U. Press of Florida

The bioarchaeology of the human head; decapitation, decoration, and deformation.

Anthropologists, archaeologists, and palaeontologists compare such practices as decapitation, the decoration of skulls, and deformation of the human head among various groups in Oceania, Europe, Eurasia, and the New World. Looking first at symbolic and contextual approaches, then bioarchaeological and biochemical approaches, they consider such topics as the collection and use of skulls in the Torres Strait Island, skull collection and display in medieval and early modern Ireland, a forensic case of biohistory and cranial morphology from Spanish colonial Georgia, and pre-Colombian Maya cranial modifications from infancy to ancestorhood. Seven of the 12 papers are from sessions at the 2005 and 2006 annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Landscapes and hydrology of the predrainage Everglades. (DVD included)

Five environmental scientists with different specialties, all currently or formerly with the South Florida Water Management District, have reconstructed from historical sources a scientifically useful description of the vast wetlands complex before it was drained between the 1880s and the early 1950s. After setting out their sources and methods, they explore phases of Everglades drainage, effects of the drainage, reconstructing the predrainage landscape, Lake Okeechobee and the Okeechobee Marsh, Sawgrass Plains, Custard Apple and Cypress Swamps, Ridge and Slough landscape, marl marshes, landscapes bordering the Everglades, and predrainage hydrology. The video disk contains historical observations and appendices. The project is enormous in itself, but also serves as a model for reconstructing other developed landscapes. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Looking south; race, gender, and the transformation of labor from reconstruction to globalization.

Eight stand-alone essays by Frederickson (history, Miami U.) explore the labor history of the American south between the transformation of the labor system with the advent of industrialization at the end of the 19th century through to the beginning of the 21st century and the impacts of globalization. The essays address issues of race, class, and gender and highlight the role of dissent in shaping the labor systems of the New South. Specific topics include interracial labor organizing and labor actions in New Orleans and their relationship to the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (the origin of the "separate but equal" doctrine overturned later in Brown v. Board of Education), reform strategies adopted by Black and white women on labor and other issues, representations of southern women in labor history, the theory and practice developed by organized labor in their efforts to organized the textile industry during the Great Depression, race and patterns of textile employment across the 20th century, the impact of the Latino immigration wave to the South that came in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the export of the New South labor paradigm to the Global South. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)