Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory (Volume 7)

Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Volume 7 is a collection of papers that deals with the study of gender, discovering new sites, and using remote sensing. Some papers describe the prestate societies in the Americas, intrasite archaeological records organization, and geomagnetic dating methods. One paper explains that an explicit framework for the archaeological study of gender should be formulated alongside the existing explicit theory of human social action. Organization of gender behaviors is connected to task differentiation, material culture, cultural solidarity, integration, extradomestic trade. Another paper notes that the extent of social differentiation seems to depend less on the number of people in a society than on its organizational divisions. It emphasizes that the total population and maximal community-size can also determine the number of administrative levels. One paper discusses the approaches and techniques in dealing with the problems of discovering unseen sites, name, their visibility and obtrusiveness. The individual archaeologists can apply remote sensing applications to pursue a cultural resource management or in a certain explanatory archaeological situation. Another paper explains how to obtain accuracy in dating objects and cultural events using geomagnetic methods. The collection is suitable for professional or amateur archaeologists, sociologists, anthropologist, and scientist involved in the analysis of artifacts.

Michael B. Schiffer, University of Arizona, Tucson