In the contemporary world, unprecedented global events are challenging our ability to protect and enhance cultural heritage for future generations. Relevance and Application of Heritage in Contemporary Society examines innovative and flexible approaches to cultural heritage protection. Bringing together cultural heritage scholars and activists from across the world, the volume showcases a spectrum of exciting new approaches to heritage protection, community involvement, and strategic utilization of expertise. The contributions deal with a range of highly topical issues, including armed conflict and non-state actors, as well as broad questions of public heritage, museum roles in society, heritage tourism, disputed ownership, and indigenous and local approaches. In so doing, the volume builds upon, and introduces readers to, a new cultural heritage declaration codified during a 2016 workshop at the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada. Offering a clarion call for an enduring spirit of innovation, collaboration, education, and outreach, Relevance and Application of Heritage in Contemporary Society will be important reading for scholars, students, cultural heritage managers, and local community stakeholders.

In the contemporary world, unprecedented global events are challenging our ability to protect and enhance cultural heritage for future generations. Relevance and Application of Heritage in Contemporary Society examines innovative and flexible approaches to cultural heritage protection. Bringing together cultural heritage scholars and activists from across the world, the volume showcases a spectrum of exciting new approaches to heritage protection, community involvement, and strategic utilization of expertise. The contributions deal with a range of highly topical issues, including armed conflict and non-state actors, as well as broad questions of public heritage, museum roles in society, heritage tourism, disputed ownership, and indigenous and local approaches. In so doing, the volume builds upon, and introduces readers to, a new cultural heritage declaration codified during a 2016 workshop at the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada. Offering a clarion call for an enduring spirit of innovation, collaboration, education, and outreach, Relevance and Application of Heritage in Contemporary Society will be important reading for scholars, students, cultural heritage managers, and local community stakeholders.

This collection of chapters by archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnoarchaeologists, biological archaeologists, and behavioral ecologists considers how humans have practiced mobility across several continents and thousands of years, raising questions about human adaptation and offering a diversity of approaches for measuring ancient mobility of small-scale societies. Mobility is a critical aspect of human adaptation, and humans are unique in their ability to adapt to an immense range of physical habitats. This capacity is at least partially dependent on strategies of population and labor movement within environments. The number of moves, the distance traveled, the frequency of movement, and the people who move all are relevant as archaeologists and anthropologists bring a variety of tools to bear in reading the vast archaeological record of environmental adaptation. This volume should appeal to professional archaeologists as well as many cultural anthropologists, and will be of special interest to researchers of hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and small-scale agricultural societies.

The potential of ancient pit ovens to yield important information about the human past has been recognized only recently in the U.S. Ovens implicate cooking and diet as well as food procurement and construction of large, complex features. Such behaviors are directly referable to subsistence, mobility, and labor organization, which are central to the tempo and mode of evolutionary change in foraging societies. Most archaeological data about pit ovens are hidden in cultural resource management reports. These data are brought to light in this study's exploration of archaeological patterning framed by the ethnography of pit cooking and the people who do it. Students and professional archaeologists will benefit from the broad survey of an ancient cooking technique in the American Southwest and Pacific Northwest, and its utility for intensification research at the theoretical level. Heritage management specialists will value the study as a useful guide for data collection in the field, and a meaningful demonstration of the enduring value of publicly funded archaeological research.

New perspectives on transitions in human history This book is about transitional periods of cultural and environmental change as seen through the lenses of archaeology and ethnography. Incorporating data from across six continents and tracing the human experience from the Late Pleistocene to the present, this book offers a global comparative perspective on transitional states. Questions of causality are considered, as are hypotheses about the processes of cultural change. Archaeology on the Threshold focuses on major transitions such as the shift from foraging to agriculture, the adoption of new technologies, the emergence of large-scale societies, the transition from egalitarian to inegalitarian leadership, and changes that occur in socioeconomic and ideological systems as a result of climate change and disease. Theoretical approaches range from processual to postprocessual, humanistic, and interpretive. Methodologies include ethnoarchaeology, the use of ethnographic analogy, crosscultural comparisons and large-scale data approaches, oral history, the historical record, participant observation, and focus group discussions. Challenging archaeologists to query long-held assumptions and theoretical positions, this volume aims to refocus inquiry into change-causing and larger evolutionary processes to problematize notions of revolutionary, irrevocable change. These case studies examine and shed light on assumptions regarding the linearity and oscillations of adaptations, with intriguing implications for archaeological inferences.

A young student of anthropology receives an offer she can't refuse: the chance to live among the Pume, a South American hunting-and-gathering people who call the tropical Venezuelan savannah home. During their time in the village of Doro Ana, the author and the principal researcher study a vanishing way of life in which cash money, the written word, automobiles, and airplanes are rare and frightening intrusions. Adopted into a Pume family, Yu's informal and personal accounts of events during her two year stay sparkle with descriptive flourishes and turns of phrase as she describes the daily cycles of birth, growth, romance, sickness, healing, and death among the villagers. Enlivened with the author's own illustrations, Yu's journal entries seek to present through a young American's eyes a sketch of her Pume family, their heroic struggle to survive in a changing world, and the power and mystery of the Pume way of life. "In Hungry Lightning we glimpse haunting fragments of life among the Pume Indians. We find an intimate, deeply feminine--but ever-so-slightly jaded and strangely melancholic--voice savoring the tastes and smells of life lived in the Venezuelan savanna. A complexly sensual portrait."--Barbara Tedlock