At a time when archaeology has turned away from questions of the long-term and large scale, this collection of essays reflects on some of the big questions in archaeology and ancient history - how and why societies have grown in scale and complexity, how they have maintained and discarded aspects of their own cultural heritage, and how they have collapsed. In addressing these long-standing questions of broad interest and importance, the authors develop counter-narratives - new ways of understanding what used to be termed 'cultural evolution'. Encompassing the Middle East and Egypt, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, the fourteen essays offer perspectives on long-term cultural trajectories; on cities, states and empires; on collapse; and on the relationship between archaeology and history. The book concludes with a commentary by one of the major voices in archaeological theory, Norman Yoffee.

Simon Goldhill offers a fresh and exciting perspective on how the Victorians used material culture to express their sense of the past in an age of progress, especially the biblical past and the past of classical antiquity. From Pompeian skulls on a writer's desk, to religious paraphernalia in churches, new photographic images of the Holy Land and the remaking of the cityscape of Jerusalem and Britain, Goldhill explores the remarkable way in which the nineteenth century's sense of history was reinvented through things. The Buried Life of Things shows how new technologies changed how history was discovered and analysed, and how material objects could flare into significance in bitter controversies, and then fade into obscurity and disregard again. This book offers a new route into understanding the Victorians' complex and often bizarre attempts to use their past to express their own modernity.

Artifacts are hybrids, both natural and cultural. They are also an essential component in the process of human evolution. In recent years, a wide range of disciplines, including cognitive science, sociology, art history, and anthropology, have all grappled with the nature of artifacts, leading to the emergence of a renewed interdisciplinary focus on material culture. The Reality of Artifacts: An Archaeological Perspective develops an argument for the artifact as a status conferred by human engagement with material. On this basis, artifacts are considered first in terms of their relationship to concepts and cognitive functions, and then to the physical body and sense of self. The book builds on and incorporates the latest developments in archaeological research, particularly from the archaeology of human evolution, and integrates this wealth of new archaeological data with new research in fields such as cognitive science, haptics, and material culture studies. Making the latest research available for the general reader interested in material culture, while also providing archaeologists with new theoretical perspectives built on a synthesis of interdisciplinary research, this book is suitable for courses taught at both graduate and undergraduate students, and is broadly accessible.

This book contributes significantly to the selection of appropriate and controllable cleaning methods for varnished and unvarnished paint surfaces. It is a distillation of many years' experience of formulating a cleaning treatment for any given object. The general principles of the chemistry and the practical applications are described. The methods are applicable to the surface cleaning of both traditional and modern paint media found on sculptures, ethnographic materials, paintings, gilded surfaces and furniture. Aqueous methods are certainly worth considering for those surfaces which cannot be cleaned safely by methods based on solvents.

Dogs in the North offers an interdisciplinary in-depth consideration of the multiple roles that dogs have played in the North. Spanning the deep history of humans and dogs in the North, the volume examines a variety of contexts in North America and Eurasia. The case studies build on archaeological, ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and anthropological research to illuminate the diversity and similarities in canine-human relationships across this vast region. The book sheds additional light on how dogs figure in the story of domestication, and how they have participated in partnerships with people across time. With contributions from a wide selection of authors, Dogs in the North is aimed at students and scholars of anthropology, archaeology, and history, as well as all those with interests in human-animal studies and northern societies.

The Later Prehistory of North-West Europe provides a unique, up-to-date, and easily accessible synthesis of the later prehistoric archaeology of north-west Europe, transcending political and language barriers that can hinder understanding. By surveying changes in social forms, landscape organization, monument types, and ritual practices over six millennia, the volume reassesses the prehistory of north-west Europe from the late Mesolithic to the end of the pre-Roman Iron Age. It explores how far common patterns of social development are apparent across north-west Europe, and whether there were periods when local differences were emphasized instead. In relation to this, it also examines changes through time in the main axes of contact between the various regions of continental Europe, Britain, and Ireland. Key to the volume's broad scope is its focus on the vast mass of new evidence provided by recent development-led excavations. The authors collate data that has been gathered on thousands of sites across Britain, Ireland, northern France, the Low Countries, western Germany, and Denmark, using sources including unpublished 'grey literature' reports. The results challenge many aspects of previous narratives of later prehistory, allowing the volume to present a distinctively fresh perspective.

Sources are the raw material of History, but whereas the written word has traditionally been seen as the principal source, historians now recognize the value of sources beyond text. In this new edition of History and Material Culture, contributors consider a range of objects - from an eighteenth-century bed curtain to a twenty-first-century shopping trolley - which can help historians develop new interpretations and new knowledge about the past. Containing two new chapters on healing objects in East Africa and the shopping trolley in the social world, this book examines a variety of material sources from around the globe and across centuries to assess how such sources can be used to study the distant and the recent past. In a revised introduction, Karen Harvey discusses some of the principal issues raised when historians use material culture, particularly in the context of 'the material turn', and suggests some initial steps for those unfamiliar with these kinds of sources. While the sources are discussed from interdisciplinary perspectives, the emphasis of the book is on what historians stand to gain from using material culture, as well as what historians have to offer the broader study of material culture. Clearly written and accessible, this book is the ideal introduction to the opportunities and challenges of researching material culture, and is essential reading for all students of historical theory and method.

This volume explores 15,000 years of indigenous human history on the North American continent, drawing on the latest archaeological theories, time-honored methodologies, and rich datasets. From the Arctic south to the Mexican border and east to the Atlantic Ocean, all of the major cultural developments are covered in 53 chapters, with certain periods, places, and historical problems receiving special focus by the volume's authors. Questions like who first peopled the continent, what did it mean to have been a hunter-gatherer in the Great Basin versus the California coast, how significant were cultural exchanges between Native North Americans and Mesoamericans, and why do major historical changes seem to correspond to shifts in religion, politics, demography, and economy are brought into focus. The practice of archaeology itself is discussed as contributors wrestle with modern-day concerns with the implications of doing archaeology and its relevance for understanding ourselves today. In the end, the chapters in this book show us that the principal questions answered about human history through the archaeology of North America are central to any larger understanding of the relationships between people, cultural identities, landscapes, and the living of everyday life.

Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology explores the archaeologies of daily living left by the indigenous and other displaced peoples impacted by European colonial expansion over the last 600 years. This new, comparative focus on the archaeology of indigenous and colonized life has emerged from the gap in conceptual frames of reference between the archaeologies of pre-contact indigenous peoples, and the post-contact archaeologies of the global European experience. Case studies from North America, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Ireland significantly revise conventional historical narratives of those interactions, their presumed impacts, and their ongoing relevance for the material, social, economic, and political lives and identities of contemporary indigenous and other peoples (e.g. metis or mixed ancestry families, and other displaced or colonized communities). The volume provides a synthetic overview of the trends emerging from this research, contextualizing regional studies in relation to the broader theoretical contributions they reveal, demonstrating how this area of study is contributing to an archaeology practiced and interpreted beyond conceptual constraints such as pre versus post contact, indigenous versus European, history versus archaeology, and archaeologist versus descendant. In addition, the work featured here underscores how this revisionist archaeological perspective challenges dominant tropes that persist in the conventional colonial histories of descendant colonial nation states, and contributes to a de-colonizing of that past in the present. The implications this has for archaeological practice, and for the contemporary descendants of colonized peoples, brings a relevance and immediacy to these archaeological studies that resonates with, and problemetizes, contested claims to a global archaeological heritage.

The eminent art historian Gerard Baldwin Brown (1849 1932) held, for fifty years, the first Chair in the History of Art in Britain at the University of Edinburgh. He published on a wide range of art and architecture; his major work was the six-volume Arts in Early England (1903 1937). His interest in the wider social context of art was reflected in his concern for the preservation of ancient monuments for the public. It was after the publication of the present book in 1906 that Brown was appointed member of a Royal Commission to compile an inventory of ancient Scottish monuments. The first half of the book outlines best practice for the preservation of monuments and architectural and natural beauty. The second part, based on extensive secondary literature and official documentation, demonstrates how other countries managed their historic monuments: in Europe, India, the Middle East and the United States.

This volume is based on a session at a 2005 Society for Historical Archaeology meeting. The organizers assembled historical archaeologists from the UK and the US, whose work arises out of differing intellectual traditions. The authors exchange ideas about what their colleagues have written, and construct dialogues about theories and practices that inform interpretive archaeology on either side of the Atlantic, ending with commentary by two well-known names in interpretive archaeology.

Thomas Young (1773-1829) was an English physician who was one of the first modern scholars to attempt to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and made significant contributions to a variety of other academic disciplines. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1794 and in 1803 published an article establishing the wave theory of light. Young became interested in hieroglyphs in 1814, when he was sent a fragment of papyrus from Egypt. After acquiring a copy of the Rosetta Stone inscriptions Young made rapid progress, publishing his results in 1816 and 1819. When Champollion published his groundbreaking work on hieroglyphs in 1822 Young believed that Champollion had based that work on his earlier translations without acknowledgement, which Champollion denied. This book was published in 1823 in an attempt by Young to lay 'public claim to whatever credit be my due', and provides a summary of his hieroglyphic research.

J. P. Droop (1882-1963) was a classical field archaeologist. After graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1904 he worked as a field archaeologist for the British School at Athens, and was appointed Chair of Classical Archaeology at Liverpool University in 1914. This volume was intended as a guide to practical archaeological excavation and was first published in 1915 as part of the Cambridge Archaeological and Ethnological series. At the time of publication, archaeology was starting to become a more scientific and academic discipline, as can be seen in Droop's arguments on the importance of archaeological context and knowledge of stratification on site. The development of excavation as a scientifically based practice is shown by the emphasis on planning of the site, in contrast to earlier guides to excavation. This volume provides insights into the development of the theory as well as the practice of archaeology.

In this book, Graham Connah offers an overview of archaeological authorship: its diversity, its challenges, and its methodology. Based on his own experiences, he presents his personal views about the task of writing about archaeology. The book is not intended to be a technical manual. Instead, Connah aims to encourage archaeologists who write about their subject to think about the process of writing. He writes with the beginning author in mind, but the book will be of interest to all archaeologists who plan to publish their work. Connah's overall premise is that those who write about archaeology need to be less concerned with content and more concerned with how they present it. It is not enough to be a good archaeologist. One must also become a good writer and be able to communicate effectively. Archaeology, he argues, is above all a literary discipline.

Marxist theory has been an undercurrent in western social science since the late nineteenth century. It came into prominence in the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s and has had a profound effect on history, sociology and anthropology. This book represents an attempt to gather together Marxist perspectives in archaeology and to examine whether indeed they represent advances in archaeological theory. The papers in this volume look forward to the growing use of Marxist theory by archaeologists; as well as enriching archaeology as a discipline they have important implications for sociology and anthropology through the addition of a long-term, historical perspective. This is a book primarily for undergraduates and research students and their teachers in departments of archaeology and anthropology but it should also be of interest to historians, sociologists and geographers.

Archaeology, like all scientific disciplines, is accumulating an ever-increasing volume of data which the researcher must be able to retrieve and use in formulating and testing theories of interpretation. There are many practical questions of how information can best be recorded, stored and disseminated, but behind these lie fundamental intellectual questions. It is to the latter that Jean-Claude Gardin addresses this book. The advent of data banks, computers, micro-publishing, etc. will not in itself improve the access of the researcher to information of real value unless some consensus can be reached on the way the information is selected and presented and the reasoning processes that these different modes of presentation embody. Jean-Claude Gardin sees this as a long-term goal, the book as one step on the way to its achievement.

This book undertakes a comparative study of the history and development of legislative and administrative systems in operation today for the protection of archaeological monuments. With the exception of Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, no country adopted a positive policy towards the protection and conservation of its archaeological and historical heritage until the twentieth century. Moreover, it was not until the middle of that century, under the threat of wholesale devastation from extensive schemes for social and economic development, that the accelerating disappearance of the sites and monuments of Antiquity became the object of intensive study and legislation. Since then systems of cultural resource management have developed throughout the world. A range of countries (from Europe, America, Asia and Africa) representing a diversity of political and ideological systems - capitalist, socialist and ex-colonial - have been selected as being broadly representative of the variety of these systems. The case studies have been written by distinguished archaeologists and provide critical evaluations of the objectives and shortcomings of these systems.

This collection considers the relevance of the Annales 'school' for archaeology. The Annales movement regarded orthodox history as too much concerned with events, too narrowly political, too narrative in form and too isolated from neighbouring disciplines. Annalistes attempted to construct a 'total' history, dealing with a wide range of human activity, and combining divergent material, documentary, and theoretical approaches to the past. Annales-oriented research utilizes the techniques and tools of various ancillary fields, and integrates temporal, spatial, material and behavioural analyses. Such an approach is obviously attractive to archaeologists, for even though they deal with material data rather than social facts, they are just as much as historians interested in understanding social, economic and political factors such as power and dominance, conflict, exchange and other human activities. Three introductory essays consider the relationship between Annales methodology and current archaeological theory. Case studies draw upon methodological variations of the multifaceted Annales approach. The volume concludes with two overviews, one historical and the other archaeological.

Museum collections are often perceived as static entities hidden away in storerooms or trapped behind glass cases. By focusing on the dynamic histories of museum collections, new research reveals their pivotal role in shaping a wide range of social relations. Over time and across space the interactions between these artefacts and the people and institutions who made, traded, collected, researched and exhibited them have generated complex networks of material and social agency.

In this innovative volume, the contributors draw on a broad range of source materials to explore the cross-cultural interactions which have created museum collections. These case studies contribute significantly to the development of new theoretical frameworks to examine broader questions of materiality, agency, and identity in the past and present.

Grounded in case studies from individual objects and museum collections from North America, Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, this truly international volume juxtaposes historical, geographical, and cross-cultural studies.

This work will be of great interest to archaeologists and anthropologists studying material culture, as well as researchers in museum studies and cultural heritage management."

The development of European archaeology as a scholarly discipline in the nineteenth century was closely connected with the appearance of systematic methods for dating archaeological materials and these methods evolved largely in Scandinavia. Professor Graslund's book is the first in-depth study of what is now recognised as a crucial stage in the history of archaeology. Beginning with an analysis of the basic elements of archaeological dating systems, he traces the origin and subsequent development of these systems, examining in detail how they were built up and refined. The Three Age System, methods of dating by find associations and the applications of typology for relative dating are themes that receive particular attention. Individuals, however, are never lost from sight. Throughout the book the author seeks to assess the contribution of the often colourful personalities involved and the volume concludes with a valuable biographical appendix.

Material culture has been part of a distinctively human way of life for over two million years. Recent symbolic and social analyses have drawn much attention to the role of material culture in human society, emphasizing the representational and ideological aspects of the material world. These studies have, nonetheless, often overlooked how the very physicality of material culture and our material surroundings make them unique and distinctive from text and discourse. In this study, Nicole Boivin explores how the physicality of the material world shapes our thoughts, emotions, cosmological frameworks, social relations, and even our bodies. Focusing on the agency of material culture, she draws on the work of a diverse range of thinkers, from Marx and Merleau-Ponty to Darwin, while highlighting a wide selection of new studies in archaeology, cultural anthropology, history, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. She asks what is distinctive about material culture compared to other aspects of human culture and presents a comprehensive overview of material agency that has much to offer to both scholars and students

Classifications are central to archaeology. Yet the theoretical literature on the subject, both in archaeology and the philosophy of science, bears very little relationship to what actually occurs in practice. This problem has long interested William Adams, a field archaeologist, and Ernest Adams, a philosopher of science, who describe their book as an ethnography of archaeological classification. It is a study of the various ways in which field archaeologists set about making and using classifications to meet a variety of practical needs. The authors first discuss how humans form concepts. They then describe and analyse in detail a specific example of an archaeological classification, and go on to consider what theoretical generalizations can be derived from the study of actual in-use classifications. Throughout the book, they stress the importance of having a clearly defined purpose and practical procedures when developing and applying classifications.

We take for granted the survival into the present of artifacts from the past. Indeed the discipline of archaeology would be impossible without the survival of such artifacts. What is the implication of the durability or ephemerality of past material culture for the reproduction of societies in the past? In this book, Andrew Jones argues that the material world offers a vital framework for the formation of collective memory. He uses the topic of memory to critique the treatment of artifacts as symbols by interpretative archaeologists and artifacts as units of information (or memes) by behavioral archaeologists, instead arguing for a treatment of artifacts as forms of mnemonic trace that have an impact on the senses. Using detailed case studies from prehistoric Europe, he further argues that archaeologists can study the relationship between mnemonic traces in the form of networks of reference in artifactual and architectural forms.

Despite being one of the most successful branches of mainstream archaeology, wetland archaeology, as an academic discipline, is still relatively unknown. We might have all heard of the wonderfully preserved organic artefacts and ecofacts found in waterlogged conditions, but do we really know how they were preserved, found, retrieved, and conserved for us to admire and study? Wetland Archaeology and Beyond takes the reader through the fascinating biography of wetland archaeology, from the dawn of the discipline to its remarkable achievements. Through a discussion of a large variety of worldwide wetland archaeological sites and their material culture, Menotti offers an appreciative study of the people who occupied these sites and who created the archaeological artefacts. The volume also includes a comprehensive explanation of the procedures and research processes involved in archaeological practice and theory. Focusing on the relationship between archaeological experts and the general public, Menotti highlights the importance of this relationship for the future of the discipline as wetland ecosystems continue to disappear at an inexorable rate - and with them our invaluable cultural heritage.

This book is a fully updated and revised edition of William Andrefsky Jr's ground-breaking manual on lithic analysis. Designed for students and professional archaeologists, this highly illustrated book explains the fundamental principles of the measurement, recording and analysis of stone tools and stone tool production debris. Introducing the reader to lithic raw materials, classification, terminology and key concepts, it comprehensively explores methods and techniques, presenting detailed case studies of lithic analysis from around the world. It examines new emerging techniques, such as the advances being made in lithic debitage analysis and lithic tool analysis, and includes a new section on stone tool functional studies. An extensive and expanded glossary makes this book an invaluable reference for archaeologists at all levels.