Contributors - historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists - to this volume present numerous examples of the frontier as a shifting zone of innovation and recombination through which cultural materials from many sources have been unpredictably channelled and transformed. At the same time, they reveal recurring processes of frontier history that enable world-historical comparison.

Bradley J. Parker is assistant professor of history at the University of Utah and author of The Mechanics of Empire. Lars Rodseth is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.