This volume reports on the excavation of Guil aquitz cave in Oaxaca, a site that provides important evidence for the earliest plant domestication in the New World. Stratigraphic studies, examinations of artifactual and botanical remains, simulations, and an imaginative reconstruction make this a model project of processual archaeology.

In this volume, the authors present an original ethnographic study of five llama herding communities in Ayacucho, Peru. Data on herd dynamics are subjected to computer modeling in an effort to evaluate the roles of biology, symbolic and ritual behavior, ecological adaptation, and practical reason. The book contains the most detailed study of the waytakuy llama marking ceremony yet available. The role of this ceremony in preventing herds from going to extinction is evaluated against anthropological and sociobiological theory. This is an interdisciplinary book will appeal to professional archaeologists, prehistorians, cultural anthropologists, Andeanists, theoretical biologists, evolutionary biologists, and zoologists interested in animal domestication.

This volume reports on the excavation of Guila Naquitz cave in Oaxaca, a site that provides important evidence for the earliest plant domestication in the New World. Stratigraphic studies, examinations of artifactual and botanical remains, simulations, and an imaginative reconstruction make this a model project of processual archaeology.

In this volume, the authors present an original ethnographic study of five llama herding communities in Ayacucho, Peru. Data on herd dynamics are subjected to computer modeling in an effort to evaluate the roles of biology, symbolic and ritual behavior, ecological adaptation, and practical reason. The book contains the most detailed study of the waytakuy llama marking ceremony yet available. The role of this ceremony in preventing herds from going to extinction is evaluated against anthropological and sociobiological theory. This is an interdisciplinary book will appeal to professional archaeologists, prehistorians, cultural anthropologists, Andeanists, theoretical biologists, evolutionary biologists, and zoologists interested in animal domestication.

One of the classic works of archaeology, The Early Mesoamerican Village was among the first studies to fully embrace the processual movement of the 1970s. Dancing around an ongoing dialogue on methods and goals between the Real Mesoamerican Archaeologist, the Great Synthesizer, and the Skeptical Graduate Student, it is both a seminal tract on scientific method in archaeology and a series of studies on formative Mesoamerica. It critically evaluates techniques for excavation, sampling of sites and regions, and stylistic analysis, as well as such theoretical factors of explanation as population pressure, trade, and religion and launched similar studies for several later generations of archaeologists. A new Foreword by Jeremy Sabloff is featured in this edition.

Cueva Blanca lies in a volcanic tuff cliff some 4 km northwest of Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico. It is one of a series of Archaic sites excavated by Kent Flannery and Frank Hole as part of a project on the prehistory and human ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca. The oldest stratigraphic level in Cueva Blanca yielded Late Pleistocene fauna, including some species no longer present in southern Mexico. The second oldest level, Zone E, produced Early Archaic material with calibrated dates as old as 11,000-10,000 BC . Zones D and C provided a rich Late Archaic assemblage whose closest ties are with the Abejas phase of Puebla's Tehuacan Valley (fourth millennium BC). Spatial analyses undertaken on the Archaic living floors include (1) the drawing of density contours for tools and animal bones; (2) a search for Archaic tool kits using rank-order and cluster analysis; and (3) an attempt to define Binfordian "drop zones" using an approach drawn from computer vision.

San Jose Mogote is a 60-70 ha Formative site in the northern Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, which was occupied for a thousand years before the city of Monte Alban was founded. Filling 432 pages and utilizing more than 400 photographs and line drawings, this book describes in detail more than 35 public buildings, including men's houses, one-room temples, a performance platform, two-room state temples, a ballcourt, and two types of palaces.