European first millennium BC studies have witnessed an increasing theoretical divide between the approaches adopted in different countries. Whilst topics such as ethnicity, identity, and agency have dominated many British studies, such themes have had less resonance in continental approaches. At the same time, British and Iberian first millennium BC studies have become increasingly divorced from research elsewhere in Europe. While such divergence reflects deep historical divisions in theory and methodology between European perspectives, it is an issue that has been largely ignored by scholars of the period. This volume addresses these issues by bringing together 33 papers by leading Bronze Age and Iron Age scholars from France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Ireland, North America, and the United Kingdom. Initial chapters from leading specialists introduce major themes (landscape studies, social organisation, historiography, dynamics of change, and identity), providing overviews on the history of approaches to these areas, personal perspectives on current problems, and possible future research directions. Subsequent chapters by key researchers develop these topics, presenting case studies and in-depth discussions of particular issues relating to the first millennium BC in the Atlantic realm of Western Europe.

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.

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.

Modern archaeology has amassed considerable evidence for the disposal of the dead through burials, cemeteries and other monuments. Drawing on this body of evidence, this book offers fresh insight into how early human societies conceived of death and the afterlife. The twenty-seven essays in this volume consider the rituals and responses to death in prehistoric societies across the world, from eastern Asia through Europe to the Americas, and from the very earliest times before developed religious beliefs offered scriptural answers to these questions. Compiled and written by leading prehistorians and archaeologists, this volume traces the emergence of death as a concept in early times, as well as a contributing factor to the formation of communities and social hierarchies, and sometimes the creation of divinities.

Warfare in Bronze Age Society takes a fresh look at warfare and its role in reshaping Bronze Age society. The Bronze Age represents the global emergence of a militarized society with a martial culture, materialized in a package of new efficient weapons that remained in use for millennia to come. Warfare became institutionalized and professionalized during the Bronze Age, and a new class of warriors made their appearance. Evidence for this development is reflected in the ostentatious display of weapons in burials and hoards, and in iconography, from rock art to palace frescoes. These new manifestations of martial culture constructed the warrior as a 'Hero' and warfare as 'Heroic'. The case studies, written by an international team of scholars, discuss these and other new aspects of Bronze Age warfare. Moreover, the essays show that warriors also facilitated mobility and innovation as new weapons would have quickly spread from the Mediterranean to northern Europe.

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.

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.

This book tracks the development of social complexity in Ireland from the late prehistoric period on into the Middle Ages. Using a range of methods and techniques, particularly data from settlement patterns, Blair Gibson demonstrates how Ireland evolved from constellations of chiefdoms into a political entity bearing the characteristics of a rudimentary state. This book argues that early medieval Ireland's highly complex political systems should be viewed as amalgams of chiefdoms with democratic procedures for choosing leaders rather than kingdoms. Gibson explores how these chiefdom confederacies eventually transformed into recognizable states over a period of 1,400 years.

This book is the first-ever monograph on clustering patterns in prehistoric settlements. It not only theoretically explains the difference between natural settlement communities and organizational forms for the first time, but also demonstrates the importance of understanding this difference in practical research. Based on extensive archaeological data from China and focusing on the evolution of prehistoric settlements and changing social relations, the book completely breaks with the globally popular research mode which is based on the assumption that settlement archaeology has nothing to do with prehistoric social organization. In terms of research methods, the book also abandons the globally popular method of measuring the grade and importance of settlements according to their size and the value of the unearthed objects. Instead, it focuses on understanding settlements' attributes from the combined perspective of the group and individuals. On the one hand, the book proves that the clustering patterns in prehistoric settlement sites reflect the organizational forms of the time; on the other, it demonstrates that historical research focusing on the organizational forms of prehistoric societies is closer to the historical reality and of more scientific value. The intended readership includes graduates and researchers in the field of archaeology, or those who are interested in cultural relics and prehistoric settlements.

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.

This book elaborates on the distinctive characteristics as well as the archaeological, historical and artistic value of Liangzhu pottery, welcoming readers to the wonderful world of Liangzhu by introducing them to its origin, type, design, decoration, evolution and processing technology. It also presents the types of pottery that people in Liangzhu used daily to eat, drink, and bury their dead. Thanks to a wealth of photos taken at the archaeological site, readers can admire the color, decorative patterns, types and shapes of unearthed pottery. The book vividly reveals the lifestyle, aesthetics and level of scientific-technical development in Liangzhu society 5000 years ago.

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 beginning of the Neolithic in Britain is a topic of perennial interest in archaeology, marking the end of a hunter-gatherer way of life with the introduction of domesticated plants and animals, pottery, polished stone tools, and a range of new kinds of monuments, including earthen long barrows and megalithic tombs. Every year, numerous new articles are published on different aspects of the topic, ranging from diet and subsistence economy to population movement, architecture, and seafaring. Thomas offers a treatment that synthesizes all of this material, presenting a coherent argument to explain the process of transition between the Mesolithic-Neolithic periods. Necessarily, the developments in Britain are put into the context of broader debates about the origins of agriculture in Europe, and the diversity of processes of change in different parts of the continent are explored. These are followed by a historiographic treatment of debates on the transition in Britain. Chapters cover the Mesolithic background, processes of contact and interaction, monumental architecture and timber halls, portable artefacts, and plants and animals. The concluding argument is that developments in the economy and material culture must be understood as being related to fundamental social transformations.

The Neolithic period is noted primarily for the change from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture, domestication and sedentism. This change has been studied in the past by archaeologists observing the movements of plants, animals and people. But has not been examined by looking at the domestic architecture of the time. Along with tracking the movement of sedentism, Neolithic houses are also able to show researchers the beginnings of cultural identity, group representation through the construction and decoration of these structures. Additionally as agriculture moved west and north in this era, the architecture and material culture shows this change and its significance. Chapters are arranged chronologically so that authors can address differences and similarities of their region to neighboring ones. To ensure continuity, authors have framed the chapters around the following considerations: construction materials and architectural characteristics; how houses facilitated or perpetua

Plog argues that there are many more factors that cause design or stylistic variations on prehistoric artifacts than have been previously acknowledged. Using data primarily from the American Southwest, he shows why the methods of design analysis that have been used are often inappropriate, and presents a new framework of explanation.

As the most important ancient cultural relics in prehistory, rock art have become a direct basis for the reproduction of human history and ideological process. Since the late 1970s, Yinshan rock art have been found in large quantities. In this study, 2842 Yinshan rock art are collected, sorted and classified systematically. The distribution characteristics of rock art in each area and the distribution and change rules of main rock art types are summarized. This book also places Yinshan rock art into the overall framework of Chinese rock art for analysis in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the overall characteristics and status of Yinshan rock art, and showcases researches on the chronology are.

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.

Cultural evolution, much like general evolution, works from the assumption that cultures are descendent from much earlier ancestors. Human culture manifests itself in forms ranging from the small bands of hunters, through intermediate scale complex hunter-gatherers and farmers, to the high density urban settlements and complex polities that characterize much of today s world.

The chapters in the volume examine the dynamic interaction between the micro- and macro-scales of cultural evolution, developing a theoretical approach to the archaeological record that has been termed evolutionary processual archaeology. The contributions in this volume integrate positive elements of both evolutionary and processualist schools of thought. The approach, as explicated by the contributors in this work, offers novel insights into topics that include the emergence, stasis, collapse and extinction of cultural patterns, and development of social inequalities. Consequently, these contributions form a stepping off point for a significant new range of cultural evolutionary studies."

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.

Archeologists have always considered the beginnings of Andean civilization from ca. 13,000 to 6,000 years ago to be important in terms of the appearance of domesticated plants and animals, social differentiation, and a sedentary lifestyle, but there is more to this period than just these developments. During this period, the spread of crop production and other technologies, kinship-based labor projects, mound-building, and population aggregation formed ever-changing conditions across the Andes. From Foraging to Farming in the Andes proposes a new and more complex model for understanding the transition from hunting and gathering to cultivation. It argues that such developments evolved regionally, were fluid and uneven, and were subject to reversal. This book develops these arguments from a large body of archaeological evidence, collected over 30 years in two valleys in northern Peru, and then places the valleys in the context of recent scholarship studying similar developments around world.

Despite the fundamental importance of the senses in human experience, archaeologists have, until recently, tended to neglect the abundant sensory dimensions of the material world they investigate, with the exception of the sense of sight, which has dominated archaeological theory and practice. In this book Robin Skeates establishes a well-defined methodology for an archaeology of the senses, produces a challenging new interpretative synthesis of Maltese prehistoric archaeology, and provides a rich archaeological case-study for the emergent interdisciplinary field of sensual culture studies. Using the combined methods of reflexivity, inventory, experimentation, thick description, and creative writing, Skeates explores the senses of sight, sound, smell and taste, touch, spatiality, the emotions, and their synaesthesthic interplay. Over space, three particular types of sensory domain are considered in detail within the wider context of the Maltese islandscape: dwelling places, monumental buildings, and the underworld. And over time the character, dynamism, and diversity of the successive sensual cultures of prehistoric Malta are defined.

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 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.