The long-awaited third edition of this well-known textbook continues to be the go-to text and reference for anyone interested in Southwest archaeology. It provides a comprehensive summary of the major themes and topics central to modern interpretation and practice. More concise, accessible, and student-friendly, the Third Edition offers students the latest in current research, debates, and topical syntheses as well as increased coverage of Paleoindian and Archaic periods and the Casas Grandes phenomenon. It remains the perfect text for courses on Southwest archaeology at the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels and is an ideal resource book for the Southwest researchers' bookshelf and for interested general readers.
About the Author: Linda S. Cordell is Senior Scholar at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe. Dr. Cordell is an archaeologist whose primary research is in the U.S. Southwest with an emphasis on the 14th and 15th century northern and central Rio Grande Valley Ancestral Pueblo peoples. Her interests include archaeological method and theory, the archaeology of settlement dynamics in agricultural communities, and human responses to climate change in arid regions. She is author of Prehistory of the Southwest (1984), Ancient Pueblo Peoples (1994), and Before Pecos: Settlement Aggregation in the Upper Pecos Valley, New Mexico (1998); editor of Tijeras Canyon, Analyses of the Past (1980); co-editor with George Gumerman of Dynamics of Southwest Prehistory (1989), with Nelson Foster of Chilies to Chocolate, Foods the Americas Gave the World (1992), and with Don D. Fowler of Southwest Archaeology in the Twentieth Century (2005); and co-author with Beatriz Braniff-C. and others of La Gran Chichimeca, el Lugar de las Rocas Secas (2001), among other works. Maxine E. McBrinn is a Research Associate with PaleoCultural Research Group in Broomfield, Colorado. Her research has focused primarily on hunter-gatherer archaeology in the Western United States, excavating Paleo-Indian and Archaic period sites and analyzing their artifacts. Firmly believing that all archaeology is both fun and informative, she is most interested in reconstructing the daily human experience. What was life like for the common man or woman in the past? What did they do and who did they see? McBrinn's explorations on social identities and personal networks in the far past move beyond straightforward questions of subsistence and mobility to take a wider perspective on the human experience. She is the author of Social Identities among Archaic Mobile Hunters and Gatherers in the American Southwest (2005) and co-editor with Laurie D. Webster and Eduardo Gamboa Carrera of Archaeology Without Borders: Contact, Commerce, and Change in the U.S. Southwest and Northwestern Mexico (2008).