, emphasizing major organizational changes, not the appearance and disappearance of specific traits. All contributors share the view that it is time to fundamentally reconsider a variety of ideas about the emergence of complex organization. Their chapters present data from a broad range of case studies, including the Northwest Coast and British Columbia Plateau, California, the Plains, the Mississippian Southeast, the American Southwest, Spain, and Northern Europe.