Lying midway between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, the lost city of Ur became the subject of great interest when excavations began in 1922. This book recounts the findings of the joint operation between the University Museum of Pennsylvania and the British Museum.

Space and Time in Mediterranean Prehistory addresses these two concepts as interrelated, rather than as separate categories, and as a means for understanding past social relations at different scales. The need for this volume was realised through four main observations: the ever growing interest in space and spatiality across the social sciences; the comparative theoretical and methodological neglect of time and temporality; the lack in the existing literature of an explicit and balanced focus on both space and time; and the large amount of new information coming from prehistoric Mediterranean. It focuses on the active and interactive role of space and time in the production of any social environment, drawing equally on contemporary theory and on case-studies from Mediterranean prehistory. Space and Time in Mediterranean Prehistory seeks to break down the space-time continuum, often assumed rather than inferred, into space-time units and to uncover the varying and variable interrelations of space and time in prehistoric societies across the Mediterranean. The volume is a response to the dissatisfaction with traditional views of space and time in prehistory and revisits these concepts to develop a timely integrative conceptual and analytical framework for the study of space and time in archaeology.

* Provides a short and simple, but entertaining, account of the prehistoric past from human origins to today from a global perspective in contrast to the current lengthy textbooks on the subject * Shows how such contemporary issues such as biological and cultural diversity, gender, and climate change have deep roots in the remote past and thus resonates with the concerns of readers * Short and low cost introductory text for students studying the subject for the first time from two experienced textbook writers

The importance of cultural contacts in the East Mediterranean has long been recognized and is the focus of ongoing international research. Fieldwork in the Aegean, Egypt, Cyprus, and the Levant continues to add to our understanding of the nature of this contact and its social and economic significance, particularly to the cultures of the Aegean. Despite sophisticated discussion of the archaeological evidence, in particular on the part of Aegean and Mediterranean archaeologists, there has been little systematic attempt to incorporate anthropological perspectives on materiality and exchange into archaeological narratives of this material. This book addresses that gap and integrates anthropological discourse on contact, examining exchange systems, the gift, notions of geographical distance and power, colonization, and hybridization. Furthermore, it develops a social narrative of culture contact in the Mediterranean context, illustrating the reasons communities chose to engage in international exchange, and how this impacted the construction of identities throughout the region. While traditional archaeologies in the East Mediterranean have tended to be reductive in their approach to material culture and how it was produced, used, and exchanged, this book reviews current research on material culture, focusing on issues such as the biography of objects, inalienable possessions, and hybridization - exploring how these issues can further illuminate the material world of the communities of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

Islands in Time explores the ecological and cultural development of prehistoric island societies. It considers the prehistory of the Mediterranean and offers an explanation of the effects of isolation on the development of human communities. Evidence is drawn from a broad range of Mediterranean islands including Cyprus, Crete and the Cyclades, Malta, Lipari, Corsica and Sardinia.

Richard B Seager excavated the Minoan cemetery on Pseira, a small island off the northeast coast of Crete, in 1907, although this work was never published. More recently, the Temple University excavations (1985-1994) under the direction of Philip P Betancourt and Costis Davaras conducted an intensive surface survey of the cemetery area, cleaned and drew plans of all the visible tombs, and excavated tombs that had not been previously investigated. The results of these new excavations are published in two volumes. This volume, Pseira VI, covers the methodology that was employed in the investigation, the topography of the cemetery area, details of Seager's campaign, the ceramic petrography for the cemetery pottery, and the results of the intensive surface survey. The survey showed that the cemetery was first used in the Neolithic period, and that it was abandoned in Middle Minoan II, before the expansion of the nearby town in the Late Minoan I period. It also demonstrated that the cemetery was larger than the area suggested by Seager, and that the funerary customs included burial in jars, even though no examples of this burial type have been excavated.

Mayan culture is known for its spectacular art, impressive architecture, and sophisticated mathematical and astronomical systems, the archaeological study of which has undergone a revolution during the past twenty years. There are now more than 5,000 different Maya archaeological sites and those in Mexico's Yucatan Pensinsula are among the most visited and studied as they include the spectacular sites of Chichen Itza and Uxmal. The Ancient Maya of Mexico presents the results of these new and important archaeological, epigraphic, and art historical studies in the Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo to a broad audience of scholars and students. The volume consists of original and timely contributions by experts whose presentations are intended to be lively and approachable so as to be accessible and of particular use to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to more advanced scholars. The organization of the volume is chronological (from the Middle Preclassic to colonial and modern periods), so that readers will understand how new data and interpretations have changed the whole of our understanding of Maya history.

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'.

It may be surprising to learn that this book is the first ever survey of the Atlantic Iron Age: this tradition is cited in archaeology frequently enough to seem firmly established, yet has never been clearly defined.With this book, Jon Henderson provides an important and much-needed exploration of the archaeology of western areas of Britain, Ireland, France and Spain to consider how far Atlantic Iron Age communities were in contact with each other. By examining the evidence for settlement and maritime trade, as well as aspects of the material culture of each area, Henderson identifies distinct Atlantic social identities through time. He also pinpoints areas of similarity: the possibility of cultural 'cross-pollination' caused by maritime links and to what extent these contacts influenced and altered the distinctive character of local communities. A major theme running through the book is the role of the Atlantic seaboard itself and what impact this unique environment had on the ways Atlantic communities perceived themselves and their place in the world. As a history of these communities unfolds, a general archaeological Atlantic identity breaks down into a range of regional identities which compare interestingly with each other and with traditional models of Celtic identity. Bringing together the Iron Age settlement evidence for the Atlantic regions in one place for the first time, this excellent and original book is certain to establish itself as the definitive study of the Atlantic Iron Age.

A long-overdue advancement in ceramic studies, this volume sheds new light on the adoption and dispersal of pottery by non-agricultural societies of prehistoric Eurasia. Major contributions from Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia make this a truly international work that brings together different theories and material for the first time. Researchers and scholars studying the origins and dispersal of pottery, the prehistoric peoples or Eurasia, and flow of ancient technologies will all benefit from this book.

Early Human Behaviour in a Global Context will be of use to students and professionals who are interested in prehistory, Paleolithic archaeology, and paleoanthropology. Those interested in our ancestors and their place in the natural world will also benefit from the information presented in this book. Chapters focus on: * the nature of archaeological evidence * stone tool technology * subsistence practices * settlement distributions.

This book presents ten papers about prehistoric Aegean people, technologies, and social networks. The geographical, chronological and methodological approaches employed in all papers weld them together into a single research theme. These papers demonstrate the value and the beauty of employing, to a more or lesser degree, the combined methodologies of cha ne op ratoire (operational chain) and cross-craft interaction. It is the theoretical underpinnings, though, that move this volume well beyond Aegean boundaries and open it up to wider anthropological and archaeological interests in pre-industrial technologies and their linked-in social networks.

This dynamic collaboration resulted in what we hoped for; opening windows on people 's past interactions with each other and material worlds, while our contemporary lives intertwined with cross-fertilized ideas, as the unique outcome of our efforts.

This volume brings together the expertise of ten people and presents a holistic approach to materials and technology studies on ceramics, orality, stone tools, figurines, music, gender issues, weights, apiculture, leftovers, and warfare. We believe that having teamed up on a search for such past social networks through multiple technologies, we have brought this past somewhat closer to our present.

Australia's human prehistory through more than 40,000 years is the challenging theme of this masterly survey. John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga bring together the discoveries and often controversial interpretations of six decades of archaeological research to reveal that across this island continent, in the face of contrasting environments and changing climates, human responses produced many cultures, languages and life styles. The Old World is usually credited with the origins of art and spirituality. Recent discoveries, however, prove that symbolic rock art and complex burial rites also existed in Australia at challengingly early times. The authors evaluate the dating evidence upon which Australia's human story before 1788 is reconstructed. They review diverse topics, such as the controversy about the time people first arrived on the continent's northern coast, the extinction of marsupial megafauna and the diversity of Aboriginal rock art. Prehistory of Australia explains why Aboriginal Australia is recognised today for its significance in global prehistory and why so many of its archaeological places have merited World Heritage listing.

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.

Humans are unique in that they expend considerable effort and ingenuity in disposing of the dead. Some of the recognisable ways we do this are visible in the Palaeolithic archaeology of the Ice Age. The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial takes a novel approach to the long-term development of human mortuary activity ? the various ways we deal with the dead and with dead bodies. It is the first comprehensive survey of Palaeolithic mortuary activity in the English language.

Observations in the modern world as to how chimpanzees behave towards their dead allow us to identify ?core? areas of behaviour towards the dead that probably have very deep evolutionary antiquity. From that point, the palaeontological and archaeological records of the Pliocene and Pleistocene are surveyed. The core chapters of the book survey the mortuary activities of early hominins, archaic members of the genus Homo, early Homo sapiens, the Neanderthals, the Early and Mid Upper Palaeolithic, and the Late Upper Palaeolithic world.

Burial is a striking component of Palaeolithic mortuary activity, although existing examples are odd and this probably does not reflect what modern societies believe burial to be, and modern ways of thinking of the dead probably arose only at the very end of the Pleistocene. When did symbolic aspects of mortuary ritual evolve? When did the dead themselves become symbols? In discussing such questions, The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial offers an engaging contribution to the debate on modern human origins. It is illustrated throughout, includes up-to-date examples from the Lower to Late Upper Palaeolithic, including information hitherto unpublished.

Humans are unique in that they expend considerable effort and ingenuity in disposing of the dead. Some of the recognisable ways we do this are visible in the Palaeolithic archaeology of the Ice Age. The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial takes a novel approach to the long-term development of human mortuary activity -- the various ways we deal with the dead and with dead bodies. It is the first comprehensive survey of Palaeolithic mortuary activity in the English language. Observations in the modern world as to how chimpanzees behave towards their dead allow us to identify core' areas of behaviour towards the dead that probably have very deep evolutionary antiquity. From that point, the palaeontological and archaeological records of the Pliocene and Pleistocene are surveyed. The core chapters of the book survey the mortuary activities of early hominins, archaic members of the genus Homo, early Homo sapiens, the Neanderthals, the Early and Mid Upper Palaeolithic, and the Late Upper Palaeolithic world. Burial is a striking component of Palaeolithic mortuary activity, although existing examples are odd and this probably does not reflect what modern societies believe burial to be, and modern ways of thinking of the dead probably arose only at the very end of the Pleistocene. When did symbolic aspects of mortuary ritual evolve? When did the dead themselves become symbols? In discussing such questions, The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial offers an engaging contribution to the debate on modern human origins. It is illustrated throughout, includes up-to-date examples from the Lower to Late Upper Palaeolithic, including information hitherto unpublished.

Britain has been inhabited by humans for over half a million years, during which time there were a great many changes in lifestyles and in the surrounding landscape. This book, now in its second edition, examines the development of human societies in Britain from earliest times to the Roman conquest of AD 43, as revealed by archaeological evidence. Special attention is given to six themes which are traced through prehistory: subsistence, technology, ritual, trade, society, and population.

Prehistoric Britain begins by introducing the background to prehistoric studies in Britain, presenting it in terms of the development of interest in the subject and the changes wrought by new techniques such as radiocarbon dating, and new theories, such as the emphasis on social archaeology. The central sections trace the development of society from the hunter-gatherer groups of the last Ice Age, through the adoption of farming, the introduction of metalworking, and on to the rise of highly organized societies living on the fringes of the mighty Roman Empire in the 1st century AD. Throughout, emphasis is given to documenting and explaining changes within these prehistoric communities, and to exploring the regional variations found in Britain. In this way the wealth of evidence that can be seen in the countryside and in our museums is placed firmly in its proper context. It concludes with a review of the effects of prehistoric communities on life today.

With over 120 illustrations, this is a unique review of Britain's ancient past as revealed by modern archaeology. The revisions and updates to Prehistoric Britain ensure that this will continue to be the most comprehensive and authoritative account of British prehistory for those students and interested readers studying the subject.

A long-overdue advancement in ceramic studies, this volume sheds new light on the adoption and dispersal of pottery by non-agricultural societies of prehistoric Eurasia. Major contributions from Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia make this a truly international work that brings together different theories and material for the first time. Researchers and scholars studying the origins and dispersal of pottery, the prehistoric peoples or Eurasia, and flow of ancient technologies will all benefit from this book.

This edited book aims to provide a new perspective on the identification and interpretation of short-term occupations in Paleolithic Archaeology. The volume includes contributions with a particular focus on the definition and identification of short-term occupations in Paleolithic contexts, aiming to improve our current knowledge on the topic, both methodologically and interpretatively. The set of chapters coming from a broad spectrum of geographies and chronologies will contribute to the debate on the definition of short-term occupations but also to a better understanding on how past hunter-gatherers communities adapted and moved in different environmental contexts across time. The in-depth examinations of short-term occupations in different chronologies and environments will shed light on an aspect of the behavioral trajectories of the human species in the management of the territory.

Rob Sands explores the evidence left by the use of axes on wooden beams and tools found in waterlogged archaeological sites dating over 2000 years old. A toolmark can not only inform the archaeologist about the implement used, but also provides evidence of building and artifact construction methods and labor patterns. Examples come from the author's work at Oakbank Crannog in Scotland. The volume examines the methods of recording, techniques of analysis and implications of this unusual form of evidence.

The Neanderthal is among the most mysterious relatives of Homo sapiens: Was he a dull, club-swinging muscleman, or a being with developed social behaviour and the ability to speak, to plan precisely, and even to develop views on the afterlife?

For many, the Neanderthals are an example of primitive humans, but new discoveries suggest that this image needs to be revised. Half a million years ago in Ice Age Europe, there emerged people who managed to cope well with the difficult climate Neanderthal Man. They formed an organized society, hunted Mammoths, and could make fire. They were able to pass on knowledge; they cared for the old and the handicapped, burying their dead, and placing gifts on their graves. Yet, they became extinct, despite their cultural abilities.

This richly illustrated book, written for general audiences, provides a competent look at the history, living conditions, and culture of the Neanderthal.

The Neanderthal is among the most mysterious relatives of Homo sapiens: Was he a dull, club-swinging muscleman, or a being with developed social behaviour and the ability to speak, to plan precisely, and even to develop views on the afterlife?

For many, the Neanderthals are an example of primitive humans, but new discoveries suggest that this image needs to be revised. Half a million years ago in Ice Age Europe, there emerged people who managed to cope well with the difficult climate a " Neanderthal Man. They formed an organized society, hunted Mammoths, and could make fire. They were able to pass on knowledge; they cared for the old and the handicapped, burying their dead, and placing gifts on their graves. Yet, they became extinct, despite their cultural abilities.

This richly illustrated book, written for general audiences, provides a competent look at the history, living conditions, and culture of the Neanderthal.

There is a little Neanderthal in all of us. Although they have been extinct for 40,000 years, our genetic inheritance means that they are not entirely gone. Since the publication of the first Neanderthal genome in 2010, our understanding of the Neanderthals - and our connection to them - has changed dramatically. Once stereotyped as simple and brutish, recent discoveries by archaeologists and geneticists have painted a different picture of Neanderthals, and one more familiar to us: they buried their dead, cared for the sick, and even painted cave walls. We can now delve into their DNA to trace their evolution in Europe and movements across Asia, and piece together how they lived and died in amazing detail. This fully updated edition presents cutting-edge research on our fascinating hominin relatives: their interbreeding with humans and other species including the recently discovered Denisovans, their social behaviours such as smiling to indicate friendliness, and the genes they have passed down to us that could be affecting our health. By confronting our differences and similarities to the Neanderthals, this book addresses the biggest question of all: what it means to be human.

The Evolution of Paleolithic Technologies provides a novel perspective on long-term trajectories of evolutionary change in Paleolithic tools and tool-makers. Members of the human lineage have been producing stone tools for more than 3 million years. These artefacts provide key evidence for important evolutionary developments in hominin behaviour and cognition. Avoiding conventional approaches based on progressive stages of development, this book instead examines global trends in six separate dimensions of technological behaviour between 2.6 million and 10,000 years ago. Combining these independent trends results in both a broader and a more finely punctuated perspective on key intervals of change in hominin behaviour. To draw this picture together, the concluding section explores behavioural, cognitive, and demographic implications of developments in material culture and technological procedures at seven key intervals during the Pleistocene. Researchers interested in Paleolithic archaeology will find this book invaluable. It will also be of interest to archaeologists researching stone tool technology and to students of human evolution and behavioural change in prehistory.