Tom D. Dillehay is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. He has conducted extensive anthropological research in Peru, Chile, and the United States. He has published extensively in both English and Spanish. He is the author of The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory and editor of Tombs for the Living: Andean Mortuary Practices and has been a visiting professor at more than fifteen universities worldwide.

• Introduction; 1. Purposes, settings, and definitions; 2. Shaping analogical and conceptual perspectives; 3. Araucanian prehistory and history: old biases and new views; 4. Imbricating social, material, metaphorical, and spiritual worlds; 5. The ethnographies of kuel, narratives, and communities; 6. An archaeological view of kuel and rehuekuel; 7. Contact, fragmentation, and recruitment and the rehuekuel; 8. Recursiveness, kinship geographies, and polity; 9. Epilogue and dying mounds.

Review of the hardback: '… I recommend this book to readers interested in South American archaeology and ethnography, as well as to those interested in other mind-building cultures … an empirically rich contribution to explorations of heterarchy, political economies and 'corporate' polities in prehistory. The book should stimulate creative thinking about shamanism, mound-building and the nature of political ties in other mound-building societies both in the ancient New World and further afield.' Cambridge Archaeological Journal