LSU Faculty Published Books

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  Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Approaches Based on Rule Induction Techniques

  2006
  Evangelos Triantaphyllou

  This book outlines the core theory and practice of data mining and knowledge discovery (DM & KD) examining theoretical foundations for various methods, and presenting an array of examples, many drawn from real-life applications. Most theoretical developments are accompanied by extensive empirical analysis, offering a deep insight into both theoretical and practical aspects of the subject. The book presents the combined research experiences of 40 expert contributors of world renown.

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  Autobiographical Reflections

  2006
  Eric Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz

  The thirty-fourth volume of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin consists of Voegelin's Autobiographical Reflections , reprinted from the 1989 edition with additional annotations; a glossary of terms used in Voegelin's writings, illustrated with examples from throughout the Collected Works ; a volume index; and a cumulative index. The last covers the entire edition, apart from The History of Political Ideas, which has its own index, and volumes 29 and 30, the Selected Correspondence , which are at present not published. The glossary lists, defines, and illustrates from the author's writings many of the key terms employed, paying particular attention to the Greek terms. The cumulative index supplies a more comprehensive access to the contents of the entire Collected Works. Together, the glossary and index systematically include names, subjects, ideas, writings, and terms, making this culminating volume an indispensable help for any serious study of Eric Voegelin's oeuvre.
  

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  Advances in Damage Mechanics: Metals and Metal Matrix Composites with an Introduction to Fabric Tensors

  2006
  George Z. Voyiadjis and Peter I. Kattan

  The book presents the principles of Damage Mechanics along with the latest research findings. Both isotropic and anisotropic damage mechanisms are presented. Various damage models are presented coupled with elastic and elasto-plastic behavior. The book includes two chapters that are solely dedicated to experimental investigations conducted by the authors. In its last chapter, the book presents experimental data for damage in composite materials that appear in the literature for the first time.

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  The Coupled Theory of Mixtures in Geo-Mechanics with Applications

  2006
  George Z. Voyiadjis and Chung R. Song

  Geomaterials consist of a mixture of solid particles and void space that may be ?lled with ?uid and gas. The solid particles may be di?erent in sizes, shapes, and behavior; and the pore liquid may have various physical and chemical properties. Hence, physical, chemical or electrical interaction - tween the solid particles and pore ?uid or gas may take place. Therefore, the geomaterials in general must be considered a mixture or a multiphase material whose state is described by physical quantities in each phase. The stresses carried by the solid skeleton are typically termed "e?ective stress" while the stresses carried by the pore liquid are termed "pore pressure. " The summation of the e?ective stress and pore pressure is termed "total stress" (Terzaghi, 1943). For a free drainage condition or completely undrained c- dition, the pore pressure change is zero or depends only on the initial stress condition; it does not depend on the skeleton response to external forces. Therefore, a single phase description of soil behavior is adequate. For an intermediate condition, however, some ?ow (pore pressure leak) may take place while the force is applied and the skeleton is under deformation. Due to the leak of pore pressure, the pore pressure changes with time, and the e?ective stress changes and the skeleton deforms with time accordingly. The solution of this intermediate condition, therefore, requires a multi-phase c- tinuum formulations that may address the interaction of solid skeleton and pore liquid interaction.

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  Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long

  2006
  Richard Downing White

  From the moment he took office as governor in 1928 to the day an assassin's bullet cut him down in 1935, Huey Long wielded all but dictatorial control over the state of Louisiana. A man of shameless ambition and ruthless vindictiveness, Long orchestrated elections, hired and fired thousands at will, and deployed the state militia as his personal police force. And yet, paradoxically, as governor and later as senator, Long did more good for the state's poor and uneducated than any politician before or since. Outrageous demagogue or charismatic visionary? In this powerful new biography, Richard D. White, Jr., brings Huey Long to life in all his blazing, controversial glory. White taps invaluable new source material to present a fresh, vivid portrait of both the man and the Depression era that catapulted him to fame. From his boyhood in dirt-poor Winn Parish, Long knew he was destined for power--the problem was how to get it fast enough to satisfy his insatiable appetite. With cunning and crudity unheard of in Louisiana politics, Long crushed his opponents in the 1928 gubernatorial race, then immediately set about tightening his iron grip. The press attacked him viciously, the oil companies howled for his blood after he pushed through a controversial oil processing tax, but Long had the adulation of the people. In 1930, the Kingfish got himself elected senator, and then there was no stopping him. White's account of Long's heyday unfolds with the mesmerizing intensity of a movie. Pegged by President Roosevelt as "one of the two most dangerous men in the country," Long organized a radical movement to redistribute money through his Share Our Wealth Society--and his gospel of pensions for all, a shorter workweek, and free college spread like wildfire. The Louisiana poor already worshiped him for building thousands of miles of roads and funding schools, hospitals, and universities; his outrageous antics on the Senate floor gained him a growing national base. By 1935, despite a barrage of corruption investigations, Huey Long announced that he was running for president. In the end, Long was a tragic hero--a power addict who squandered his genius and came close to destroying the very foundation of democratic rule. Kingfish is a balanced, lucid, and absolutely spellbinding portrait of the life and times of the most incendiary figure in the history of American politics.

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  Modern Baptists: A Novel

  2006
  James Wilcox

  Universally and repeatedly praised ever since it first appeared in 1983, Modern Baptists is the book that launched novelist James Wilcox's career and debuted the endearingly daft community of Tula Springs, Louisiana. It's the tale of Bobby Pickens, assistant manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, who gains a new lease on life, though he almost comes to regret it. Bobby's handsome half brother F.X. -- ex-con, ex-actor, and ex-husband three times over -- moves in, and things go awry all over town. Mistaken identities; entangled romances with Burma, Toinette, and Donna Lee; assault and battery; charges of degeneracy; a nervous breakdown -- it all comes to a head at a Christmas Eve party in a cabin on a poisoned swamp. This is sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter.
  Modern Baptists was included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, in GQ magazine's forty-fifth anniversary issue as one of the best works of fiction in the past forty-five years, and among Toni Morrison's "favorite works by unsung writers" in U.S. News and World Report.

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  Using Computers in Educationals and Psychological Research: Using Information Technologies to Support the Research Process

  2006
  Jerry W. Willis

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  Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China

  2006
  Margherita Zanasi

  Economic modernity is so closely associated with nationhood that it is impossible to imagine a modern state without an equally modern economy. Even so, most people would have difficulty defining a modern economy and its connection to nationhood. In Saving the Nation, Margherita Zanasi explores this connection by examining the first nation-building attempt in China after the fall of the empire in 1911.
  
  Challenging the assumption that nations are products of technological and socioeconomic forces, Zanasi argues that it was notions of what constituted a modern nation that led the Nationalist nation-builders to shape China's institutions and economy. In their reform effort, they confronted several questions: What characterized a modern economy? What role would a modern economy play in the overall nation-building effort? And how could China pursue economic modernization while maintaining its distinctive identity? Zanasi expertly shows how these questions were negotiated and contested within the Nationalist Party. Silenced in the Mao years, these dilemmas are reemerging today as a new leadership once again redefines the economic foundation of the nation.

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  Market Reform in Society: Post-Crisis Politics and Economic Change in Authoritarian Peru

  2005
  Moisés Arce

  Going beyond the usual state-centric approach to the study of the politics of neoliberal reform, Moisés Arce emphasizes the importance of understanding the interaction between state reformers and collective actors in society. In Market Reform in Society he helpfully focuses our attention on how various societal groups are affected by different types of reform and how their responses in turn affect the state's subsequent pursuit of reform.

  As a country characterized by strong state autonomy and widespread disintegration of civil society and representative institutions during the 1990s when Alberto Fujimori was president, Peru serves as an excellent case for examining how collective actors can succeed in influencing the reform process. Arce compares reforms in three areas: taxation, pension privatization, and social-sector programs in poverty alleviation and health decentralization. Differences in the concentration or dispersion of costs and benefits, he shows, affected incentives for groups to form and engage in collective action for supporting, opposing, or modifying the reforms.

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  Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

  2005
  Charles P. Bigger

  Charles Bigger's goal is to align the primacy of the good in Plato and Christian neoplatonism with the creator God of Genesis and the God of love in the New Testament.

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  An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature

  2005
  Craig Colten

  Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an impossible but inevitable city. How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans's natural environment from 1800 to 2000. Before the city could swell in size and commercial importance as its nineteenth-century boosters envisioned, builders had to wrest it from its waterlogged site, protect it from floods, expel disease, and supply basic services using local resources. Colten shows how every manipulation of the environment made an impact on the city's social geography as well - often with unequal, adverse consequences for minorities - and how each still requires maintenance and improvement today. For example, while the massive levee system has controlled the unpredictable Mississippi, it also captures heavy down-pours, creating a new set of internal flood problems.

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  A Hobo Life in the Great Depression: A Regional Narrative From the American Midwest

  2005
  Rebecca W. Crump

  Provides an expression of the American experience sometimes labeled as modernism. This book includes the early twentieth century search for the meaning of life in an era of social and economic break-down, characterized by a sense of loss of a stable, secure world, based on a belief in absolute truth.
  

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  The Economic and Political Aspects of the Tobacco Industry: An Annotated Bibliography and Statisical Review, 1990-2004

  2005
  Tom Diamond

  This unique annotated bibliography guides the reader through the economic and political aspects of the tobacco industry from 1990-2004. The work provides access to quality print and electronic materials, and serves as the standard and comprehensive historical reference source for documents examining a critical side of the tobacco industry. Readers will learn about economic aspects such as packaging, products, sponsorships, military sales, and illegal trade (e.g. smuggling). Political facets include California's battle with the industry - politics, politicians, and lobbyists - and the various tobacco settlement agreements. Four appendixes provide statistical data (e.g. military and commissary tobacco sales), tobacco company profiles, selected tobacco litigation, duty-free and tax-free worldwide sales, and tobacco web sites.

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  Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300-800

  2005
  Maribel Dietz

  Religious travelers were a common sight in the Mediterranean world during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In fact, as Maribel Dietz finds in Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims , this formative period in the history of Christianity witnessed an explosion of travel, as both men and women took to the roads, seeking spiritual meaning in a life of itinerancy.

  Much of this early Christian religious travel was not focused on a particular holy place, as in the pilgrimage of later centuries to Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela. Rather, the inspiration was more practical. Travel was a way of escaping hostility or social pressures or of visiting living and dead holy people. It was also a means of religious expression of homelessness and temporary exile. The wandering lifestyle mirrored an interior journey, an imitation of Christ and a commitment to the Christian ideal that an individual is only temporarily on this earth.

  Women were especially attracted to religious travel. In the centuries before the widespread cloistering of women, a life of itinerancy offered an alternative to marriage and a religious vocation in a society that excluded women from positions of spiritual leadership.

  Eventually, ascetic travel gave way to full-fledged pilgrimage. Dietz explores how and why religious travel and monasticism diverged and altered so greatly. She examines the importance of the Cluniac reform movement and the creation of the pilgrimage center of Santiago de Compostela in the emergence of a new model of religious travel: goal-centered, long-distance pilgrimage aimed not at monks but at the laity.

  Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims is essential reading for those who study the history of monasticism, for it was in a monastic context that religious travel first claimed an essential place within Christianity. It will also be important for anyone interested in pilgrimage and the role of women in the history of Christianity.

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  Creating EAD-Compatible Finding Guides on Paper

  2005
  Elizabeth H. Dow

  Many archivists work in a repository that cannot consider publishing its inventories on the World Wide Web at this time. They have watched the growing use of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) for publishing inventories and other finding aids on the Web, and they look forward to the day when their repository will also have a place in the Internet's mega-library of intellectual resources. This book shows those archivists how to create clear and precise archival description in order to start preparing for that day. Dow focuses on the information needed to collect and describe one's collection, where to put it in relation to other information, and what standards to use in the process. Rounding out this publication is a bibliography, a glossary of terms, and an index.

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  Poetics of the Creative Process: An Organic Practicum to Playwriting

  2005
  Femi Euba

  Based on the author's teaching methods and experience, the book presents an examination and analysis of the creative process of playwriting through the insight of the very foundations of drama and theatre--the ritual process. Using the playwright as a ritual quester, it attempts to concretize the playwright's creative experience from the gestation of a dramatic idea, through the development of that idea, to its expression as a scripted and theatrical expression. To give the concept a wider scope, parallels and/or contrasts are often made with similar creative experiences, especially performative. The first part of the book visually crystallizes the ritual-creative concept in the psychical emanations of the questing playwright; the second part locates the concept in the dramatic structure, a result of the physical engagement, struggle and expression of the playwright. Various established dramatic works, classical and contemporary, are used to illustrate this creative concept.

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  Conversations with Issac Asimov

  2005
  Carl Freedman

  Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), one of the most popular and influential American authors of the twentieth century, sparked the imagination of generations of writers. His Foundation trilogy paved the way for science fiction that was more speculative and philosophical than had been previously seen in the genre, and his book I, Robot and his story "The Bicentennial Man" have been made into popular movies. First published as a teenager in John W. Campbell's groundbreaking science fiction magazine Astounding , Asimov published over two hundred books during his lifetime.

  While most prolific writers tend to concentrate almost exclusively on a single genre, Asimov was a polymath who wrote widely on a variety of subjects. He authored mysteries, autobiographies, histories, satires, companions to Shakespeare, children's books on science, and collections of bawdy limericks. A lifelong atheist, he nevertheless wrote more than a half dozen books on the Bible.

  Asimov's varied interests establish him as a premier public intellectual, one who was frequently called upon to clarify debates in science, in history, and on the effects of technology on the modern age. Conversations with Isaac Asimov collects interviews with a man considered to be--along with Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Arthur C. Clarke--a founder of modern science fiction. Despite this, Asimov is perhaps best known for his many books of popular science writing. Carl Sagan once described Asimov as the greatest explainer of his age, and this talent made Asimov a natural for the interview form. His manner is always crisp and lucid, his tone always engaging, and his comments always enlightening.

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  Scientific and Religious Habits of Mind: Irreconcilable Tensions in the Curriculum

  2005
  Ron Good

  The open, inquiring nature of science is fundamentally incompatible with the closed, authoritarian nature of most religious training. Reasons for rejection of personal god concepts by Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell are used by this author to underline this incompatibility and to show how each of these important scientists came to reject organized religion. Conflicts between scientific and religious habits of mind are described and ideas for education are offered. Common assumptions about our natural environment and human nature are shown to be obstacles to scientific literacy and to a sound liberal education. Research on the nature of the relationship between scientific and religious habits of mind is proposed, recognizing the potential incompatibilities between these important influences in society.

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  Distributed Sensor Networks

  2005
  Sundararaja S. Iyengar

  The vision of researchers to create smart environments through the deployment of thousands of sensors, each with a short range wireless communications channel and capable of detecting ambient conditions such as temperature, movement, sound, light, or the presence of certain objects is becoming a reality. With the emergence of high-speed networks and with their increased computational capabilities, Distributed Sensor Networks (DSN) have a wide range of real-time applications in aerospace, automation, defense, medical imaging, robotics, and weather prediction. Over the past several years, scientists, engineers, and researchers in a multitude of disciplines have been clamoring for more detailed information without much success. Until now, in fact, this evolving technology was so new and proprietary that information has been available only in scattered articles or basic books.
  
  Distributed Sensor Networks is a complete, self-contained book that introduces background theory and applications of this revolutionary new technology. It contains essential background on wireless networks, signal processing, and self-organizing systems. This volume encompasses a number of recurring themes like multidimensional data structures, reasoning with uncertainty, system dependability, and the use of metaheuristics.
  
  With over 500 illustrations and over 1,000 pages of in depth information, Distributed Sensor Networks is both an excellent introduction to the field and a complete reference source. With contributions from leading experts, virtually every major topic on 'Smart Dust' is examined. This volume promises to become the definitive guide to understanding this far-reaching technology for years to come, opening frontiers in research and applications.

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  Biofunctionalization of Nanomaterials

  2005
  Challa S. S. R. Kumar

  The new book series 'Nanotechnologies for the Life Sciences' is the first comprehensive source on the topics where materials science and life sciences meet on the nanoscale. Each volume provides a concise overview of the underlying nanotechnologies for the design, creation and characterization of biomedical applications, collating the many articles found in the relevant specialized journals but as yet unseen by those working in other disciplines.
  
  Written by international experts describing the various facets of nanofabrication, the ten volumes of this single source of information cover the complete range of synthetic methods, tools and techniques being developed towards medical, biological and cybernetic applications.
  
  This volume covers the synthetic and materials aspects of instilling biocompatibility into nanomaterials with properties desirable for advanced medical and biological applications.
  
  Essential reading for anyone working in the various related disciplines: from medicine and biology through chemistry, materials science and physics to engineering.
  

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  Nanofabrication Towards Biomedical Applications: Techniques, Tools, Applications, and Impact

  2005
  Challa S. S. R. Kumar

  This book focuses on the materials, synthetic methods, tools and techniques being developed in the nanoregime towards the life sciences -- in particular biology, biotechnology and medicine.
  Readers from materials science, engineering, chemistry, biology and medical backgrounds will find detailed accounts of the design and synthesis of nanomaterials and the tools and techniques involved in their production for applications in biology, biotechnology and medicine.
  

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  Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach

  2005
  John Lowe

  A panorama of past and contemporary southern society are captured in Bridging Southern Cultures by some of the South's leading historians, anthropologists, literary critics, musicologists, and folklorists. Crossing the chasms of demographics, academic disciplines, art forms, and culture, this exciting collection reaches aspects of southern heritage that previous approaches have long obscured.

  Virtually every dimension of southern identity receives attention here. William Andrews,Thadious Davis, Sue Bridwell Beckham, Richard Megraw, and Joyce Marie Jackson offer engaging reflections on art, age, race, and gender. Bertram Wyatt-Brown delivers a startling reading of Faulkner, revealing the tangled history of southern modernism. Daniel C. Littlefield, Henry Shapiro, and Charles Reagan Wilson provide important assessments of Africanisms in southern culture, Appalachian studies, and the blessing and burden of southern culture. John Shelton Reed probes the humorous and awkward aspects of the South's midlife crisis. John Lowe shows how the myth of the biracial southern family complicated plantation-school narratives for both white and black writers.

  Showcasing the thought of preeminent southern intellectuals, Bridging Southern Cultures is a timely assessment of the state of contemporary southern studies.

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  Trails of Bones: More Cases from the Files of a Forensic Anthropologist

  2005
  Mary Huffman Manhein

  A fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and an expert on the human skeleton, Mary H. Manhein assists law enforcement officials across the country in identifying bodies and solving criminal cases. In Trail of Bones, her much-anticipated sequel to The Bone Lady, Manhein reveals the everyday realities of forensic anthropology. Going beyond the stereotypes portrayed on television, this real-life crime scene investigator unveils a gritty, exhausting, exacting, alternately rewarding and frustrating world where teamwork supersedes individual heroics and some cases unfortunately remain unsolved.
  
  A natural storyteller, Manhein provides gripping accounts of dozens of cases from her twenty-four-year career. Some of them are famous. She describes her involvement in the hunt for two serial killers who simultaneously terrorized the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, region for years; her efforts to recover the remains of the seven astronauts killed in the Columbia space shuttle crash in 2003; and her ultimately successful struggle to identify the beheaded toddler known for years as Precious Doe. Less well-known but equally compelling are cases involving the remains of a Korean War soldier buried for more than forty years and the mystery of ?Mardi Gras Man,? who was wearing a string of plastic beads when his body was discovered.
  Manhein describes how the increased popularity of tattoos has aided her work and how forensic science has labored to expose frauds?including a fake ?big foot? track she examined from Louisiana's Kisatchie National Forest. She also shares ambitious plans to create a database of biological and DNA profiles of all of the state's missing and unidentified persons.
  
  Possessing both compassion and tenacity, Mary Manhein has an extraordinary gift for telling a life story through bones. Trail of Bones takes readers on an entertaining and educating walk in the shoes of this remarkable scientist who has dedicated her life to providing justice for those no longer able to speak for themselves.

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  France in 1938

  2005
  Benjamin F. Martin

  At the beginning of 1938, containment of Nazi Germany by a coalition of eastern and western democracies without resorting to war was still a distinct possibility. By the end of 1938, however, Germany was much stronger, the western democracies stood alone, and war was all but certain. The primary cause for these developments, argues Benjamin F. Martin, was the foreign and domestic policies adopted by the French government and embraced by the French people. In a riveting account of the dark days leading up to France's defeat and occupation, Martin reveals a great and civilized nation committing a kind of suicide in 1938. Using movies, novels, newspapers, and sensational court cases, Martin weaves an absorbing tale of France's collective fear and melancholy during this troubled prewar period. He masterfully counts the small change of history - those seemingly unimportant incidents that together compose daily life - by chronicling the four seasons of 1938. From the upset of relative calm in the first quarter with Germany's invasion of Austria to the sense of doom reflected in the year's films noir, Martin addresses both the day-to-day events and the major topics of the time. perspective of 1940. Exhibiting his trademark compelling narrative style, sense for unusual and telling detail, and vivid portraits of individual men and women, Martin brings remarkable texture to this depiction of a society and period. He recreates life in France during the year when terrors to come could already be imagined only too well.
  

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  In Search of Maya Sea Traders

  2005
  Heather Irene McKillop

  Stone temples rising above the rainforest canopy and elaborate hieroglyphs carved onto stone monuments give silent testimony to the high culture of the Maya ancestors of the indigenous peoples of Central America. They have inspired generations of archaeologists, professional and avocational, to take to the field in search of the past.
  
  One such archaeologist is Heather McKillop, who in 1979 first visited the coast of Belize in search of a little-known aspect of ancient Maya life: the sea trade that helped move salt, obsidian, coral, and other goods around the interior of the empire. In 1982, she began bringing volunteers and students to the islands off the coast of Port Honduras, Belize. Since then she has returned many times to excavate sites that reveal the scope and diversity of the trade that passed by water throughout the Maya world.
  
  In this book, McKillop tells the story of the search for the Maya sea traders, as well as the story of the traders themselves as it emerges from the excavations. In Search of Maya Sea Traders describes the trading port of Wild Cane Cay, where exotic obsidian, jade, gold, and other goods--including highly crafted pots--were traded from distant lands. McKillop also tells us about the more coastal-inland trade of salt, seafood, and other marine resources.
  
  Through the story of her own work and that of her students and volunteers, McKillop models both the research design and the field work that are required to interpret the civilizations of the past. She includes the adventure of discovery, the challenges of working in wild environments (from snakes and rising sea levels to falling coconuts) and the tedium of daily measured digs in a near-tropical setting. Through her experiences, the reader also gets to know some of the local residents of Port Honduras and Wild Cane Cay, descendants of the ancient Maya.
  
  In Search of Maya Sea Traders will appeal to that part of each of us that longs to explore distant places and cultures, in quest of a seldom-glimpsed past.