Archaeology/Anthropology

The Italian son of a barber. A failed hydraulic engineer. A giant who performed feats of strength and agility in the circus. Giovanni Belzoni (1778–1824) was all of these before going on to become one of the most controversial figures in the history of Egyptian archaeology. A man of exceptional... More

While Jamestown and colonial settlements dominate narratives of Virginia’s earliest days, the land’s oldest history belongs to its native people. Monacan Millennium tells the story of the Monacan Indian people of Virginia, stretching from 1000 A.D. through the moment of colonial contact in 1607 and... More

What was life really like for the band of adventurers who first set foot on the banks of the James River in 1607? Important as the accomplishments of these men and women were, the written records pertaining to them are scarce, ambiguous, and often conflicting. In Jamestown, the Truth Revealed,... More

Glamour subverts convention. Models, images, and even landscapes can skew ordinary ways of seeing when viewed through the lens of photography, suggesting new worlds imbued with fantasy, mystery, sexuality, and tension.In Old Fields, John Stilgoe—one of the most original observers of his time—offers... More

The architectural history of Texas spans more than 300 years of European settlement and 10,000 years of habitation by native peoples. The incredibly diverse natural landscape and equally varied built environment has produced an architectural heritage of national and international stature. This book... More

Jordan’s Point, a nearly triangular promontory in the James River, is situated in Prince George County, just east of the confluence of the James and Appomattox Rivers. A broad terrace overlooking the James, Jordan’s Point is bounded by small streams, tidal marshes, and protective uplands that rise... More

Ivor Noël Hume has devoted his life to uncovering countless lives that came before him. In A Passion for the Past the world-renowned archaeologist turns to his own life, sharing with the reader a story that begins amid the bombed-out rubble of post–World War II London and ends on North Carolina’s... More

Is anthropology simply a continuation of colonial domination and cultural imperialism by other means, or has it--since its nineteenth-century rebirth as a purportedly scientific discipline--produced reliable knowledge about the cultures it studies? Is anthropology a mirror--which reflects only the... More

A characteristically unconventional and engaging work, Carmel Schrire’s Tigers in Africa: Stalking the Past at the Cape of Good Hope interweaves such diverse themes as colonial slavery and apartheid, human and carnivore evolution, and science and romance to show how we create the past and... More

The moral mission archaeology set in motion by black activists in the 1960s and 1970s sought to tell the story of Americans, particularly African Americans, forgotten by the written record. Today, the archaeological study of African-American life is no longer simply an effort to capture unrecorded... More

The concept of African American home ground knits together diverse aspects of the American landscape, from elite suburbs and tower apartments to the old homeplaces of the countryside, to the tabletop array of family photos beside the bed of a housebound elder. This fascinating volume focuses on... More

As a new resident of Togo in 1985, Judy Rosenthal witnessed her first Gorovodu trance ritual. Over the next eleven years, she studied this voodoo in West Africa's Ewe populations of coastal Ghana, Togo, and Benin, an area once called the Slave Coast. The result is Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in... More

Johannes Fabian was one of the first anthropologists to introduce the concept of popular culture into the study of contemporary Africa. Drawing on his research in the Shaba region of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he has been writing for thirty years about the practices, beliefs, and... More

Mixing chronological narrative with a full ecological portrait, anthropologists Rountree and Davidson have reconstructed the culture and history of Virginia’s and Maryland’s Eastern Shore Indians from a.d. 800 until the last tribes disbanded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In The Virginia Adventure, Noel Hume turns his attention to the two earliest English settlements in Virginia, Roanoke and James Towne, with fascinating results. Combining information gathered through excavations of the sites with contemporary accounts from journals, letters, and official records of... More

Interested in preserving her family folklore, Jeannie B. Thomas recorded detailed oral histories from her mother and two grandmothers. While analyzing the tapes of these sessions, she notices the inappropriate laughter often accompanied the retelling of painful stories. In this book, Thomas... More

Deetz’s Flowerdew Hundred is a synopsis of the result of twenty-five years of archaeological investigations at Flowerdew Hundred, a former plantation on the south side of the James River in Prince George County, Virginia. Throughout the work, Deetz conveys the importance of combining historiography... More

In Digging Through Darknes, Carmel Schrire interweaves art and fact to recreate a distant world. Tracking the broad sweep of European expansion into Africa, Australia, and the Pacific, Schrire focuses on the evidence unearthed in archaeological sites, leading the reader through a wealth of strata... More

Using an innovative combination of archaeology, anthropology, and ethnohistory, Stephen R. Potter traces the rise of the Chicacoans, whose domain on the south shore of the Potomac River straddled the boundary between the Powhatans and the Conoys. By presenting a case study of the Chicacoans from A.... More

In this book, America's foremost scholar of African-American folklife revolutionizes our understanding of Afro-American material culture. Bringing to the essays his extensive research into the written, oral, and material sources of Afro-American culture as well as his impressive scholarly knowledge... More

What do devil dogs, witches, haunted houses, Daniel Boone, Railroad Bill, "Justice John" Crutchfield, and lost silver mines have in common? All are among the subjects included in the vast collection of legends gathered between 1937 and 1942 by the field workers of the Virginia Writers Project of... More

The author describes his archeological excavation of a seventeenth-century English settlement in Virginia and his discovery of evidence of the early colonial way of life.