This category of the catalogue is set up to describe books that are on special regions of the world, countries or adjacent areas. At the moment, this category will point up the shallowness of the range of books I've seen to date; the list is weak in everything except the archaeology of the Americas. Look for that to change in the coming months.
There was a sword-maker in Seville... so starts the account of Andrés de Segura, a teenaged Spanish sailor shipwrecked off the coast of the New World in 1595. Translated by John Hann.
Laurence Flanagan's lively survey of Irish archaeology contains a wealth of information concerning the prehistory of the green isle, from the first human occupations, about 8000 years B.C., to the end of the Late Bronze Age, 700 BC.
Paul Goldstein's 2005 book called Andean Diaspora, subtitled The Tiwanaku Colonies and the Origins of Empire, is an intriguing look at the Tiwanaku empire of South America and its colonies several hundred kilometers away.
Subtitled "Exclusion, Incorporation and Identity," this book by Douglass W. Bailey provides a glimpse into how life was changing between 6500 and 2500 BC.
Before the Volcano Erupted is a site report, written by scientists for the scientific community. Cerén is a most unusual and beautiful site, and I think it was a smart move to see that these sorts of images were made available in a cost-effective manner. While the book is a little dry, as site reports always are, the information gathered there is fascinating.
In Between the Lines, Anthony F. Aveni provides a personal and somewhat eccentric account of how he and his fellow researchers have come to believe what they do about the geometric shapes and animal effigy drawings called the Nasca Lines.
E. James Dixon's Bones, Boats and Bison is a well-written and readable summary of the pertinent data about the first colonization of the America continents.
The book China before China describes the history of the archaeological investigations of Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson and Ding Wenjiang, intellectual and scholar of the newly established Chinese republic between 1914 and 1925. Together, they discovered Chinese prehistory and paleontology.
The site of Grasshopper Pueblo was the home of the Mogollon people for the latter half of the 13th and the first half of the 14th centuries AD; and the home of an archaeological crew for the better part of 30 summers. Reid and Whittlesley interweave the two human occupations of this beautiful austere place in the mountain country of central Arizona, in an entertaining and illuminating manner.
From Robert A. Birmingham and Leslie E. Eisenberg, a discussion of the history and archaeology of the mounds, including information about the history of the "mound builder myth".
The Indians of the Greater Southeast is a collection of papers on Native American groups living from Florida to Texas during the first years of the European colonization of the American continent.
William Wayne Farris's 1998 book, Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures, provides welcome insight into recent understandings of the historical period of Japan, consisting of the 700 years from AD 100 to 800.
Edited by Robin Torrence and Anne Clarke, this book discusses the archaeology of Oceania at the time when Europeans first made contact.
The Berbers melds archaeology and history to provide a terrific introduction to the culture history of the Berbers of North Africa.
In the Mexican state of Chihuahua lies Paquimé, the capital city of what is considered the third great regional state of prehistory in the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries of the American Southwest.
Douglas Kennett's book, The Island Chumash, is an interesting examination of the way humans adapt to changes in their surroundings, whether self- or nature-induced.
Roger C. Smith's The Maritime Heritage of the Cayman Islands takes the reader on a trip both underwater and into the past of the Cayman Islands; and a rollicking, swash-buckling, pirate-filled, shipwreck-strewn adventure-on-the-high-seas past it was!
Chapurukha Kusimba's book The Rise and Fall of Swahili States investigates a truly cosmopolitan civilization which rose and fell on the eastern coast of Africa between the 11th and 16th centuries AD
Several recent books on the history and prehistory of Central America make it clear that exciting things are happening in Mesoamerican archaeology.
There are lots of books on South American archaeology which have been published in the last few years; here's a sample.
Only a handful of recent books on archaeology of the African countries have reached my doorstep to date; luckily, what there is is choice.
Recent books on the American southeast, consisting of the southeast quadrant of the United States, from Florida to Kentucky, and Louisiana to North Carolina.
