Ever since Roman tourists scratched graffiti on the pyramids and temples of Egypt over two thousand years ago, people have travelled far and wide seeking the great wonders of antiquity. In From Stonehenge to Samarkand, noted archaeologist and popular writer Brian Fagan offers an engaging historical account of our enduring love of ancient architecture-the irresistible impulse to visit strange lands in search of lost cities and forgotten monuments. Here is a marvellous history of archaeological tourism, with generous excerpts from the writings of the tourists themselves. Readers will find Herodotus describing the construction of Babylon; Edward Gibbon receiving inspiration for his seminal work while wandering through the ruins of the Forum in Rome; Gustave Flaubert watching the sunrise from atop the Pyramid of Cheops. We visit Easter Island with Pierre Loti, Machu Picchu with Hiram Bingham, Central Africa with David Livingstone. Fagan describes the early antiquarians, consumed with a passionate and omnivorous curiosity, pondering the mysteries of Stonehenge, but he also considers some of the less reputable figures, such as the Earl of Elgin, who sold large parts of the Parthenon to the British Museum. Finally, he discusses the changing nature of archaeological tourism, from the early romantic wanderings of the solitary figure, communing with the departed spirits of Druids or Mayans, to the cruise-ship excursions of modern times, where masses of tourists are hustled through ruins, barely aware of their surroundings. From the Holy Land to the Silk Road, the Yucatan to Angkor Wat, Fagan follows in the footsteps of the great archaeological travellers to retrieve their first written impressions in a book that will delight anyone fascinated with the landmarks of ancient civilization.

This book presents the first comprehensive description of the lithic assemblages from Qafzeh Cave, one of only two Middle Paleolithic sites in the Levant that has yielded multiple burials of early anatomically modern Homo sapiens (AMHs). The record from this region raises the question of possible long-term temporal overlap between early AMHs and Neanderthals. For this reason, Qafzeh has long been one of the pivotal sites in debates on the origins of AMHs and in attempts to compare and contrast the two species' adaptations and behavior.
Although the hominin fossils from the site were published years ago, until now the associated archaeological assemblages were incompletely described, often leading to conflicting interpretations. This monograph includes a thorough technological analysis of the lithic assemblages, incorporated in their geological and sedimentological contexts. This description serves as a springboard for regional comparisons as well as a more general discussion about Middle Paleolithic behavior, which is relevant to important and as yet unresolved questions on the origins of "modern" behavior patterns.
The volume includes a wide-ranging and up-to-date bibliography that provides the middle-range for discussing the ecological context and behavioral complexity of the Middle Paleolithic period, and ends with some thought-provoking conclusions about the dynamic human interations that existed in the region during this time.

This remarkable book is the most ambitious work on mythology since that of the renowned Mircea Eliade, who all but single-handedly invented the modern study of myth and religion. Focusing on the oldest available texts, buttressed by data from archeology, comparative linguistics and human population genetics, Michael Witzel reconstructs a single original African source for our collective myths, dating back some 100,000 years. Identifying features shared by this "Out of Africa" mythology and its northern Eurasian offshoots, Witzel suggests that these common myths--recounted by the communities of the "African Eve"--are the earliest evidence of ancient spirituality. Moreover these common features, Witzel shows, survive today in all major religions. Witzel's book is an intellectual hand grenade that will doubtless generate considerable excitement--and consternation--in the scholarly community. Indeed, everyone interested in mythology will want to grapple with Witzel's extraordinary hypothesis about the spirituality of our common ancestors, and to understand what it tells us about our modern cultures and the way they are linked at the deepest level.

Our understanding of the human past is very limited. The mute evidence from excavation - the dusty pot shards, fragments of bone, slight variations in soil colour and texture - encourages abstraction and detachment. Reconstruction art offers a different way into the past, bringing archaeology to life and at times influencing and informing archaeologist's ideas. At its best it delivers something vivid, vital and memorable. Illustrating the Past explores the history of reconstruction art and archaeology. It looks at how attitudes have swung from the scientific and technical to a freer more imaginative way of seeing and back again. Through the exploration of seven artists' work, the reader is shown how the artist's way of seeing illustrates the past and sometimes how it has changed the way the past is seen. Illustrators working in archaeology are often anonymous and yet the picture that summarises an excavation can be the idea that endures. As well as drawing on her specialist knowledge, Judith Dobie uses conversation and correspondence to build a picture of how these artists' personalities, interests and backgrounds influences their art. Case studies featuring working sketches demonstrate how reconstruction artists deliver understanding and can change the interpretation of a site. This book celebrates and acknowledges reconstruction art within the field of archaeology.

This work is a revealing study of the enigmatic Indus civilization and how a rich repertoire of archaeological tools is being used to probe its puzzles. The Indus Valley gave rise to one of the most sophisticated civilizations of the Bronze Age, an extraordinarily peaceful society that developed everything from a complex political organization to sanitary plumbing to a rich mythology. Then it vanished, forgotten by history for centuries, until remarkable finds in the 1920s led to its rediscovery. The Ancient Indus Valley: New Perspectives takes readers back to a civilization as complex as its contemporaries in Mesopotamia and Egypt, one that covered a far larger region, yet lasted a much briefer time (less than a millennium) and left far fewer traces. Researchers have tentatively reconstructed a model of Indus life based on limited material remains and despite its virtually indecipherable written record. This volume describes what is known about the roots of Indus civilization in farming culture, as well as its far-flung trading network, sophisticated crafts and architecture, and surprisingly war-free way of life. extraordinary methods that have brought it back to life.

The North American Arctic was one of the last regions on Earth to be settled by humans, due to its extreme climate, limited range of resources, and remoteness from populated areas. Despite these factors, it holds a complex and lengthy history relating to Inuit, Inupiat, Inuvialuit, Yup'ik and Aleut peoples and their ancestors. The artifacts, dwellings, and food remains of these ancient peoples are remarkably well-preserved due to cold temperatures and permafrost, allowing archaeologists to reconstruct their lifeways with great accuracy. Furthermore, the combination of modern Elders' traditional knowledge with the region's high resolution ethnographic record allows past peoples' lives to be reconstructed to a level simply not possible elsewhere. Combined, these factors yield an archaeological record of global significance-the Arctic provides ideal case studies relating to issues as diverse as the impacts of climate change on human societies, the complex process of interaction between indigenous peoples and Europeans, and the dynamic relationships between environment, economy, social organization, and ideology in hunter-gatherer societies. In the The Oxford Handbook of the Prehistoric Arctic, each arctic cultural tradition is described in detail, with up-to-date coverage of recent interpretations of all aspects of their lifeways. Additional chapters cover broad themes applicable to the full range of arctic cultures, such as trade, stone tool technology, ancient DNA research, and the relationship between archaeology and modern arctic communities. The resulting volume, written by the region's leading researchers, contains by far the most comprehensive coverage of arctic archaeology ever assembled.

How do you predict eclipses at Stonehenge? Why do the Carnac alignments follow geological fault lines? Was Avebury intentionally sited precisely one seventh of a circle down from the north pole? Why are so many stone circles egg-shaped or flattened? What is the meaning of the designs in ancient rock art? Do you really have to wait nineteen years to visit the remote site of Callanish? What were the ancients up to? These are our oldest buildings, our first messages, our earliest visual art. With eight authors, and packed with detailed information and exquisite rare illustrations, Megalith is a timeless and valuable sourcebook for anyone interested in prehistory.

How did small-scale societies in the past experience and respond to sea-level rise? What happened when their dwellings, hunting grounds and ancestral lands were lost under an advancing tide? This book asks these questions in relation to the hunter-gatherer inhabitants of a lost prehistoric land; a land that became entirely inundated and now lies beneath the North Sea. It seeks to understand how these people viewed and responded to their changing environment, suggesting that people were not struggling against nature, but simply getting on with life - with all its trials and hardships, satisfactions and pleasures, and with a multitude of choices available. At the same time, this loss of land - the loss of places and familiar locales where myths were created and identities formed - would have profoundly affected people's sense of being. This book moves beyond the static approach normally applied to environmental change in the past to capture its nuances. Through this, a richer and more complex story of past sea-level rise develops; a story that may just have resonance for us today.

The Neolithic of the Near East is a period of human development which saw fundamental changes in the nature of human society. It is traditionally studied for its development of domestication, agriculture, and growing social complexity. In this book Karina Croucher takes a new approach, focusing on the human body and investigating mortuary practices - the treatment and burial of the dead - to discover what these can reveal about the people of the Neolithic Near East. The remarkable evidence relating to mortuary practices and ritual behaviour from the Near Eastern Neolithic provides some of the most breath-taking archaeological evidence excavated from Neolithic contexts. The most enigmatic mortuary practices of the period produced the striking 'plastered skulls', faces modelled onto the crania of the deceased. Archaeological sites also contain evidence for many intriguing mortuary treatments, including decapitated burials and the fragmentation, circulation, curation, and reburial of human and animal remains and material culture. Drawing on recent excavations and earlier archive and published fieldwork, Croucher provides an overview and introduction to the period, presenting new interpretations of the archaeological evidence and in-depth analyses of case studies. The book explores themes such as ancestors, human-animal relationships, food, consumption and cannibalism, personhood, and gender. Offering a unique insight into changing attitudes towards the human body - both in life and during death - this book reveals the identities and experiences of the people of the Neolithic Near East through their interactions with their dead, with animals, and their new material worlds.

Peter Karavites presents a revisionist overview of Homeric scholarship, whose purpose is to bridge the gap between the "positivist" and "negativist" theories dominant in the greater part of the twentieth century. His investigation derives new insights from Homer's text and solves the age old question of the relationship between Homer and the Mycenaean age.

** WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 2021 ** 'Beautiful, evocative, authoritative.' Professor Brian Cox 'Important reading not just for anyone interested in these ancient cousins of ours, but also for anyone interested in humanity.' Yuval Noah Harari Kindred is the definitive guide to the Neanderthals. Since their discovery more than 160 years ago, Neanderthals have metamorphosed from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins. Rebecca Wragg Sykes uses her experience at the cutting-edge of Palaeolithic research to share our new understanding of Neanderthals, shoving aside cliches of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals them to be curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. Above all, they were successful survivors for more than 300,000 years, during times of massive climatic upheaval. Much of what defines us was also in Neanderthals, and their DNA is still inside us. Planning, co-operation, altruism, craftsmanship, aesthetic sense, imagination, perhaps even a desire for transcendence beyond mortality. Kindred does for Neanderthals what Sapiens did for us, revealing a deeper, more nuanced story where humanity itself is our ancient, shared inheritance.

Moundville, near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is one of the largest pre-Columbian mound sites in North America. Comprising twenty-nine earthen mounds that were once platforms for chiefly residences and temples, Moundville was a major political and religious center for the people living in its region and for the wider Mississippian world. A much-needed synthesis of the rapidly expanding archaeological work that has taken place in the region over the past two decades, this volume presents the results of multifaceted research and new excavations. Using models deeply rooted in local ethnohistory, it ties Moundville and its people more closely than before to the ethnography of native southerners and emphasizes the role of social memory and ritual practices both at the mound center and in the hinterland, providing an up-to-date and refreshingly nuanced interpretation of Mississippian culture.

Nearly 13,000 years ago millions of people and animals were wiped out, and the world plunged abruptly into a new ice-age. It was more than a thousand years before the climate, and mankind, recovered. The people of Gobekli Tepe in present-day southern Turkey, whose ancestors witnessed this catastrophe, built a megalithic monument formed of many hammer-shaped pillars decorated with symbols as a memorial to this terrible event. Before long, they also invented agriculture, and their new farming culture spread rapidly across the continent, signalling the arrival of civilisation. Before abandoning Gobekli Tepe thousands of years later, they covered it completely with rubble to preserve the greatest and most important story ever told for future generations. Archaeological excavations began at the site in 1994, and we are now able to read their story, more amazing than any Hollywood plot, again for the first time in over 10,000 years. It is a story of survival and resurgence that allows one of the world's greatest scientific puzzles - the meaning of ancient artworks, from the 40,000 year-old Lion-man figurine of Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany to the Great Sphinx of Giza - to be solved. We now know what happened to these people. It probably had happened many times before and since, and it could happen again, to us. The conventional view of prehistory is a sham; we have been duped by centuries of misguided scholarship. The world is actually a much more dangerous place than we have been led to believe. The old myths and legends, of cataclysm and conflagration, are surprisingly accurate. We know this because, at last, we can read an extremely ancient code assumed by scholars to be nothing more than depictions of wild animals. A code hiding in plain sight that reveals we have hardly changed in 40,000 years. A code that changes everything.

Most of the literature dealing with the origins of modern humans concentrates on the European sequence, where the Levant is referred to in passing as being problematic because it does not fit with the sequence of events documented in Europe. This is the first book that attempts to examine the issues specifically from the Levant, viewing it as central rather than peripheral to the problem. It also discusses in some depth the ramifications of possible interactions between the different hominids in the region.

Rather than viewing the transition from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic as the time at which fully modern adaptive systems came to the forefront, emphasis is placed on the Middle Paleolithic itself in order to test hypotheses that hominids of this period were culturally archaic. Through an analysis of the archaeological evidence, it is concluded that by at least 100,000 years ago people of the period, usually regarded as being somewhat less than human were, on the contrary, fully modern in terms of their behavioral and cultural systems. This conclusion applies to both the Neanderthals and their anatomically modern contemporaries. The author further concludes that the cultural and behavioral differences between the two types were minimal and that there was a potential for interaction and acculturation between them. The possibility is raised that the Near East is the region in which modern human cultural adaptation arose and then dispersed to other regions.

The Neolithic village known as Skara Brae was continuously occupied for about 300 to 400 years, before being abandoned around 2500 BC. Despite severe coastal erosion, eight houses and a workshop have survived largely intact, with their stone furniture still in place. This is the best-preserved settlement of its period in northern Europe, and thousands of artefacts were discovered during excavations of the site. Who lived here? How did they live? And why did they ultimately abandon the village? In this lively account, Dr David Clarke, who led major excavations at Orkney's Skara Brae, describes the details of the site and explores some of the enigmas posed by this extraordinary survival.

Think of a souvenir from a foreign trip, or an heirloom passed down the generations - distinctive individual artefacts allow us to think and act beyond the proximate, across both space and time. While this makes anecdotal sense, what does scholarship have to say about the role of artefacts in human thought? Surprisingly, material culture research tends also to focus on individual artefacts. But objects rarely stand independently from one another they are interconnected in complex constellations. This innovative volume asserts that it is such 'networks of objects' that instill objects with their power, enabling them to evoke distant times and places for both individuals and communities.
Using archaeological case studies from the Bronze Age of Greece throughout, Knappett develops a long-term, archaeological angle on the development of object networks in human societies. He explores the benefits such networks create for human interaction across scales, and the challenges faced by ancient societies in balancing these benefits against their costs. In objectifying and controlling artefacts in networks, human communities can lose track of the recalcitrant pull that artefacts exercise. Materials do not always do as they are asked. We never fully understand all their aspects. This we grasp in our everyday, unconscious working in the phenomenal world, but overlook in our network thinking. And this failure to attend to things and give them their due can lead to societal 'disorientation'.

The Hunter, the Stag, and the Mother of Animals offers an in-depth exploration of the changing traditions of belief in pre-Bronze and Bronze Age North Asia. Esther Jacobson-Tepfer centers her argument on a female deity and her evolution up until the early Iron Age, across a 2,000 year period. Through the art historical and archaeological evidence of the symbolic systems left behind, she traces the progression of the deity from an originating animal mother through her incarnation as the mother of animals, her late embodiment as the guardian of the road to the land of the dead, the transformation of her essential liminality into the structures of predation and, in the form of a predated stag, her subsequent destruction. In detailed commentaries on rock art structures and monuments, Jacobson-Tepfer reconstructs and explores how the deity's power was embedded in the Janus-faced concept of life/death: how, in all her forms, the deity occupied the threshold between the worlds of humans and ancestors, humans and animals. More broadly, this study details how her fate was directly related to the sociological evolution at the onset of the Iron age: the transition of the cultures in South Siberia and Mongolia from hunting-based settlement to horse-dependent semi-nomadism, and with that the rise of a heroic narrative tradition. Jacobson-Tepfer has had unparalleled access to regional data still unavailable in the West, and the collection of this data in English as well as her extensive collection of color photographs and drawings will fill a gaping hole in the literature and prove invaluable to both archaeologists and art historians.The Hunter, the Stag, and the Mother of Animals will surely become a standard reference for both disciplines as well as a guide to those interested in rock art and beliefs systems more generally.

At the heart of this book is the matter of how isotopic landscapes combined with data mining enriches insights on prehistoric migration and cultural transfer. Isotopic mapping is an indispensable tool for the assessment of mobility and trade in the past, but is limited by eco-geographic redundancies. An interdisciplinary research group focuses on the archaeological isotopic landscape of a reference region of outstanding importance, namely the transalpine migration route via the Brenner Pass which has been in use since the Mesolithic. Over the period of several cultural epochs, cremation was either the most common or exclusive burial custom practiced. For the first time, a systematic and large scale investigation of cremated remains was being conducted in the field of prehistoric migration research.87Sr/86Sr, 208Pb/204Pb, 207Pb/204Pb, 206Pb/204Pb, 208Pb/207Pb, 206Pb/207Pb and - if applicable - also 18O were measured in human and animal skeletal finds, an isotopic map was established, and innovative methods of data mining and similarity research have been applied to accomplish this novel approach to studying prehistoric migration and culture transfer. The book has interdisciplinary appeal and scholars working in bioarchaeology, physical anthropology and computer applications in life sciences will find it of particular interest.

This book, a guide and companion to the prehistoric archaeology of Greece, is designed for students, travelers, and all general readers interested in archaeology. Greece has perhaps the longest and richest archaeological record in Europe, and this book reviews what is known of Greece from the earliest inhabitants in the Stone Age to the end of the Bronze Age and the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations.
The book describes the prehistoric cultures of Greece in chronological order, and illustrates with 98 detailed drawings each culture's typical artifacts, architecture, burial customs, and art. Written in an informal and accessible style free of scientific jargon, the book can be used in the classroom or as a guide for the traveler, or read simply for pleasure by anyone with a curiosity about the earliest ages of this fascinating region.
Although intended for a wide audience, the book has a solid scientific foundation. The authors are professional archaeologists with more than 25 years of experience in the field and with a first-hand knowledge of the methods and results of contemporary research. There is no other book today that covers the same range of periods and subjects, making it essential reading for anyone interested in the early civilizations that shaped the Greek landscape, laid the foundations for Classical Greek civilization, and contributed in many ways to the formation of the modern Greek world.
The authors have been careful to address the many questions concerning prehistoric Greece that have been asked them by students and visitors to Greece through the years. The illustrations were created especially for this book, showing familiar artifacts and sites from a new perspective, and selecting others for illustration that rarely, if ever, appear in popular publications.

Humans at the End of the Ice Age chronicles and explores the significance of the variety of cultural responses to the global environmental changes at the last glacial-interglacial boundary. Contributions address the nature and consequences of the global climate changes accompanying the end of the Pleistocene epoch-detailing the nature, speed, and magnitude of the human adaptations that culminated in the development of food production in many parts of the world. The text is aided by vital maps, chronological tables, and charts.

The chapters in this edited volume present multi-disciplinary case studies of prehistoric archaeological sites located on now-submerged portions of the continental shelf. Each chapter represents an extension of the known prehistoric record beyond the modern shoreline. Case studies represent central themes of landscape change, climate change and societal development, using new technologies for mapping, monitoring and managing these sites.

The recent resurgence of academic interest in caves has demonstrated the central roles they played as arenas for ritual, ceremony and performance, and their importance within later prehistoric cosmologies. Caves represent very particular types of archaeological site and require novel approaches to their recording, interpretation and presentation. This is especially true in understanding the ritual use of caves, when the less tangible aspects of these environments would have been fundamental to the practices taking place within them. Between Worlds explores new theoretical frameworks that examine the agency of these enduring 'natural' places and the complex interplay between environment, taphonomy and human activity. It also showcases the application of innovative technologies, such as 3D laser-scanning and acoustic modelling, which provide new and exciting ways of capturing the experiential qualities of these enigmatic sites. Together, these developments offer more nuanced understandings of the role of caves in prehistoric ritual, and allow for more effective communication, management and presentation of cave archaeology to a wide range of audiences.

The topics of style and function within evolutionary archaeology have been the subject of great debate in the field of archaeology in general over the past two decades. Evolutionary archaeologists have a unique perspective on these concepts-one that has sometimes been misunderstood by archaeologists working within other theoretical perspectives.

The dichotomy between style and function was first formulated in the late 1970s by Robert Dunnell and remains axiomatic within the theoretical perspective of evolutionary archaeology. The original definitions of style and function were grounded in biological evolutionary concepts regarding neutral variation versus variation that is subject to natural selection. Several chapters expand upon these concepts, and explore how Darwinian evolutionary theory may be used to understand the archaeological record. Other chapters demonstrate this application through empirical case studies. Dunnell provides a foreword introducing and re-examining his original thesis.

This volume is the only text devoted to the topic of style and function within the literature of evolutionary archaeology. It provides not only theoretical discussions and augmentation, but also significant historical background regarding the development of the style/function distinction within archaeology. Moreover, it presents several case studies that provide examples of how evolutionary style and function may be applied to the prehistoric record.