A wide-ranging exploration of Time as experienced and contemplated. Included are offerings on ancient Mesopotamian archaeology, literature and religion, Biblical texts and archaeology, Chinese literature and philosophy, and Islamic law. In addition, the majority of the papers specifically address issues of differences and similarities between cultures, with or without actual cultural contact. This volume is the publication of a conference designed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Midwest branch of the American Oriental Society, held at St. Mary's University in Notre Dame, Indiana, in February 2017.

Information and its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands explores the question of how information, broadly conceived, is acquired, stored, circulated, and utilized in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, or bands. Given the nature of this question, the volume brings together a group of scholars from multiple disciplines, including archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and evolutionary ecology. Each of these specialties deals with the question of information in different ways and with different sets of data given different primacy. The fundamental goal of the volume is to bridge disciplines and subdisciplines, open discussion, and see if some common ground-either theoretical perspectives, general principles, or methodologies-can be developed upon which to build future research on the role of information in hunter-gatherer bands. Volume 5 in the Ideas, Debates and Perspectives series.

One of the most troubling problems in archaeology is to determine the manner and content of prehistoric thought. A fundamental challenge is to develop the theory, methodology and tools to understand human cognition. Cognitive archaeology as a subject is still in its infancy, and archaeologists are adopting a variety of approaches--literary, linguistic, and scientific. The contributors to The Ancient Mind develop a new direction in prehistoric cognitive research that is rooted in the scientific tradition and in an empirical methodology. Together, they begin to develop a science of cognitive archaeology.

In A Critique of Archaeological Reason, Giorgio Buccellati presents a theory of excavation that aims at clarifying the nature of archaeology and its impact on contemporary thought. Integrating epistemological issues with methods of data collection and the role and impact of digital technology on archaeological work, the book explores digital data in order to comprehend its role in shaping meaning and understanding in archaeological excavation. The ability of archaeologists to record in the field, rather than offsite, has fundamentally changed the methods of observation, conceptualization, and interpretation of deposits. Focusing on the role of stratigraphy as the center of archaeological field work, Giorgio Buccellati examines the challenges of interpreting a 'broken tradition'; a civilization for which there are no living carriers today. He uses the site of Urkesh in Syria, where he has worked for decades, as a case study to demonstrate his theory.

Drawing upon the theoretical perspectives of systems theory, cybernetics and cultural ecology, the author uses cross-cultural comparisons to explain the origins and evolution of the pottery making craft. An innovative approach to the archaeological interpretation of ceramics.

This book offers a series of studies focused on the analysis of stone tool technology of the Folsom Culture, bison-hunting inhabitants of the North American prairie grasslands during the terminal Pleistocene. Recent work on Folsom lithic assemblages has revealed considerable complexity in the factors that generated similarities and differences in Folsom chipped stone economy, beyond simply the manufacturing sequence and technique of fluting Folsom projectile points. The analyses presented here use comparative methods to identify patterns of lithic assemblage structure and variation that provide insights into the organization of Folsom technology and lifeways, considering multiple aspects of Folsom technology including: tool manufacture and reduction system modeling, studies of raw material variation, use-wear, technological variation in weaponry assemblages, and the organization of technology. They thus contribute substantially to a growing understanding of the patterns and processes in Folsom technology and the causes of diversity within Folsom lithic assemblages.

This book offers a series of studies focused on the analysis of stone tool technology of the Folsom Culture, bison-hunting inhabitants of the North American prairie grasslands during the terminal Pleistocene. Recent work on Folsom lithic assemblages has revealed considerable complexity in the factors that generated similarities and differences in Folsom chipped stone economy, beyond simply the manufacturing sequence and technique of fluting Folsom projectile points. The analyses presented here use comparative methods to identify patterns of lithic assemblage structure and variation that provide insights into the organization of Folsom technology and lifeways, considering multiple aspects of Folsom technology including: tool manufacture and reduction system modeling, studies of raw material variation, use-wear, technological variation in weaponry assemblages, and the organization of technology. They thus contribute substantially to a growing understanding of the patterns and processes in Folsom technology and the causes of diversity within Folsom lithic assemblages.

Das Fachgebiet "Ur- und Fruhgeschichtliche Archaologie" erfuhr eine massive Foerderung durch den nationalsozialistischen Staat, so durch die Einrichtung von zahlreichen neuen Lehrstuhlen. Dieser Band widmet sich jedoch nicht in erster Linie dem Lebenslauf und dem politischen Verhalten von zehn exemplarisch untersuchten Hochschullehrern, sondern stellt sich bei einer kritischen Lekture ihrer wissenschaftlichen Schriften die Frage, wie die Forscher vor, im und nach dem Dritten Reich gedacht und ihre wissenschaftlichen Ergebnisse formuliert haben. Es zeigt sich, dass sowohl die wissenschaftlichen Paradigmen, Fragestellungen und Schilderungen der vergangenenen Epochen der Ur- und Fruhgeschichte als auch das sprachliche Vokabular langst vor 1933 entwickelt waren und auf das spate 19. und fruhe 20. Jahrhundert zuruckgingen und dass sich die Sprache erst lange nach Kriegsende wandelte.

Archaeological remains are ‘fragmented by definition’: apart from exceptional cases, the study of the human past takes into account mainly traces, ruins, discards, and debris of past civilisations. It is rare that things have been preserved as they were originally made and conceived in the past. However, not all the ancient fragmentary objects were the ‘leftovers’ from the past. A noticeable portion of them was part and parcel of the ancient materiality already in the form of a fragment or damaged item. In 2000, John Chapman, with his volume Fragmentation in Archaeology, attracted the attention of scholars on the need to reconsider broken artefacts as the result of the deliberate anthropic process of physical fragmentation. The phenomenon of fragmentation can be thus explored with more outcomes for a category of objects that played an important role inside the society: the figurines. Due to their portability and size, figurines are particularly entangled and engaged in social, spatial, temporal, and material relations, and – more than other artefacts – can easily accommodate acts of embodiment and dismemberment. The act of creation symmetrically also involves the act of destruction, which in turn is another act of creation, since from the fragmentation comes a new entity with a different ontology. Breaking contains the paradigms of life: creation and reparation, destruction and regeneration. The scope of this volume is to search for traces of any voluntary and intentional fragmentation of ancient artefacts, creating, improving, and sharpening the methods and principles for a scientific investigation that goes beyond single author impression or sensitivity. The comparative lens adopted in this volume can allow the reader to explore different fields taken from ancient societies of how we can address, assess, detect, and even discuss the action of breaking and mutilation of ancient figurines.

This is an ethnoarchaeological study of the settlements of the Raramuri (often known as the Tarahumara), focusing primarily on their mobility strategy. This is important because this groups presents a case where the common equation of agriculturalists = sedentary, and hunter-gatherers = mobile is broken. The Raramuri are agriculturalists with a pattern of mobility between two or more settlements during the course of any year. Graham provides not only a description of this unusual pattern of mobility by a farming group but also a number of insights and suggestions on how archaeologists can detect a mobile lifestyle in the residential areas of prehistoric agriculturalists.

In Breaking the Surface, Doug Bailey offers a radical alternative for understanding Neolithic houses, providing much-needed insight not just into prehistoric practice, but into another way of doing archaeology. Using his years of fieldwork experience excavating the early Neolithic pit-houses of southeastern Europe, Bailey exposes and elucidates a previously under-theorized aspect of prehistoric pit construction: the actions and consequences of digging defined as breaking the surface of the ground. Breaking the Surface works through the consequences of this redefinition in order to redirect scholarship on the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in Neolithic Europe, offering detailed critiques of current interpretations of these earliest European architectural constructions. The work of the book is performed by juxtaposing richly detailed discussions of archaeological sites (Etton and The Wilsford Shaft in the UK, and Magura in Romania), with the work of three artists-who-cut (Ron Athey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana), with deep and detailed examinations of the philosophy of holes, the perceptual psychology of shapes, and the linguistic anthropology of cutting and breaking words, as well as with cultural diversity in framing spatial reference and through an examination of pre-modern ungrounded ways of living. Breaking the Surface is as much a creative act on its own - in its mixture of work from disparate periods and regions, its use of radical text interruption, and its juxtaposition of text and imagery - as it is an interpretive statement about prehistoric architecture. Unflinching and exhilarating, it is a major development in the growing subdiscipline of art/archaeology.

Change and Archaeology explores how archaeologists have historically described, interpreted, and explained change, and argues that change has been under-theorised. The study of change is central to the discipline of archaeology, but change is complex, and this makes it challenging to write about in nuanced ways that effectively capture the nature of our world. Relational approaches offer archaeologists more scope to explore change in complex and subtle ways. Change and Archaeology presents a posthumanist, post-anthropocentric, new materialist approach to change. It argues that our world is constantly in the process of becoming and always on the move. By recasting change as the norm rather than the exception and distributing it between both humans and non-humans, this book offers a new theoretical framework for exploring change in the past that allows us to move beyond block-time approaches where change is located only in transitional moments and periods are characterised by blocks of stasis. Archaeologists, scholars, anthropologists and historians interested in the theoretical frameworks we use to interpret the past will find this book a fascinating new insight into the way our world changes and evolves. The approaches presented within will be of use to anyone studying and writing about the way societies and their environs move through time.

Walter Benjamin observed that it is precisely the modern which conjures up prehistory. From Yanagita's 'mountain people' to Umehara's 'Jomon civilisation', Japan has been an especially resonant site of prehistories imagined in response to modernity. Conjuring Up Prehistory: Landscape and the Archaic in Japanese Nationalism looks at how archaeology and landscapes of the archaic have been used in Japanese nationalism since the early twentieth century, focusing on the writings of cultural historian Tetsuro Watsuji, philosopher Takeshi Umehara and environmental archaeologist Yoshinori Yasuda. It is argued that the Japanese nationalist project has been mirrored by the continuing influence of broader Romantic ideas in Japanese archaeology, especially in Jomon studies.

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.

This volume provides case studies about successful strategies employed in diverse world areas for the protection of archaeological heritage resources. Some chapters focus on a search for solutions arrived at by diverse groups of people working in specific areas rather than simply describing loss of cultural heritage. Other chapters provide a long-term view of intensified efforts at protection of archaeological resources. The authors describe challenges and solutions derived by concerned people in eastern Asia (China, Japan, Thailand), West Africa, Easter Island, Jordan, Honduras and more than one area of Peru. All of the authors draw upon deep, personal involvement with the protection of cultural heritage in each area. This volume is a timely addition to a growing number of conferences and publications about the management of cultural heritage-both archaeological and historical.

• Combines material culture, environmental history and history of science for the first time to look at living things rather than non-living and human-made things/objects enabling students and museum professionals alike to see the importance of including living things within the history of material culture and the early modern world to understand the full scope. • Provides a deeper understand of global exchange and the history of commodities/collecting for early modern students and museum professionals to understand the development of trade in the early modern period and the creation of a system of trade based on moving things from their geography of origin to another area that valued them more highly. • Enables students and scientist to see the theoretical and empirical interventions with the living objects which reveal connected histories that link Europe to other regions of the globe, by way of naturalists, natural philosophers, collectors, merchants, apothecaries, physicians, agriculturalists, and professional scientists, to inform their own studies and research.

Many consider Lewis Binford to be the single most influential figure in archaeology in the last half-century. His contributions to the "New Archaeology" changed the course of the field, as he argued for the development of a scientifically rigorous framework to guide the excavation and interpretation of the archaeological record. This book, the culmination of Binford's intellectual legacy thus far, presents a detailed description of his methodology and its significance for understanding hunter-gatherer cultures on a global basis. This landmark publication will be an important step in understanding the great process of cultural evolution and will change the way archaeology proceeds as a scientific enterprise. This work provides a major synthesis of an enormous body of cultural and environmental information and offers many original insights into the past. Binford helped pioneer what is now called "ethnoarchaeology"-the study of living societies to help explain cultural patterns in the archaeological record-and this book is grounded on a detailed analysis of ethnographic data from about 340 historically known hunter-gatherer populations. The methodological framework based on this data will reshape the paradigms through which we understand human culture for years to come.

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.

In its original edition, Bruce Trigger's book was the first ever to examine the history of archaeological thought from medieval times to the present in world-wide perspective. Now, in this new edition, he both updates the original work and introduces new archaeological perspectives and concerns. At once stimulating and even-handed, it places the development of archaeological thought and theory throughout within a broad social and intellectual framework. The successive but interacting trends apparent in archaeological thought are defined and the author seeks to determine the extent to which these trends were a reflection of the personal and collective interests of archaeologists as these relate - in the West at least - to the fluctuating fortunes of the middle classes. While subjective influences have been powerful, Professor Trigger argues that the gradual accumulation of archaeological data has exercised a growing constraint on interpretation. In turn, this has increased the objectivity of archaeological research and enhanced its value for understanding the entire span of human history and the human condition in general.

Since the eighteenth century, the concept of prehistory was exported by colonialism to far parts of the globe and applied to populations lacking written records. Prehistory in these settings came to represent primitive people still living in a state without civilization and its foremost index, literacy. Yet, many societies outside the Western world had developed complex methods of history making and documentation, including epic poetry and the use of physical and mental mnemonic devices. Even so, the deeply engrained concept of prehistory-deeply entrenched in European minds up to the beginning of the twenty-first century-continues to deny history and historical identify to peoples throughout the world. The fourteen essays, by notable archaeologists of the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia, provide authoritative examples of how the concept of prehistory has diminished histories of other cultures outside the West and how archaeologists can reclaim more inclusive histories set within the idiom of deep histories-accepting ancient pre-literate histories as an integral part of the flow of human history.

Multispecies Archaeology explores the issue of ecological and cultural novelty in the archaeological record from a multispecies perspective. Human exceptionalism and our place in nature have long been topics of academic consideration and archaeology has been synonymous with an axclusively human past, to the detriment of gaining a more nuanced understanding of one that is shared. Encompassing more than just our relationships with animals, the book considers what we can learn about the human past without humans as the focus of the question. The volume digs deep into our understanding of interaction with plants, fungi, microbes, and even the fundamental building blocks of life, DNA. Multispecies Archaeology examines what it means to be human-and non-human-from a variety of perspectives, providing a new lens through which to view the past. Challenging not only the subject or object of archaeology but also broader disciplinary identities, the volume is a landmark in this new and evolving area of scholarly interest.

The Past as Digital Playground: Archaeology, Virtual Reality, and Video Games collects the contributions to a two-day conference which illustrate a digital project developed at the Archaeological and Technological Park of Poggibonsi (Siena, Tuscany), where Virtual Reality and an educational video game are being used to enhance the archaeological content deriving from the excavation of the medieval site. In recent decades, digital technologies have pervaded every aspect of the production of archaeological knowledge, from data collection to analysis and interpretation, to interaction with the public. The increasing convenience of 3D and interactive technologies has led to a proliferation of digital tools (VR, AR, mobile applications) used to communicate the past in a more engaging way, offering the public an experience that takes place largely outside of the traditional channels. Alongside the experience at Poggibonsi, the book also gathers important contributions originating from other Italian and international case studies in the fields of digital technologies applied to archaeological heritage.

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.

Using archaeological sites and historic landscapes to promote mental health well-being represents one of the most significant advances in archaeological resource management for many years. Its potential contribution to health-care and wellness initiatives is boundless. Prompted by the Human Henge project working within the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, this volume provides an overview of work going on across Britain and the near Continent at many different scales. Contributors share experiences, and discuss the outcomes, implications, and theoretical underpinnings of heritage-based well-being projects.

Of the parts of the human body, the bones have a unique durability that lends itself to collection. Provided a body has not been cremated, the skeletal remains can be recovered even millions of years after death, cleaned of flesh and debris, studied at length, and stored indefinitely without the maintenance that wet specimens require. Motivations for collecting human skeletal material range from the practical (in anthropology, medicine, forensics) to the ritualistic (phrenology, in the relics of martyrs and saints). This book is an examination of those motivations and the collections they have brought about--catacombs, ossuaries, mass graves, prehistoric excavations, private collections, and institutions. The book contains sections on procuring, handling, storing, transporting, cleaning, and identifying skeletal remains. The repatriation of remains and legislation covering the topic are also addressed.