Randall H Mcguire
Biographic Data
| ID | 89184 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Randall H Mcguire |
| GIVEN NAMES | Randall H |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcguire |
| SIGNATURE | MCGUIRE R H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Binghamton University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 87 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1153 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 84 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands
Memorial: Robert W. Paynter (1949–2023)
Reframing and Expanding Sonoran Archaeology
Archaeologists acknowledge that contemporary nation state boundaries were irrelevant to precolonial populations. Notwithstanding, the boundary between the United States and México both physically and ideologically impacts language, where archaeologists are trained, how knowledge is disseminated, and what research questions are asked. Sonora's archaeology is generally classified within the Southwest/Northwest culture area; however, English publica…
Vapaki: Ancestral O'Odham Platform Mounds of the Sonoran Desert
Border walls, imagined and real
Hanscam and Buchanan (2023) give us an insightful comparative analysis of Hadrian's Wall and the US/Mexico border wall. Their analysis shows how critically to study and use these long walls in an explicitly political archaeology. I have engaged in archaeology as political action (McGuire 2008), and have researched the materiality of the US/Mexico border while doing humanitarian work along that border (McGuire 2013). Hanscam and Buchanan deftly em…
Reflections on archaeology and inequality. A foreword
Una crítica marxista relacional del posthumanismo en arqueología
De las cenizas del post-modernismo ha surgido un posthumanismo que ha declarado que el marxismo en arqueología está muerto. Los partidarios de la teoría posthumanista de la Arqueología Simétrica seleccionan a su conveniencia algunas ideas marxistas para luego refutarlas y descartarlas, sin considerar la profundidad y los matices que las diferentes teorías marxistas poseen. Caracterizan de manera incorrecta a la dialéctica relacional como una form…
A Relational Marxist Critique of Posthumanism in Archaeology
In archaeology, a Posthumanism has arisen from the ashes of post-modernism and declared that Marxism is dead in archaeology. Archaeological advocates of the posthumanist theory of Symmetrical Archaeology cherry-pick ideas to dismiss Marxism out of hand without considering the depth and nuances of different Marxist theories. They misrepresent the relational dialectic as oppositional thinking and ignore the fundamental dualism of their own polemic.…
Childe, Vere Gordon (Political and Social Archaeology)
Capitalism in Archaeological Theory
The Materiality and Heritage of Contemporary Forced Migration
Fleeing violence, poverty, abuse, war, and climatic change, tens of millions of people have fled their homes in the Global South seeking refuge in adjacent nations and in the Global North. This modern migration entails a material, sensual experience in time. The craft of archaeology has traditionally engaged with the material, the sensual, and the temporal. Archaeologists who study the materiality of modern undocumented migration embrace activist…
Death, Society, and Ideology in a Hohokam Community
Border and Its Bodies: The Embodiment of Risk along the U. S. -México Line
Capitalism in Archaeological Theory
Childe, Vere Gordon (Political and Social Archaeology)
Diálogos con los muertos. Ideología y cementerio
Los arqueólogos están acostumbrados a asumir una relación directa entre la inversión funeraria y el estatus social (Binford, 1971; Saxe, 1970; Tainter, 1978; O’Shea, 1984; Bartel, 1982). Muchos han supuesto que los ricos siempre han adquirido para sí las formas de exhibición mortuoria más suntuosas. Para estos investigadores, el ritual mortuorio, la forma de enterramiento, el ajuar funerario y los monumentos reflejan directamente la dimensión soc…
Bearing Witness on the US-Mexico Border
Archaeology as Bearing Witness
Sonoran Pre-Hispanic Traditions
The international border between the United States and Mexico has no meaning for the Aboriginal history of the Southwest/Northwest. It has, however, greatly limited the amount of archaeology done in northern Mexico. Since the 1980s, Mexican and U.S. archaeologists have done increasing amounts of research in the Mexican state of Sonora. Here they have developed an international collaborative practice of archaeology unique in North America. Sonora …
Transforming Archaeology
Transforming Archaeology: Activist Practices and Prospects
El oficio de la arqueología
La idea de la arqueología como arte desafía la separación entre razonamiento y ejecución, teoría y práctica, que hoy caracteriza a la disciplina. El Movimiento de Artes y Oficios de fines del siglo XIX estableció a la artesanía como una manifestación estética de oposición. Asentamos a la artesanía dentro de una crítica marxista del trabajo alienado y proponemos una práctica unificada de mano, corazón y mente. Los debates engendrados por la arqueo…
War and Defense onCerros de Trincherasin Sonora, México
At the turn of the twenty-first century, critics suggested that warfare profoundly shaped cultural change in the prehistoric Southwest/Northwest. This challenge was part of a much larger debate concerning violence and warfare before civilization. It has become clear that scholars need to consider violence and warfare to understand the aboriginal history of the Southwest/ Northwest. Increasingly, archaeologists are asking: How did indigenous peopl…
Won with Blood: Archaeology and Labor’s Struggle
Steel Walls and Picket Fences: Rematerializing the U.S.-Mexican Border in Ambos Nogales
For most of the 20th century, the border cities of Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora formed the single transnational community of Ambos Nogales (Both Nogales). Today the people in Ambos Nogales nostalgically remember this border as a picket fence between neighbors. In the mid-1990s, the United States tore down the picket fence and erected a steel wall to enclose the border and prevent undocumented migration and drug smuggling. In 2011, they er…
The Archaeology of inequality
Although They Have Petty Captains, They Obey Them Badly: The Dialectics of Prehispanic Western Pueblo Social Organization
Southwestern archaeologists have debated the nature of late Prehispanic western pueblo social organization for nearly a century. Were the fourteenth-century pueblos egalitarian or hierarchical? This issue remains unsettled largely because of the oppositional thinking that has informed most contributions to the debate: that is, the tendency to frame questions about Prehispanic sociopolitical organization in dichotomous 'either-or' terms. We critiq…
The Premise and Promise of Indigenous Archaeology
Researchers have increasingly promoted an emerging paradigm of Indigenous archaeology, which includes an array of practices conducted by, for, and with Indigenous communities to challenge the discipline's intellectual breadth and political economy. McGhee (2008) argues that Indigenous archaeology is not viable because it depends upon the essentialist concept of 'Aboriginalism.' In this reply, we correct McGhee's description of Indigenous Archaeol…
The study of ethnicity in historical archaeology
Archeology and the First Americans
The land! don't you feel it? Doesn't it make you want to go out and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to steal from them-as if it must be clinging even to their corpses-some authenticity
Immaculate Consumption: A Critique of the “Shop till you drop” School of Human Behavior
The Evolution of Political Systems
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Steel Walls and Picket Fences: Rematerializing the U.S.-Mexican Border in Ambos Nogales
For most of the 20th century, the border cities of Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora formed the single transnational community of Ambos Nogales (Both Nogales). Today the people in Ambos Nogales nostalgically remember this border as a picket fence between neighbors. In the mid-1990s, the United States tore down the picket fence and erected a steel wall to enclose the border and prevent undocumented migration and drug smuggling. In 2011, they er…
Hohokam and Patayan: Prehistory of southwestern Arizona
The Craft of Archaeology
The idea of archaeology as craft challenges the separation of reasoning and execution that characterizes the field today. The Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century established craftwork as an aesthetic of opposition. We establish craft in a Marxian critique of alienated labor, and we propose a unified practice of hand, heart, and mind for archaeology. The debates engendered by postprocessual archaeology have firmly situated arch…
The Mesoamerican Connection in the Southwest
The theory that Mesoamerican pochteca intruded into the Southwest between A.D. 1000 and 1400 and that these pochteca exercised political and economic control of the region during this period is critically considered. Close examination of the data and arguments advanced to support this theory reveal that it cannot be accepted. An alternate interpretation of Mesoamerican-Southwestern interaction is presented. This alternate view is not based on a s…
Class confrontations in archaeology
Building a Working-Class Archaeology: The Colorado Coal Field War Project
(2003). Building a Working-Class Archaeology: The Colorado Coal Field War Project. Industrial Archaeology Review: Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 83-95
The Unromantic West: Labor, capital, and struggle
Struggling with the Past
The Structure and Organization of Hohokam Shell Exchange
This paper summarizes what is currently known about Hohokam shell exchange in the U.S. Southwest and attempts to interpret the role of this trade in Hohokam prehistory. Data gathered in the 1970s and 1980s and the application of quantitative methods in exchange analysis form the basis for this new synthesis. This synthesis treats Hohokam shell exchange in terms of regional specialization within a bounded exchange network. We further consider how …
Trade, Women, Class, and Society in Ancient Western Asia [and Comments and Reply]
Recent discussion of the effects on society of long-distance exchange has brought the once generally accepted view of early Mesopotamian society as "statist" under heavy fire. There is now broad consensus that by Early Dynastic III there were widespread exchange systems in which the production of commodities played an important role and that by that time individuals were engaging in exchange for personal gain. These important new insights have ha…
Prehistoric New Mexico: Background for Survey
Prehistoric New Mexico, first published in 1981 by the state of New Mexico, is the only one of the archeology overview documents prepared by federal and state agencies in the Southwest during the late 1970s and 1980s that presents a statewide plan for archeology site conversation and research. Professional archeologists and students of archeology will welcome the reissue of this useful reference book by the University of New Mexico Press
The Materiality and Heritage of Contemporary Forced Migration
Fleeing violence, poverty, abuse, war, and climatic change, tens of millions of people have fled their homes in the Global South seeking refuge in adjacent nations and in the Global North. This modern migration entails a material, sensual experience in time. The craft of archaeology has traditionally engaged with the material, the sensual, and the temporal. Archaeologists who study the materiality of modern undocumented migration embrace activist…
Ripples in the Chichimec Sea: New considerations of southwestern-Mesoamerican interactions
Archaeology as Bearing Witness
The deer hunters: Star Carr reconsidered
Star Carr, the Mesolithic site excavated thirty years ago, has been considered a classic example of a winter season base camp until recently reinterpreted as a specialized industrial locale. By focusing on site formation processes, we present an alternative interpretation that Star Carr was a hunting and butchering site occupied frequently for very short periods at various times of the year. Our argument considers how recent ethnoarchaeological, …
Probing Praxis in Archaeology: The Last Eighty Years
For decades, archaeologists have "ponied up" to the Marxist buffet, picking and choosing from a vast array of appealing tidbits that are incorporated in various aspects of their research. We believe that praxis is one of the key issues separating Marxism from other theoretical approaches. For Marxist archaeologists, praxis comes from knowledge and critique; they generate knowledge about the past, use this knowledge to engage in a critique of our …
War and Defense onCerros de Trincherasin Sonora, México
At the turn of the twenty-first century, critics suggested that warfare profoundly shaped cultural change in the prehistoric Southwest/Northwest. This challenge was part of a much larger debate concerning violence and warfare before civilization. It has become clear that scholars need to consider violence and warfare to understand the aboriginal history of the Southwest/ Northwest. Increasingly, archaeologists are asking: How did indigenous peopl…
Death, Society, and Ideology in a Hohokam Community
Prehistoric Subsistence at the Kiewit Site, Northwestern Arizona
The Kiewit Site, Arizona G:15:22 (ASM), was a multi- component site located approximately 15.5 km southwest of Seligman, Arizona. The site was investigated as part of the continuing program of Highway Salvage Archaeology in Arizona. This report presents the data recovered from the site and attempts to evaluate the subsistence activities at the site. Nine discrete loci were defined at the site and they represented a time span of as much as 1,000 y…
The Mesoamerican Connection in the Southwest
The theory that Mesoamerican pochteca intruded into the Southwest between A.D. 1000 and 1400 and that these pochteca exercised political and economic control of the region during this period is critically considered. Close examination of the data and arguments advanced to support this theory reveal that it cannot be accepted. An alternate interpretation of Mesoamerican-Southwestern interaction is presented. This alternate view is not based on a s…
The deer hunters: Star Carr reconsidered
Star Carr, the Mesolithic site excavated thirty years ago, has been considered a classic example of a winter season base camp until recently reinterpreted as a specialized industrial locale. By focusing on site formation processes, we present an alternative interpretation that Star Carr was a hunting and butchering site occupied frequently for very short periods at various times of the year. Our argument considers how recent ethnoarchaeological, …
Hohokam and Patayan: Prehistory of southwestern Arizona
Rich Men… Poor Men
A Consideration of Observational Error in Lithic Use Wear Analysis
(1982). A Consideration of Observational Error in Lithic Use Wear Analysis. Lithic Technology: Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 59-63
Green Slimy Frogs
Leveling peasants? the maintenance of equality in a Swiss Alpine community
This quantitative examination of economic stratification in a Swiss Alpine village is based on data of individually owned farm land and building valuations for the period 1851-1915. Comparisons with other societies and with European peasant communities indicate a relatively low degree of inequality and the possibility of considerable intergenerational mobility in wealth. Demographic factors appear to have little influence on wealth. The egalitari…
The study of ethnicity in historical archaeology
Breaking Down Cultural Complexity: Inequality and Heterogeneity
A theory of architectural design
Recycling: Great Expectations and Garbage Outcomes
Ripples in the Chichimec Sea: New considerations of southwestern-Mesoamerican interactions
Trade, Women, Class, and Society in Ancient Western Asia [and Comments and Reply]
Recent discussion of the effects on society of long-distance exchange has brought the once generally accepted view of early Mesopotamian society as "statist" under heavy fire. There is now broad consensus that by Early Dynastic III there were widespread exchange systems in which the production of commodities played an important role and that by that time individuals were engaging in exchange for personal gain. These important new insights have ha…
Archeologist's Dilemma: Ethical Issue
The Structure and Organization of Hohokam Shell Exchange
This paper summarizes what is currently known about Hohokam shell exchange in the U.S. Southwest and attempts to interpret the role of this trade in Hohokam prehistory. Data gathered in the 1970s and 1980s and the application of quantitative methods in exchange analysis form the basis for this new synthesis. This synthesis treats Hohokam shell exchange in terms of regional specialization within a bounded exchange network. We further consider how …
Ripples in the Chichimec Sea: New Considerations of Mesoamerican Interaction
Prehistoric New Mexico: Background for Survey
Prehistoric New Mexico, first published in 1981 by the state of New Mexico, is the only one of the archeology overview documents prepared by federal and state agencies in the Southwest during the late 1970s and 1980s that presents a statewide plan for archeology site conversation and research. Professional archeologists and students of archeology will welcome the reissue of this useful reference book by the University of New Mexico Press
Dating the Hohokam Phase Sequence: An Analysis of Archaeomagnetic Dates
In the past decade more than 700 archaeomagnetic samples have been collected from the Hohokam area of southern Arizona. Four hundred twenty of the dated archaeomagnetic samples could be assigned to specific phases and phase transitions and this large data set is useful in analyzing the absolute chronology of the Hohokam area. Mean dates and date ranges for each phase and transition provide the data for a new calibration of the Hohokam chronology …
The Archaeology of inequality
Archeology: Critical Traditions in Contemporary Archaeology: Essays in the Philosophy, History and Socio‐Politics of Archaeology . Valerie Pinsky and Alison Wylie , eds
Binghamton: The secrets of a backwater
The great economic engines that powered the growth of the United States as a core zone lay in the major metropolitan centers, such as Detroit and New York. But the process involved in this growth also worked themselves out in hundreds of smaller manufacturing cities around the nation. Broome County, New York, had established itself as such a secondary center by 1880. Broome County is located in southern New York along its border with Pennsylvania…
Creating and Transforming Households: The Constraints of the World-Economy
This book, first published in 1992, seeks an explanation of the pattern of sharp discrepancy of wage levels across the world-economy for work of comparable productivity. It explores how far such differences can be explained by the different structures of households as 'income-pooling units', examining three key variables: location in the core or periphery of the world-economy; periods of expansion versus periods of contraction in the world-econom…
Archeology and the First Americans
The land! don't you feel it? Doesn't it make you want to go out and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to steal from them-as if it must be clinging even to their corpses-some authenticity
The Structure and Organization of Hohokam Exchange
History (51 works) · Archaeology (47 works) · Sociology (44 works) · Political science (34 works) · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies (31 works) · Law (29 works) · History (26 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (25 works) · Geography (24 works) · Computer Science (23 works)