| American Beginnings: The Prehistory and Palaeoecology of Beringia Contributor(s): West, Frederick Hadleigh (Editor) |
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ISBN: 0226893995 ISBN-13: 9780226893990 Publisher: University of Chicago Press OUR PRICE: $152.46 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: December 1996 Annotation: During the last Ice Age, a thousand-mile-wide land bridge connected Siberia and Alaska, creating the region known as Beringia. Sometime prior to twelve thousand years ago, a grand procession of large mammals and the humans who hunted them crossed this bridge to America. With its diverse large fauna, the peculiar Beringian environment appears to have encouraged these hunting peoples in the perfection of the skills that ultimately prepared them to settle and thrive in the empty continents of North and South America. Here they formed the bases for the immensely diversified populations "discovered" by Europeans ten thousand years later. A matter of consuming interest on both sides of the present-day Bering Strait, much of the Russian evidence for this migration has until now remained largely inaccessible to American scholars. In American Beginnings Frederick Hadleigh West has brought together for the first time in one volume the most up-to-date information from both Russia and America. Over the past twenty-five years, extensive research has been carried out in Siberia and Alaska, painting a vivid picture of the nature of Beringia, its peoples, and their movements. The fifty-six contributors to this volume, all preeminent scholars of Beringia, draw on this wealth of archaeological and palaeoecological evidence to reconstruct the Beringian environment. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Archaeology - History | United States - General |
| Dewey: 970 |
| LCCN: 96011719 |
| Physical Information: 1.65" H x 8.77" W x 11.24" (4.30 lbs) 600 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: During the last Ice Age, a thousand-mile-wide land bridge connected Siberia and Alaska, creating the region known as Beringia. Over twelve thousand years ago, a procession of large mammals and the humans who hunted them crossed this bridge to America. Much of the Russian evidence for this migration has until now remained largely inaccessible to American scholars. American Beginnings brings together for the first time in one volume the most up-to-date archaeological and palaeoecological evidence on Beringia from both Russia and America. An invaluable resource. . . . It will no doubt remain the key reference book for Beringia for many years to come.--Steven Mithen, Journal of Human Evolution Extraordinary. The fifty-six contributors . . . represent the most prominent American and Russian researchers in the region.--Choice Publication of this well-illustrated compendium is a great service to early American and especially Siberian Upper Paleolithic archaeology.--Nicholas Saunders, New Scientist This is a great book . . . perhaps the greatest contribution to the archaeology of Beringia that has yet been published. . . . This is the kind of book to which archaeology should aspire.--Herbert D.G. Maschner, Antiquity |