Search results for ""university of utah press,u.s.""

Opening with the extraordinary story of a young French priest working in 1968 amongst impoverished villages of northeast Brazil, struggling to bring sustenance, sustainability, and hope to these disregarded and willfully ignored communities, this book asks a broad and far-reaching question that challenges the contemporary sustainability movement.

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A newly updated guide to highpoints in all 50 states.

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North America's Galapagos: The Historic Channel Islands Biological Survey recounts the story of a group of researchers, naturalists, adventurers, cooks, immigrants, and scientifically curious teenagers who came together in the late 1930s to embark upon a Series of ambitious expeditions never before, or since, attempted. Their mission: to piece together the broken shards of the Channel Islands' history and evolution. California's eight Channel Islands, sometimes called 'North America's Galapagos' each support unique ecosystems with varied flora and fauna and differing human histories. The thirty-three men and women who set out to explore the islands hoped to make numerous discoveries that would go down in history along with their Names. More than eighty years ago, a lack of funds and dearth of qualified personnel dogged the pre-WWII expeditions, but it was only after America entered the war and the researchers were stranded on one of the islands that the survey was aborted, their work left for future scientists to complete. This untold saga of adventure, discovery, and goals abandoned is juxtaposed against the fresh successes of a new generation of Channel Island scholars. Engagingly written, North America's Galapagos illuminates the scientific process and reveals remarkable modern discoveries that are rewriting archaeological textbooks and unraveling the answer to the age-old question: how and when were the Americas populated? Anyone interested in the work conducted behind closed museum doors will want to read this book, so will history buffs, environmentalists, scientists, and general readers curious about our world.

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At the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Mormons were deliberately excluded from one of the main attractions, the Parliament of Religions. Organizers believed that Mormonism, with its connections to polygamy, did not merit a place alongside other world religions being showcased for the similar ways in which they inspired people to follow God. At the same time, however, Americans who had long shown hatred or distrust toward their Mormon neighbors had begun to look at Mormonism in a different light. Underlying this new look at Mormonism was a rapidly developing belief in America's fading western frontier as a place linked to core American values such as self-reliance, personal freedom, and democratic rule. With a unique history intimately tied to the frontier, Mormonism began to be seen less as something outside America, and more as a faith closely associated with the country's most important principles. In Frontier Religion Konden Smith Hansen examines the dramatic influence these perceptions of the frontier had on Mormonism and other religions in America. Endeavoring to better understand the sway of the frontier on religion in the United States, this book follows several Mormon-American conflicts, from the Utah War and the antipolygamy crusades to the Reed Smoot hearings. The story of Mormonism's move toward American acceptability represents a larger story of the nation's transition toward modernity and religious pluralism. This book challenges old assumptions and provokes further study of the ever changing dialectic between society and faith.

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Like other Christian denominations, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) has been engaged in the battle for the Bible since challenges to biblical authority began to exert significant influence in America toward the end of the nineteenth century. Other believing communities have responded with various reevaluations of biblical text. Latter-day Saints have experimented with similar approaches, often taking liberal positions on biblical authority and conservative positions on history and authorship. However, Latter-day Saints accept additional scripture as well as embracing a theology notably distinct from traditional Christianity. Hence, Latter-day Saints relate to the Bible differently from other Christians, creating gaps with mainstream biblical studies. This volume bridges that gap.From comparing the Book of Mormon to the Bible or the Dead Sea Scrolls, to Mormon feminists’ biblical studies approaches to the Gospels, this volume takes a comprehensive and inclusive approach to understanding Bible scholarship’s role in Mormon history and exploring these differences for both scholars and students. A diverse group of contributors presents an accessible resource to mediate between Latter-day Saint traditions and the broader context of biblical history, literature, and scholarship. Each essay provides a synopsis of relevant major scholarly views and delivers new insights into a wide variety of Bible receptions.

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The first full account of the journey and discoveries of an archaeological expedition into the rugged American Southwest.In 1931 a group from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum accomplished something that had never been attempted in the history of American archaeology—a six-week, four-hundred-mile horseback survey of prehistoric sites through some of the West’s most rugged terrain. The expedition was successful, but a report on the findings was never completed. What should have been one of the great archaeological stories in American history was relegated to boxes and files in the basement of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Now, based on over a thousand pages of documents and over four hundred photographs, this book recounts the remarkable day-to-day adventures of this crew of one professor, five students, and three Utah guides who braved heat, fatigue, and the dangerous canyon wilderness to reveal vestiges of the Fremont culture in the Tavaputs Plateau and Uinta Basin areas. To better tell this story, authors Spangler and Aton undertook extensive fieldwork to confirm the sites; their recent photographs and those of the original expedition are shared on these pages.

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Cultural Resource Management (CRM) refers to the discovery, evaluation, and preservation of culturally significant sites, focusing on but not limited to archaeological and historical sites of significance. CRM stems from the National Historic Preservation Act, passed in 1966. In 1986, archaeologists reviewed the practice of CRM in the Great Basin. They concluded that it was mainly a system of finding, flagging, and avoiding— a means of keeping sites and artifacts safe. Success was measured by counting the number of sites recorded and acres surveyed.This volume provides an updated review some thirty years later. The product of a 2016 symposium, its measures are the increase in knowledge obtained through CRM projects and the inclusion of tribes, the general public, industry, and others in the discovery and interpretation of Great Basin prehistory and history. Revealing both successes and shortcomings, it considers how CRM can face the challenges of the future. Chapters offer a variety of perspectives, covering highway archaeology, inclusion of Native American tribes, and the legacy of the NHPA, among other topics.

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The toil of several million peasant farmers in Aztec Mexico transformed lakebeds and mountainsides into a checkerboard of highly productive fields. This book charts the changing fortunes of one Aztec settlement and its terraced landscapes from the twelfth to the twenty-first century. It also follows the progress and missteps of a team of archaeologists as they pieced together this story. Working at a settlement in the Toluca Valley of central Mexico, the authors used fieldwalking, excavation, soil and artifact analyses, maps, aerial photos, land deeds, and litigation records to reconstruct the changing landscape through time. Exploiting the methodologies and techniques of several disciplines, they bring context to eight centuries of the region's agrarian history, exploring the effects of the Aztec and Spanish Empires, reform, and revolution on the physical shape of the Mexican countryside and the livelihoods of its people. Accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike, this well-illustrated and well-organized volume provides a step-by-step guide that can be applied to the study of terraced landscapes anywhere in the world. The four authors share an interest in terraced landscapes and have worked together and on their own on a variety of archaeological projects in Mesoamerica, the Mediterranean, Poland, and the United Kingdom.

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The structures of Chaco Canyon, built by native peoples between AD 850 and 1130, are among the most compelling ancient monuments on earth. Recognized as a World Heritage Site, these magnificent ruins are consistently featured in scholarly books and popular media. Yet, like Chaco itself, these buildings are anomalous in Southwestern archaeology and much debated.In a century of study, our understanding and means of approaching these ruins have grown considerably. Important tree-ring dating, GIS research, and computer imaging point to the need for a new volume on Chaco architecture that unifies older information with the new.The chapters in this volume focus on Chaco Great Houses and consider three overlapping themes: studies of technology and building types, analyses of architectural change, and readings of the built environment. To aid reconsideration there are over 150 maps, floor plans, elevations, and photos, including a number of color illustrations.

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Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.Book One describes in detail the gods of the Aztec people, including Uitzilopochtli, Tlatoc, and Quetzalcoatl. This colorful and clear translation brings to life characteristics of each god, describing such items as clothing or adornment worn by individual gods, as well as specific personality traits.

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Nobody knows what to do about queer Mormons. The institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prefers to pretend they don’t exist, that they can choose their way out of who they are, leave, or at least stay quiet in a community that has no place for them. Even queer Mormons don’t know what to do about queer Mormons. Their lived experience is shrouded by a doctrine in which heteronormative marriage is non-negotiable and gender is unchangeable. For women, trans Mormons, and Mormons of other marginalized genders, this invisibility is compounded by social norms which elevate (implicitly white) cisgender male voices above those of everyone else. This collection of essays gives voice to queer Mormons. The authors who share their stories—many speaking for the first time from the closet—do so here in simple narrative prose. They talk about their identities, their experiences, their relationships, their heartbreaks, their beliefs, and the challenges they face. Some stay in the church, some do not, some are in constant battles with themselves and the people around them as they make agonizing decisions about love and faith and community. Their stories bravely convey what it means to be queer, Mormon, and marginalized—what it means to have no voice and yet to speak anyway.

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Graffiti-covered industrial concrete ruins are all that remain today to remind us of the lives, adventures, and human relationships that once animated Bauer, Utah. Located just south of Tooele, across the Oquirrh Mountains west of the Salt Lake Valley, Bauer was abandoned in 1979 and declared a toxic waste site. The Book of Bauer: Stories from a Forgotten Town brings it back to life, evoking mid-twentieth century family and community in that company town as seen through the eyes of an observant adolescent boy. Presenting a dramatic snapshot of life in Bauer in narrative autobiographical form, the book recalls the fate of hundreds of derelict mining towns throughout the mountain and sagebrush West. With vivid prose and intimate observation, The Book of Bauer offers an unparalleled memoir of small-town life in Utah and the Great Basin.

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Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people. The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century. Book Eight lists the rulers of Tenochtitlan from the first, Acamapichtli, to the sixteenth, Don Cristobal Cecepatic. It also documents the rulers of the ancient Aztec cities of Tlatillco, Texcoco, and Uexotla. Several chapters are devoted to describing the various articles of clothing that the rulers and noblemen wore and the foods they ate for differing ceremonies and activities.

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This volume presents the multiyear archaeological investigations of Cerro Juanaqueña and related sites in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. These remarkable terraced hilltop settlements represent a series of watershed developments, including substantial dependence on agriculture and early experiments with village living, fortified settlements, collective labor, and communal architecture. Part of a larger, regional development, they parallel changes in northern Sonora and southern Arizona. The emergence of large fortified agricultural villages at 1300 BC before the use of ceramics was an unexpected discovery that changed how archaeologists view early agriculture in this region. The authors place their work in a regional and theoretical context, providing detailed analyses of radiocarbon dates, structures, features, and artifacts. Authors Hard and Roney, and their contributors, present innovative analyses of plant and animal remains, ground stone, chipped stone, and landscape evolution. Through comparisons with a global cross-cultural probe of hilltop sites and a detailed examination of the features and artifacts of Cerro Juanaqueña, Hard and Roney argue that these cerros de trincheras sites are the earliest fortified defensive sites in the region. Readers with interests in ancient agriculture, warfare, village formation, and material culture will find this to be a foundational volume.

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For 12,000 years, people have left a rich record of their experiences in Utah's Capitol Reef National Park. In The Capitol Reef Reader, award-winning author and photographer Stephen Trimble collects the best of this writing—160 years worth of words that capture the spirit of the park and its surrounding landscape in personal narratives, philosophical riffs, and historic and scientific records.The volume features nearly fifty writers who have anchored their attention and imagination in Utah's least-known national park. The bedrock elders of Colorado Plateau literature are here (Clarence Dutton, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey), as are generations of writers who love this land (including Ellen Meloy, Craig Childs, Charles Bowden, Renny Russell, Ann Zwinger, Gary Ferguson, and Rose Houk). Their pieces are a pleasure to read and each reveals a facet of Capitol Reef's story, creating a gem of a volume. Editor Stephen Trimble guides and orients with commentary and context.A visual survey of the park in almost 100 photographs adds another layer to our understanding of this place. Historic photos, pictures from Trimble's forty-five years of hiking the park, as well as images from master visual artists who have worked in Capitol Reef are included. No other book captures the essence of Capitol Reef like this one.

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