The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs, the first of its kind, provides a current overview of recent research on the Aztec empire, the best documented prehispanic society in the Americas. Chapters span from the establishment of Aztec city-states to the encounter with the Spanish empire and the Colonial period that shaped the modern world. Articles in the Handbook take up new research trends and methodologies and current debates. The Handbook articles are divided into seven parts. Part I, Archaeology of the Aztecs, introduces the Aztecs, as well as Aztec studies today, including the recent practice of archaeology, ethnohistory, museum studies, and conservation. The articles in Part II, Historical Change, provide a long-term view of the Aztecs starting with important predecessors, the development of Aztec city-states and imperialism, and ending with a discussion of the encounter of the Aztec and Spanish empires. Articles also discuss Aztec notions of history, writing, and time. Part III, Landscapes and Places, describes the Aztec world in terms of its geography, ecology, and demography at varying scales from households to cities. Part IV, Economic and Social Relations in the Aztec Empire, discusses the ethnic complexity of the Aztec world and social and economic relations that have been a major focus of archaeology. Articles in Part V, Aztec Provinces, Friends, and Foes, focuses on the Aztec's dynamic relations with distant provinces, and empires and groups that resisted conquest, and even allied with the Spanish to overthrow the Aztec king. This is followed by Part VI, Ritual, Belief, and Religion, which examines the different beliefs and rituals that formed Aztec religion and their worldview, as well as the material culture of religious practice. The final section of the volume, Aztecs after the Conquest, carries the Aztecs through the post-conquest period, an increasingly important area of archaeological work, and considers the place of the Aztecs in the modern world.

Students and travelers to Sicily will welcome this inviting introduction to the archaeology of the Mediterranean's largest island. In the first English-language book on prehistoric Sicily in over forty years, Robert Leighton explores the region's rich archaeological record. He charts the development of Sicily's early cultures from the Palaeolithic onward, concluding with an account of the indigenous society at the time of Greek and Phoenician settlement in the 8th century B.C.

Each chapter in this generously illustrated volume highlights the principal developments of a major chronological period and then addresses social and economic themes. Among the topics discussed are settlement patterns and structures; local autonomy; external influences; cultural expression; and contacts with Italy, nearby satellite islands, and the Mycenaean world. Informed by recent fieldwork and scholarship, this book is a necessary guide to the current state of knowledge on prehistoric Sicily.

Study addressing the idea of gradual population increase focussing on northern England, and also examining issues such as resource exploitation and settlement patterns. The author models the changing environment of northern England using GIS and discusses possible human adaptations to these changes and the implications for the concept of gradual population increase.

This fascicle completes the presentation of the ceramic remains from the Franchthi Cave excavations.

Subtitled, 'decision-making and gender roles in subsistence and settlement strategies', this study questions the central place of big game-hunting in the interpretation of Paleoindian archaeology. It tries to redress the balance by examining subsistence and settlement strategies from the perspective of gender.

Twenty-eight essays by a very distinguished collection of contributors who were invited to speak at a conference in Newcastle in 1993 on a number of themes in terms of evidence for cave and rockshelter use in their areas of the world. The contributors include: Lawrence Straus ( Some human uses of caves and rockshelters ); Pavel Dolukhanov ( Cave vs open-air settlement in the European Upper Palaeolithic ); Marcel Otte ( The Belgian Palaeolithic ); Ann Sieveking ( Cave as context in Palaeolithic art ); Paul Bahn ( Pleistocene cave art ); Erwin Cziesla ( The Weidental cave ); Manuel Gonzalez Morales ( Cantabrian Spain ); Keith Branigan ( Caves as workshops ); Vassily Lubin ( The Caucasus ); Andrea Stone ( Pre-Columbian cave utilization in the Maya area ); Josephine Flood ( Aboriginal use of caves ); Penny Dransart ( Northern Chile ).

Collection of quirky papers from the second Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Catastrophists' Convention held in Cambridge in 1997. The papers bring together thoughts from a wide range of disciplines - physics, astronomy, archaeology, geology, and anthropology - and from around the world. Amos Nur (Stanford University) explains how the collapse of Bronze Age civilisation can be related to a 50-year-long earthquake storm; Gunnar Heinsohn (Universitat Bremen) argues that Bronze Age ritual and blood sacrifice was a response to living in catastrophic times; and Mark E. Bailey (Armagh Observatory) presents a review of recent findings and historical implications in the study of Near-Earth Objects.

Only rarely in Europe do the surface remains of Neolithic flint mines remain so dramatically for all to see as those located along the South Downs and in the Breckland of England. Even within England they represent a diminishing resource and only ten sites have been recorded with any certainty. As examples of our earliest industrial heritage they represent archaeological sites of the first importance and have a special part to play in the history of technology. However, despite a lengthy history of archaeological investigation, they have rarely been considered nationally as a class of monument. Although some sites such as Grime's Graves are well known through excavation campaigns, others are known only through obscure articles and unpublished archival material. Many of those that survive as earthworks or cropmarks have never been surveyed previously or accurately planned. Consequently, English Heritage has compiled detailed plans of the surface areas of all of the known flint mines and investigated the sites of other potential examples. Using a combination of field survey, aerial photography and archival research, this volume looks at each site in its own right as a major and important complex and - for the first time - offers a synthesis of the evidence to date.

Students and travelers to Sicily will welcome this inviting introduction to the archaeology of the Mediterranean's largest island. In the first English-language book on prehistoric Sicily in over forty years, Robert Leighton explores the region's rich archaeological record. He charts the development of Sicily's early cultures from the Palaeolithic onward, concluding with an account of the indigenous society at the time of Greek and Phoenician settlement in the 8th century B.C.

Each chapter in this generously illustrated volume highlights the principal developments of a major chronological period and then addresses social and economic themes. Among the topics discussed are settlement patterns and structures; local autonomy; external influences; cultural expression; and contacts with Italy, nearby satellite islands, and the Mycenaean world. Informed by recent fieldwork and scholarship, this book is a necessary guide to the current state of knowledge on prehistoric Sicily.

This study's main aim is to summarise the available site and ceramic evidence upon which understanding of the Manx Neolithic currently rests, augmented with discussion of the location and topography of the island and the history of Manx research studies.

The Great New Wilderness Debate is an expansive, wide-ranging collection that addresses the pivotal environmental issues of the modern era. This eclectic volume on the varied constructions of "wilderness" reveals the recent controversies that surround those conceptions, and the gulf between those who argue for wilderness "preservation" and those who argue for "wise use." J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson have selected thirty-nine essays that provide historical context, range broadly across the issues, and set forth the positions of the debate. Beginning with such well-known authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, the collection moves forward to the contemporary debate and presents seminal works by a number of the most distinguished scholars in environmental history and environmental philosophy. The Great New Wilderness Debate also includes essays by conservation biologists, cultural geographers, environmental activists, and contemporary writers on the environment.

Pictorial reconstructions of ancient human ancestors have twin purposes: to make sense of shared ancestry and to bring prehistory to life. Stephanie Moser analyzes the close relationship between representations of the past and theories about human evolution, showing how this relationship existed even before a scientific understanding of human origins developed. How did mythological, religious, and historically inspired visions of the past, in existence for centuries, shape this understanding? Moser treats images as primary documents, and her book is lavishly illustrated with engravings, paintings, photographs, and reconstructions. In surveying the iconography of prehistory, Moser explores visions of human creation from their origins in classical, early Christian, and medieval periods through traditions of representation initiated in the Renaissance. She looks closely at the first scientific reconstructions of the nineteenth century, which dramatized and made comprehensible the Darwinian theory of human descent from apes. She considers, as well, the impact of reconstructions on popular literature in Europe and North America, showing that early visualizations of prehistory retained a firm hold on the imagination—a hold that archaeologists and anthropologists have found difficult to shake.

True to its initial aims, the latest volume of the Journal of Greek Archaeology runs the whole chronological range of Greek Archaeology, while including every kind of material culture. Papers include an overview of a major project investigating Palaeolithic environments, human settlement and other activities in the Ionian Islands. Neolithic industries in large stone artefacts link two papers on the human palaeobiology of populations in the Mycenaean and then Iron Age eras. Two papers on Greeks abroad enlighten us on the nature of Greek presence and impact on indigenous society (and vice versa) in Archaic and Classical Egypt and Southern France. In a totally contrasted fashion, a long article on the fate of Southern Greek cities under Rome offers a very negative but definitively researched analysis on their radical decline. Architecture makes two appearances for the periods that follow, firstly for the towns of Crete under Venetian then Ottoman rule, secondly in the form of Landscape Architecture - the physical infrastructure of rural land use in the unusual landscape of the Mani. Finally, to show that Greek Archaeology knows no boundaries when it comes to material culture, there is a piece on a 21st century fashion designer who has used ancient art to enrich his designs. Alongside these papers, there are articles challenging the accepted view of the Late Bronze 'Sea Peoples', shedding welcome light on the neglected later prehistory and protohistory of Epiros, on Greek terracotta figurines and their links to sacrificial offerings, and finally providing a long-term study of the walls of Athens over almost two-and-a-half millennia. The full complement of reviews for almost every period of the Greek Past are also full of fascinating insights and updates.

The simple question "How did the Maya come up with a calendar that had only 260 days?" led Vincent Malmstrom to discover an unexpected "hearth" of Mesoamerican culture. In this boldly revisionist book, he sets forth his challenging, new view of the origin and diffusion of Mesoamerican calendrical systems--the intellectual achievement that gave rise to Mesoamerican civilization and culture.

Malmstrom posits that the 260-day calendar marked the interval between passages of the sun at its zenith over Izapa, an ancient ceremonial center in the Soconusco region of Mexico's Pacific coastal plain. He goes on to show how the calendar developed by the Zoque people of the region in the fourteenth century B.C. gradually diffused through Mesoamerica into the so-called "Olmec metropolitan area" of the Gulf coast and beyond to the Maya in the east and to the plateau of Mexico in the west.

These findings challenge our previous understanding of the origin and diffusion of Mesoamerican civilization. Sure to provoke lively debate in many quarters, this book will be important reading for all students of ancient Mesoamerica--anthropologists, archaeologists, archaeoastronomers, geographers, and the growing public fascinated by all things Maya.

Subtitled the reconstruction of the social organization of a mesolithic culture in Northern Europe', this book is based on a structural analysis of the Ulkestrup Huts in Central Zealand. The distribution patterns of microliths and arrangement of hearths, bark floors and other patterned evidence are compared with all the available evidence from northern Europe to suggest some general patterns and possible future directions for research.

Subtitled a critical review of some archaeological and craniological concepts', this is an innovative and controversial study of the Beaker Culture problem; diffusion or migration into Britain. The first part of the book critically reviews previous work on the problem and suggests that the processualist revolt against migrational explanations might have been an error in this case. The second part presents an original study of English Neolithic and Bronze Age crania which, although inconclusive, moves a step nearer to a migrationist explanatory framework.

A study of the development of settlements in the Hebrides in the period from 1000 BC to 800 AD. Armit proposes a new classification of sites to take account of their particular characteristics; he reasses older excavations in the light of the new classification and comes up with a coherent sequence of settlement and architectural development. He puts forward models for the interpretation of settlement changes in the light of changes in culture and social relationships between the islands and emergent Scotland. Based on an Edinburgh doctoral thesis.

This fascicle is the first of two detailed reports on the more than one million pieces of pottery (and three complete vessels) recovered from Franchthi Cave and Paralia. These accounts will significantly increase our understanding of Neolithic pottery and Neolithic society in southern Greece. The enormous amount of pottery and the detailed stratigraphic sequences at Franchthi have enabled Vitelli to propose finer chronological distinctions than ever before possible and to talk meaningfully about the people who made and used that pottery. Vitelli's report describes a new classification system she developed for Aegean Neolithic ceramics that makes it possible to address questions about social and economic organization in Neolithic Greece. Part I of this volume explains the new classification system developed by Vitelli and its rationale, describes the analyses performed on the sherds, and describes and explains the establishing of ceramic phases within the stratigraphic record. Part II discusses in turn each of the ceramic subphases for the period covered by this volume (Early and Middle Neolithic). of pottery found at the site. Part IV begins the task of assessing the implications of the analyses reported here.

Thurrock's Deeper Past: A Confluence of Time' looks at the evidence for human activity in Thurrock and this part of the Thames estuary since the last Ice Age, and how the river crossing point here has been of great importance to the development of human settlement and trade in the British Isles. It is a book about the archaeology of Thurrock. It takes in all periods and most of the sites which have been excavated in the borough of Thurrock over the last sixty or more years. The account opens at a time when Britain is still joined to the continent and the inhabitants are using flint tools and weapons. The author follows through the impact of the succeeding ages on the locality: the melting of the ice, the Neolithic period bringing the farming of crops and stockholding, the first appearance of worked metal in the Bronze Age, through the widespread use of iron in the Iron Age; and then the dramatic impact of Rome and its gradual dissolution to the English kingdoms whose traces are still recognisable today. All is set in the context of the author's lasting interest in the subject, first nurtured at his Tilbury school.

The East African coast and the Western Indian Ocean are regions of global historical significance. This volume contains papers first presented at the conference, Early Maritime Cultures of the East African Coast, held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on October 23-24, 2015. Rather than limiting publication to the proceedings of the conference, additional contributions were solicited to expand the scope of the research presented and to place East Africa in its broader geographic and cultural contexts. The resulting volume focuses broadly on East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean and unites the papers under the general themes of movement and connection. These papers represent a multi-disciplinary effort to examine East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean. Multiple lines of evidence drawn from linguistics, archaeology, history, art history, and ethnography come together in novel ways to highlight different aspects of the region's past and offer innovative avenues for future research. The papers cover a diverse array of topics, including but not limited to: subsistence, watercraft traditions, trade and exchange (especially concerning the Silk Routes), migration, food ways, and familial relationships. This volume is unique in that it includes some speculative research as well, intended to present novel methods to deal with data-poor topics and to start important conversations about understudied topics. The goal of this volume is to showcase aspects of the complex cultures and histories of this vast region and to emphasize its importance to world history. Ideally, it will generate scholarly and popular interest in the histories and cultures of the region and bring to the fore Africa's and the Western Indian Ocean's important (yet often overlooked) role in world historical narratives. It may also serve as a more advanced introduction to East Africa's and the Western Indian Ocean's history of interaction with other regions of the Old World and as a survey of methods used to understand the region's past.

This book presents the major tool types of European Lower and Middle Paleolithic. Building on the typelist of the late Francois Bordes, with many forms that have been recognized since, it presents working definitions of the types with illustrations and discussions of the variability inherent to lithic typologies. The authors combine classic typological views with current notions of lithic typological variation.This handbook represents not only an important reference source for gaining a practical understanding of how Lower and Middle Paleolithic typology is applied but of the nature of lithic variability in other kinds of assemblages as well.

This second volume from the 1988 Deya conference contains sixteen papers which fall into the categories of (3) bridging the two aspects of techniques and technology, seeking in physical and statistical analyses to explain and interpret change and innovation in hypothetical terms of economy and resources, and (4) papers dealing more directly with theoretical discussion of acknowledgeable archaeological problems.

The Sauveterrian represents one of the main cultural aspects of the European Early Mesolithic. In this work, its presumed uniformity-mostly based on typological grounds-is questioned with the purpose of assessing and verifying the relationships existing between the two central areas of diffusion of this complex: southern France and northern Italy. A broad technological approach, combining complementary analytical techniques, was applied to the study of a series of French and Italian lithic assemblages. More specifically, these were investigated with the aim of reconstructing the entire reduction sequences, from the procurement of lithic raw materials to the use and discard of tools. Results indicate that the two regions responded to the same conceptual scheme and their respective lithic technical systems shared the same rationale: an extremely optimized technology, not opportunistic in the least, but issued from a careful strategic planning. Nonetheless, in the context of this generalized behaviour, a consistent variability can be found, marked by differences of both 'stylistic' and technical nature especially regarding the processes for producing microlithic armatures. At a general level, in the context of the important environmental changes that characterized the Late Glacial to Early Holocene transition, the emergence of Sauveterrian technology was fundamental in allowing the development of a complex settlement structure, characterized by a mobility system based on relatively short distances and with a strong logistic component.

Rockshelter Excavations in the East Hamersley Range' offers a detailed study of six exceptional rockshelter sites from the inland Pilbara Region of Western Australia. It provides highly descriptive, chapter-length accounts of archaeological investigations at Jundaru, Djadjiling, HS-A1, HD073APAD13, PAD 3, and HD073A03 rockshelters, which were excavated as part of a mitigative salvage program conducted at the Hope Downs 1 mine between 2007 and 2010. The research findings show that early Aboriginal peoples initially occupied the area ca. 45,000 years ago, demonstrating that the east Hamersley Range contains some of the oldest known Aboriginal archaeological sites in the Australian arid zone. The story of the Pleistocene and Holocene Aboriginal occupation at Hope Downs 1 is long and complex. Using an extensive radiocarbon and OSL chronology that spans from >47,000 years ago to the recent past, the story of the Aboriginal archaeological record is explored via prominent changes in lithic technology, artefact use-wear/residues, combustion features, faunal remains, rockshelter geomorphology, archaeomagnetism, and pollen/phytolith analysis. The work investigates the early occupation of the region and examines the archaeological evidence for occupation during the last glacial maximum. It chronicles significant changes in Aboriginal stone artefact technology over time with its analysis of more than 35,000 chipped stone artefacts. Consisting of 18 chapters, the volume is rich with colour photographs, illustrations, and figures, including highresolution images of the rockshelter sites, excavations, stratigraphic sections, cultural features, and artefacts. It includes a foreword by the Martidja Banyjima elders, who contextualise the cultural importance of this work to Banyjima Peoples and Traditional Owners of the region. The monograph also includes comprehensive synthesis of the regional archaeological record by the editors and a chapter on Banyjima culture and traditions by consulting anthropologists Dr Nadia Butler, Dr Neale Draper, and Fiona Sutherland. Many specialist studies were commissioned for the Hope Downs work, including an archaeomagnetism report by Dr Andy Herries (LaTrobe University), a faunal analysis study by Dr. Matthew McDowell (University of Tasmania), a phytolith analysis by Dr Lynley Wallis (University of Notre Dame Australia), a palynological study by Dr Simon Haberle, Feli Hopf, and Dr Phil Roberts (Australian National University), artefact usewear/residue analysis by Dr Richard Fullagar (University of Wollongong), optically stimulated luminescence dating by Frances Williams (University of Adelaide), and a rockshelter geomorphological study by Prof Martin Williams (University of Adelaide).