Barbara Voorhies

Professor Emerita
Research Professor

Contact Phone

805-893-2257

Specialization

Archaeology, cultural ecology; Mesoamerica

Education

PhD, Anthropology, Yale University, 1969

BS, Geology, Tufts University, 1961

 

Research

  • Mesoamerican Prehistory–the prehistory of Mexico and the northern Central American countries from first settlement to the arrival of peoples from the Old World.
  • Coastal Adaptations–how people over time have met the challenges of living along the world's coastlines.
  • Transition from Foraging to Farming in Tropical Coastal Habitats–how mobile foragers shifted their lifeways to settled village farmers in tropical lowland habitats, especially on the south Pacific coast of Mexico.

 

Prehistoric Games of North American Indians: Subarctic to Mesoamerica

edited by Barbara Voorhies

 

The University of Utah Press

J. Willard Marriott Library | THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

Prehistoric Games of North American Indians is a collection of studies on the ancient games of indigenous peoples of North America. The authors, all archaeologists, muster evidence from artifacts, archaeological features, ethnography, ethnohistory, and to a lesser extent linguistics and folklore. Chapters sometimes center on a particular game (chunkey rolling disc game or patolli dice game, for example) or sometimes on a specific pre-historic society and its games (Aztec acrobatic games, games of the ancient Fremont people), and in one instance on the relationship between slavery and gaming in ancient indigenous North American societies.

In addition to the intrinsic value of pursuing the time depth of these games, some of which remain popular and culturally important today among Native Americans or within the broader society, the book is important for demonstrating a wide variety of research methods and for problematizing a heretofore overlooked research topic. Issues that emerge include the apparently ubiquitous but difficult to detect presence of gambling, the entanglement of indigenous games and the social logic of the societies in which they are embedded, the characteristics of women’s versus men’s games or those of in-group and out-group gaming, and the close correspondence between gaming and religion. The book’s coverage is broad and balanced in terms of geography, level of socio-cultural organization and gender.

Barbara Voorhies is research professor and professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“This is not a trivial subject. The book is focused on an important and often neglected aspect of human culture. It will stand out for its seriousness and its readability.”

—Dean R. Snow, professor emeritus of anthropology, Penn State University

 

400 pp., 7 x 10

98 illustrations, 19 maps

ISBN 978-1-60781-559-4

Cloth $65.00

 

TO ORDER: phone: 800-621-2736 fax: 800-621-8476 email: orders@press.uchicago.edu

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For publicity inquiries, contact Hannah New, Marketing Manager, 801-585-9786 or hannah.new@utah.edu

 

 

An Archaic Mexican Shellmound

and Its Entombed Floors

Principal Author and Editor: Barbara Voorhies

Publication date: 2015

ISBN: 978-1-938770-02-9

This book presents investigations of several floors that are within the site of Tlacuachero's shell depositsthat formed over a 600-800 year interval during the Archaic period (ca. 8000-2000 BCE), a crucialtimespan in Mesoamerican prehistory when people were transitioning from full blown dependency on wildresources to the use of domesticated crops.

Pdf ebook $35.00

Tlacuachero is the site of an Archaic-period shellmound located in the wetlands of the outer coast of southwest Mexico. This book presents investigations of several floors that are within the site's shell deposits that formed over a 600-800 year interval during the Archaic period (ca. 8000-2000 BCE), a crucial timespan in Mesoamerican prehistory when people were transitioning from full blown dependency on wild resources to the use of domesticated crops. The floors are now deeply buried in an limited area below the summit of the shellmound. The authors explore what activities were carried out on their surfaces, discussing the floors’ patterns of cultural features, sediment color, density and types of embedded microrefuse and phytoliths, as well as chemical signatures of organic remains. The studies conducted at Tlacuachero are especially significant in light of the fact that data-rich lowland sites from the Archaic period are extraordinarily rare; the wealth of information gleaned from the floors of the Tlacuachero shellmound can now be widely appreciated.

Table of Contents

Ch. 1: Introduction by Barbara Voorhies

Ch. 2: Stratigraphy and Chronology of the Archaic Period Deposits at Tlacuachero by Brendan

Culleton, Barbara Voorhies, and Douglas J. Kennett

Ch. 3: Dating the Tlacuachero Post-Archaic Deposits: Ceramic Analysis by Heather B. Thakar

Ch. 4: The Tlacuachero Floors: Description and Sampling Methods by Heather B. Thakar

Ch. 5: Geochemistry of the Tlacuachero Floors by Hector Neff, Paul Burger, and Isabela Kott

Ch. 6: Spatial Analysis of Microrefuse and Floor Color Variations by Heather B. Thakar

Ch. 7: A Spatial Analysis of Phytoliths at Tlacuachero by Doug H. Drake

Ch. 8: Early Use of Chipped Stone at Tlacuachero by Elizabeth H. Paris

Ch. 9: The Tlacuachero Vertebrate Fauna by Thomas A. Wake and Barbara Voorhies

Ch. 10: Some Considerations of Site Formation Processes and Functions of Tlacuachero by

Barbara Voorhies

Ch. 11: Site Formation Process and Function at Mega-Shellmounds: Refuse Heaps or Platform

Mounds? by Barbara Voorhies

 

Pages:231

Language: English

Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press

Publications

  • 2002 A Middle Archaic Archaeological Site on the West Coast of Mexico: (Authored by Barbara Voorhies, Douglas J. Kennett, John G. Jones, and Thomas A. Wake). Latin American Antiquity 13:179-200.
  • 2004 Coastal Collectors in the Holocene: The Chantuto People of Southwest Mexico. The University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
  • 2004 Postclassic Soconusco Society:The Late Prehistory of Coastal Chiapas, Mexico. Co-authored with Janine Gasco. Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, University of Albany, New York.
  • 2006 An Ecological Model for the Origins of Maize-based Food Production on the Pacific Coast of Southern Mexico. (Co-authored by Douglas J. Kennett, Barbara Voorhies, and Dean Martorana). In Human Behavioral Ecology and the Origins of Agriculture, edited by D.J. Kennett and B. Winterhalder, pp. 103-136. University of California Press, Berkeley.
  •  2006 An Ecological Model for the Origins of Maize-based Food Production on the Pacific Coast of Southern Mexico. (Co-authored by Douglas J. Kennett, Barbara Voorhies, and Dean Martorana). In Human Behavioral Ecology and the Origins of Agriculture, edited by D.J. Kennett and B. Winterhalder, pp. 103-136. University of California Press, Berkeley.
  • 2008  Long-Term Effects on Marine Ecosystems in Guerrero, Mexico (Authored by Douglas J. Kennett, Barbara Voorhies, Thomas A. Wake, and Natalia Martínez).  In Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems: A Global Perspective, edited by Torben C. Rick and Jon M. Erlandson, pp. 103-124. University of California Press, Berkeley.

  • 2011  A Gender-Based Model for Changes in Subsistence and Mobility during the Terminal Late Archaic Period on the Coast of Chiapas, Mexico.  (Authored by Barbara Voorhies and Douglas J. Kennett). In Early Mesoamerican Social Transformations: Archaic and Formative Lifeways in the Soconusco Region, pp. 27-46, edited by Richard Lesure. University of California Press. Berkeley.

  • 2013 The Deep Prehistory of Indian Gaming: Possible Late Archaic Game Boards at the Tlacuachero Shellmound, Chiapas, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 24(1):98-115.
  • 2013 Games and Other Amusements of the Ancient Mesoamericans.http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/games-and-other-amusements-of-the-ancient-mesoamericans
  • 2015 Some Considerations of Site Formation Processes and Functions of Tlacuachero. An Archaic Mexican Shellmound and its Entombed Floors. Barbara Voorhies, editor and principal author, pp. 171-192. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles.
  • 2015 Site Formation Process and Function at Mega-Shellmounds: Refuse Heaps or Platform Mounds? An Archaic Mexican Shellmound and its Entombed Floors. Barbara Voorhies, editor and principal author, pp.193-207. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles.

  • 2016   Clamming Up: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of a Costa Rican Artisanal Clam Fishery. (Authored by Barbara Voorhies and Natalia Martínez Tagüeña) Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology.  Published online 16 December, 2016.  http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/knECFqR8SFs2Nuh38dcC/full
  • 2016  Classic Period Ritual Ceramics from the Coast of Chiapas, Mexico (authored by Barbara Voorhies and Margaret Arvey). Ancient Mesoamerica 27(1): 91-108.
  • 2017  Introduction. In Prehistoric Games of North American Indians: Subarctic to Mesoamerica, edited by Barbara Voorhies. University of Utah Press.  In press.         
  • 2017  Ancient Maya Patolli (authored by John Walden and Barbara Voorhies). In Prehistoric Games of North American Indians: Subarctic to Mesoamerica, edited by Barbara Voorhies. University of Utah Press. In press.
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