FEATURED BACKLIST

Like A Fiery Meteor

The Life of Joseph F. Smith

Stephen C. Taysom eBook ISBN 978-1-64769-129-5

Joseph F. Smith was born in 1838 to Hyrum Smith and Mary Fielding Smith. Six years later both his father and his uncle, Joseph Smith Jr., the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were murdered in Carthage, Illinois. The trauma of that event remained with Joseph F. for the rest of his life. In this first cradle-to-grave biography of Joseph F. Smith, Stephen C. Taysom uses previously unavailable primary source materials to craft a deeply detailed, insightful story of a prominent member of a governing and influential Mormon family. Importantly, Taysom situates Smith within the historical currents of American westward expansion, rapid industrialization, settler colonialism, regional and national politics, changing ideas about family and masculinity, and more. Though some writers tend to view the LDS Church and its leaders through a lens of political and religious separatism, Taysom does the opposite, pushing Joseph F. Smith and the LDS Church closer to the centers of power in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.

Hardcover ISBN 978-1-64769-127-1 $95.00s

Paper ISBN 978-1-64769-128-8 $34.95

Bears Ears

Landscape of Refuge and Resistance

Andrew Gulliford eBook ISBN 978-1-64769-078-6

Designated in 2016 by President Obama and reduced to 85 percent of its original size one year later by President Trump, Bears Ears National Monument continues to be a flash point of conflict among ranchers, miners, environmental groups, states’ rights advocates, and Native American activists. In this volume, Andrew Gulliford synthesizes 11,000 years of the region’s history to illuminate what’s truly at stake in this conflict and distills this geography as a place of refuge and resistance. Gulliford’s engaging narrative explains prehistoric Pueblo villages and cliff dwellings, Navajo and Ute history, stories of Mormon families who arrived by wagon train in 1880, impacts of the Atomic Age, uranium mining, and the pothunting and looting of Native graves that inspired the passage of the Antiquities Act over a century ago. The book describes how the national monument came about and its deep significance to five native tribes. Bears Ears National Monument is a bellwether for public land issues in the American West. Its recognition will be relevant for years to come.

Hardcover ISBN 978-1-64769-0762 $95.00s Paper ISBN 978-1-64769-077-9 $29.95

B/RDS

Béatrice Szymkowiak

B/RDS endeavors to dismantle discourses that create an artificial distinction between nature and humanity through a subversive erasure of an iconic work of natural history: John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-1838). This process of erasure considers the text of Birds of America as an archival cage. The author selectively erases words from the textual cage to reveal its ambiguity and the complex relationship between humanity and the other-than-human world. As the cage disappears, leaving a space for scarce, lyrical poems, birds break free, their voices inextricably entangled with ours.

Prose poems written in the author’s own words and prompted by the erasure process are also interspersed throughout the collection. These migratory poems, like ripples, trace the link between past and present and reveal the human-nature disconnect at the root cause of environmental and social problems, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Along its five movements, B/RDS also explores how we can reimagine our relationship to environment through language within new frameworks of interconnectedness.

eBook ISBN 978-1-64769-118-9

Paper ISBN 978-1-64769-115-8 $16.95

New Deal Archaeology in the West

Edited by Kelly J. Pool & Mark L. Howe

During Roosevelt’s New Deal, archaeological and cultural heritage projects of different scope and size were funded across this country from 1933 to 1944. The results of work east of the Mississippi River have been variously described in other publications. However, until now little has been reported or synthesized about western archaeological work, its role in economic recovery, or its impact on the direction and knowledge of the discipline. This volume shares previously untold stories of New Deal archaeology from across the American West and explores insights into the past revealed by these projects.

Descriptions of New Deal projects and their contributions to our understanding of the past, as well as the stories of those involved— archaeologists, avocationalists, and others—are woven together across the chapters. This volume demonstrates that despite regional differences, New Deal–funded archaeological and cultural heritage projects created a legacy of knowledge and practice across the nation.

Hardcover ISBN 978-1-64769-130-1 $65.00s

Mogollon

Communal Spaces and Places in the Greater American Southwest

Edited by Robert J. Stokes, Katherine

A. Dungan, & Jakob W. Sedig

This volume presents the latest research on the development and use of communal spaces and places across the Mogollon region, located in what is now the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. New data demonstrate that these spaces and places, though diverse in form and function, were essential to community development and cohesion.

The authors ask questions crucial to understanding past communities: What is a communal space or place? How did villagers across the Mogollon region use such places? And how do modern archaeologists investigate the past to learn how ancient people thought about themselves? Contributors use innovative approaches to explore the development patterns and properties of communal spaces and places. Buildings and other types of communal spaces are placed into broader cultural and social contexts, acknowledging the enduring importance of the kiva-type structure to many Native American societies of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico.

eBook ISBN 978-1-64769-126-4

Hardcover ISBN 978-1-64769-125-7 $75.00s

The Old Vero Site

One Hundred Years Later, The 2014 - 2017 Excavations

Edited by J. M. Adovasio, C. Andrew Hemmings, & F. J. Vento

A century ago, the Old Vero Site (8IR009) was brought to prominence by Elias Sellards's claim that the site contained early human remains associated with Pleistocene fauna. It was the first serious challenge to the belief, widely accepted until the Folsom discoveries in 1926, that humans had not entered Florida before the current Holocene geological epoch. The claim that human remains at the site were contemporary with late Ice Age animals stirred enduring controversy. Recent construction near the site resulted in new archaeological work being completed from 2014 to 2017.

The Old Vero Site (8IR009) details the course of the recent re-excavations of the Old Vero Site while also summarizing the original excavations from a century ago. This re-examination determined that Sellards’s claims are not supported by the evidence. Adovasio, Hemmings, and Vento provide the data to settle the matter definitively: human remains at the site were intrusive from a later time horizon, as critics of the original work had vociferously argued.

eBook ISBN 978-1-64769-133-2

Hardcover ISBN 978-1-64769-132-5 $75.00s