The volume contains summaries of facts, theories, and unsolved problems pertaining to the unexplained extinction of dozens of genera of mostly large terrestrial mammals, which occurred ca. 13,000 calendar years ago in North America and about 1,000 years later in South America. Another equally mysterious wave of extinctions affected large Caribbean islands around 5,000 years ago. The coupling of these extinctions with the earliest appearance of human beings has led to the suggestion that foraging humans are to blame, although major climatic shifts were also taking place in the Americas during some of the extinctions. The last published volume with similar (but not identical) themes -- Extinctions in Near Time -- appeared in 1999; since then a great deal of innovative, exciting new research has been done but has not yet been compiled and summarized. Different chapters in this volume provide in-depth resumes of the chronology of the extinctions in North and South America, the possible insights into animal ecology provided by studies of stable isotopes and anatomical/physiological characteristics such as growth increments in mammoth and mastodont tusks, the clues from taphonomic research about large-mammal biology, the applications of dating methods to the extinctions debate, and archeological controversies concerning human hunting of large mammals."

Geophysics operations in archaeology have become well known through exposure on television. However, the technique is presented as the action of specialists and something of a mystery, where people walk about with strange contraptions, and results appear from a computer. This is not the case, however. Some scientific knowledge is needed in order to understand how the machines work and what they detect but otherwise it is only necessary to know how to handle the instruments, how to survey a field and how to interpret the computer results. This book provides all the relevant information. It explains geophysics operations in archaeology, describes the science that gives the soil properties to measure and the means by which the instruments make their measurements.

Dr John Oswin is in charge of the geophysics operation of the Bath and Camerton Archaeological Society and his work has recently been the subject of a television programme. He has taught many students how to use geophysical equipment.

Since the 1960s, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF), both wavelength and energy-dispersive have served as the workhorse for non-destructive and destructive analyses of archaeological materials. Recently eclipsed by other instrumentation such as LA-ICP-MS, XRF remains the mainstay of non-destructive chemical analyses in archaeology, particularly for volcanic rocks, and most particularly for obsidian. In a world where heritage and repatriation issues drive archaeological method and theory, XRF remains an important tool for understanding the human past, and will remain so for decades to come.

Currently, there is no comprehensive book in XRF applications in archaeology at a time when the applications of portable XRF and desktop XRF instrumentation are exploding particularly in anthropology and archaeology departments worldwide.

The contributors to this volumeare the experts in the field, and most are at the forefront of the newest applications of XRF to archaeological problems. Itcovers all relevant aspects of the field for thoseusing the newest XRF technologies to deal with very current issues in archaeology. "

The Egyptian Sudan is a detailed account of early travels and archaeological missions to the Sudan in Egypt. The two-volume series contains illustrations and explanations of the dig sites and artifacts excavated, the history behind the pyramids and temples explored, and the details of the actual trips to Sudan and the scientists who took them. A wonderfully explicit and precise series for anyone interested in archeology and Egyptian artifacts, The Egyptian Sudan is a must-read. Volume II contains the histories of the Sudan during different historical periods, including the rise of the Nubian kingdom, their successors, the Sudan in the Ptolemaic Period, before and after Christ, the rule of Muhammad in the Sudan, the rise of Christianity, and finally Sudan in the modern day. SIR ERNEST ALFRED THOMPSON WALLIS BUDGE (1857-1934) was born in Bodmin, Cornwall in the UK and discovered an interest in languages at a very early age. Budge spent all his free time learning and discovering Semitic languages, including Assyrian, Syriac, and Hebrew. Eventually, through a close contact, he was able to acquire a job working with Egyptian and Iraqi artifacts at the British Museum. Budge excavated and deciphered numerous cuneiform and hieroglyphic documents, contributing vastly to the museum's collection. Eventually, he became the Keeper of his department, specializing in Egyptology. Budge wrote many books during his lifetime, most specializing in Egyptian life, religion, and language.

The Indus civilization flourished for half a millennium from about 2600 to 1900 BC, when it mysteriously declined and vanished from view. It remained invisible for almost four thousand years, until its ruins were discovered in the 1920s by British and Indian archaeologists. Today, after almost a century of excavation, it is regarded as the beginning of Indian civilization and possibly the origin of Hinduism. The Indus: Lost Civilizations is an accessible introduction to every significant aspect of an extraordinary and tantalizing 'lost' civilization, which combined artistic excellence, technological sophistication and economic vigour with social egalitarianism, political freedom and religious moderation. The book also discusses the vital legacy of the Indus civilization in India and Pakistan today.

Britain has long been fascinated with its own history and identity, as an island nation besieged by invaders from beyond the seas: the Romans, Vikings and Normans. The long saga of prehistory is often forgotten – but our understanding of our past is changing.

Mike Pitts presents ten astounding archaeological discoveries that shed new light on those who came before us, and radically altered the way we think about our history. His compelling, sometimes teasing, archaeological odyssey illustrates the diversity, complexity and sheer strangeness of the lives that represent Britain’s past.

The practiceof archaeology has many different facets: from academia, to government, tocultural resource management, to public media.

Considering the place of archaeology in society means understanding the rolesthat archaeology has in the present day and a sense of the contributions thatit can make in each of these areas, both now and in the future. Archaeologistscome to the field to pursue a variety of interests: teaching, examininghistory, preserving the environment, or studying a specialized time period orinterest. The outside world has a number of other expectations of archaeology: preservation, tourism, and education, to name but a few.

From a broad and varied background, the editors have compiled a rare group ofcontributors uniquely qualified to address questions about the current state ofarchaeology and its relevance in society. There is no single answer to thequestion of how the field of archaeology should develop, and what it can do forsociety. Instead, the authors in this volume lay out the many ways in which archaeology isrelevant to the present day - considering, for example, climate change, energyexploration, warfare, national identity, the importance of stories and how theyare told, and how and why opportunities to engage with the past throughmuseums, digs, television, classes, and the print media have the formsthey currently do - creating a state-of-the-art tool for archaeologists, policymakers and the public alike to understand thework of many in the fieldand address the challenges we all face."

This volume provides an important new synthesis of archaeological work carried out in Australia on the post-contact period. It draws on dozens of case studies from a wide geographical and temporal span to explore the daily life of Australians in settings such as convict stations, goldfields, whalers' camps, farms, pastoral estates and urban neighbourhoods. The different conditions experienced by various groups of people are described in detail, including rich and poor, convicts and their superiors, Aboriginal people, women, children, and migrant groups. The social themes of gender, class, ethnicity, status and identity inform every chapter, demonstrating that these are vital parts of human experience, and cannot be separated from archaeologies of industry, urbanization and culture contact.

The book engages with a wide range of contemporary discussions and debates within Australian history and the international discipline of historical archaeology. The colonization of Australia was part of the international expansion of European hegemony in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The material discussed here is thus fundamentally part of the global processes of colonization and the creation of settler societies, the industrial revolution, the development of mass consumer culture, and the emergence of national identities. Drawing out these themes and integrating them with the analysis of archaeological materials highlights the vital relevance of archaeology in modern society. "

The first study to bring together such a breadth of data, this book compares responses to colonization in the Iron-Age Mediterranean. From North Syria to Sicily and North Africa, Tamar Hodos explores the responses to these colonies in areas where Greeks and Phoenicians were in competition with one another via the same local communities. Highlighting the diversity of interest displayed by local populations in these foreign cultural offering, Hodos charts their selective adaptation, modification and reinterpretation of Greek and Phoenician goods and ideas as their own cultures evolve. For students of archaeology and history, this will provide an essential resource for their degree course studies.

In An Arena for Higher Powers Olof Sundqvist investigates ceremonial buildings and religious ruler strategies in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (i.e. AD 550-1050/1100). The author offers here an account of the role played by religion in political undertakings among the pre-Christian ruling elites at halls and cultic buildings. Sundqvist applies a regional approach, so as to be able to account for the specific historical, cultural and social contexts. The focus is mainly on three regions, the Lake Malaren area in Sweden, Trondelag in Norway, and Iceland. Since the political structure and other contextual aspects partly differed in the three regions, the religious strategies for gaining legitimacy and authorization at the sanctuaries also varied to some extent in these areas.

Although in Second Temple literature we find a variety of songs concerned with the future of Jerusalem, little attempt has been made to analyse these comparatively as a generic group. In this study, three songs have been selected on the basis of their similarity in style, ideas and their apparent original composition in Hebrew. The texts have been subjected to a literary analysis both individually and then comparatively.

This book is the first to bring together all that is known about the humanly-modified and cultivated landscapes of Middle America just prior to the European conquest. It assesses the agricultural and human-environment conditions existing at that time, and its implications for various contemporary themes ranging from global change to the presumed 'environment friendly' Native American.

Over the years, impairment has been discussed in bioarchaeology, with some scholars providing carefully contextualized explanations for their causes and consequences. Such investigations typically take a case study approach and focus on the functional aspects of impairments. However, these interpretations are disconnected from disability theory discourse. Other social sciences and the humanities have far surpassed most of anthropology (with the exception of medical anthropology) in their integration of social theories of disability. This volume has three goals: The first goal of this edited volume is to present theoretical and methodological discussions on impairment and disability. The second goal of this volume is to emphasize the necessity of interdisciplinarity in discussions of impairment and disability within bioarchaeology. The third goal of the volume is to present various methodological approaches to quantifying impairment in skeletonized and mummified remains. This volume serves to engage scholars from many disciplines in our exploration of disability in the past, with particular emphasis on the bioarchaeological context.

Although many believe that archaeological knowledge consists simply of empirical findings, this notion is false; data are generated with the guidance of theory, or some sense-making system acting in its place whether researchers recognize this or not. Failure to understand the relationship between theory and the empirical world has led to the many debates and frustrations of contemporary archaeology.

Despite years of trying, the atheoretical, empiricist foundations of archaeology have left us little but a history of storytelling and unsatisfying generalizations about historical change and human diversity. The present work offers promising directions for building theoretically defensible results by providing well-designed case studies that can be used as guides or exemplars. Evolutionary theory, in at least some form, is the foundation for a scientific archaeology that will yield scientific explanations for historical change.

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At the heart of this book is the matter of how isotopic landscapes combined with data mining enriches insights on prehistoric migration and cultural transfer. Isotopic mapping is an indispensable tool for the assessment of mobility and trade in the past, but is limited by eco-geographic redundancies. An interdisciplinary research group focuses on the archaeological isotopic landscape of a reference region of outstanding importance, namely the transalpine migration route via the Brenner Pass which has been in use since the Mesolithic. Over the period of several cultural epochs, cremation was either the most common or exclusive burial custom practiced. For the first time, a systematic and large scale investigation of cremated remains was being conducted in the field of prehistoric migration research.87Sr/86Sr, 208Pb/204Pb, 207Pb/204Pb, 206Pb/204Pb, 208Pb/207Pb, 206Pb/207Pb and - if applicable - also 18O were measured in human and animal skeletal finds, an isotopic map was established, and innovative methods of data mining and similarity research have been applied to accomplish this novel approach to studying prehistoric migration and culture transfer. The book has interdisciplinary appeal and scholars working in bioarchaeology, physical anthropology and computer applications in life sciences will find it of particular interest.

Global in perspective and covering over four million years of history, this accessible volume provides a chronological account of both the development of the human race and the order in which modern societies have made discoveries about their ancient past. Beginning deep in prehistory, it takes in all the great archaeological sites of the world as it advances to the present day. A masterful combination of succinct analysis and driving narrative, Archaeology: The Whole Story also addresses the questions that inevitably arise as we gradually learn more about the history of our species: what are we? Where did we come from? What inspired us to start building, writing and all the other activities that we traditionally regard as exclusively human? A concluding section explains how we know what we know: for example, how seventeen prehistoric shrines were discovered around Stonehenge using magnetometers, ground-penetrating radars, and 3D laser scanners; and how DNA analysis enabled us to identify some bones discovered beneath a car park in Leicester as the remains of a fifteenth-century king of England. Written by an international team of archaeological experts and richly illustrated throughout, Archaeology: The Whole Story offers an unparalleled insight into the origins of humankind.

While European scholarship in the Classics has a long and established tradition, very little has been written on the history of classical scholarship in North America. By providing profiles of some 600 North American Classicists, this reference book presents a starting point for defining the history of Classical scholarship in Canada and the United States. Included are those Classicists who made significant contributions to the field and those who are representative figures. The people profiled were either born in the United States or Canada, or were born in other countries but had careers in North America. They were either founding fathers of the profession, scholars known more for their specialized contributions, or members of smaller or remote institutions who achieved at least regional distinction for their work. The first part of each entry provides basic biographical and professional information. A narrative summary of the person's career follows, and each profile closes with a short bibliography. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order and were written by expert contributors.

Theatre and Dictatorship in the Luso-Hispanic World explores the discourses that have linked theatrical performance and prevailing dictatorial regimes across Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. These are divided into three different approaches to theatre itself - as cultural practice, as performance, and as textual artifact - addressing topics including obedience, resistance, authoritarian policies, theatre business, exile, violence, memory, trauma, nationalism, and postcolonialism. This book draws together a diverse range of methodological approaches to foreground the effects and constraints of dictatorship on theatrical expression and how theatre responds to these impositions.

The Iguvine Tables (Tabulae Iguvinae) are among the most invaluable documents of Italic linguistics and religion. Seven bronze tablets discovered in 1444 in the Umbrian town of Gubbio (ancient Iguvium), they record the rites and sacral laws of a priestly brotherhood, the Fratres Atiedii, with a degree of detail unparalleled elsewhere in ancient Italy. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines philological and linguistic, as well as ritual analysis, Michael Weiss not only addresses the many interpretive cruces that have puzzled scholars for a century and a half, but also constructs a coherent theory of the entire ritual performance described on Tables III and IV. In addition, Weiss sheds light on many questions of Roman ritual practice and places the Iguvine Tables in their broader Italic and Indo-European contexts.

This book analyses British action in the Southern hemisphere in the late 18th century, examining two Royal Navy ships, one off the Argentinean coast and one off the Southeast Australian coast. The author goes beyond a descriptive analysis of wrecks by treating them and their cargoes as embodiments of 18th century social relations. The book challenges traditional approaches, providing a perspective that emphasises the richness, diversity and complexity of British action.