On the remote north-western Isle of Lewis stands one of the most spectacular megalithic monuments in the world, a stone circle forming part of a huge Celtic Cross, built over four thousand years ago. Behold Callanish! This small book, packed with fine old engravings, is a great new introduction to the 'Stonehenge of the Hebrides' by one of the leading writers and lecturers in the subject. WOODEN BOOKS are small but packed with information. "Fascinating" FINANCIAL TIMES. "Beautiful" LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS. "Rich and Artful" THE LANCET. "Genuinely mind-expanding" FORTEAN TIMES. "Excellent" NEW SCIENTIST. "Stunning" NEW YORK TIMES. Small books, big ideas.

Daniel Albero Santacreu presents a wide overview of certain aspects of the pottery analysis and summarizes most of the methodological and theoretical information currently applied in archaeology in order to develop wide and deep analysis of ceramic pastes. The book provides an adequate framework for understanding the way pottery production is organised and clarifies the meaning and role of the pottery in archaeological and traditional societies. The goal of this book is to encourage reflection, especially by those researchers who face the analysis of ceramics for the first time, by providing a background for the generation of their own research and to formulate their own questions depending on their concerns and interests. The three-part structure of the book allows readers to move easily from the analysis of the reality and ceramic material culture to the world of the ideas and theories and to develop a dialogue between data and their interpretation. Daniel Albero Santacreu is a Lecturer Assistant in the University of the Balearic Islands, member of the Research Group Arqueo UIB and the Ceramic Petrology Group. He has carried out the analysis of ceramics from several prehistoric societies placed in the Western Mediterranean, as well as the study of handmade pottery from contemporary ethnic groups in Northeast Ghana.

This book portrays the Himalayan-born River Saraswati, a legendary river that was the lifeline of a progressive and vibrant society for more than three thousand years. Written in simple language and richly illustrated, it highlights the events that resulted in the robbing of the Saraswati of its water and the end of a wonderful culture. The author weaves a geological narrative out of a mass of data generated by explorers, archaeologists, sedimentologists, geohydrologist, seismologists and remote-sensing specialists. The story explains how a great Himalayan river disappeared and how the Harappan Civilization vanished from the banks of the river Saraswati more than three and half thousand years ago in the wake of tectonic upheavals in the foothills of the Himalaya at a time when the rainfall had drastically declined. And it reveals that nowadays the Saraswati is an extraordinary wide water-less channel coursing through the vast but dry floodplain in western India.

The Sacred Identity of Ephesos offers a full-length interpretation of one of the largest known bequests in the Classical world, made to the city of Ephesos in AD 104 by a wealthy Roman equestrian, and challenges some of the basic assumptions made about the significance of the Greek cultural renaissance known as the 'Second Sophistic'. Professor Rogers shows how the civic rituals created by the foundation symbolised a contemporary social hierarchy, and how the ruling class used foundation myths - the birth of the goddess Artemis in a grove above the city - as a tangible source of power, to be wielded over new citizens and new gods. Utilising an innovative methodology for analysing large inscriptions, Professor Rogers argues that the Ephesians used their past to define their present during the Roman Empire, shedding new light on how second-century Greeks maintained their identities in relation to Romans, Christians, and Jews.

A new narrative history of the Viking Age, interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields. To many, the word 'Viking' brings to mind red scenes of rape and pillage, of marauders from beyond the sea rampaging around the British coastline in the last gloomy centuries before the Norman Conquest. It is true that Britain in the Viking Age was a turbulent, violent place. The kings and warlords who have impressed their memories on the period revel in names that fire the blood and stir the imagination: Svein Forkbeard and Edmund Ironside, Ivar the Boneless and Alfred the Great, Erik Bloodaxe and Edgar the Pacifier amongst many others. Evidence for their brutality, their dominance, their avarice and their pride is still unearthed from British soil with stunning regularity. But this is not the whole story. In Viking Britain, Thomas Williams has drawn on his experience as project curator of the British Museum exhibition of Vikings: Life and Legend to show how the people we call Vikings came not just to raid and plunder, but to settle, to colonize and to rule. The impact on these islands was profound and enduring, shaping British social, cultural and political development for hundreds of years. Indeed, in language, literature, place-names and folklore, the presence of Scandinavian settlers can still be felt, and their memory - filtered and refashioned through the writings of people like J.R.R. Tolkien, William Morris and G.K.Chesterton - has transformed the western imagination. This remarkable book makes use of new academic research and first-hand experience, drawing deeply from the relics and landscapes that the Vikings and their contemporaries fashioned and walked: their runestones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields, poems and chronicles. The book offers a vital evocation of a forgotten world, its echoes in later history and its implications for the present.

The nineteen papers collected in this volume explore a notable phenomenon, that of retrospection in the art and architecture of Romanesque Europe. They arise from a conference organized by the British Archaeological Association in 2010, and reflect its interest in how and why the past manifested itself in the visual culture of the 11th and 12th centuries. This took many forms, from the casual re-use of ancient material to a specific desire to re-present or emulate earlier objects and buildings. Central to it is a concern for the revival of Roman and early medieval forms, spolia, selective quotation, archaism and the construction of histories. The individual essays presented here cover a wide range of topics and media: the significance of consecration ceremonies in the creation of architectural memory, the rise of pictorial concepts in 12th-century chronicles, the creation of history in the Paris of Hugh of St-Victor, and the appeal of the works of Bernward of Hildesheim and of Hrabanus Maurus in the centuries after their deaths. There are studies of buildings and the ideological purpose behind them at Tarragona, Ripoll, Cluny, Pannonhalma (Hungary), La Roccelletta (Calabria), and Old St Peter's, comparative studies of Trier, Villenauxe and Glastonbury, and of Bury St Edmunds, Rievaulx and Canterbury, and wide-ranging papers on the tantalizing evidence for an engagement with an overseas past in Ireland, an Anglo-Saxon past in England, and a Milanese past among the aisleless cruciform churches of Augustinian Europe. The volume concludes with an assessment of the very concept of Romanesque.

This volume provides an up-to-date and in-depth summary and analysis of the political practices of pre-Columbian communities of the Araucanians or Mapuche of south-central Chile and adjacent regions. This synthesis draws upon the empirical record documented in original research, as well as a critical examination of previous studies. By applying both archaeological and ethnohistorical approaches, the latter including ethnography, this volume distinguishes itself from many other studies that explore South American archaeology. Archaeological and traditional-historical narratives of the pre-European past are considered in their own terms and for the extent to which they can be integrated in order to provide a more rounded and realistic understanding than otherwise of the origins and courses of ecological, economic, social and political changes in south-central Chile from late pre-Hispanic times, through the contact period and up to Chile s independence from Spain (ca. AD 1450-1810). Both the approach and the results are discussed in the light of similar situations elsewhere.

Throughout its treatment, the volume continually comes back to two central questions: (1) how did the varied practices, institutions and worldviews of the Mapuche s ancient communities emerge as a historical process that resisted the Spanish empire for more than 250 years? and (2) how were these communities reproduced and transformed in the face of ongoing culture contact and landscape change during the early Colonial period? These questions are considered in light of contemporary theoretical concepts regarding practice, landscape, environment, social organization, materiality and community that will make the book relevant for students and scholars interested in similar processes elsewhere."

The Early Anglo-Saxon Period is characterized archaeologically by the regular deposition of artefacts in human graves in England. The scope for dating these objects and graves has long been studied, but it has typically proved easier to identify and enumerate the chronological problems of the material than to solve them. Prior to the work of the project reported on here, therefore, there was no comprehensive chronological framework for Early Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, and the level of detail and precision in dates that could be suggested was low. The evidence has now been studied afresh using a co-ordinated suite of dating techniques, both traditional and new: a review and revision of artefact-typology; seriation of grave-assemblages using correspondence analysis; high-precision radiocarbon dating of selected bone samples; and Bayesian modelling using the results of all of these. These were focussed primarily on the later part of the Early Anglo-Saxon Period, starting in the 6th century. This research has produced a new chronological framework, consisting of sequences of phases that are separate for male and female burials but nevertheless mutually consistent and coordinated. These will allow archaeologists to assign grave-assemblages and a wide range of individual artefact-types to defined phases that are associated with calendrical date-ranges whose limits are expressed to a specific degree of probability. Important unresolved issues include a precise adjustment for dietary effects on radiocarbon dates from human skeletal material. Nonetheless the results of this project suggest the cessation of regular burial with grave goods in Anglo-Saxon England two decades or even more before the end of the seventh century. That creates a limited but important discrepancy with the current numismatic chronology of early English sceattas. The wider implications of the results for key topics in Anglo-Saxon archaeology and social, economic and religious history are discussed to conclude the report.

This work offers a re-edition of twelve mathematical tablets from the site of Tell Harmal, in the borders of present-day Baghdad. In ancient times, Tell Harmal was Saduppum, a city representative of the region of the Diyala river and of the kingdom of Esnunna, to which it belonged for a time. These twelve tablets were originally published in separate articles in the beginning of the 1950s and mostly contain solved problem texts. Some of the problems deal with abstract matters such as triangles and rectangles with no reference to daily life, while others are stated in explicitly empirical contexts, such as the transportation of a load of bricks, the size of a vessel, the number of men needed to build a wall and the acquisition of oil and lard. This new edition of the texts is the first to group them, and takes into account all the recent developments of the research in the history of Mesopotamian mathematics. Its introductory chapters are directed to readers interested in an overview of the mathematical contents of these tablets and the language issues involved in their interpretation, while a chapter of synthesis discusses the ways history of mathematics has typically dealt with the mathematical evidence and inquires how and to what degree mathematical tablets can be made part of a picture of the larger social context. Furthermore, the volume contributes to a geography of the Old Babylonian mathematical practices, by evidencing that scribes at Saduppum made use of cultural material that was locally available. The edited texts are accompanied by translations, philological, and mathematical commentaries.

This innovative study offers an up-to-date analysis of the archaeology of the North Sea. Robert Van de Noort traces the way people engaged with the North Sea from the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 BC, to the close of the Middle Ages, about AD 1500. Van de Noort draws upon archaeological research from many countries, including the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium and France, and addresses topics which include the first interactions of people with the emerging North Sea, the origin and development of fishing, the creation of coastal landscapes, the importance of islands and archipelagos, the development of seafaring ships and their use by early seafarers and pirates, and the treatments of boats and ships at the end of their useful lives.

The third volume in the Andean Archaeology series, this book focuses on the marked cultural differences between the northern and southern regions of the Central Andes, and considers the conditions under which these differences evolved, grew pronounced, and diminished. This book continues the dynamic, current problem-oriented approach to the field of Andean Archaeology that began with Andean Archaeology I and Andean Archaeology II. Combines up-to-date research, diverse theoretical platforms, and far-reaching interpretations to draw provocative and thoughtful conclusions.

Historical archaeologists often become so involved in their potsherd patterns they seldom have time or energy left to address the broader processes responsi ble for the material culture patterns they recognize. Some ofus haveurged our colleagues to use the historical record as a springboard from which to launch hypotheses with which to better understand the behavioral and cultural pro cesses responsible for the archaeological record. Toooften, this urging has re sulted in reports designed like a sandwich, having a slice of "historical back ground," followed by a totally different "archaeological record," and closed with a weevil-ridden slice of "interpretation" of questionable nutritive value for understanding the past. The reader is often left to wonder what the archae ological meat had to do with either slice of bread, since the connection be tween the documented history and the material culture is left to the reader's imagination, and the connection between the interpretation and the other disparate parts is tenuous at best. The plethora of stale archaeological sandwiches in the literature has re sulted at the methodological level from a too-narrow focus on the specific history and archaeology ofa site and the individuals involvedon it, rather than a focus on the explanation of broader processes of culture to which the actors and events at the site-specific level responded."

Taking a bioarchaeological approach, this book examines the Ancestral Pueblo culture living in the Four Corners region of the United States during the late Pueblo I through the end of the Pueblo III period (AD 850-1300). During this time, a vast system of pueblo villages spread throughout the region creating what has been called the Chaco Phenomenon, named after the large great houses in Chaco Canyon that are thought to have been centers of control. Through a bioarchaeological analysis of the human skeletal remains, this volume provides evidence that key individuals within the hierarchical social structure used a variety of methods of social control, including structural violence, to maintain their power over the interconnected communities.

Nasca pots, Quimbaya figurines, Moche porn figures, stone shamans. Fakes and forgeries run rampant in the Andean art collections of international museums and private individuals. Authors Karen Bruhns and Nancy Kelker examine the phenomenon in this eye-opening volume. They discuss the most commonly forged classes and styles of artifacts, many of which were being duplicated as early as the 19th century. More important, they describe the system whereby these objects get made, purchased, authenticated, and placed in major museums as well as the complicity of forgers, dealers, curators, and collectors in this system. Unique to this volume are biographies of several of the forgers, who describe their craft and how they are able to effectively fool connoisseurs and specialists. This is an important accessible introduction to pre-Columbian art fraud for archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals alike. A parallel volume by the same authors discusses fakes in Mesoamerican archaeology.

This technical and well-illustrated guide for archaeologists and conservators aims to 'provide a methodology for the identification of the woody taxa used to manufacture artefacts recovered from archaeological excavations', to provide the anatomical descriptions of the taxa and to present a list of characters of the taxa. The guide is heavily illustrated with photographs, maps, and tables to allow easy identification.

The study of the prehistory of East Asia is developing very rapidly. In uncovering the story of the flows of human migration that constituted the peopling of East Asia there exists widespread debate about the nature of evidence and the tools for correlating results from different disciplines.

Drawing upon the latest evidence in genetics, linguistics and archaeology, this exciting new book examines the history of the peopling of East Asia, and investigates the ways in which we can detect migration, and its different markers in these fields of inquiry. Results from different academic disciplines are compared and reinterpreted in the light of evidence from others to attempt to try and generate consensus on methodology. Taking a broad geographical focus, the book also draws attention to the roles of minority peoples - hitherto underplayed in accounts of the region's prehistory - such as the Austronesian, Tai-Kadai and Altaic speakers, whose contribution to the regional culture is now becoming accepted.

Past Human Migrations in East Asia presents a full picture of the latest research on the peopling of East Asia, and will be of interest to scholars of all disciplines working on the reconstruction of the peopling of East and North East Asia.

Phoenician and Punic archaeology have long been overlooked by Mediterranean archaeologists, who focused their attention on Greek and Roman cultures. Although the Punic cities and their rural landscapes are to be found along the southern shores and on the islands of the western Mediterranean basin, comprehensive studies of these archaeological remains are virtually non-existent. It is the aim of this book to investigate Punic rural settlement in the western Mediterranean by bringing together and comparing the currently dispersed existing evidence for rural Punic settlement. The core of the volume is accordingly made up by a detailed discussion of the archaeological evidence for Punic rural settlement from Sardinia, Sicily, Ibiza, mainland Spain and North Africa.Because agriculture and agrarian produce have always been assumed to have played a critical role in the Carthaginian colonial expansion, the connections between the various colonial contexts and the local characteristics of rural organisation explored in detail in order to enhance our understanding of these colonial contexts. This in turn provides better insight in Carthaginian colonialism and local Punic rural settlement and their role in the wider Mediterranean context. By publishing this evidence and these interpretations in English, we hope to draw attention to Punic archaeology in general and to these rural studies in particular and to situate them in the wider Mediterranean context of both classical Antiquity and Mediterranean archaeology.

Newfoundland lies at the intersection of arctic and more temperate regions and, commensurate with this geography, populations of two Amerindian and two Paleoeskimocultural traditions occupied Port au Choix, in northern Newfoundland, Canada, for centuries and millennia. Over the past two decades The Port au Choix Archaeology Project has sought a comparative understanding of how these different cultures, each with their particular origin and historical trajectory, adapted to the changing physical and social environments, impacted their physical surroundings, and created cultural landscapes. This volume brings together the research of Renouf, her colleagues and her students who together employ multiple perspectives and methods to provide a detailed reconstruction and understanding of the long-term history of Port au Choix. Although geographically focussed on a northern coastal area, this volume has wider implications for understanding archaeological landscapes, human-environment interactions and hunter-gatherer societies. "

They are essential to every major archaeological excavation but rarely acknowledged by the visiting researchers once the artifacts have been shipped. As part of the innovative, multivocal output from the famous Turkish Neolithic site of Catalhoeyuk, we hear from one of the site guards, Sadrettin Dural, who tells the story of the excavation from the point of view of the "Other." He offers tales of the strange habits of archaeologists, describes the local in-fighting that scholars never see, and explains how scientists can be protected from the Yatirs, spirits of the dead who guard the mound. Ian Hodder, director of the Catalhoeyuk project, provides explanatory notes for the reader and an interview with the author, exploring indigenous interpretations of ancient sites and the archaeologists who excavate them. For the archaeologist, this offers a revolutionary new viewpoint on their work. For the cultural anthropologist, Dural's role as site guard is only a small part of his life as a Turkish villager. The author recounts the daily lived experience of one man in a contemporary Turkish village, including changing economic strategies for supporting his family, brushes with the law, trips to the beach and the city, and Turkish phone sex.

Located in the Mewar region of Rajasthan, India, Gilund is the largest known site of the Ahar-Banas Cultural Complex, a large agropastoral group that was contemporaneous with and flanked by the Indus Civilization. Occupied during the Chalcolithic and Early Historic periods, the ancient site of Gilund holds significant clues to understanding third millennium B.C.E cultural interactions in South Asia and beyond. Excavations at Gilund provides a full analysis of the artifacts recovered during the five-year excavation project conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and Deccan College. The excavators investigated the regional development of early farming villages, their shifting subsistence practices, their economy and trade with other cultures, and the traces of Gilund's transition from the Chalcolithic to the Iron Age. Their findings shed light on the extent and nature of early trade networks, the rise of early complex societies, and the symbolic and ideological beliefs of this region. This volume synthesizes new discoveries with previous findings and considers Gilund in a broader regional and global context, making it the most comprehensive presentation of archaeological data for this region to date. Contributors: Marta Ameri, Shweta Sinha Deshpande, Debasri Dasgupta Ghosh, Lorena Giorgio, Praveena Gullapalli, Julie Hanlon, Peter Johansen, Matthew Landt, Gregory L. Possehl, Teresa P. Raczek, Vasant Shinde. University Museum Monograph, 138

Includes evidence from Soviet scholarship that is often not accessible to scholars working on this period.

This is a scientific expoe that will shatter our knowledge of ancient human history. Scholars have told us that the first civilisation on Earth emerged in a land called Sumer some 6000 years ago. New archaeological and scientific discoveries made by Michael Tellinger, Johan Heine and a team of leading scientists, show that the Sumerians and even the Egyptians inherited all their knowledge from an earlier civilisation that lived at the southern tip of Africa more than 200,000 years ago...mining gold.

These were also the people who carved the first Horus bird, the first Sphinx, built the first pyramids and built an accurate stone calendar right in the heart of it all. "Adam's Calendar" is the flagship among millions of circular stone ruins, ancient roads, agricultural terraces and thousands of ancient mines, left behind by a vanished civilisation which we now call the First People. They carved detailed images into the hardest rock, worshipped the sun, and are the first to carve an image of the Egyptian Ankh - key of life and universal knowledge, 200,000 years before the Egyptians came to light.

This book graphically exposes these discoveries and will be the catalyst for rewriting our ancient human history. The book is a continuation of Tellinger's previous books Slave Species of God and Adam's Calendar which have become favourites with readers in over 20 countries.

This comprehensive and absorbing book traces the cultural history of Southeast Asia from prehistoric (especially Neolithic, Bronze-Iron age) times through to the major Hindu and Buddhist civilizations, to around AD 1300. Southeast Asia has recently attracted archaeological attention as the locus for the first recorded sea crossings; as the region of origin for the Austronesian population dispersal across the Pacific from Neolithic times; as an arena for the development of archaeologically-rich Neolithic, and metal using communities, especially in Thailand and Vietnam, and as the backdrop for several unique and strikingly monumental Indic civilizations, such as the Khmer civilization centred around Angkor. Southeast Asia is invaluable to anyone interested in the full history of the region.

How did human thought evolve into the highly complex process it is today? In the field of evolutionary cognitive archaeology, cognitive science and archaeology intersect to provide a more complete and grounded picture of the mind. With the combination of cognitive theories and archaeological evidence, this burgeoning field is only beginning to tap into the potential for a better understanding of the development of specific cognitive abilities. Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaeology explores hominin cognitive development by applying formal cognitive models to analyze prehistoric remains from the entire range of the Palaeolithic, from the earliest stone tools 3.3 million years ago to artistic developments that emerged 50,000 years ago. Several different cognitive models are presented, including expert cognition, information processing, material engagement theory, embodied/extended cognition, neuroaesthetics, visual resonance theory, theory of mind, and neuronal recycling. By examining archaeological remains, and thereby past activities and behavior, through the grounded lenses of these models, a mosaic pattern of human cognitive evolution emerges. This volume, authored by many leading authorities in the field of cognitive archaeology, will attract scholars and students of cognitive evolution and paleoanthropology, who will find a new understanding of hominin cognitive evolution and substantive conclusions about our hominin evolution as opportunities for further research.