Anuta, a small Polynesian community in the eastern Solomon Islands, has had minimal contact with outside cultural forces. Even at the start of the 21st century, it remains one of the most traditional and isolated islands in the insular Pacific. In Polynesian Oral Traditions, Richard Feinberg offers a window into this fascinating and relatively unfamiliar culture through a collection of Anutan historical narratives, including indigenous texts and English translations.

Revised to stimulate and engage an undergraduate student audience, Feinberg’s updated account of Anuta opens with a chapter on his varied experiences when he initially undertook fieldwork in this tiny, isolated Polynesian community in the Solomon Islands. The following chapters explore dominant cultural features, including language, kinship, marriage, politics, and religion—topics that align with subject matter covered in introductory anthropology courses. The final chapter looks at some of the challenges Anutans face in the twenty-first century. Like many other peoples living on small, remote islands, Anutans strive to maintain traditional values while at the same time becoming involved in the world market economy. In all, Feinberg gives readers magnificent material for studying the relations between demography, environment, culture, and society in this changing world.

In this astounding new archaeological survey, authors Robert York and Gigi York examine the history of Oceania and the Americas to unveil the significant role slings and slingstones played in developing societies. They present new evidence that suggests that unlike David who plucked rounded pebbles from a stream, inhabitants of the Pacific Islands deliberately fashioned sling missiles out of coral, stone, and clay into uniquely deadly shapes. They also show that the use of slings in the Americas was more pervasive and inclined to variability than previously recognized.

Arrow Talk makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Melanesian culture and contemporary sociopolitical issues in Papua New Guinea. In a post modern era in which culture has been dismissed by many anthropologists as a reification, this book makes a cogent argument for cultural holism by showing how symbolic, psychological, religious and linguistic factors have combined to shape Melpa responses to the political and economic crises they have had to face in the waning years of the millennium. This analysis also contributes notably to the development of anthropological perspectives on colonial and post colonial historical processes.

Landmarks addresses a wide range of questions relevant to the recent history of anthropology and its importance to contemporary issues. These questions include the significance of anthropology for Third World studies; the debate on whether anthropology is a scientific or a humanistic subject; anthropology as a means of reflecting on ourselves as well as others; and the criticisms of anthropological work that have emerged out of postmodernism. Drawing on his research findings in Papua New guinea since 1964 and his more recent work on the cross-cultural study of medicine, the author examines the extent to which we can achieve understanding between different cultures and the relative merits of approaches that stress indigenous categories or those of the observer.

Caves and Culture is primarily focused on the archaeological research of Dr. Olaf H. Prufer and his associates as they investigated and explored caves in Ohio since 1964. Spurlock and her co-editors report, sometimes reclaim, and frequently reinterpret data that will be useful to the understanding of Ohio archaeology for decades to come. Anyone with interest in local or regional (Midwestern or midcontinental) prehistory will appreciate this exploration into Ohio’s history.

Cultural Variability in Context, a collection of papers presented at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in April 1989, documents and explains the varied settlement and subsistence practices found in the prehistoric mid-Ohio Valley during the Woodland Period, ca. 1000 B.C.-A.D. 1000. The prehistoric societies of the mid-Ohio Valley played an important part in the development of the social complexity that characterized the Woodland period in eastern North America. Ohio Valley Adena and Ohio Hopewell ceremonialism occupy prominent positions in current interpretations of the period, as they have for many years. This volume focuses on underlying settlement and subsistence relationships, and is especially concerned with assessing time/space variability within the period and its ultimate influence on broader, inter-regional issues.

Notwithstanding the archaeological record amassed over nearly a century, little is understood abut the dynamics that led from the Stone Age to a semblance of formative civilization. This volume attempts to fill this gap in terms of archaeology, biological anthropology, demography, pathology, and paleo-ethnographic interpretation and has vast implications as far as archaic transition throughout eastern North America is concerned.

In sharp contrast with the southern and southeastern uplands of Ohio, rockshelters are rare in the northern parts of the state. Only at Krill Cave has it been possible to reconstruct a temporal sequence from the Archaic through Late Woodland times on the basis of quantitatively appreciable data. The results of these excavations (carried out in the summers of 1974 and 1975) can best be discussed in terms of what the three major occupations have in common. The shared commonalities are probably due to the environmental/ecological setting in which the occupations occurred.

This richly illustrated book explores the theory and technique used by Anutans in construction, use, and handling of their craft; the navigational skills still employed in interisland voyaging; and their culturally patterned attitudes toward the ocean and travel on the high seas. Further, the discussion is set within the context of social relations, values, and the Anutan’s own symbolic definitions of the world in which they live.