Maize has been described as a primary catalyst to complex sociocultural development in the Americas. State of the art research on maize chronology, molecular biology, and stable carbon isotope research on ancient human diets have provided additional lines of evidence on the changing role of maize through time and space and its spread throughout the Americas. The multidisciplinary evidence from the social and biological sciences presented in this volume have generated a much more complex picture of the economic, political, and religious significance of maize. The volume also includes ethnographic research on the uses and roles of maize in indigenous cultures and a linguistic section that includes chapters on indigenous folk taxonomies and the role and meaning of maize to the development of civilization. Histories of Maize is the most comprehensive reference source on the botanical, genetic, archaeological, and anthropological aspects of ancient maize published to date. This book will appeal to a varied audience, and have no titles competiting with it because of its breadth and scope. The volume offers a single source of high quality summary information unavailable elsewhere.

This volume expands archaeological understandings of the past by using a neglected database - ground stone artifacts - to stretch the boundaries of our comprehension of the ancient world. Ground stone artifacts, long recognized as part of the essential domestic tool kit for food production and other activities, have received little methodical attention in the archaeological community until relatively recently. A trend of increasing focus on ground stone artifacts in the archaeological literature over the past two decades, particularly in the New World, indicates the need to integrate such analyses with larger theoretical and methodological issues. The editors bring together for the first time a detailed, comprehensive view of the variety of approaches to the archaeological analyses of these artifacts melding together archaeological data and innovative analyses of the most recent research. In a thought provoking introduction, the editors provide context for the issues and note recent advances made in ground stone artifact analysis. Case studies based on original data, organized along broad thematic interests, form the bulk of the volume. The limitations and opportunities that natural resources of a given region impose on technological change, production, and exchange are key points that many contributors touch upon. In the concluding remarks, the case studies are critically summarized with an eye towards a synthetic, diachronic appraisal, and potential avenues for future related studies.

This book focuses on the formative period in pastoral-sedentary relations, the late second and early first millennium BCE, on today's northern borders of China. This area - known as the Northern Zone - emerged as a crucial arena for interactions among sedentary, semi-sedentary, and nomadic people during a decisive period in which the region's unique economic adaptations, socio-political systems, local cultures and identities took shape. It is also during this period that the real and symbolic chasm between the "Chinese" (or Zhou) states and their northern neighbors emerged, and when conscious attempts were made to define a broader, ethnic-like identity vis-a-vis the "other" way of life. Based on archaeological field work in the Chifeng area of Inner Mongolia and on data carefully collected from Chinese archaeological publications, as well as on anthropologically-derived theories and rigorous analytical methods, the book challenges common perceptions which were based mainly on the Chinese historical records. It demonstrates that while changes in aspects of daily life, such as subsistence strategies and political organization, were gradual; a much more dramatic change occurred in the style and quantity of symbolic expression. This suggests that the construction of identities - local and regional- was not merely the end result of the process but rather was, from the beginning, an important catalyst of change.The book brings more comprehensive and nuance understanding to the archaeology and history of East Asia. By focusing on issues of identity, its construction, manipulation and materialization in symbols and artifacts, it also brings new theoretical and methodological innovations to atopic which has a relatively long history in anthropology but which has only recently been seriously addressed by archaeologists.

Striking similarities in Etruscan and Anatolian material culture reveal various forms of contact and exchange between these regions on opposite sides of the Mediterranean. This is the first comprehensive investigation of these connections, approaching both cultures as agents of artistic exchange rather than as side characters in a Greek-focused narrative. It synthesizes a wide range of material evidence from c. 800 - 300 BCE, from tomb architecture and furniture to painted vases, terracotta reliefs, and magic amulets. By identifying shared practices, common visual language, and movements of objects and artisans (from both east to west and west to east), it illuminates many varied threads of the interconnected ancient Mediterranean fabric. Rather than trying to account for the similarities with any one, overarching theory, this volume presents multiple, simultaneous modes and implications of connectivity while also recognizing the distinct local identities expressed through shared artistic and cultural traditions.

This early civilization was erased from human memory until 1924, when it was rediscovered and announced in the Illustrated London Times. Our understanding of the Indus has been partially advanced by textual sources from Mesopotamia that contain references to Meluhha, a land identified by cuneiform specialists as the Indus, with which the ancient Mesopotamians traded and engaged in battles. In this volume, Rita P. Wright uses both Mesopotamian texts but principally the results of archaeological excavations and surveys to draw a rich account of the Indus civilization s well-planned cities, its sophisticated alterations to the landscape, and the complexities of its agrarian and craft-producing economy. She focuses principally on the social networks established between city and rural communities; farmers, pastoralists, and craft producers; and Indus merchants and traders and the symbolic imagery that the civilization shared with contemporary cultures in Iran, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf region. Broadly comparative, her study emphasizes the interconnected nature of early societies."

The Association's 2001 conference was held in Carlisle and concentrated on the Roman and medieval art, architecture and archaeology of the city and county. Under the Romans, and with its position on Hadrian's Wall, Carlisle had the distinction of being the most north-westerly centre of 'Romanitas' in a vast empire. Later, the castle-building programme, initiated under William II, the establishment of the priory in 1123, followed by the See in 1133, marked Carlisle out as a key strategic bulwark against an ever-present threat from the Scots. The majority of papers at the conference and in this volume focus on the cathedral, various aspects of its architectural development, the wonderful east window and its stained glass, the fine medieval woodwork and extraordinary paintings on the backs of the choir stalls and the ceiling of the Prior's Tower. The castle and other important churches and monastic sites in Cumbria were also examined, along with the Bishop's residence at Rose Castle, and an appreciation of the work of that distinguished cleric, Dean Tait.This volume will go a long way towards providing future generations of scholars with a firm baseline for future research in this area.

Two prehistoric cave sites on the Bird's Head of western New Guinea provide a detailed narrative of 26,000 years of human occupation of this area. During Late Pleistocene times, lower temperatures allowed a suite of montane animal species to descend onto the lowland Ayamaru Plateau. When the montane fauna receded during the subsequent climatic amelioration, people switched their hunting focus to a forest wallaby, known locally as Djief. Detailed analysis of this species' remains, including the reconstruction of their age profile, provides insights into why prolonged hunting of this species did not lead to its extinction. The wallaby population evidently thrived at its demographic maximum throughout the early and mid-Holocene, suggesting that human population densities, and therefore hunting pressure, were low until c. 5000 BP.This volume of Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia offers a unique perspective on sustainable hunting in prehistory and provides intriguing insights into hunter-gatherer subsistence, tool manufacturing and use, the changing intensity of occupation of the sites, and environmental exploitation from Late Pleistocene times onwards in a lowland tropical region. It forms an important contribution to the current debate on the possibilities of human occupation of tropical rainforest before the advent of agriculture.

With Wayne Bennett From the silky wax qualities of the surfaces of some quartz menhirs to the wood-grain textures of others, to the golden honeycombed limestones of Malta, to the icy frozen waves of the Cambrian sandstone of south-east Sweden, this book investigates the sensuous material qualities of stone. Tactile sensations, sonorous qualities, colour, and visual impressions are all shown to play a vital part in our understanding of the power and significance of prehistoric monuments in relation to their landscapes. In The Materiality of Stone, Christopher Tilley presents a radically new way of analyzing the significance of both 'cultural' and 'natural' stone in prehistoric European landscapes. Tilley's groundbreaking approach is to interpret human experience in a multidimensional and sensuous human way, rather than through an abstract analytical gaze. The studies range widely from the menhirs of prehistoric Brittany to Maltese Neolithic temples to Bronze Age rock carvings and cairns in southern Sweden. Tilley leaves no stone unturned as he also considers how the internal spaces and landscape settings are interpreted in relation to artifacts, substances, and related places that were deeply meaningful to the people who inhabited them and remain no less evocative today. In its innovative approach to understanding human experience through the tangible rocks and stone of our past, The Materiality of Stone is both a major theoretical and substantive contribution to the field of material culture studies and the study of European prehistory.

Pamela Willoughby provides a wide-ranging synthesis of current knowledge about the evolution of fully modern humans in Africa during the Middle Palaeolithic / Middle Stone Age. According to most scholars, our modern ancestors first emerged in Africa and then spread throughout the habitable world. Willoughby brings evidence from mitochondrial DNA, ancient fossils, and archaeological remains (including her own research in Tanzania) to bear on questions regarding the place of human species in nature, the specific origins of Homo Sapiens, and the dispersal of these modern humans throughout Africa and around the globe. She confronts straightforwardly the problems of dating the earliest modern humans, and she discusses the various alternative models of modern human origins, which will be debated for years to come. The Evolution of Modern Humans in Africa is a compelling, thought-provoking book for both students and scholars.

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE The earliest rock art - in the Americas as elsewhere - is geometric or abstract. Until Early Rock Art in the American West, however, no book-length study has been devoted to the deep antiquity and amazing range of geometrics and the fascinating questions that arise from their ubiquity and variety. Why did they precede representational marks? What is known about their origins and functions? Why and how did humans begin to make marks, and what does this practice tell us about the early human mind? With some two hundred striking color images and discussions of chronology, dating, sites, and styles, this pioneering investigation of abstract geometrics on stone (as well as bone, ivory, and shell) explores its wide-ranging subject from the perspectives of ethology, evolutionary biology, cognitive archaeology, and the psychology of artmaking. The authors' unique approach instills a greater respect for a largely unknown and underappreciated form of paleoart, suggesting that before humans became Homo symbolicus or even Homo religiosus, they were mark-makers - Homo aestheticus.

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels. Starting at Hindu-Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, colonial, and prehistoric heritage sites in Indonesia, the focus is on people's encounters and the knowledge exchange taking place across colonial and post-colonial regimes. Objects are followed as they move from their site of origin to other locations, such as the Buddhist statues from Borobudur temple, that were gifted to King Chulalongkorn of Siam. The ways in which the meaning of these objects transformed as they moved away to other sites reveal their role in parallel processes of heritage formation outside Indonesia. Calling attention to the power of the material remains of the past, Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff explore questions of knowledge production, the relationship between heritage and violence, and the role of sites and objects in the creation of national histories.

For purchasers of the 1998 edition of this book, download a list of changes and addenda that are included in the 2011 printing here. In this comprehensive study, Horowitz examines all of the extant Mesopotamian texts (both Sumerian and Akkadian) relating to the ideas of the physical universe and its constituent parts (Heaven, Earth, subterranean waters, underworld). The author shows that the Mesopotamian view of the universe was at once cohesive as well as discordant and deficient, while remaining fairly constant over more than 2,500 years. Horowitz first surveys the various sources for Mesopotamian cosmic geography, including various mythological and literary texts, as well as the famous Babylonian Map of the World and various astrological and astronomical texts. The universe was built by the gods in earliest times and was thought to be held together by cosmic bonds. Given this general notion, there is nevertheless significant variety in the inclusion or omission of various elements of the picture in texts of different genres and from different periods. In addition, the available evidence leaves a number of problems unsolved. What are the bounds of the universe? What is beyond the limits of the universe? In the second section of the book, Horowitz then discusses each of the various regions and their names in various locales and time periods, drawing on the disparate sources to show where there is coherence and where there is difference of perspective. In addition, he discusses all of the names for the different parts of the universe and examines the geographies of each region. Of importance for both Assyriologists and those interested in the history of ideas, particularly the cosmologies of the ancient Near East.

Written as an engrossing detective story by the leading authority on the subject, this is the first major account in nearly a century to deal with the core issues of how the Irish people came into being. Bringing together the evidence of archaeology, culture, tradition, genetics and linguistics to shed welcome new light on the age-old riddle of Irish origins, and illustrated with numerous informative line drawings and maps, this brilliantly argued book is essential reading for anyone interested in Ireland and the Irish.

Prehistoric Florida societies, particularly those of the peninsula, have been largely ignored or given only minor consideration in overviews of the Mississippian southeast (A.D. 1000-1600). This groundbreaking volume lifts the veil of uniformity frequently draped over these regions in the literature, providing the first comprehensive examination of Mississippi-period archaeology in the state.
Featuring contributions from some of the most prominent researchers in the field, this collection describes and synthesizes the latest data from excavations throughout Florida. In doing so, it reveals a diverse and vibrant collection of cleared-field maize farmers, part-time gardeners, hunter-gatherers, and coastal and riverine fisher/shellfish collectors who formed a distinctive part of the Mississippian southeast.

Iconoclasm, the debate about the legitimacy of religious art that began in Byzantium around 730 and continued for nearly 120 years, has long held a firm grip on the historical imagination. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era is the first book in English to survey the original sources crucial for a modern understanding of this most elusive and fascinating period in medieval history. It is also the first book in any language to cover both the written and the visual evidence from this period, a combination of particular importance to the iconoclasm debate. The authors, an art historian and a historian who both specialise in the period, have worked together to provide a comprehensive overview of the visual and the written materials that together help clarify the complex issues of iconoclasm in Byzantium.

Over two thousand years ago, Oaxaca, Mexico, was the site of one of the New World's earliest episodes of primary state formation and urbanism, and today it is one of the world's archaeologically best-studied regions. This volume, which thoroughly revises and updates the first edition, provides a highly readable yet comprehensive path to acquaint readers with one of the earliest and best-known examples of Native American state formation and its consequences as seen from the perspectives of urbanism, technology, demography, commerce, households, and religion and ritual. Written by prominent archaeological researchers who have devoted decades to Oaxacan research and to the development of suitable social theory, the book places ancient Oaxaca within the context of the history of ideas that have addressed the causes and consequences of social evolutionary change. It also critically evaluates the potential applicability of more recent thinking about state building grounded in collective action and related theories.

Using fresh evidence and nontraditional ideas, the contributing authors of Mississippian Beginnings reconsider the origins of the Mississippian culture of the North American Midwest and Southeast (A.D. 1000-1600). Challenging the decades-old opinion that this culture evolved similarly across isolated Woodland populations, they discuss signs of migrations, pilgrimages, violent conflicts, and other far-flung entanglements that now appear to have shaped the early Mississippian past. Presenting recent fieldwork, archival studies, and new investigations of legacy collections, the essays in this volume interpret results through contemporary perspectives that emphasize agency and historical contingency. They track the various ways disparate cultures across a sizeable swath of the continent came to share similar architecture, pottery, subsistence strategies, sociopolitical organization, iconography, and religion. Together, they provide the most comprehensive examination of early Mississippian culture in nearly thirty years.

Series Information:
One World Archaeology

These studies examine the physical remains of Frankish settlement in Palestine in the 12th and 13th centuries. In recent years the view that Frankish settlement was largely confined to the fortified urban centres and castles, with few westerners venturing into the open countryside, has come to be challenged in the light of new archaeological evidence and re-examination of the sources. The present studies contribute to an understanding of the nature of Frankish settlement by illustrating aspects of the relationship between fortification and settlement: in particular, the role of castles and towers in promoting settlement and providing both security and domestic accommodation; the relationship between castles, towers and other semi-fortified rural structures; the physical planning of the new towns established by the canons of the Holy Sepulchre; the measures undertaken to defend urban settlements; and the contribution that town walls and castles made to the security of the kingdom.

There is no possibility of entering the world of Yiddish, its literature and culture, without understanding what the shtetl was, how it functioned, and what tensions charged its existence. Whether idealized or denigrated, evaluated as the site of memory or mined for historical data, scrutinized as a socio-economic phenomenon or explored as the mythopoetics of a rich literature, the shtetl was the heart of Eastern European Jewry. The papers published in this volume - most of them presented at the second Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish organized by the Oxford European Humanities Research Centre and the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies (July 1999) - re-examines the structure, organization and function of numerous small market towns that shaped the world of Yiddish. The different perspectives from which these studies view the shtetl trenchently re-evaluate common preconceptions, misconceptions and assumptions, and offer new insights that are challenging as they are informative.

Description and discussion of over two thousand brooches, rings, buckles, pendants, buttons, purses and other accessories found in archaeological digs in London, and dating from the period 1150-1450. Brooches, rings, buckles, pendants, buttons, purses and other accessories were part of everyday dress in the middle ages. Over two thousand such items dating from the period 1150-1450 are described and discussed here, all found inrecent archaeological excavations in London - then as now one of western Europe's most cosmopolitan cities, its social and economic activity compounded by the waterside bustle of the Thames. These finds constitute the mostextensive and varied group of such accessories yet recovered in Britain, and their close dating and the scientific analysis carried out on them have been highly revealing. Important results published here for the first time show,for example, the popularity of shoddy, mass-produced items in base metals during the high middle ages and enable researchers to identify the varied products of rival traditions of manufacture mentioned in historical sources.Anyone needing accurate information on period costume will welcome this book, which will appeal to the general reader interested in costume and design, as well as to archaeologists and historians. THE AUTHORS are members of staff of the Museum of London.

Over two thousand years ago, Oaxaca, Mexico, was the site of one of the New World's earliest episodes of primary state formation and urbanism, and today it is one of the world's archaeologically best-studied regions. This volume, which thoroughly revises and updates the first edition, provides a highly readable yet comprehensive path to acquaint readers with one of the earliest and best-known examples of Native American state formation and its consequences as seen from the perspectives of urbanism, technology, demography, commerce, households, and religion and ritual. Written by prominent archaeological researchers who have devoted decades to Oaxacan research and to the development of suitable social theory, the book places ancient Oaxaca within the context of the history of ideas that have addressed the causes and consequences of social evolutionary change. It also critically evaluates the potential applicability of more recent thinking about state building grounded in collective action and related theories.

A collection of papers presented to the 1992 international British Archaeological Association conference in Chester. Presented in chronological order, the fourteen essays comprise Martin Henig's analysis of carved stonework from Roman Deva; Alan Thacker's study of the formation of the town and its parishes during the early medieval period; Simon Ward, Virginia Jansen, John Maddison and Christa Grossinger examine the architecture, fittings and restoration of the Cathedral and churches; Elizabeth Danbury, J Patrick Greene and Nigel Ramsay assess the life and dissolution of religious foundations; Roland B Harris looks at the origins of the famous Chester Rows and Sharon Cather, David Park and Robyn Pender discuss the recently rediscovered Henry III wall paintings at Chester Castle. A broad and illustrated guide to many aspects of Chester's long history.

Explains how Cairo came to have its important Genizah archive, how Cambridge developed its interests in Hebraica, and how a number of colourful figures brought about the connection between the two centres. Also shows the importance of the Genizah material for Jewish cultural history.