Timothy R. Pauketat, Professor of Anthropology and Medieval Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Timothy R. Pauketat is Professor of Anthropology and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He previous publications include The Archaeology of Ancient North America, The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology (as editor), and Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi.

"Readers interested in pre-Columbian North America will be enlightened by this bold study." - Publishers Weekly

"A grand narrative of the thousand years in North America before Columbus. Blends Native accounts and cosmologies, and archaeology, and ethnohistory. A landmark for the deep history of our continent" - Stephen H. Lekson, University of Colorado

"This remarkable work of synthesis demonstrates the power of archaeological research in bringing to light key social and ecological transformations in North America, between 800 and 1300 AD; the results are truly staggering and place the contemporaneous history of medieval Eurasia in an entirely new perspective." - David Wengrow, Institute of Archaeology, University College London

"Pauketat offers a complex and extraordinarily rich narrative detailing how Indigenous peoples of ancient America celebrated and ritualized water as a response to climate change. He entangles seemingly disparate peoples of ancient North and Central America by making climatic events and processes - such as the evapotranspiration cycle and the Medieval Warm Period - as key actors in the histories of the ancient Maya, Aztec, and Mississippian peoples. And by exploring these processes within the ontological dimensions of Indigenous experience, Pauketat masterfully demonstrates the intersections of spirituality and science, or what contemporary Indigenous peoples describe as traditional ecological knowledge. In doing so, he makes clear that the language of water rights and movements such as Mní Wičhóni (Water is Life) have a much deeper past in which climate history has always been human history." - Patrick Bottiger, Kenyon College

"Finally, after decades of sidestepping by archaeologists, Pauketat has finally brought to light the question of interaction between Mesoamerica and the American Bottom city of Cahokia. Even at present, extensive research in archaeology is focused on the ties between Northwest Mexico and the American Southwest, while we have been waiting for someone to break the ice on the fundamental problem of Mesoamerica's possible connections beyond its northeastern frontier. Pauketat takes the reader on a personal journey as he delves into this perplexing inquiry with a sharp mind that arrives at fascinating insights and conclusions." - Peter F. Jimenez, author of The Mesoamerican World System, 200-1200 CE