Since its violent dissolution in 1521, the Aztec Empire of Mexico has continually intrigued us. Recent discoveries resulting from the excavation of the Templo Mayor in the heart of Mexico City have taught us even more about this fascinating culture. The increasing recognition that the achievements of Mesoamerican civilizations were among the most sophisticated of the ancient world has led to a demand for introductions to the basic methods and theories of scholars working throughout the region. Handbook to Life in the Aztec World gathers the results from recent archaeological discoveries and scholarly research into a single accessible volume. Organized thematically, the handbook covers all aspects of life in the Aztec world: Mesoamerican civilizations and Aztec archeology; evolution of Aztec civilization; geography of the Aztec world; society and government; religion, cosmology, and mythology; funerary beliefs and customs; Aztec art; Aztec architecture; Nahuatl literature; the calendar, astronomy, and mathematics; economy, industry, and trade; daily life; the Aztec after conquest and today. Each chapter includes an extensive bibliography, and more than 165 original line drawings, photographs, and maps complement the text. Handbook to Life in the Aztec World provides all the essential information required by anyone interested in Aztec history or culture.

This book deals with Britain in the centuries immediately before the Roman conquest: a period when the first individuals appeared in British history, and when a series of dynasties emerged to take control of much of Southern Britain. Combining archaeological, literary and numismatic evidence, it paints a vivid picture of how people in Late Iron Age Britain reacted to the changing world around them, and how rulers bolstered their power through use of imagery on coins, myths, language, and material culture. It includes illustrations of 246 Iron Age coins and a separate coin index.

Food and diet are central to understanding daily life in the middle ages. In the last two decades, the potential for the study of diet in medieval England has changed markedly: historians have addressed sources in new ways; material from a wide range of sites has been processed by zooarchaeologists and archaeobotanists; and scientific techniques, newly applied to the medieval period, are opening up possibilities for understanding the cumulative effects of diet on the skeleton. In a multi-disciplinary approach to the subject, this volume, written by leading experts in different fields, unites analysis of the historical, archaeological, and scientific record to provide an up-to-date synthesis. The volume covers the whole of the middle ages from the early Saxon period up to c.1540, and while the focus is on England wider European developments are not ignored. The first aim of the book is to establish how much more is now known about patterns of diet, nutrition, and the use of food in display and social competition; its second is to promote interchange between the methodological approaches of historians and archaeologists. The text brings together much original research, marrying historical and archaeological approaches with analysis from a range of archaeological disciplines, including archaeobotany, archaeozoology, osteoarchaeology, and isotopic studies.

Formative Britain presents an account of the peoples occupying the island of Britain between 400 and 1100 AD, whose ideas continue to set the political agenda today. Forty years of new archaeological research has laid bare a hive of diverse and disputatious communities of Picts, Scots, Welsh, Cumbrian and Cornish Britons, Northumbrians, Angles and Saxons, who expressed their views of this world and the next in a thousand sites and monuments. This highly illustrated volume is the first book that attempts to describe the experience of all levels of society over the whole island using archaeology alone. The story is drawn from the clothes, faces and biology of men and women, the images that survive in their poetry, the places they lived, the work they did, the ingenious celebrations of their graves and burial grounds, their decorated stone monuments and their diverse messages. This ground-breaking account is aimed at students and archaeological researchers at all levels in the academic and commercial sectors. It will also inform relevant stakeholders and general readers alike of how the islands of Britain developed in the early medieval period. Many of the ideas forged in Britain's formative years underpin those of today as the UK seeks to find a consensus programme for its future.

Patriarchy, colonialism, and the capitalist mode of production have shaped gender through time and across many different cultures. In historic America, gendered social relations were created, codified, and reproduced through the objects used in cultural rituals, the spatial organization of houses, the construction of village landscapes, and the institutions of society, in addition to other social, ideological, economic, and political forces. From domestic spaces to the public square, Deborah Rotmancontextualizes gender and the associated social relationships from the colonial period through the twentieth century. By exploring how individuals and families negotiated and mediated these relationships, she sheds light on how prescriptive gender categories were experienced by those expected to follow them and examines how diverse groups responded to popular gender ideologies. Additionally, she reveals the ways gender and society influence each other, exposing how American normative notions of masculinity and femininity intersect with class, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and identity. Albeit, Rotman contends, they do not intersect in mutually supportive ways, ultimately giving rise to transformative social changes.

This is an in-depth treatment of the antecedents and first flourescence of early state and urban societies in lowland Mesopotamia over nearly three millennia, from approximately 5000 to 2100 BC. The approach is explicitly anthropological, drawing on contemporary theoretical perspectives to enrich our understanding of the ancient Mesopotamian past. It explores the ways people of different genders and classes contributed and responded to political, economic, and ideological changes. The interpretations are based on studies of regional settlement patterns, faunal remains, artifact distributions and activity patterning, iconography, texts and burials.

First published in the 1950s, this is a classic account of the discovery in 1911 of the lost city of Machu Picchu. In 1911 Hiram Bingham, a pre-historian with a love of exotic destinations, set out to Peru in search of the legendary city of Vilcabamba, capital city of the last Inca ruler, Manco Inca. With a combination of doggedness and good fortune he stumbled on the perfectly preserved ruins of Machu Picchu perched on a cloud-capped ledge 2000 feet above the torrent of the Urubamba River. The buildings were of white granite, exquisitely carved blocks each higher than a man. Bingham had not, as it turned out, found Vilcabamba, but he had nevertheless made an astonishing and memorable discovery, which he describes in his bestselling book LOST CITY OF THE INCAS.

From the time of its composition (c.1280) for Philip the Fair of France until the early sixteenth century, Giles of Rome's mirror of princes, the De regimine principum, was read by both lay and clerical readers in the original Latin and in several vernacular translations, and served as model or source for several works of princely advice. This study examines the relationship between this didactic political text and its audience by focusing on the textual and material aspects of the surviving manuscript copies, as well as on the evidence of ownership and use found in them and in documentary and literary sources. Briggs argues that lay readers used De regimine for several purposes, including as an educational treatise and military manual, whereas clerics, who often first came into contact with it at university, glossed, constructed apparatus for, and modified the text to suit their needs in their later professional lives.

The archaeology of death and burial is central to our attempts to understand vanished societies. Through the remains of funerary rituals we can learn not only about the attitudes of prehistoric people to death and the afterlife, but also about their way of life, their social organisation and their view of the world. This ambitious new book reviews the latest research in this huge and important field, and describes the sometimes controversial interpretations that have led to rapid advances in our understanding of life and death in the distant past. It provides a unique overview and synthesis of one of the most revealing fields of research into the past, It creates a context for several of archaeology's most breath-taking discoveries, from Tutankhamen to the Ice Man, and will find a keen market among archaeologists, historians and others who have a professional interest in, or general curiosity about, death and burial.

China in the Early Bronze Age Shang Civilization Robert L. Thorp "Thorp has packed a massive amount of information in a concise and easily accessible way into well organized chapters. . . . This book is clearly the result of many years of intensive research but appears to the reader to be an effortless achievement."--"Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies" One of the great breakthroughs in Chinese studies in the early twentieth century was the archaeological identification of the earliest, fully historical dynasty of kings, the Shang (ca. 1300-1050 B.C.E.). The last fifty years have seen major advances in all areas of Chinese archaeology, but recent studies of the Shang, their ancestors, and their contemporaries have been especially rich. Since the last English-language overview of Shang civilization appeared in 1980, the pace of discovery has quickened. "China in the Early Bronze Age: Shang Civilization" is the first work in twenty-five years to synthesize current knowledge of the Shang for everyone interested in the origins of Chinese civilization. "China in the Early Bronze Age" traces the development of early Bronze Age cultures in North and Northwestern China from about 2000 B.C.E., including the Erlitou culture (often identified with the Xia) and the Erligang culture. Robert L. Thorp introduces major sites, their architectural remains, burials, and material culture, with special attention to jades and bronze. He reviews the many discoveries near Anyang, site of two capitals of the Shang kings. In addition to the topography of these sites, Thorp discusses elite crafts and devotes a chapter to the Shang cult, its divination practices, and its rituals. The volume concludes with a survey of the late Shang world, cultures contemporary with Anyang during the late second millennium B.C.E. Fully documented with references to Chinese archaeological sources and illustrated with more than one hundred line drawings, "China in the Early Bronze Age" also includes informative sidebars on related topics and suggested readings. Students of the history and archaeology of early civilizations will find "China in the Early Bronze Age" the most up-to-date and wide-ranging introduction to its topic now in print. Scholars in Chinese studies will use this work as a handbook and research guide. This volume makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the formative stages of Chinese culture. Robert L. Thorp is Professor Emeritus of Chinese Art History and Archaeology at Washington University, St. Louis. He is the author of "Chinese Art and Culture." Encounters with Asia 2005 320 pages 6 x 9 133 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3910-2 Cloth $69.95s 45.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0361-5 Ebook $69.95s 45.50 World Rights Archaeology, Asian Studies Short copy: Students of the history and archaeology of early civilizations will find China in the Early Bronze Age the most up-to-date and wide-ranging introduction to its topic now in print. Scholars in Chinese studies will use this work as a handbook and research guide. For all readers, this volume makes fascinating reading in the formative stages of Chinese culture accessible.

This book introduces readers to the remarkable linguistic diversity of East and Southeast Asia. It contains wide-ranging and accessible discussions of every important aspect of the languages of the region, including word origins, cultural key words, tones and sounds, language families and typology, key syntactic structures, writing systems, and communicative styles. Students of linguistics will welcome the book's treatments of celebrated East Asian features such as classifiers, serial verb constructions, tones, topic-prominence, and honorifics. It shows students of particular Asian languages how their language fits structurally and culturally into the regional language mosaic. With its exercises, solutions, glossary, and many fascinating cases and insights, the book is an ideal introduction to descriptive and field linguistics. Cliff Goddard writes with great clarity and an eye for interesting examples. His book will appeal to all those with a serious interest in the languages and cultures of the region.

This book is a historical and archeological examination of the Isthmus Zapotec state, which was established at Tehuantepec in late prehispanic times through a campaign of conquest and colonization, and the responses that its descendant populations made to the complex political, economic, and cultural changes introduced by Spanish colonialism. Although the modern-day Isthmus Zapotecs are renowned in Mexico and among Latin Americanists for their vibrant cultural traditions and their legacy of political resistance, only isolated elements of the complex historical processes by which these patterns emerged have been studied previously. Using complementary archival and archeological sources, the book details the transformation of Isthmus Zapotec society under colonialism and the enduring structures through which its members redefined their political autonomy.

Harriet Crawford presents a scholarly account of the archaeology of the Arabian Gulf from c.4500-1500 BC. It offers an interpretation of the structure of society in the Early Dilmun period (c.2000-1500 BC) using material from the excavated site of Saar on the main Bahrain island. The urban, centralized and probably literate society in Dilmun is contrasted with the contemporary societies in Oman and the Emirates. Here there is evidence from buildings and graves for a loosely knit, apparently tribal society. Both societies were greatly influenced by their participation in the complex trade routes which linked them with ancient Mesopotamia to the north and the Indus Valley to the south east, but developed their own distinctive cultures. The reason for their divergent development seems to relate to the fact that Dilmun was an entrepot, while the Oman peninsula was a source of raw materials.

Harriet Crawford presents a scholarly and up-to-date account of the archaeology of the Arabian Gulf from c. 4500-1500 BC. She offers a new interpretation of the structure of the urban, centralized and probably literate society of the Early Dilmun period (c. 2000-1800 BC) using material from the recently excavated site of Saar on the main Bahrain island. Like the neighboring societies in Oman and the Emirates, Dilmun was greatly influenced by its participation in the complex trade routes linking it to Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley.

My interest in the archaeology of the Scottish Highlands began long before I had any formal training in the subject. Growing up on the eastern fringes of the southern Highlands, close to Loch Lomond, it was not hard stumble across ruined buildings, old field boundaries, and other traces of everyday life in the past. This is especially true if you spend much time, as I have done, climbing the nearby mountains and walking and driving through the various glens that give access into the Highlands. At the time, I had no real understanding of these remains, simply accepting them as being built and old. After studying archaeology for a few years at the University of Glasgow, itself only a short commute from the area where I grew up, I became acutely aware that I still had no real understanding of these - miliar, yet enigmatic, buildings and fields. This and a growing interest in Scotland's historical archaeology drove me to take several courses on the subject of rural settlement studies. These courses allowed me to place what I now knew to be houses, barns, mills, shieling (transhumance) settlements, rig-and-furrow cultivation, and other related remains in history. Overwhelmingly, they seemed to date from the period of the last 300 years. I also began to understand how they all worked together as component parts of daily rural life in the past.

Historical archaeology has largely focused on the study of early military sites and homes of upper class. Research on lower classes was viewed as a supplement to local histories documenting political, military and financial leaders of the 18th and 19th centuries.

An Archaeological Study of Rural Capitalism and Material Life will be of interest to historical archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, social historians, and historical sociologists, especially researchers studying the influence of globalization and economic development upon rural regions like Appalachia.

This volume presents the results of archaeological survey and excavation at Eckweek, Somerset, which yielded one of the most important medieval rural settlement sequences yet excavated from south-west England. At the centre of the narrative is a succession of well-preserved buildings spanning the late 10th to the 14th centuries A.D. forming the nucleus of a Domesday manor and its Late Saxon precursor. Detailed analysis of the structural sequence offers a new regional perspective on pre-Conquest earthfast timber architecture and its subsequent (12th-century) replacement by masonry traditions. Culminating in a richly preserved 14th-century farmhouse, including a very complete assemblage of structural and domestic objects, the structural archaeology provides an unusually refined picture of the internal organisation of later medieval domestic space within a rural farming setting. Detailed analytical attention is given to the abundant artefactual and environmental datasets recovered from the excavations (including prolific assemblages of medieval pottery and palaeonvironmental data) with a nuanced appraisal of their interpretative implications. Anyone with an interest in the dynamics and regional complexity of medieval rural communities will find this a stimulating and enlightening read.

Conditioned by local ways of knowing and doing, Great Zimbabwe develops a new interpretation of the famous World Heritage site of Great Zimbabwe. It combines archaeological knowledge, including recent material from the author's excavations, with native concepts and philosophies. Working from a large data set has made it possible, for the first time, to develop an archaeology of Great Zimbabwe that is informed by finds and observations from the entire site and wider landscape. In so doing, the book strongly contributes towards decolonising African and world archaeology. Written in an accessible manner, the book is aimed at undergraduate students, graduate students, and practicing archaeologists both in Africa and across the globe. The book will also make contributions to the broader field such as African Studies, African History, and World Archaeology through its emphasis on developing synergies between local ways of knowing and the archaeology.

This new synthesis draws on advances in scientific dating to understand the Mesolithic inhabitation of Britain as a historical process. The book describes the lives of the first pioneers in the early Mesolithic; the emergence of new modes of inhabitation in the Middle Mesolithic; the regionally diverse settlement of the late Mesolithic; and the radical changes of the final millennium of the period.

In the tenth century AD, a remarkable cultural development took place in the harsh and forbidding San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico. From small-scale, simply organised, prehistoric Pueblo societies, a complex and socially differentiated political system emerged which has become known as the Chaco Phenomenon. The origins, evolution, and decline of this system have long been the subject of intense archaeological debate. Lynne Sebastian examines the transition of the Chaco system from an acephalous society, in which leadership was situational and most decision making carried out within kinship structures, to a hierarchically organised political structure with institutional roles of leadership. She argues that harsh environmental factors were not the catalyst for the transition, as has previously been thought. Rather, the increasing political complexity was a consequence of improved rainfall in the region which permitted surplus production, thus allowing those farming the best land to capitalise on the material success. By combining information on political evolution with archaeological data and the results of a computer simulation, she is able to produce a sociopolitically based model of the rise, florescence, and decline of the Chaco Phenomenon.

Sicily as it is - Sicily as it was. This unique book with acetate overlays reconstructs existing buildings and ruins into the magnificence if the Monuments, Temples and Theatres of classical times. For beginner or expert archaeologists, this book should accompany all who visits Sicily.

This book addresses the controversy over the origins of the Bronze Age of Southeast Asia. Charles Higham provides a systematic and regional presentation of the current evidence. He suggests that the adoption of metallurgy in the region followed a period of growing exchange with China. Higham then traces the development of Bronze Age cultures, identifying regionality and innovation, and suggesting how and why distinct cultures developed. This book is the first comprehensive study of the period, placed within a broader comparative framework.

This uniquely broad and challenging book reviews the latest archaeological evidence on Neolithic Europe from 7,000-2,500 BC. Describing important areas, sites and problems, Dr. Whittle addresses the major themes that have engaged the attention of scholars: the transition from a forager lifestyle; the rate and dynamics of change; and the nature of Neolithic society. A revised version of Whittle's Neolithic Europe: A Survey (CUP, 1985), the book reflects radical changes in evidence and in interpretive approaches over the past decade.

This is the first historical study of the whole body of late Viking runic inscription stones in Scandinavia. The 3,000 inscriptions which are more or less complete yield unexpected information on a wide range of topics, including the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity, the growth of royal power, and, most important of all, the inheritance customs of the period.

Cities and states developed in South Asia between c. BC 800 and AD 250, as Hinduism and Buddhism arose and spread. Drawing on archaeological studies and also on texts and inscriptions, this book explores the character of the early Indian cities, paying particular attention to their art and architecture and analyzing the political ideas that shaped the state systems. The study extends to the opening centuries of the Christian era, offering an Indian perspective on the contacts with the Greek and Roman worlds that followed the invasion by Alexander the Great.