Pyramids are now being found almost everywhere: in 1994 in China; then in Caral, in Peru, Southern America; then in Northern Italy and in 2005 in Bosnia. Despite their prevalence, massive pyramids remain as mysterious and controversial as ever. Though Egyptologists continue to argue that the Egyptian pyramids are tombs, no bodies have ever been discovered in them. None of the other pyramids are tombs either. Apart from the Mayan pyramids, which are much more recent, all pyramids are similar in shape, size and age. Does this mean that each culture developed this rather unique shape on its own, or does it mean that there was a truly global movement - somewhere around 3000 BC? This is the first book to explore the new landscape of pyramids found worldwide. It describes the changed nature of the pyramid debate and offers science a challenge, but equally tries to answer some of the key questions raised during the last decade of pyramid discovery. It is a series of discoveries that has changed the archaeological world and extended all our horizons.

Situated at the intersection of cultural heritage and local community, this book enlarges our understanding of the Indigenous peoples of southern Mexico and northern Central America who became detached from "the ancient Maya" through colonialism, government actions, and early twentieth-century anthropological and archaeological research. Through grass-roots heritage programs, local communities are reconnecting with a much valorized but distant past. Maya Cultural Heritage explores how community programs conceived and implemented in a collaborative style are changing the relationship among, archaeological practice, the objects of archaeological study, and contemporary ethnolinguistic Mayan communities. Rather than simply describing Maya sites, McAnany concentrates on the dialogue nurtured by these participatory heritage programs, the new "heritage-scapes" they foster, and how the diverse Maya communities of today relate to those of the past.

This book provides a history and ethnography of the Cheyenne people from their prehistoric origins north of the Great Lakes to their present life in the reservations in Oklahoma. It is based on archaeological material, historical and linguistic evidence and draws vividly on the oral traditions of the Cheyenne themselves.

After an investigation of Cheyenne origins, the author describes their settlement, around 500 BC on the plains of North Dakota. Here they hunted buffalo and antelope on foot, and gradually developed the means to cultivate the often arid ground. In a reverse of the typical European pattern, the reintroduction of the horse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries allowed the Cheyenne to revert from settled horticultural communities to nomadic hunters across the American mid-west.

The author describes the early French and British contacts with the Cheyenne and the beginnings of trade and Indian-settler politics. Early contacts were largely peaceful, and it was not until after Independence and when the Cheyenne became involved in the intricacies of the Civil War that full scale conflict broke out between them and the US Federal Army. The tragic massacre of Cheyenne women and children at Sand Creek was avenged two decades later at the Battle of Little Big Horn - but the scale and swiftness of Federal retaliation served ultimately to accelerate the driving of the Cheyenne from their traditional lands to reservations in the south.

The author provides a detailed account of reservation life and shows how the dance ceremonies and oral traditions have largely survived the Cheyenne's enforced removal from their long-held homelands. He concludes with a criticalexamination of contemporary Cheyenne life and of the mixed results of the often inept intrusions of State and Federal bureaucracies.

This is a vivid and readable history and ethnography of one of the most prominent of the American Indian peoples.

In 1884 a community of Brazilians was "discovered" by the Western world. The Ecology of Power examines these indigenous people from the Upper Xingu region, a group who even today are one of the strongest examples of long-term cultural continuity. Drawing upon written and oral history, ethnography, and archaeology, Heckenberger addresses the difficult issues facing anthropologists today as they "uncover" the muted voices of indigenous peoples and provides a fascinating portrait of a unique community of people who have in a way become living cultural artifacts.

In 1884 a community of Brazilians was "discovered" by the Western world. The Ecology of Power examines these indigenous people from the Upper Xingu region, a group who even today are one of the strongest examples of long-term cultural continuity. Drawing upon written and oral history, ethnography, and archaeology, Heckenberger addresses the difficult issues facing anthropologists today as they "uncover" the muted voices of indigenous peoples and provides a fascinating portrait of a unique community of people who have in a way become living cultural artifacts.

* Provides a short and simple, but entertaining, account of the prehistoric past from human origins to today from a global perspective in contrast to the current lengthy textbooks on the subject * Shows how such contemporary issues such as biological and cultural diversity, gender, and climate change have deep roots in the remote past and thus resonates with the concerns of readers * Short and low cost introductory text for students studying the subject for the first time from two experienced textbook writers

In A History of Science in Society, Ede and Cormack trace the history of the changing place of science in society and explore the link between the pursuit of knowledge and the desire to make that knowledge useful. Volume I covers the origins of natural philosophy in the ancient world to the scientific revolution. The fourth edition of this bestselling textbook adds content on non-Western science and a new "Connections" case study feature on the scientist and poet Omar Khayyam. The text is accompanied by over fifty images and maps that illustrate key developments in the history of science. Essay questions, chapter timelines, a further readings section, and an index provide additional support for students.

It is widely believed that the practice of ancient Egyptian religion ceased with the end of pharaonic culture and the rise of Christianity. However, an organised reconstruction and revival of the authentic practice of Egyptian, or Kemetic religion has been growing, almost undocumented, for nearly three decades. Profane Egyptologists is the first in-depth study of the now-global phenomenon of Kemeticism. Presenting key players in their own words, the book utilises extensive interviews to reveal a continuum of beliefs and practices spanning eight years of community growth. The existence of competing visions of Egypt, which employ ancient material and academic resources, questions the position of Egyptology as a gatekeeper of Egypt's past. Exploring these boundaries, the book highlights the politised and economic factors driving the discipline's self-conception. Could an historically self-imposed insular nature have harmed Egyptology as a field, and how could inclusive discussion help guard against further isolationism? Profane Egyptologists is both an Egyptological study of Kemeticism, and a critical study of the discipline of Egyptology itself. It will be of value to scholars and students of archaeology and Egyptology, cultural heritage, religion online, phenomenology, epistemology, pagan studies and ethnography, as well as Kemetics and devotees of Egyptian culture.

First published in 2001, this is the first reference work to cover the archaeology of medieval Europe. No other reference can claim such comprehensive coverage -- from Ireland to Russia and from Scandinavia to Italy, the archaeology of the entirety of medieval Europe is discussed. With coverage ranging from the fall of the western Roman empire in the 5th century CE through the end of the high Middle Ages in 1500 CE, Medieval Archaeology: An Encyclopedia answers the needs of medieval scholars from a variety of backgrounds, including archaeologists, historians and classicists. Featuring over 150 entries by an international team of leading archaeologists, this unique reference is soundly based on the most important developments and scholarship in this rapidly growing field.

Encompassing a landmass greater than the rest of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean combined, the Arabian peninsula remains one of the last great unexplored regions of the ancient world. This book provides the first extensive coverage of the archaeology of this region from c. 9000 to 800 BC. Peter Magee argues that a unique social system, which relied on social cohesion and actively resisted the hierarchical structures of adjacent states, emerged during the Neolithic and continued to contour society for millennia later. The book also focuses on how the historical context in which Near Eastern archaeology was codified has led to a skewed understanding of the multiplicity of lifeways pursued by ancient peoples living throughout the Middle East.

The three-thousand-year-old rock-cut temples at Abu Simbel and the story of their rescue from the rising waters of Lake Nasser in the 1960s are almost as familiar worldwide as the tale of the gold funerary mask and brief life of the boy king Tutankhamun. Yet although they are among the most celebrated, visited, and photographed archaeological sites in the world, the two temples are among the least understood by the visitor. In this lucidly written, beautifully illustrated guide, Nigel Fletcher-Jones explains the main features of both temples, discusses what they teach us about ancient Egypt during the reign of Rameses II (1265-1200 BC), and illustrates which gods and goddesses were worshipped here. With over 50 new photographs, drawings, and diagrams, and packed with fascinating insights, Abu Simbel: A Short Guide to the Temples is an indispensable companion and souvenir to one of the world's great archaeological sites.

The Neolithic saw the spread of the first farmers, and the formation of settled villages throughout Europe. Traditional archaeology has interpreted these changes in terms of population growth, economic pressures and social competition, but in The Domestication of Europe Ian Hodder works from a new, controversial theory focusing instead on the enormous expansion of symbolic evidence from the homes, settlements and burials of the period. Why do the figurines, decorated pottery, elaborate houses and burial rituals appear and what is their significance? The author argues that the symbolism of the Neolithic must be interpreted if we are to understand adequately the associated social and economic changes. He suggests that both in Europe and the Near East a particular set of concepts was central to the origins of farming and a settled mode of life. These concepts relate to the house and home - termed `domus' - and they provided a metaphor and a mechanism for social and economic transformation. As the wild was brought in and domesticated through ideas and practices surrounding the domus, people were brought in and settled into the social and economic group of the village. Over the following millennia cultural practices relating to the domus continued to change and develop, until finally overtaken by a new set of concepts which became socially central, based on the warrior, the hunter and the wild. This book is an exercise in interpretive prehistory. Ian Hodder shows how a contextual reading of the evidence can allow symbolic structures to be cautiously but plausibly identified, and sets out his arguments for complex dialectical relationships between long-term symbolic structures and economic causes of cultural change.

Among the best-known and most esteemed people known from antiquity is the Babylonian king Hammurabi. His fame and reputation are due to the collection of laws written under his patronage. This book offers an innovative interpretation of the Laws of Hammurabi. Ancient scribes would demonstrate their legal flair by composing statutes on a set of traditional cases, articulating what they deemed just and fair. The scribe of the Laws of Hammurabi advanced beyond earlier scribes in composing statutes that manifest systematization and implicit legal principles, and inserted the Laws of Hammurabi into the form of a royal inscription, shrewdly reshaping the genre. This tradition of scribal improvisation on a set of traditional cases continued outside of Mesopotamia. It influenced biblical law and the law of the Hittite empire significantly. The Laws of Hammurabi was also witness to the start of another stream of intellectual tradition. It became the subject of formal commentaries, marking a profound cultural shift. Scribes related to it in ways that diverged from prior attitudes; it became an object of study and of commentary, a genre that names itself as dependent on another text. The famous Laws of Hammurabi is here given the extensive attention it continues to merit.

The Continental Saxons developed from a subsistence economy, practiced up to the Carolingian conquest in the late eighth century, to become rulers of the Holy Roman Empire a little over a century and a half later. A historian introduces the topic, evaluating the reliability of the sources. Archaeologists then describe the living conditions, especially along the coast where villages have been excavated, and social customs revealed by grave-goods. Legal procedures are inferred from surviving evidence, and the regional economy, based on agriculture and animal husbandry, is reconstructed through the study of vegetable remains and pollen analysis. The birth of urban communities, stimulated by monastic settlements and trade, is followed through archaeological evidence; study of visual art-forms is based on analysis of grave-goods; and in the absence of surviving evidence for poetry, a Carolingian eulogical poem is discussed. Also discussed are Saxon political relations prior to and during the Carolingian conquest; the few signs of traditional religion that can be gleaned from the 'Lives' of missionaries; and Christianity and the activity of religious orders, which eventually brought about the conversion of the Saxons and the introduction of written culture.

Human settlement has often centered around coastal areas and waterways. Until recently, however, archaeologists believed that marine economies did not develop until the end of the Pleistocene, when the archaeological record begins to have evidence of marine life as part of the human diet. This has long been interpreted as a postglacial adaptation, due to the rise in sea level and subsequent decrease in terrestrial resources. Coastal resources, particularly mollusks, were viewed as fallback resources, which people resorted to only when terrestrial resources were scarce, included only as part of a more complex diet.

Recent research has significantly altered this understanding, known as the Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR) model. The contributions to this volume revise the BSR model, with evidence that coastal resources were an important part of human economies and subsistence much earlier than previously thought, and even the main focus of diets for some Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherer societies.

With evidence from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, this volume comprehensively lends a new understanding to coastal settlement from the Middle Paleolithic to the Middle Holocene.

In July 1456, a massive Turkish army settled in before Belgrade, an ancient city at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers. The army's leader was the twenty-four-year-old Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, "the Conqueror," who sought to take one of the most strategically important fortifications in southeastern Europe. Three weeks later, Mehmed's army was driven from Belgrade by a Hungarian warlord and his army, along with a ragtag force of ill-equipped crusaders. In The Crusade of 1456, James D. Mixson gathers together the key primary sources for understanding the events that led to the siege of Belgrade. These newly translated sources challenge readers with their variety: papal decrees, letters, liturgies, and chronicles from Latin, Byzantine, and Ottoman perspectives. An accessible introduction, timelines, and maps help to illuminate this fascinating yet previously neglected story.

Eretria, on the island of Euboia, was an early and significant coloniser in both the Levant and in the West. During the period of the Persian advance towards the Aegean, the city was the moving spirit in the Greek resistance to Persian domination. Her democratic government pre-dates that of Athens and given the presence in Eretria of political exiles from Peisistratid Athens, it may have provided the basic model of Kleishthenes' reforms in Attica. This comprehensive and well-argued book is the first detailed history in any language of the city, one of the most prosperous and important of the pre-classical period. This study offers an alternative to the orthodox Athenocentric perception of the history of late sixth-and early fifth-century Greece. Keith Walker's stimulating and thoughtful work seamlessly synthesises evidence from archaeology, philology, textual research, epigraphy and numismatics. The study begins by examining the period from the later Neolithic to the early Iron Age. The following chapters cover the city's rise to prominence in the Archaic era. Throughout there is skilful reconstruction of the complex alliances and enmities of the Greek cities, crucial to understand

Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, has been called the Stonehenge of North America. Its spectacular pueblos, or great houses, are world famous and have attracted the attention of archaeologists for more than a century. Beautifully illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, Chaco Canyon draws on the very latest research on Chaco and its environs to tell the remarkable story of the people of the canyon, from foraging bands and humble farmers to the elaborate society that flourished between the tenth and twelfth centuries A.D. Brian Fagan is a master story teller, and he weaves the latest discoveries into a compelling narrative of people living in a harsh, unpredictable environment. Indeed, this is not a story about artifacts and dusty digs, but a riveting narrative of people in the distant past, going about their daily business, living and dying, loving, raising children, living in plenty and in hunger, pondering the cosmos, and facing the unpredictable challenges of the environment. Drawing on rare access to the records of the Chaco Synthesis Project, Fagan reveals a society where agriculture and religion went hand-in-hand, where the ritual power of Chaco's leaders drew pilgrims from distant communities bearing gifts. He describes the lavish burials in the heart of Pueblo Bonito, which offer clues about the identity of Chaco's shadowy leaders. And he explores the enduring mystery of Chaco's sudden decline in the face of savage drought and shows how its legacy survives into modern times. Here then is the first authoritative account of the Chaco people written for a general audience, lending a fascinating human face to one of America's most famous archaeological sites.

The allure of Egypt is not exclusive to the modern world. Egypt also held a fascination and attraction for people of the past. In this book, academics from a wide range of disciplines assess the significance of Egypt within the settings of its past. The chronological span is from later prehistory, through to the earliest literate eras of interaction with Mesopotamia and the Levant, the Aegean, Greece and Rome. Ancient Perspectives on Egypt includes both archaeological and documented evidence, which ranges from the earliest writing attested in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC, to graffiti from Abydos that demonstrate pilgrimages from all over the Mediterranean world, to the views of Roman poets on the nature of Egypt. This book presents, for the first time in a single volume, a multi-faceted but coherent collection of images of Egypt from, and of, the past.

This work evokes the fascination and wonder of the most ancient period of Egypt's history, from c 5000 to 2000 BC. It draws on Jungian theory to explore the psychological forces that contributed to the nation's special character, and which also account for Egypt's continuing allure up to the 21st century. The author covers a huge range of topics, including formative influences in the political and social organisation and art of Egypt, the origins of kingship, the age of pyramids, the nature of Egypt's contact with the lands around the Arabian Gulf, and the earliest identifiable developments of the historic Egyptian personality. Wholly revised and updated in the light of the many discoveries made since its first publication, "Egypt's Making" is a scholarly yet readable approach to this compelling ancient civilization.

Motherhood is a subject that has largely been ignored by archaeologists who focus on gender and history-until now. Using archaeological materials recovered from a housesite in Mobile, Alabama, Laurie Wilkie explores how one extended African-American family engaged with competing and conflicting mothering ideologies in the post-Emancipation South. The female head of this household, Lucrecia Perryman, turned to midwifery to support her family and as a midwife, became a vehicle for transmitting cultural, social and political knowledge regarding mothering performance and practice to the broader African-American community.

Geometric Greece has long been the standard work on this absorbing period, which saw the evolution of the Greek city-states, the composition of the Homeric poems, the rise of the great Panhellenic sanctuaries and the first exodus of Greek colonists to southern Italy and Sicily. Professor Coldstream has now fully updated his comprehensive survey with a substantial new chapter on the abundant discoveries and developments made since the book's first publication. The text is presented in three main sections: the passing of the dark ages, c. 900-770 BC; the Greek renaissance, c. 770-700 BC, covered region by region, and the final part on life in eighth century Greece. Its geographical coverage in the Mediterranean ranges from Syria to Sicily, and the detailed archaeological evidence is amplified by reference to literary sources. Heavily illustrated, including images of several finds never previously published, this is the essential handbook for anyone studying early Greek antiquity.

Geometric Greece has long been the standard work on this absorbing period, which saw the evolution of the Greek city-states, the composition of the Honeric poems, the rist of the great Panhellenic sanctuaries and the first exodus of Greek colonists to southern Italy and Sicily.
Professor Coldstream has now fully updated his comprehensive survey with a substantial new chapter on the abundant discoveries and developments made since the book's first publication.
The text is presented in three main sections: the passing of the dark ages, c.900-770 BC; the Greek renaissance, c.770-700 BC, covered region by region, and the final part on life in eighth century Greece. Its geographical coverage in the Mediterranean ranges from Syria to Sicily, and the detailed archaeological evidence is amplified by reference to literary sources.
Highly illustrated, including images of several finds never previously published, this is the essential handbook for anyone studying early Greek antiquity.

Motherhood is a subject that has largely been ignored by archaeologists who focus on gender and history-until now. Using archaeological materials recovered from a housesite in Mobile, Alabama, Laurie Wilkie explores how one extended African-American family engaged with competing and conflicting mothering ideologies in the post-Emancipation South. The female head of this household, Lucrecia Perryman, turned to midwifery to support her family and as a midwife, became a vehicle for transmitting cultural, social and political knowledge regarding mothering performance and practice to the broader African-American community.

Originally published in 1981, The Origins of Open Field Agriculture looks at the problems connected with open field agriculture - the origins of strip cultivation, the three-field system, the adaptation of 'Celtic' fields, and the development of ploughing techniques. The book looks at the challenges to traditional ideas on the origins of settlement and their associated economy, and casts new light on understandings of village development. The book suggests that conventional views of the nucleated village, in the midst of open field strips as a product of the Anglo-Saxon migration, is no longer tenable. The book brings together the work of distinguished archaeologists, historians, and historical geographers and opens up a new perspective on the early development of medieval agriculture.