An Archaeology of Woodland Transformation: Social Movements, Identities, and Pottery Production on the Gulf Coast
By Jessica A. Jenkins
Jessica Jenkins delivers a concise yet powerful reexamination of Florida’s Middle–Late Woodland transition. Drawing on ceramic-analysis techniques, she reframes what many have labeled a societal collapse around 650 A.D. as a deliberate era of social movements and identity formation. Jenkins shows that Indigenous communities in the Lower Suwannee region intentionally dispersed from civic-ceremonial centers, distanced themselves from ancestral burial grounds, altered mortuary customs, and introduced new pottery surface treatments and vessel designs.
By cataloging ceramic assemblages from twelve island sites near present-day Cedar Key, Jenkins identifies material markers of collective identity and traces the relational networks that underpinned transformative change. She explores how these shifts in craft and ritual practice fostered new social bonds across the Gulf Coast landscape.
As the first synthesis of village structures, network dynamics, and communal identities for this place and period, the book offers rich datasets and delivers fresh interpretations of Woodland society. Its 228 compact pages chart the ebb and flow of social movements and underscore the agency of Indigenous actors in shaping their cultural landscapes.
Jenkins’s accessible prose balances empirical rigor with theoretical clarity, making complex arguments approachable for scholars. Her focus on relational networks illustrates how everyday pottery functioned not only as utilitarian vessels but also symbols and mechanisms of communal cohesion during a pivotal era. By shifting the narrative from collapse to transformation, this volume provides a compelling new lens on the power of material culture to illuminate prehistoric social worlds.
University Press of Florida, 2025; 228 pp.; $90 hardback; upf.com
Ancient Indigenous Cuisines: Archaeological Explorations of the Midcontinent
Edited by Susan M. Kooiman, Jodie A. O’Gorman, and Autumn M. Painter
This volume stakes a bold claim in foodways archaeology, surveying cuisine from the Early Archaic (circa 9000 B.C.) through Late Precontact (up to A.D. 1500) across ecological zones from boreal forests to prairie lands. The editors assemble 14 contributors who blend residue chemistry, zooarchaeology, and experimental cooking to reconstruct ancient menus and mealtime rituals—not just what people ate, but how food forged social bonds and marked identity.
Standout essays include a deep dive into earth-oven feasting via fire-cracked rock, revealing communal cooking strategies; an exploration of wild rice’s cultural pulse among Anishinaabe communities in the Northern Great Lakes; and an innovative chapter on limestone-based nixtamalization that defined Cahokian cuisine. Each case study is rigorously underpinned by 18 data-rich tables and 34 black-and-white figures, anchored by six regional maps that guide the reader through shifting culinary landscapes.
The volume’s punch comes from its dual framing: detailed, method-driven chapters are bookended by reflective essays that argue cuisine itself is a form of material culture and ritual performance. The result is neither dry cataloging nor romantic nostalgia, but a crisp, evidence-driven narrative that reframes ancient meals as windows into social worlds. For archaeologists, anthropologists, and anyone hungry to taste the past, Ancient Indigenous Cuisines serves a robust feast of insights—and lays out a tantalizing research agenda for the next generation of culinary archaeologists.
University of Alabama Press, 2025; 326 pp.; $110 hardcover, $39.95 e book; upcolorado.com
Memory in Fragments: The Lives of Ancient Maya Sculptures
By Megan E. O’Neil
This fascinating exploration of the treatment of ancient Maya monumental stone sculptures, particularly those depicting rulers and other elite figures, presents an insightful perspective on ways the Maya engaged with their history through time when these sculptures and monuments, especially stelae, were frequently moved, reset, burned, broken, re-carved, and buried. Rather than interpreting their inscriptions, O’Neil examines how the ancient Maya used, repurposed, and experienced these monuments over centuries, presenting important insights into their role in Maya culture. As seen in modern times with Confederate monuments, ancient Maya monuments could be contested as perceptions of them changed through time, highlighting their role as a “critical medium for the ancient Maya to act in the present and connect with the past.”
The Maya flourished from 2,000 B.C. to A.D. 1521 in the lowlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras. This study compares stone sculptures at multiple Maya sites in the southern lowlands from the 5th through the 9th centuries, encompassing the Early and Late Classic periods and the beginning of the Terminal Classic. Using evidence from excavations, fieldnotes, photographs from 1930s to current archaeological projects, and from analyses of sculptures and architecture in situ and in museums, O’Neil explores the often-complex life histories of stone sculptures/monuments from prehistoric to modern times. Years in the making, this thoroughly researched book focuses on Tikal and Uaxactun in Petén, Calakmul in Campeche, Yaxchilan in the Usmacinta River Valley, and Copán in western Honduras, among other sites, drawing on Maya perspectives for conceiving the world as well as using approaches from art history, anthropology, religious studies, and other fields to theorize about the many meanings and life histories of ancient Maya sculptures. Beautifully illustrated, with hundreds of color and black-and-white plates, the book is organized into three sections that explore aspects of the creation, modification, and reuse of ancient Maya sculptures, clearly demonstrating that they were not static, inanimate objects, but remained dynamic entities.
The University of Texas Press, 2024; 280 pp; illus., $65 hardcover, $35 e-book; utpress.utexas.edu)
Pueblo Bonito and Chaco Canyon Revisited: The Published versus the Unpublished Record
By Jonathan E. Reyman
Reyman is a retired professor of anthropology at Illinois State University, and served for over a decade as curator of the American Southwest, Mesoamerican, and South American collections at the Illinois State Museum. His book presents the results of his meticulous research, begun more than 50 years ago with his desire to examine “likely” Mesoamerican influences on Chaco Canyon through materials excavated by the Hyde Expedition (1896-1901), housed at the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. Finding many of the fieldnotes and key details of this expedition, the first large-scale excavation in Chaco Canyon, and other past investigations and stabilization projects at Chaco to be unpublished, his research eventually took him to 22 institutions across the U.S.
Reyman’s slim volume is packed with detailed information about Chaco burials and other insights gleaned from unpublished fieldnotes, diaries, and archaeological analyses, highlighting the great value of unpublished records housed in archives, museums, and libraries that contain essential primary data. Some of the early excavations at Chaco were solely focused on obtaining collections, with no thorough excavation of the rooms or accounting of human remains, and important data about these and other Chaco finds are revealed in unpublished fieldnotes. Reyman argues that the apparent lack of burials at Chaco is largely a problem of unpublished data, since the canyon supported thousands for at least three to four centuries. While the Chaco Digital Initiative at the University of Virginia is making much of the unpublished record for Chaco available, it is still a work in progress. Reyman’s examination of unpublished records, particularly those relating to Pueblo Bonito, Chaco’s largest and most thoroughly excavated site, provides new information regarding mortuary practices and suggests recent estimates of ancient Chacoan populations are too low, since they are largely based on the apparent paucity of burials there. His extensive appendices and photographs provide research resources and sensitive details about Chaco skeletal materials that some may find disturbing. A useful index and numerous site maps, illustrations, and field sketches are also included.
The University of New Mexico Press, 2024; 168 pp; illus; $85 hardcover, $39.95 paperback, $26.99 e-book; unmpress.com
