MESOAMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY - THEORY AND PRACTICE

• Offers a comprehensive introduction to the archaeology of Mesoamerica by focusing on key time periods, sites, and the issues these times and places require us to confront.
  
• Examines key moments in the Mesoamerican historical tradition, from the earliest villages where Olmec art flourished, to the Aztec and Maya City-states that Spanish invaders described in the 16th century.
  
• Engages the chronological benchmarks of precolumbian social development in Mesoamerica, such as the transition to village life, emergence of political stratification, and formation of Mesoamerican urban centers.
  
• Includes an extensive introduction by the editors that situates contemporary Mesoamerican archaeology in the broader terms of the social politics of archaeology.

For further resources to use with this book - including study questions, maps and photographs - visit the website at www.blackwellpublishing.com/BSGA/mesoam

Rosemary A. Joyce is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been engaged in archaeological fieldwork in Honduras since 1977. Her most recent publications include: Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica (2001), The Languages of Archaeology (2002), and Embodied Lives: Egypt and the Ancient Maya (editor, with Lynn Meskell, 2003).