An exciting new cross-disciplinary field of biocultural research is emerging at the start of the twenty-first century: developmental evolutionary biology.

War in the Tribal Zone, the 1991 anthropology of war classic, is back in print with a new preface by the editors. Their timely and insightful essay examines the occurrence of ethnic conflict and violence in the decade since the idea of the "tribal zone" originally was formulated.

In Regimes of Language, ten leading linguistic anthropologists integrate two often segregated domains: politics (without language) and language (without politics). Their essays contribute to an understanding of the role of language ideologies and discursive practices in state formation, nationalism, and the maintenance of ethnic groups, on the one hand, and in the creation of national, ethnic, and professional identities, on the other.

In The Origins of Language, ten primatologists and paleoanthropologists conduct a comprehensive examination of the nonhuman primate data, discussing different views of what language is and suggesting how the primatological perspective can be used to fashion more rigorous theories of language origins and evolution.

Building on the legacy of Writing Culture, Critical Anthropology Now vividly represents the changing nature of anthropological research practice, demonstrating how new and more complicated locations of research-from the boardrooms of multinational corporations to the chat rooms of the Internet-are giving rise to shifts in the character of fieldwork and fieldworker.

One of the most challenging problems facing contemporary archaeology concerns the operation and diversity of ancient states. This volume addresses how ancient states were structured and how they operated, an understanding of which is key to our ability to interpret a state's rise or fall.

Some of the country's most influential thinkers use anthropological methods and theories to examine the practices and practitioners of contemporary science, technology, and medicine in the United States. The authors explore such questions as how science gains authority to direct truth practices, the boundaries between humans and machines, and how science, technology, and medicine contribute to the fashioning of selves.

The complex relationship of people to places has come under increasing scholarly scrutiny in recent years as acute global conditions of exile, displacement, and inflamed borders-to say nothing of struggles by indigenous peoples and cultural minorities for ancestral homelands, land rights, and retention of sacred places-have brought the political question of place into sharp focus.

In case studies ranging from the Far East to the American Southwest, the authors of Last Hunters-First Farmers provide a global perspective on contemporary research into the origins of agriculture. Downplaying more traditional explanations of the turn to agriculture, such as the influence of marginal environments and population pressures, the authors emphasize instead the importance of the resource-rich areas in which agriculture began, the complex social organizations already in place, the role of sedentism, and, in some locales, the advent of economic intensification and competition.

The authors argue that although intentionality might appear to be a wholly abstract phenomenon, it is deeply entwined with the nature and distribution of power, the portrayal of events, the assessment of personhood, the interplay of trust and deception, and the assessment of moral and legal responsibility.

Eight anthropologists, sociologists, and historians probe the oppositional narratives created by Chinese rural intellectuals, Ã¨migrè Croats, and organized dissenters such as the Djilas of Yugoslavia who constructed and maintained oppositional histories in state socialist societies.

Two dozen leading archaeologists isolate a number of themes that were central to the process of increasing complexity in prehistoric Southwestern society, including increased food production, a greater degree of sedentism, and a dramatically increasing population.

Environmental change is one of the most pressing problems facing the world community. In this volume, the authors take a critical step toward establishing a new environmental science by deconstructing the traditional culture/nature dichotomy and placing human/environmental interaction at the center of any new attempts to deal with global environmental change.

Employing data from central Mexico, the Maya area, coastal Peru, and highland Peru and Bolivia, directors of several major archaeological field projects interpret evidence of prehistoric ideology and address the question, has ideology any relevance in the reconstruction of prehistory?

The ten contributors to this book-anthropologists and psychologists-explore the ways in which dreams are remembered, recounted, shared (or not shared), interpreted, and used by people from New Guinea to the Andes. The authors take a major step toward moving the study of dreaming from the margins to the mainstream of anthropological thought.

The ten papers in this volume offer different versions of how and where anthropologists might work usefully in today's world, converging on the issue of how anthropology can best recapture the progressive character its basic concepts, such as "culture," once had.

Synthesizing data and current thought about the regional systems of the Chacoans and the Hohokam, eleven archaeologists examine settlement patterns, subsistence economy, social organization, and trade, shedding new light on two of the most sophisticated cultures of the prehistoric Southwest.

This edited collection contains important new material on the origins and role of warfare in “tribal� societies. The chapters focus on a number of basic research issues, including war and social evolution, causes of war, ideology of war, and European transformation of indigenous warfare patterns.

This book is a series of essays that offers a framework for the study of lowland Maya settlement patterns, surveying the range of interpretive ideas about ancient Maya remains. Suggesting hypotheses to guide future research, the articles discuss historical, geographical, chronological, and theoretical matters.

"Shipwrecks are part of the legitimate domain of anthropology and can produce results that are as significant for our ability to explain variability in human behavior as any other kind of archaeology, whether it deals with stone tools in a European Paleolithic rockshelter or ceramics contained in a sixteenth-century Spanish shipwreck." So argues Richard A. Gould, the editor of this volume originating from a 1981 School of American Research advanced seminar.

This book is a collection of essays focusing on the role that elites play in shaping modern societies. Critiquing the treatment accorded elites as subjects in recent Western social thought, the essays reflect upon past results and explore directions in the investigation of elite groups by anthropologists.

The contributors to this book scrutinize the data, survey external influences on the early Maya, and consider economics, ecology, demography, and warfare - as well as social and ideological factors - in explaining the transformation of Maya culture from a village-oriented society to one centered on elite classes living in large civic centers with monumental architecture.

Of the many mysteries surrounding ancient Maya civilization, none has attracted greater interest than its collapse in the eighth and ninth centuries AD. Until recently, speculations on the causes of the collapse have been more numerous than excavated sites in the area. But the past twenty-five years have produced many new findings. In this book, thirteen leading scholars use new data to revise the image of ancient Maya civilization and create a new model of its collapse--a general model of sociopolitical collapse not limited to the cultural history of the Maya alone.

This book provides analysis of social anthropology and approaches to the study of patronage and clientage from work done in Latin America in the late 1960s. Essays include discussions on topics as diverse as the effect of societal structures on the actions of individuals and communities wherein women play the roles of both patrons and clients.