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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeological methodology & techniques
This volume addresses the relationship between archaeologists and the dead, through the many dimensions of their relationships: in the field (through practical and legal issues); in the lab (through their analysis and interpretation); and in their written, visual and exhibitionary practice - disseminated to a variety of academic and public audiences. Written from a variety of perspectives, its authors address the experience, effect, ethical considerations, and cultural politics of working with mortuary archaeology. Whilst some papers reflect institutional or organisational approaches, others are more personal in their view: creating exciting and frank insights into contemporary issues which have hitherto often remained 'unspoken' amongst the discipline. Reframing funerary archaeologists as 'death-workers' of a kind, the contributors reflect on their own experience to provide both guidance and inspiration to future practitioners, arguing strongly that we have a central role to play in engaging the public with themes of mortality and commemoration, through the lens of the past. Spurred by the recent debates in the UK, papers from Scandinavia, Austria, Italy, the US, and the mid-Atlantic, frame these issues within a much wider international context which highlights the importance of cultural and historical context in which this work takes place.
One of the most exciting recent developments in archaeology and history has been the adoption of new perspectives which see human societies in the past-as in the present-as made up of networks of interlinked individuals. This view of people as always connected through physical and conceptual networks along which resources, information, and disease flow, requires archaeologists and historians to use new methods to understand how these networks form, function, and change over time. The Connected Past provides a constructive methodological and theoretical critique of the growth in research applying network perspectives in archaeology and history, and considers the unique challenges presented by datasets in these disciplines, including the fragmentary and material nature of such data and the functioning and change of social processes over long timespans. An international and multidisciplinary range of scholars debate both the rationale and practicalities of applying network methodologies, addressing the merits and drawbacks of specific techniques of analysis for a range of datasets and research questions, and demonstrating their approaches with concrete case studies and detailed illustrations. As well as revealing the valuable contributions archaeologists and historians can make to network science, the volume represents a crucial step towards the development of best practice in the field, especially in exploring the interactions between social and material elements of networks, and long-term network evolution.
Laying the Foundations, which developed out of the British Museum's 'Iraq Scheme' archaeological training programme, covers the core components for putting together and running an archaeological field programme. The focus is on practicality. Individual chapters address background research, the use of remote sensing, approaches to surface collection, excavation methodologies, survey with total (and multi) stations, use of a dumpy level, context classification, on-site recording, databases and registration, environmental protocols, conservation, photography, illustration, post-excavation site curation and report writing. While the manual is oriented to the archaeology of Iraq, the approaches are no less applicable to the Middle East more widely, an aim hugely facilitated by the open-source distribution of translations into Arabic and Kurdish.
Long Kesh / Maze prison was infamous as the major holding centre for paramilitary prisoners during the course of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Some of the major events of the recent conflict centred on, emanated from, and were transformed by it, including the burning of the internment camp in 1974, the protests and hunger strikes of 1980-1981, the mass escape of PIRA prisoners in 1983, and the role of prisoners in facilitating and sustaining the peace process of the 1990s. Now, over a decade after the signing of the Belfast Agreement (1998), Long Kesh / Maze remains one of the most contentious remnants of the conflict and has become central to debates about what we do with such sites, what they mean, and how they relate to contemporary rememberings of the difficult recent past. The only independent archaeological investigation of Long Kesh / Maze prior to its partial demolition, this volume reveals the seminal role of material culture in understanding the prison. It moves from traditional uses of solely documentary and oral evidence to exploring the full range of material remains of the prison as they have been abandoned in situ or been dispersed and re-contextualized into wider society. Using a multitude of sources, McAtackney creatively provides a unique interpretation of the Northern Irish Troubles and the continuing destabilizing role of material remnants of the conflict in the peace process.
Mankind's utter dependency on technology extends back approximately three million years to the first stone tools, but it was only with the innovation of hafting, some 300,000 years ago, that technology took its first modern form and revolutionized our social and economic lives. The development of handles and shafts, which were added to some tools previously made of single materials and hand-held, made the tools not only more efficient but improved their makers' chances of survival by making the quest for food more productive. This volume brings together evidence for the cognitive, social, and technological foundations necessary for the development of hafting to form a speculative theory about this revolutionary innovation. The creation of tools with handles required considerable planning based on an expert understanding of the properties of the raw materials involved, a form of early engineering. Yet it was the ability to envisage the final, integrated form of the tool which underpinned the remarkable novelty of hafting, one which had massive implications for the human species and which laid the foundations for the technology we rely on today.
Africa has the longest and arguably the most diverse archaeological record of any of the continents. It is where the human lineage first evolved and from where Homo sapiens spread across the rest of the world. Later, it witnessed novel experiments in food-production and unique trajectories to urbanism and the organisation of large communities that were not always structured along strictly hierarchical lines. Millennia of engagement with societies in other parts of the world confirm Africa's active participation in the construction of the modern world, while the richness of its history, ethnography, and linguistics provide unusually powerful opportunities for constructing interdisciplinary narratives of Africa's past. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. As well as covering almost all periods and regions of the continent, it includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates, and situates the subject's contemporary practice within the discipline's history and the infrastructural challenges now facing its practitioners. Bringing together essays on all these themes from over seventy contributors, many of them living and working in Africa, it offers a highly accessible, contemporary account of the subject for use by scholars and students of not only archaeology, but also history, anthropology, and other disciplines.
Bringing together a team of international experts from different subject areas - including law, history, archaeology and anthropology - this book re-evaluates the traditional narratives surrounding the origins of Roman law before the enactment of the Twelve Tables. Much is now known about the archaic period, relevant evidence from later periods continues to emerge and new methodologies bring the promise of interpretive inroads. This book explores whether, in light of recent developments in these fields, the earliest history of Roman law should be reconsidered. Drawing on the critical axioms of contemporary sociological and anthropological theory, the contributors yield new insights and offer new perspectives on Rome's early legal history. In doing so, they seek to revise our understanding of Roman legal history as well as to enrich our appreciation of its culture as a whole.
Zooarchaeology has emerged as a powerful way of reconstructing the lives of past societies. Through the analysis of animal bones found on a site, zooarchaeologists can uncover important information on the economy, trade, industry, diet, and other fascinating facts about the people who lived there. Animal Bones in Australian Archaeology is an introductory bone identification manual written for archaeologists working in Australia. This field guide includes 16 species commonly encountered in both Indigenous and historical sites. Using diagrams and flow charts, it walks the reader step-by-step through the bone identification process. Combining practical and academic knowledge, the manual also provides an introductory insight into zooarchaeological methodology and the importance of zooarchaeological research in understanding human behaviour through time.
Objects of adornment have been a subject of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic study for well over a century. Within archaeology, personal ornaments have traditionally been viewed as decorative embellishments associated with status and wealth, materializations of power relations and social strategies, or markers of underlying social categories such as those related to gender, class, and ethnic affiliation. Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity seeks to understand these artefacts not as signals of steady, pre-existing cultural units and relations, but as important components in the active and contingent constitution of identities. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on materiality and relationality in archaeological and social theory, this book uses one genre of material culture - items of bodily adornment - to illustrate how humans and objects construct one another. Providing case studies spanning 10 countries, three continents, and more than 9,000 years of human history, the authors demonstrate the myriad and dynamic ways personal ornaments were intertwined with embodied practice and identity performativity, the creation and remaking of social memories, and relational collections of persons, materials, and practices in the past. The authors’ careful analyses of production methods and composition, curation/heirlooming and reworking, decorative attributes and iconography, position within assemblages, and depositional context illuminate the varied material and relational axes along which objects of adornment contained social value and meaning. When paired with the broad temporal and geographic scope collectively represented by these studies, we gain a deeper appreciation for the subtle but vital roles these items played in human lives.
This volume is the result of the Cambridge Annual Student Archaeology Conference (CASA), held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research from September 13–15, 2019. CASA developed out of the Annual Student Archaeology Conference, first held in 2013, which was formed by students at Cambridge, Oxford, Durham and York. In 2017, Cambridge became the home of the conference and the name was changed accordingly. The conference was developed to give students (from undergraduate to PhD candidates) in archaeology and related fields the chance to present their research to a broad audience. The theme for the 2019 conference was New Frontiers in Archaeology and this volume presents papers from a wide range of topics such as new geographical areas of research, using museum collections and legacy data, new ways to teach archaeology and new scientific or theoretic paradigms. From hunting and gathering in the Neolithic to the return of artefacts to Turkey, the papers contained within show a great variety in both geography and chronology. Discussions revolve around access to data, the role of excavation in today’s archaeology, the role of local communities in archaeological interpretation and how we can ask new questions of old data. This volume presents 18 papers arranged in the six sessions with the two posters in their thematic sessions.
This book explores the development of territorial identity in the late prehistoric, Roman, and early medieval periods. Over the course of the Iron Age, a series of marked regional variations in material culture and landscape character emerged across eastern England that reflect the development of discrete zones of social and economic interaction. The boundaries between these zones appear to have run through sparsely settled areas of the landscape on high ground, and corresponded to a series of kingdoms that emerged during the Late Iron Age. In eastern England at least, these pre-Roman socio-economic territories appear to have survived throughout the Roman period despite a trend towards cultural homogenization brought about by Romanization. Although there is no direct evidence for the relationship between these socio-economic zones and the Roman administrative territories known as civitates, they probably corresponded very closely. The fifth century saw some Anglo-Saxon immigration but whereas in East Anglia these communities spread out across much of the landscape, in the Northern Thames Basin they appear to have been restricted to certain coastal and estuarine districts. The remaining areas continued to be occupied by a substantial native British population, including much of the East Saxon kingdom (very little of which appears to have been 'Saxon'). By the sixth century a series of regionally distinct identities - that can be regarded as separate ethnic groups - had developed which corresponded very closely to those that had emerged during the late prehistoric and Roman periods. These ancient regional identities survived through to the Viking incursions, whereafter they were swept away following the English re-conquest and replaced with the counties with which we are familiar today.
Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four, legs. From an evolutionary perspective, this is an illogical development, as it slows us down. But here we are, suggesting there must have been something tremendous to gain from bipedalism. First Steps takes our ordinary, everyday walking experience and reveals how unusual and extraordinary it truly is. The seven-million-year-long journey through the origins of upright walking shows how it was in fact a gateway to many of the other attributes that make us human-from our technological skills and sociality to our thirst for exploration. DeSilva uses early human evolution to explain the instinct that propels a crawling infant to toddle onto two feet, differences between how men and women tend to walk, physical costs of upright walking, including hernias, varicose veins and backache, and the challenges of childbirth imposed by a bipedal pelvis. And he theorises that upright walking may have laid the foundation for the traits of compassion, empathy and altruism that characterise our species today and helped us become the dominant species on this planet.
Egyptian mummies have always aroused popular and scientific interest; however, most modern studies, although significantly increased in number and range, have been published in specialist journals. Now, this unique book, written by a long-established team of scientists based at the University of Manchester (England), brings this exciting, cross-disciplinary area of research to a wider readership. Its main aim is to show how this team's multidisciplinary, investigative methods and the unique resource of the Egyptian Mummy Tissue Bank are being used for the new major international investigations of disease evolution and ancient Egyptian pharmacy and pharmacology. It also assesses the current status of palaeopathology and ancient DNA research, and treatments available for conserving mummified remains. Descriptions of the historical development of Egyptian mummifications and medicine and detailed references to previous scientific investigations provide the context for firsthand accounts of cutting-edge research by prominent specialists in this field, demonstrating how these techniques can contribute to a new perspective on Egyptology.
Egyptian mummies have always aroused popular and scientific interest; however, most modern studies, although significantly increased in number and range, have been published in specialist journals. Now, this unique book, written by a long-established team of scientists, brings this exciting, cross-disciplinary area of research to a wider readership. It shows how this team's multidisciplinary, investigative methods and the unique resource of the Egyptian Mummy Tissue Bank are being used for the new major international investigations of disease evolution and ancient Egyptian pharmacy and pharmacology. It also assesses the current status of palaeopathology and ancient DNA research, and treatments available for conserving mummified remains. Descriptions of the historical development of Egyptian mummifications and medicine and detailed references to previous scientific investigations provide the context for firsthand accounts of cutting-edge research by prominent specialists in this field, demonstrating how these techniques can contribute to a new perspective on Egyptology.
This volume presents a selection of the best papers presented at the forty-first annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. The theme for the conference was "Across Space and Time", and the papers explore a multitude of topics related to that concept, including databases, the semantic Web, geographical information systems, data collection and management, and more.
It has been clear for many years that the ways in which archaeology is practised have been a direct product of a particular set of social, cultural, and historical circumstances - archaeology is always carried out in the present. More recently, however, many have begun to consider how archaeological techniques might be used to reflect more directly on the contemporary world itself: how we might undertake archaeologies of, as well as in the present. This Handbook is the first comprehensive survey of an exciting and rapidly expanding sub-field and provides an authoritative overview of the newly emerging focus on the archaeology of the present and recent past. In addition to detailed archaeological case studies, it includes essays by scholars working on the relationships of different disciplines to the archaeology of the contemporary world, including anthropology, psychology, philosophy, historical geography, science and technology studies, communications and media, ethnoarchaeology, forensic archaeology, sociology, film, performance, and contemporary art. This volume seeks to explore the boundaries of an emerging sub-discipline, to develop a tool-kit of concepts and methods which are applicable to this new field, and to suggest important future trajectories for research. It makes a significant intervention by drawing together scholars working on a broad range of themes, approaches, methods, and case studies from diverse contexts in different parts of the world, which have not previously been considered collectively.
Contemporary Archaeology and the City foregrounds the archaeological study of post-industrial and other urban transformations through a diverse, international collection of case studies. Over the past decade contemporary archaeology has emerged as a dynamic force for dissecting and contextualizing the material complexities of present-day societies. Contemporary archaeology challenges conventional anthropological and archaeological conceptions of the past by pushing temporal boundaries closer to, if not into, the present. The volume is organized around three themes that highlight the multifaceted character of urban transitions in present-day cities - creativity, ruination, and political action. The case studies offer comparative perspectives on transformative global urban processes in local contexts through research conducted in the struggling, post-industrial cities of Detroit, Belfast, Indianapolis, Berlin, Liverpool, Belem, and post-Apartheid Cape Town, as well as the thriving urban centres of Melbourne, New York City, London, Chicago, and Istanbul. Together, the volume contributions demonstrate how the contemporary city is an urban palimpsest comprised by archaeological assemblages - of the built environment, the surface, and buried sub-surface - that are traces of the various pasts entangled with one another in the present. This volume aims to position the city as one of the most important and dynamic arenas for archaeological studies of the contemporary by presenting a range of theoretically-engaged case studies that highlight some of the major issues that the study of contemporary cities pose for archaeologists.
This volume of papers delivered to The Royal Society in February of 1992 explores the debate over the "single center" hypothesis of human origins versus "multi-regional evolution." Over the last five years there has been growing support for a recent "Out of Africa" origin of modern humans--based on fresh interpretations of the palaeoanthropological and archaeological evidence, new applications of physical dating techniques to important sites, and a greatly increased genetic data base on recent human variation and its geographical patterning. But there has also been a parallel growth of doubts about interpretations of the new evidence from some workers. This book provides a review of recent progress and allows some of these doubts to be aired and discussed. In addition to the editors, the contributors are O. Bar-Yosef, A. M. Bowcock, P. Brown, H. J. Deacon, L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, J. D. Clark, R. Grun, J.-J. Hublin, A. A. Lin, G. H. Miller, J. L. Mountain, H. P. Schwarcz, N. J. Shackleton, F. H. Smith, and M. Stoneking. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Fishes is a practical introduction to the study of fish remains from archaeological sites, designed for archaeologists and archaezoologists working in the field and in the laboratory. It provides clear guidelines for the identification of remains and how to interpret them. The identification and analysis of fish remains unearthed in archaeological excavations are invaluable factors in the reconstruction of climate, economic strategy, diet and trade. In this manual the authors discuss the importance of fishes in past economies and in archaeological research. They describe methods of extraction, fish anatomy and classification with the aid of numerous line drawings. The book also includes a survey of fishes most likely to be represented in archaeological sites and describes the biology of fishes in order to help archaeozoologists make informed judgements about methods of exploitation, size of fish caught and meat yield. This study is unique in making a realistic assessment of both the potential and limitations of the use of fish remains in archaeological interpretation.
The technique of aerial photography, widely recognized as of immense value to field archaeologists, had been little used in Ireland, although the relatively slight disturbance of land by modern ploughing or industrial development makes Ireland a particularly suitable region for the identification of ancient features by this method. The results of the surveys carried out by the Cambridge Committee for Aerial Photography between 1963 and 1968 are nevertheless surprising. Many ancient earthworks have been revealed by differences in soil-colour or crop-growth, and the natural and man-made environments of these and other prehistoric and early Christian settlements can be fully appreciated. The pattern of settlement emerges over a wide area, as does the character of large and complex sites such as Tara, while detailed oblique views pick out smaller structures invisible on the ground.
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHORS OF FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS AND THE ORION MYSTERY 'An exciting book . . . deservedly a bestseller' SPECTATOR ___________________________________________ In Keeper of Genesis, Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval present a tour de force of historical and scientific detective work: * When and where did history begin? * When was the genesis of civilisation in Egypt? * How and why were the Great Sphinx and the three pyramids of Giza designed to serve as parts of an immense three-dimensional model of the sky of 'First Time'? * What is contained in the rectangular chamber that seismic surveys have located in the bedrock far below the paws of the sphinx? * What lies behind the mysterious doors recently discovered at the end of a previously unexplored shaft inside the Great Pyramid? * Does mankind have a rendezvous with destiny - a rendezvous not in the future, but in the distant past - at a precise place and time? Using sophisticated computer simulations of the ancient skies to crack the millennial code that the monuments transcribe, Bauval and Hancock set out a startling new theory of the Pyramid Texts and other archaic Egyptian scriptures. ___________________________________________ 'Reads like a detective story, with the reader enthusiastically trying to outguess the writers' Literary Review 'Start the book in the early evening and continue uninterrupted till you complete it in the small house. The effect is wonderful . . . Your entire world view has been shifted a hundred yards . . . You fall asleep thinking that nothing will ever be the same again' Sunday Telegraph
Quantitative Paleozoology describes and illustrates how the remains of long-dead animals recovered from archaeological and paleontological excavations can be studied and analyzed. The methods range from determining how many animals of each species are represented to determining whether one collection consists of more broken and more burned bones than another. All methods are described and illustrated with data from real collections, while numerous graphs illustrate various quantitative properties.
Flakes, and small flakes in particular, are usually seen as by-products or debris of the knapping process, rather than as desired end-products with a specific potential use. In recent years, this particular category of small tools has attracted increasing interest among researchers, especially when focusing on technological aspects in Lower Palaeolithic contexts, while the functional role of these tools is still poorly investigated. 'Understanding Lithic Recycling at the Late Lower Palaeolithic Qesem Cave, Israel: A functional and chemical investigation of small flakes' examines Late Lower Palaeolithic Qesem Cave, Israel, where a particular lithic trajectory directed towards the production of small flakes by means of recycling and exploiting old discarded flakes as cores has been recognised. The high density of this production throughout the stratigraphic sequence of the cave demonstrates that this was a conscious and planned technological choice aimed at providing small and sharp items to meet specific functional behaviours, and that this lithic behaviour persisted for some 200 kyr of human use of the cave. The exceptional conservation of use-wear signs and residues has made it possible to reconstruct the functional role of this specific production system, highlighting its specialised nature mostly related to the processing of the animal carcasses through accurate and careful actions and in a very specific way. The application of functional analysis based on the determination of wear on artefacts by means of optical light microscope, scanning electron microscopy and chemical analysis (FTIR and EDX), provides a useful and effective approach for understanding the adaptive strategies of the Qesem Cave hominins while facing various situations and solving different needs.
This book is an introductory manual that explains the basic concepts of chemistry behind scientific analytical techniques and that reviews their application to archaeology. It explains key terminology, outlines the procedures to be followed in order to produce good data, and describes the function of the basic instrumentation required to carry out those procedures. The manual contains chapters on the basic chemistry and physics necessary to understand the techniques used in analytical chemistry, with more detailed chapters on Atomic Absorption, Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission Spectroscopy, Neutron Activation Analysis, X-ray Flourescence, Electron Microscopy, Infra-red and Raman Spectroscopy, and Mass Spectrometry. Each chapter describes the operation of the instruments, some hints on the practicalities, and a review of the application of the technique to archaeology, including some case studies. With guides to further reading on the topic, it is an essential tool for practitioners, researchers and advanced students alike.
This volume of papers delivered to The Royal Society in February of 1992 explores the debate over the "single center" hypothesis of human origins versus "multi-regional evolution." Over the last five years there has been growing support for a recent "Out of Africa" origin of modern humans--based on fresh interpretations of the palaeoanthropological and archaeological evidence, new applications of physical dating techniques to important sites, and a greatly increased genetic data base on recent human variation and its geographical patterning. But there has also been a parallel growth of doubts about interpretations of the new evidence from some workers. This book provides a review of recent progress and allows some of these doubts to be aired and discussed. In addition to the editors, the contributors are O. Bar-Yosef, A. M. Bowcock, P. Brown, H. J. Deacon, L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, J. D. Clark, R. Grun, J.-J. Hublin, A. A. Lin, G. H. Miller, J. L. Mountain, H. P. Schwarcz, N. J. Shackleton, F. H. Smith, and M. Stoneking. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905." |
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