More than a million people visit the Stonehenge World Heritage Site every year, pondering the stones and soaking up the surrounding landscape. When was it built? Who built it? What was it? How did it work? Here Timothy Darvill argues that around 2600 BC local communities transformed an existing sanctuary into a cult centre that developed a big reputation: perhaps as an oracle and healing place. For centuries people came from near and far, and even after activities at the site began to decline the memory lived on and people chose to be buried within sight of the stones. But Stonehenge itself is only part of a story that involves the whole landscape. People first came to the area during the last Ice Age nearly half a million years ago. Long before Stonehenge was built they were erecting posts, digging pits to contain sacred objects, and constructing long mounds to house their dead. By the Age of Stonehenge this was a heavily occupied landscape with daily life focused along the River Avon. Later, farms and hamlets were established, Roman villas came and went, and from about AD 1000 the pattern of villages dotted along the valleys and the town of Amesbury came to prominence. In the last hundred years or so the army established training grounds and camps, but the biggest battles in recent years have been over the future of the Stonehenge landscape.

Anthropological histories and historical geographies of colonialism both have examined the material and discursive processes of colonization and have identified the opportunities for different kinds of relationships to emerge between Europeans and the indigenous people they encountered and in different ways colonized. These studies have revealed complex, differentiated, colonializing and colonialized identities, shifting and ambiguous political relations, social pluralities, and mutating and distinctive modes of colonization. This book focuses on the complementary historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence for indigenous resistance and resilience in the specific form of parlamento political negotiations or attempted treaties between the Spanish Crown and the Araucanians in south-central Chile from the late 1600s to the early 1800s. Armed conflict, the rejection of most Spanish material culture, and the use of the indigenous Mapundungun language at parlamentos were obvious forms of Araucanian resistance. From a bigger picture, the book is based on an interdisciplinary perspective and asserts that historical archeology can provide better interpretations of past societies only if combined with other disciplines experienced by the treatment of existing data for historical periods, such as those provided by the written documents and which can be subjected to an anthropological, ethnohistorical, and linguistic reading by these disciplines. This creates tension because complementarity but also requires a questioning of the methods themselves as an offset look in order to include the other disciplinary perspectives.

In the early nineteenth century, antebellum America witnessed a Second Great Awakening led by evangelical Protestants who gathered in revivals and contributed to the blossoming of social movements throughout the country. Preachers and reformers promoted a Christian lifestyle, and evangelical fervor overtook entire communities. One such community in Smithfield, New York, led by activist Gerrit Smith, is the focus of Hadley Kruczek-Aaron's study. In this incisive volume, Kruczek-Aaron demonstrates that religious ideology - specifically a lifestyle of temperance and simplicity as advocated by evangelical Christians - was as important an influence on consumption and daily life as socioeconomic status, purchasing power, access to markets, and other social factors. Investigating the wealthy Smith family's material worlds - meals, attire, and domestic wares - Kruczek-Aaron reveals how they engaged their beliefs to maintain a true Christian home. While Smith spread his practice of lived religion to the surrounding neighborhood, incongruities between his faith and his practice of that faith surface in the study, demonstrating the trials he and all convertsfaced while striving to lead a virtuous life. Everyday Religion reveals how class, gender, ethnicity, and race influenced the actions of individuals attempting to walk in God's light and the dynamics that continue to shape how this history is presented and commemorated today.

The great empires of the vast Eurasian continent have captured the imagination of many. Awe-inspiring names such as ancient Rome, Han and Tang China, Persia, Assyria, the Huns, the Kushans and the Franks have been the subject of countless scholarly books and works of literature. However, very rarely, if at all, have these vast pre-industrial empires been studied holistically from a comparative, interdisciplinary and above all Eurasian perspective. This collection of studies examines the history, literature and archaeology of these empires and others thus far treated separately as a single inter-connected subject of inquiry. It highlights in particular the critical role of Inner Asian empires and peoples in facilitating contacts and exchange across the Eurasian continent in antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

This volume represented a compilation of interdisciplinary research being done throughout the American South and the Caribbean by historians, archaeologists, architects, anthropologists, and other scholars on the topic of slavery and plantations. It synthesizes materials known through the 1980s and reports on key sites of excavation and survey in the Carolinas, Barbados, Louisiana and other locations. Contributors include many of the leading figures in historical archaeology.

The primary theoretical question addressed in this book focuses on the lingering concern of how the ancient Maya in the northern Peten Basin were able to sustain large populations in the midst of a tropical forest environment during the Late Classic period. This book asks how agricultural intensification was achieved and how essential resources, such as water and forest products, were managed in both upland areas and seasonal wetlands, or bajos. All of these activities were essential components of an initially sustainable land use strategy that eventually failed to meet the demands of an escalating population. This spiraling disconnect with sound ecological principles undoubtedly contributed to the Maya collapse. The book's findings provide insights that broaden the understanding of the rise of social complexity - the expansion of the political economy, specifically - and, in general terms, the trajectory of cultural evolution of the ancient Maya civilization.

A comprehensive and scholary history of prehistoric and early Cardiganshire. This volume is illustrated with maps, line-drawings and photographic plates. It begins with the geography of the county, its flora and fauna, and traces the slow emergence of Man in prehistoric times. It reconstructs, from evidence much of which has only been recently discovered, the extent and nature of the Roman Occupation, and finaly the slow emergence of the kingdom of Ceredigion, the nature of its economic and social organization and political structures. The coming of Christianity, the settlements of the Saints and their priceless heritage, are also explored. The volume ends with the coming of the Normans. This is the first volume to appear in the County History which is being prepared by the Cardiganshire County Historical Society. The completed history will consist of three scholarly volumes designed to present the history of the ancient county from the beginning to the present day. Volume 2: "Medieval and Early Modern Cardiganshire", edited by Professor J. Beverley Smith and Volume 3: "Cardiganshire in Modern Times", edited by Professor Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and Professor Geraint H. Jenkins are in preparation and will follow at regular intervals.

Final report of a key set of archaeological surveys in a previously unstudied area of eastern Iran by one of the pioneer archaeologists of this region.

Although it has been occupied for as long and possesses a mound-building tradition of considerable scale and interest, Muller contends that the archaeology of the lower Ohio River Valley-from the confluence with the Mississippi to the falls at Louisville, Kentucky - remains less well-known that that of the elaborate mound-building cultures of the upper valley. This study provides a synthesis of archaeological work done in the region, emphasizing population growth and adaptation within an ecological framework in an attempt to explain the area's cultural evolution.

The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current and comprehensive guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this Handbook also includes coverage of important new work by archaeologists on the Colonial and Republican periods. Unique among recent works, the text brings together in a single volume article-length regional syntheses and topical overviews written by active scholars in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology.
The first section of the Handbook provides an overview of recent history and trends of Mesoamerica and articles on national archaeology programs and practice in Central America and Mexico written by archaeologists from these countries. These are followed by regional syntheses organized by time period, beginning with early hunter-gatherer societies and the first farmers of Mesoamerica and concluding with a discussion of the Spanish Conquest and frontiers and peripheries of Mesoamerica. Topical and comparative articles comprise the remainder of Handbook. They cover important dimensions of prehispanic societies--from ecology, economy, and environment to social and political relations--and discuss significant methodological contributions, such as geo-chemical source studies, as well as new theories and diverse theoretical perspectives. The Handbook concludes with a section on the archaeology of the Spanish conquest and the Colonial and Republican periods to connect the prehispanic, proto-historic, and historic periods. This volume will be a must-read for students and professional archaeologists, as well as other scholars including historians, art historians, geographers, and ethnographers with an interest in Mesoamerica.

A group of scholars analyse and interpret data and artifacts from the most important museum collections in central Europe and the Balkans, illustrating the evolution, beginning in the Copper Age, of political hierarchy in this region. Over a span of four millennia, early agricultural villages gave rise to Europe's first kingdoms and monarchies, the first complex state organisations.

Archibald Henry Sayce (1845-1933) became interested in Middle Eastern languages and scripts while still a teenager. Old Persian and Akkadian cuneiform had recently been deciphered, and popular enthusiasm for these discoveries was running high when Sayce began his academic career at Oxford in 1869. In this 1895 work, he considers the history of the Holy Land in the context of the flood of new documentary and archaeological material which had come to light in the course of the nineteenth century. Sayce's approach opposed the 'higher criticism' which sought to demonstrate that the stories of the Old Testament should not be interpreted literally; in his opinion, 'in the narrative of the Pentateuch we have history and not fiction', and he believed that archaeological discoveries supported his view. Although this approach was already outdated, his reconstruction of the history of the ancient Near East remains of interest to historians of archaeology.

This 1906 work was written jointly by Leonard King (1869-1919) and Henry Hall (1873-1930), both members of the department of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum. Their synthesis of what was currently known of the history of the Near East and Egypt came at a time when intensive excavation was bringing to light significant new material every year, and opinions and interpretations were in a constant state of revision. The two men had experience of excavation in Assyria and Egypt, and King had already edited several books of cuneiform texts, so they were therefore ideally placed to produce an overarching history of the area for a popular audience. The highly illustrated work begins with 'the discovery of prehistory', describing recent finds of stone tools and other material in Egypt, and ends with the decline of the Babylonian and Egyptian empires.

Archibald Henry Sayce (1845-1933) became interested in Middle Eastern languages and scripts while still a teenager. Old Persian and Akkadian cuneiform had recently been deciphered, and popular enthusiasm for these discoveries was running high when Sayce began his academic career at Oxford in 1869. In this 1907 work, based on lectures delivered in Edinburgh in the previous year, he considers the state of archaeological knowledge of Babylonia and Assyria, which he describes as 'miserably deficient', and in particular the paradox of a huge number of cuneiform tablets in various languages drawn from many sites at which the original excavation had not provided an adequate context. Beginning with the history of the decipherment of cuneiform, Sayce goes on to describe what the tablets reveal of political and trade interactions among the different nations of the Near East and Asia Minor, and the relevance of these discoveries to Old Testament studies.

In the preface to this 1904 work by Leonard King (1869-1919) of the British Museum's department of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities, he states that the text it presents 'is of great historical value, inasmuch as it supplements our knowledge of the history of Assyria and her relations with Babylonia during the early part of the thirteenth century BC'. The tablet containing the text was buried under the wall of a city founded by King Tukulti-Ninib I (transliterated as Tukulti-Ninurta by modern scholars), to commemorate its building and his previous military achievements, which included the invasion of Babylonia. This account confirms earlier documents, and gives more detail on the chronology of a crucial period in the ancient history of the Near East. The book offers a lengthy introduction on the tablet and on the tradition of such foundation documents, as well as the cuneiform text and a parallel translation, along with an appendix of related documents.

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.

New edition with a new Prologue by the author An Archaeology of Elmina examines a complex African settlement on the coast of present-day Ghana from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries using the archaeological record, European narratives and indigenous oral histories. Placing the site in broader context as the first European trading post in sub-Saharan Africa, Christopher DeCorse explores the developments there in light of Portuguese, Dutch, and British expansion and illustrates remarkable cultural continuity in the midst of technological change. Originally published by Smithsonian Institution Press in 2001.

Recent archaeological discoveries, including manuscripts, have shed new light on China's history, in particular Qin and Han (221 BCE-220 CE), this volume's main focus. They make possible a deeper account of the growth of cities and of the spread of Chinese influence over distant areas. This book provides the first comprehensive survey of recent developments, evaluating the newly-found evidence in the light of earlier conclusions from China, Japan, Europe and America. Through cross-cultural comparisons and a close study of both the excavated and received literature, new conclusions are presented with respect to relatively understudied topics, such as gender, history of science, and modes of persuasion, while challenging the 'common wisdom' in such fields as Buddhism, Daoism and social history. Thus the volume provides a supplement to Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of China (1986) and shows how subsequent archaeology has enriched our perception of China's history in this period.

"In this book, Michael Collins ... demonstrates why he is considered one of the leading researchers in the field of lithic analysis. The work offers a masterful review and synthesis of Clovis blade technology with lucid prose and lavish illustrations.... I recommend this book for all professional and avocational archaeologists interested in Paleoindian occupations of the New World." -- Illinois Archaeology "This book makes an important contribution to a newly revived debate on the significance of the Clovis phenomenon and the timing and migration routes of the peopling of the New World more generally." -- SAS Bulletin

Around 11,000 years ago, a Paleoindian culture known to us as "Clovis" occupied much of North America. Considered to be among the continent's earliest human inhabitants, the Clovis peoples were probably nomadic hunters and gatherers whose remaining traces include camp sites and caches of goods stored for utilitarian or ritual purposes.

This book offers the first comprehensive study of a little-known aspect of Clovis culture-- stone blade technology. Michael Collins introduces the topic with a close look at the nature of blades and the techniques of their manufacture, followed by a discussion of the full spectrum of Clovis lithic technology and how blade production relates to the production of other stone tools. He then provides a full report of the discovery and examination of fourteen blades found in 1988 in the Keven Davis Cache in Navarro County, Texas.

Collins also presents a comparative study of known and presumed Clovis blades from many sites, discusses the Clovis peoples' caching practices, and considers what lithic technology and cachingbehavior can add to our knowledge of Clovis lifeways. These findings will be important reading for both specialists and amateurs who are piecing together the puzzle of the peopling of the Americas, since the manufacture of blades is a trait that Clovis peoples shared with the Upper Paleolithic peoples in Europe and northern Asia.

This volume celebrates the career of Norma Franklin, an archaeologist who has made important contributions to our understanding of the three key cities of Samaria, Megiddo and Jezreel in the Northern Kingdom of Israel during the Iron Age. The sixteen essays offered by Franklin's colleagues in archaeology and biblical studies are a fitting tribute to the woman in the pith helmet: an indomitable field archaeologist who describes herself as "happiest with complex stratigraphy" and as being dedicated to "killing sacred cows".

The Islands of the Sun and the Moon in Bolivia's Lake Titicaca were two of the most sacred locations in the Inca empire. A pan-Andean belief held that they marked the origin place of the Sun and the Moon, and pilgrims from across the Inca realm made ritual journeys to the sacred shrines there. In this book, Brian Bauer and Charles Stanish explore the extent to which this use of the islands as a pilgrimage center during Inca times was founded on and developed from earlier religious traditions of the Lake Titicaca region.

Drawing on a systematic archaeological survey and test excavations in the islands, as well as data from historical texts and ethnography, the authors document a succession of complex polities in the islands from 2000 BC to the time of European contact in the 1530s AD. They uncover significant evidence of pre-Inca ritual use of the islands, which raises the compelling possibility that the religious significance of the islands is of great antiquity. The authors also use these data to address broader anthropological questions on the role of pilgrimage centers in the development of pre-modern states.

The classic images of Iranian nomads in circulation today and in years past suggest that Western awareness of nomadism is a phenomenon of considerable antiquity. Though nomadism has certainly been a key feature of Iranian history, it has not been in the way most modern archaeologists have envisaged it. Nomadism in Iran recasts our understanding of this "timeless" tradition. Far from constituting a natural adaptation on the Iranian Plateau, nomadism is a comparatively late introduction, which can only be understood within the context of certain political circumstances. Since the early Holocene, most, if not all, agricultural communities in Iran had kept herds of sheep and goat, but the communities themselves were sedentary: only a few of their members were required to move with the herds seasonally. Though the arrival of Iranian speaking groups, attested in written sources beginning in the time of Herodutus, began to change the demography of the plateau, it wasn't until later in the eleventh century that an influx of Turkic speaking Oghuz nomadic groups-"true" nomads of the steppe-began the modification of the demography of the Iranian Plateau that accelerated with the Mongol conquest. The massive, unprecedented violence of this invasion effected the widespread distribution of largely Turkic-speaking nomadic groups across Iran. Thus, what has been interpreted in the past as an enduring pattern of nomadic land use is, by archaeological standards, very recent. Iran's demographic profile since the eleventh century AD, and more particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth century, has been used by some scholars as a proxy for ancient social organization. Nomadism in Iran argues that this modernist perspective distorts the historical reality of the land. Assembling a wealth of material in several languages and disciplines, Nomadism in Iran will be invaluable to archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians of the Middle East and Central Asia.

Urbanization and Religion in Ancient Central Mexico examines the ways in which urbanization and religion intersected in pre-Columbian central Mexico, with a primary focus on the later Formative period and the transition to the Classic period. The major societal transformations of this interval occurred approximately two-thousand years ago and over a millennium before Mexico's best known early civilization, the Aztecs. David M. Carballo presents a synthesis of data from regional archaeological projects and key sites such as Teotihuacan and Cuicuilco, while relying on the author's own excavations at the site of La Laguna as the central case study. A principal argument is that cities and states developed hand in hand with elements of a religious tradition of remarkable endurance and that these processes were fundamentally entangled. Prevalent religious beliefs and ritual practices created a cultural logic for urbanism, and as populations urbanized they became socially integrated and differentiated following this logic. Nevertheless, religion was used differently over time and by groups and individuals across the spectra of urbanity and social status. This book calls for a materially informed history of religion, with the temporal depth that archaeology can provide, and an archaeology of cities that considers religion seriously as a generative force in societal change.

The Nile Basin contains a record of human activities spanning the last million years. However, the interactions between prehistoric humans and environmental changes in this area are complex and often poorly understood. This comprehensive book explains in clear, non-technical terms how prehistoric environments can be reconstructed, with examples drawn from every part of the Nile Basin. Adopting a source-to-sink approach, the book integrates events in the Nile headwaters with the record from marine sediment cores in the Nile Delta and offshore. It provides a detailed record of past environmental changes throughout the Nile Basin and concludes with a review of the causes and consequences of plant and animal domestication in this region and of the various prehistoric migrations out of Africa into Eurasia and beyond. A comprehensive overview, this book is ideal for researchers in geomorphology, climatology and archaeology.