BiblioVault - Books about Hall, Robert L.

African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture
Edited by Anne L. Bower
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Library of Congress TX715.A2428 2007 | Dewey Decimal 641.59296073

Ranging from seventeenth-century West African fare to contemporary fusion dishes using soul food ingredients, the essays in this book provide an introduction to many aspects of African American foodways and an antidote to popular misconceptions about soul food. Examining the combination of African, Caribbean, and South American traditions, the volume's contributors offer lively insights from history, literature, sociology, anthropology, and African American studies to demonstrate how food's material and symbolic values have contributed to African Americans' identity for centuries. Individual chapters examine how African foodways survived the passage into slavery, cultural meanings associated with African American foodways, and the contents of African American cookbooks, both early and recent.

Contributors are Anne L. Bower, Robert L. Hall, William C. Whit, Psyche Williams-Forson, Doris Witt, Anne Yentsch, Rafia Zafar.

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An Archaeology of the Soul: NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN BELIEF AND RITUAL
Robert L. Hall
University of Illinois Press, 1997
Library of Congress E98.R3H16 1997 | Dewey Decimal 299.7

The richness and the range of Native American spirituality has long been
noted, but it has never been examined so thoroughly, nor with such an
eye for the amazing interconnectedness of Indian tribal ceremonies and
practices, as in An Archaeology of the Soul. In this monumental
work, destined to become a classic in its field, Robert Hall traces the
genetic and historical relationships of the tribes of the Midwest and
Plains--including roots that extend back as far as 3,000 years.
Looking beyond regional barriers, An Archaeology of the Soul offers new depths of insight into American Indian ethnography. Hall uncovers the lineage and kinship shared by Native North Americans through the perspectives of history, archaeology, archaeoastronomy, biological anthropology, linguistics, and mythology. The wholeness and panoramic complexity of American Indian belief has never been so fully explored--or more deeply understood.

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Enduring Motives: The Archaeology of Tradition and Religion in Native America
Linea Sundstrom
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Library of Congress E59.R38E54 2012 | Dewey Decimal 299.7

Enduring Motives examines tradition and religious beliefs as they are expressed in landscape, the built environment, visual symbols, stories, and ritual.

Bringing together archaeologists and Native American experts, this volume focuses on long-lived religious traditions of the native peoples of the Americas and how religion codifies, justifies, and reinforces these traditions by placing a high value on continuity of beliefs and practice.

Using clues from the archaeological record to piece together the oldest religions of the Americas, Enduring Motives is organized into four parts. Part 1 creates continuity through structure, iconography, and sacred stories that correspond to culture-specific symbolic representations of the universe. Part 2 explores the encoding of tradition in place and object, or how people use objects to enliven tradition and pass it on to future generations. Part 3 examines stability and change and shows how traditions can evolve over time without losing their core cultural significance. The final part recognizes deep-time traditions through the evidence of ancient cosmology and religious tradition.

Spanning cultures as diverse as the Aztec, Plains Indians, Hopi, Mississippian, and Southwest Pueblo, Enduring Motives brings to light new insights on ancient religious beliefs, practices, methods, and techniques, which allow otherwise intangible facets of culture to be productively explored.

Contributors
Wesley Bernardini / James S. Brown Jr. / Cheryl Claassen / John E. Clark / ArleneColman / Warren DeBoer /

Robert L. Hall /Kelley Hays-Gilpin / Alice Beck Kehoe /John E. Kelly / Stephen H. Lekson / ColinMcEwan /

John Norder / Jeffrey Quilter /Amy Roe / Peter G. Roe / Linea Sundstrom

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Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar
Edited by R. Barry Lewis and Charles Stout
University of Alabama Press, 1998
Library of Congress E99.M6815M575 1998 | Dewey Decimal 306.09762

Archaeologists and architects draw upon theoretical perspectives from their fields to provide valuable insights into the structure, development, and meaning of prehistoric communities.

Architecture is the most visible physical manifestation of human culture. The built environment envelops our lives and projects our distinctive regional and ethnic identities to the world around us. Archaeology and architecture find common theoretical ground in their perspectives of the homes, spaces, and communities that people create for themselves. Although archaeologists and architects may ask different questions and apply different methods, the results are the same—a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

In this volume, prominent archaeologists examine the architectural design spaces of Mississippian towns and mound centers of the eastern United States. The diverse Mississippian societies, which existed between A.D. 900 and 1700, created some of the largest and most complex Native American archaeological sites in the United States. The dominant architectural feature shared by these communities was one or more large plazas, each of which was often flanked by buildings set on platform mounds. The authors describe the major dimensions of an architectural grammar, centered on the design of the plaza and mound complex that was shared by different societies across the Mississippian world. They then explore these shared architectural features as physical representations or metaphors for Mississippian world views and culture.

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