Twelve Millennia: Archaeology of the Upper Mississippi River Valley (Volume 1) (Bur Oak Book)

From the end of the Ice Age to the fur trade era, Twelve Millennia: Archaeology of the Upper Mississippi River Valley provides an excellent overview of the 12,000-year human past of the Driftless region of the Upper Mississippi River Valley—roughly from Dubuque, Iowa, to Red Wing, Minnesota, but framed within a somewhat larger area extending from the Rock Island Rapids at the modern Moline-Rock Island area to the Falls of St. Anthony at Minneapolis-St. Paul. James Theler and Robert Boszhardt tell the story of past peoples of the Upper Mississippi from the first inhabitants who lived alongside mammoths and mastodons, through the Wood-land cultures, best known for the exotic materials buried in the Hopewell Mounds and the animal-shaped Effigy Mounds, into the days of the Oneota—intensive corn farmers who supplemented their diet through annual buffalo hunts—and the era of European contact and the end of prehistory. The book concludes with useful catalogs of the animal remains and rock art found in the valley as well as a list of archaeological sites and museums to visit. Focusing as much on ancient peoples as on their artifacts, this well-illustrated, carefully written book draws upon accumulated knowledge of past climate changes, such as the end of the last Ice Age, and of human adaptation to shifting environments through technological innovations and social stimuli as seen in the introduction of the bow and arrow and the adaptation of corn agriculture. Targeted for a nonprofessional audience, this informative, accessible book is written not for the specialist but for the general public, avocational archaeologists, college professors and high school teachers needing a text for midwestern prehistory, and park and natural area managers. The people of Taquile Island on the Peruvian side of beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas, are renowned for the hand-woven textiles that they both wear and sell to outsiders. One thousand seven hundred Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, who depend on potatoes and the fish from the lake, host the forty thousand tourists who visit their island each year. Yet only twenty-five years ago, few tourists had even heard of Taquile. In Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island, Elayne Zorn documents the remarkable transformation of the isolated rocky island into a community-controlled enterprise that now provides a model for indigenous communities worldwide. Over the course of three decades and nearly two years living on Taquile Island, Zorn, who is trained in both the arts and anthropology, learned to weave from Taquilean women. She also learned how gender structures both the traditional lifestyles and the changes that tourism and transnationalism have brought. In her comprehensive and accessible study, she reveals how Taquileans used their isolation, landownership, and communal organizations to negotiate the pitfalls of globalization and modernization and even to benefit from tourism. This multi-sited ethnography set in Peru, Washington, D.C., and New York City shows why and how cloth remains central to Andean society and how the marketing of textiles provided the experience and money for Taquilean initiatives in controlling tourism. The first book about tourism in South America that centers on traditional arts as well as community control, Weaving a Future will be of great interest to anthropologists and scholars and practitioners of tourism, grassroots development, and the fiber arts. "James Theler and Robert Boszhardt provide an overview of the Driftless region of the Upper Mississippi River Valley - roughly from Dubuque, Iowa, to Red Wing, Minnesota, but framed within a somewhat larger area extending from the Rock Island Rapids at the modern Moline-Rock Island area to the Falls of St. Anthony at Minneapolis-St. Paul. The book concludes with useful catalogs of the animal remains and rock art found in the valley as well as a list of archaeological sites and museums to visit."--Jacket.

James Theler and Robert Boszhardt provide an overview of the Driftless region of the Upper Mississippi River Valley - roughly from Dubuque, Iowa, to Red Wing, Minnesota, but framed within a somewhat larger area extending from the Rock Island Rapids at the modern Moline-Rock Island area to the Falls of St. Anthony at Minneapolis-St. Paul. The book concludes with useful catalogs of the animal remains and rock art found in the valley as well as a list of archaeological sites and museums to visit.

From the end of the ice age to the fur trade era, this book provides an overview of the 12,000-year human past of the Driftless region of the Upper Mississippi River Valley. Focusing on ancient peoples and artefacts, it draws upon knowledge of past climate changes and human adaptation.