In Breaking the Surface, Doug Bailey offers a radical alternative for understanding Neolithic houses, providing much-needed insight not just into prehistoric practice, but into another way of doing archaeology. Using his years of fieldwork experience excavating the early Neolithic pit-houses of southeastern Europe, Bailey exposes and elucidates a previously under-theorized aspect of prehistoric pit construction: the actions and consequences of digging defined as breaking the surface of the ground. Breaking the Surface works through the consequences of this redefinition in order to redirect scholarship on the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in Neolithic Europe, offering detailed critiques of current interpretations of these earliest European architectural constructions. The work of the book is performed by juxtaposing richly detailed discussions of archaeological sites (Etton and The Wilsford Shaft in the UK, and Magura in Romania), with the work of three artists-who-cut (Ron Athey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana), with deep and detailed examinations of the philosophy of holes, the perceptual psychology of shapes, and the linguistic anthropology of cutting and breaking words, as well as with cultural diversity in framing spatial reference and through an examination of pre-modern ungrounded ways of living. Breaking the Surface is as much a creative act on its own - in its mixture of work from disparate periods and regions, its use of radical text interruption, and its juxtaposition of text and imagery - as it is an interpretive statement about prehistoric architecture. Unflinching and exhilarating, it is a major development in the growing subdiscipline of art/archaeology.

Many undergraduates struggle to fully understand the size of the earth and the diverse environments to which human beings have successfully adapted. An Atlas of Human Prehistory gives students an appreciation for the sheer size of the earth and the diverse geographies through which humanity and our ancestors have migrated and settled over millions of years. The book's unique formatting allows students to read a stand-alone topical essay on the left-hand page, which refers to the accompanying detailed maps and diagrams on the right-hand page. The maps and diagrams provide additional details and enable students to "see" human adaptation across time and space. This fresh, engaging approach covers hominin evolution, important fossil sites, early dispersal around the world, biocultural and subsistence adaptations, and the establishment of ancient civilizations. An outstanding blend of words and visuals, An Atlas of Human Prehistory gives readers excellent graphical representations of the chief lessons of our shared past and a greater understanding of the pace of movement across time. It is an excellent supplement for courses in archaeology, ancient history, human geography, and physical anthropology.

This book is an analysis of a collection of artefacts from the Neolithic period of the southern Levant. Although they have traditionally been identified as human images, the relationship of some of them to naturalistic human anatomy is tenuous, and, drawing on comparative examples from other periods and locations, Estelle Orrelle interprets them as images of Gods. Situating the artefacts in the context of the Neolithic transition, she shows how a Darwinian symbolic origins theory can explain the emergence of this iconography; that it lies in ancient sexual selection strategies, as power relations changed from an original social contract underpinned by female ritual power, to a new social contract driven by competing male elites."