Books in the Co-published with The Society for Historical Archaeology series

The Iroquois confederacy, one of the most influential Native American groups encountered by early European settlers, is commonly perceived as having plunged into steep decline in the late seventeenth century due to colonial encroachment into the Great Lakes region. Kurt Jordan challenges long-standing interpretations that depict the Iroquois as defeated, colonized peoples by demonstrating that an important nation of that confederacy, the Senecas, maintained an impressive political and economic autonomy and resisted colonialism with a high degree of success.By combining archaeological data grounded in the material culture of the Seneca Townley-Read site with historical documents, Jordan answers larger questions about the Seneca's cultural sustainability and durability in an era of intense colonial pressures. He offers a detailed reconstruction of daily life in the Seneca community and demonstrates that they were extremely selective about which aspects of European material culture, plant and animal species, and lifeways they allowed into their territory.

Through archaeological and archival research from sites associated with the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Disposing of Modernity explores the changing world of urban America at the turn of the twentieth century. Featuring excavations of trash deposited during the fair, Rebecca Graff's first-of-its-kind study reveals changing consumer patterns, notions of domesticity and progress, and anxieties about the modernization of society.Graff examines artifacts, architecture, and written records from the 1893 fair's Ohio Building, which was used as a clubhouse for fairgoers in Jackson Park, and the Charnley-Persky House, an aesthetically modern city residence designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of the items she uncovers were products that first debuted at world's fairs, and materials such as mineral water bottles, cheese containers, dentures, and dinnerware illustrate how fairs created markets for new goods and influenced consumer practices. Graff discusses how the fair's ephemeral nature gave it transformative power in Chicago society, and she connects its accompanying "e;conspicuous disposal"e; habits to today's waste disposal regimes. Reflecting on the planning of the Obama Presidential Center at the site of the Chicago World's Fair, she draws attention to the ways the historical trends documented here continue in the present.Published in cooperation with the Society for Historical Archaeology