This excellent introductory textbook describes and explains the origins of modern culture- the dawn of agriculture in the Neolithic area. Written in an easy-to-read style, this lively and engaging book familiarizes the reader with essential archaeological and genetic terms and concepts, explores the latest evidence from scientific analyses as varied as deep sea coring, pollen identification, radiometric dating and DNA research, condensing them into an up-to-date academic account, specifically written to be clear even the novice reader. Focusing primarily on sites in southwest Asia, Neolithic addresses questions such as: Which plants and animals were the first to be domesticated, and how? How did life change when people began farming? What were the first villages like? What do we know about the social, political and religious life of these newly founded societies? What happened to human health as a result of the Neolithic Revolution? Lavishly illustrated with almost a hundred images, this enjoyable book is an ideal introduction both for students of archaeology and for general readers interested in our past.

This book tackles the topic of religion, a broad subject exciting renewed interest across the social and historical sciences. The volume is tightly focused on the early farming village of Catalhoeyuk, which has generated much interest both within and outside of archaeology, especially for its contributions to the understanding of early religion. The volume discusses contemporary themes such as materiality, animism, object vitality, and material dimensions of spirituality while at the same time exploring broad evolutionary changes in the ways in which religion has influenced society. The volume results from a unique collaboration between an archaeological team and a range of specialists in ritual and religion.

These papers bring an interdisciplinary approach to bear on what is arguably the central question in the study of human social evolution: how did the simple hunting and foraging bands of the Upper Palaeolithic evolve into the institutionally complex societies of the so-called Neolithic Revolution? The contributors to this volume are leading experts from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and game theory, all of whom share a common evolutionary perspective. The ideas presented here form a major addition to the widespread current interest in evolutionary theory as applied to human behaviour.

* 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

Coastal Landscapes of the Mesolithic: Human Engagement with the Coast from the Atlantic to the Baltic Sea explores the character and significance of coastal landscapes in the Mesolithic - on different scales and with various theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. Mesolithic people were strongly connected to the sea, with coastal areas vital for subsistence and communication across the water. This anthology includes case studies from Scandinavia, western Europe and the Baltic area, presented by key international researchers. Topics addressed include large-scale analyses of the archaeological and geological development of coastal areas, the exploration of coastal environments with interdisciplinary methods, the discussion of the character of coastal settlements and of their possible networks, social and economic practices along the coast, as well as perceptions and cosmological aspects of coastal areas. Together, these topics and approaches contribute in an innovative way to the understanding of the complexity of topographically changing coastal areas as both border zones between land and sea and as connecting landscapes. Providing novel insights into the study of the Mesolithic as well as coastal areas and landscapes in general, the book is an important resource for researchers of the Mesolithic and coastal archaeology.

Pyramids are now being found almost everywhere: in 1994 in China; then in Caral, in Peru, Southern America; then in Northern Italy and in 2005 in Bosnia. Despite their prevalence, massive pyramids remain as mysterious and controversial as ever. Though Egyptologists continue to argue that the Egyptian pyramids are tombs, no bodies have ever been discovered in them. None of the other pyramids are tombs either. Apart from the Mayan pyramids, which are much more recent, all pyramids are similar in shape, size and age. Does this mean that each culture developed this rather unique shape on its own, or does it mean that there was a truly global movement - somewhere around 3000 BC? This is the first book to explore the new landscape of pyramids found worldwide. It describes the changed nature of the pyramid debate and offers science a challenge, but equally tries to answer some of the key questions raised during the last decade of pyramid discovery. It is a series of discoveries that has changed the archaeological world and extended all our horizons.

Mankind's utter dependency on technology extends back approximately three million years to the first stone tools, but it was only with the innovation of hafting, some 300,000 years ago, that technology took its first modern form and revolutionized our social and economic lives. The development of handles and shafts, which were added to some tools previously made of single materials and hand-held, made the tools not only more efficient but improved their makers' chances of survival by making the quest for food more productive. This volume brings together evidence for the cognitive, social, and technological foundations necessary for the development of hafting to form a speculative theory about this revolutionary innovation. The creation of tools with handles required considerable planning based on an expert understanding of the properties of the raw materials involved, a form of early engineering. Yet it was the ability to envisage the final, integrated form of the tool which underpinned the remarkable novelty of hafting, one which had massive implications for the human species and which laid the foundations for the technology we rely on today.

Going West? uses the latest data to question how the Neolithic way of life was diffused from the Near East to Europe via Anatolia. The transformations of the 7th millennium BC in western Anatolia undoubtedly had a significant impact on the neighboring regions of southeast Europe. Yet the nature, pace and trajectory of this impact needs still to be clarified. Archaeologists searched previously for similarities in prehistoric, especially Early Neolithic, material cultures on both sides of the Sea of Marmara. Recent research shows that although the isthmi of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus connect Asia Minor and the eastern Balkans, they apparently did not serve as passageways for the dissemination of Neolithic innovations. Instead, the first permanent settlements are situated near the Aegean coast of Thrace and Macedonia, often occurring close to the mouths of big rivers in secluded bays. The courses and the valleys of rivers such as the Maritsa, Strymon and Axios, were perfect corridors for contact and exchange.Using previous studies as a basis for fresh research, this volume presents exciting new viewpoints by analyzing recently discovered materials and utilising interdisciplinary investigations with the application of modern research methods. The seventeen authors of this book have dedicated their research to a renewed evaluation of an old problem: namely, the question of how the complex transformations at the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic can be explained. They have focused their studies on the vast area of the eastern Balkans and the Pontic region between the Bosporus and the rivers Strymon, Danube and Dniestr. Going West? thus offers an overview of the current state of research concerning the Neolithisation of these areas, considering varied viewpoints and also providing useful starting points for future investigations.

The 'bog bodies' of north-western Europe have captured the imaginations of poets and archaeologists alike, allowing us to come face-to-face with individuals from the past. Their exceptional preservation permits us to examine minute details of their lives and deaths, making us reflect poignantly on our own mortality. But, as this book argues, the bodies must be resituated within a turbulent world of endemic violence and change. Reinterpreting the latest continental research and new discoveries, and featuring a ground-breaking 'cold case' forensic study of Worsley Man, Manchester Museum's 'bog head', it brings the bogs to life through both natural history and folklore, revealing them as places that were rich and fertile yet dangerous. The book also argues that these remains do not just pose practical conservation problems but also philosophical dilemmas, compounded by the critical debate on if - and how - they should be displayed. -- .

In popular discourse, tropical forests are synonymous with 'nature' and 'wilderness'; battlegrounds between apparently pristine floral, faunal, and human communities, and the unrelenting industrial and urban powers of the modern world. It is rarely publicly understood that the extent of human adaptation to, and alteration of, tropical forest environments extends across archaeological, historical, and anthropological timescales. This book is the first attempt to bring together evidence for the nature of human interactions with tropical forests on a global scale, from the emergence of hominins in the tropical forests of Africa to modern conservation issues. Following a review of the natural history and variability of tropical forest ecosystems, this book takes a tour of human, and human ancestor, occupation and use of tropical forest environments through time. Far from being pristine, primordial ecosystems, this book illustrates how our species has inhabited and modified tropical forests from the earliest stages of its evolution. While agricultural strategies and vast urban networks emerged in tropical forests long prior to the arrival of European colonial powers and later industrialization, this should not be taken as justification for the massive deforestation and biodiversity threats imposed on tropical forest ecosystems in the 21st century. Rather, such a long-term perspective highlights the ongoing challenges of sustainability faced by forager, agricultural, and urban societies in these environments, setting the stage for more integrated approaches to conservation and policy-making, and the protection of millennia of ecological and cultural heritage bound up in these habitats.

The Neolithic saw the spread of the first farmers, and the formation of settled villages throughout Europe. Traditional archaeology has interpreted these changes in terms of population growth, economic pressures and social competition, but in The Domestication of Europe Ian Hodder works from a new, controversial theory focusing instead on the enormous expansion of symbolic evidence from the homes, settlements and burials of the period. Why do the figurines, decorated pottery, elaborate houses and burial rituals appear and what is their significance? The author argues that the symbolism of the Neolithic must be interpreted if we are to understand adequately the associated social and economic changes. He suggests that both in Europe and the Near East a particular set of concepts was central to the origins of farming and a settled mode of life. These concepts relate to the house and home - termed `domus' - and they provided a metaphor and a mechanism for social and economic transformation. As the wild was brought in and domesticated through ideas and practices surrounding the domus, people were brought in and settled into the social and economic group of the village. Over the following millennia cultural practices relating to the domus continued to change and develop, until finally overtaken by a new set of concepts which became socially central, based on the warrior, the hunter and the wild. This book is an exercise in interpretive prehistory. Ian Hodder shows how a contextual reading of the evidence can allow symbolic structures to be cautiously but plausibly identified, and sets out his arguments for complex dialectical relationships between long-term symbolic structures and economic causes of cultural change.

Human settlement has often centered around coastal areas and waterways. Until recently, however, archaeologists believed that marine economies did not develop until the end of the Pleistocene, when the archaeological record begins to have evidence of marine life as part of the human diet. This has long been interpreted as a postglacial adaptation, due to the rise in sea level and subsequent decrease in terrestrial resources. Coastal resources, particularly mollusks, were viewed as fallback resources, which people resorted to only when terrestrial resources were scarce, included only as part of a more complex diet.

Recent research has significantly altered this understanding, known as the Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR) model. The contributions to this volume revise the BSR model, with evidence that coastal resources were an important part of human economies and subsistence much earlier than previously thought, and even the main focus of diets for some Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherer societies.

With evidence from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, this volume comprehensively lends a new understanding to coastal settlement from the Middle Paleolithic to the Middle Holocene.

Where do we find the world's very first art? When, and why, did people begin experimenting with different materials, forms and colours? Were our once-cousins, the Neanderthals, also capable of creating art? Prehistorians have been asking these questions of our ancestors for decades, but only very recently, with the development of cutting-edge scientific and archaeological techniques, have we been able to piece together the first chapter in the story of art. Overturning the traditional Eurocentric vision of our artistic origins, which has focused almost exclusively on the Franco-Spanish cave art, Paul Bahn and Michel Lorblanchet take the reader on a search for the earliest art across the whole world. They show that our earliest ancestors were far from being the creatively impoverished primitives of past accounts, and Europe was by no means the only 'cradle' of art; the artistic impulse developed in the human mind wherever it travelled. The long universal history of art mirrors the development of humanity.

Textile production and the introduction of wool and woolen textiles represented a great revolution in Bronze Age Europe at the dawn of the second millennium BC. The available contemporary written sources from the Mediterranean and Near East suggest that textile production had a strong impact on the cultural, social, and economic life. In most parts of continental Europe, however, archaeological material alone can help us understand the details relating to textile production and its wider importance to early societies. This book provides new insights on patterns of production, specialization, and consumption of textiles in Europe throughout the Bronze Age. Assembling a diverse array of studies on various aspect of the textile production and economy, the essays, specially written for this volume, provide a wide range of scientific data as well as archaeological evidence. They also show the great potential of examining early textile production through the use of innovative methodologies and diverse perspectives.

Alasdair Whittle's new work argues powerfully for the complexity and fluidity of life in the Neolithic, through a combination of archaeological and anthropological case studies and current theoretical debate.
The book ranges from the sixth to the fourth millennium BC, and from the Great Hungarian Plain, central and western Europe and the Alpine foreland to parts of southern Britain. Familiar terms such as individuals, agency, identity and structure are dealt with, but Professor Whittle emphasises that they are too abstract to be truly useful.
Instead, he highlights the multiple dimensions which constituted Neolithic existence: the web of daily routines, group and individual identities, relations with animals, and active but varied attitudes to the past.
The result is a vivid, original and perceptive understanding of the early Neolithic which will offer insights to readers at every level.

Alasdair Whittle's new work argues powerfully for the complexity and fluidity of life in the Neolithic, through a combination of archaeological and anthropological case studies and current theoretical debate.
The book ranges from the sixth to the fourth millennium BC, and from the Great Hungarian Plain, central and western Europe and the Alpine foreland to parts of southern Britain. Familiar terms such as individuals, agency, identity and structure are dealt with, but Professor Whittle emphasises that they are too abstract to be truly useful.
Instead, he highlights the multiple dimensions which constituted Neolithic existence: the web of daily routines, group and individual identities, relations with animals, and active but varied attitudes to the past.
The result is a vivid, original and perceptive understanding of the early Neolithic which will offer insights to readers at every level.

The idea of prehistory dates from the nineteenth century, but Richard Bradley contends that it is still a vital area for research. He argues that it is only through a combination of oral tradition and the experience of encountering ancient material culture that people were able to formulate a sense of their own pasts without written records.
The Past in Prehistoric Societies presents case studies which extend from the Palaeolithic to the early Middle Ages and from the Alps to Scandinavia. It examines how archaeologists might study the origin of myths and the different ways in which prehistoric people would have inherited artefacts from the past. It also investigates the ways in which ancient remains might have been invested with new meanings long after their original significance had been forgotten. Finally, the author compares the procedures of excavation and field survey in the light of these examples.
The work includes a large number of detailed case studies, is fully illustrated and has been written in an extremely accessible style.

The idea of prehistory dates from the nineteenth century, but Richard Bradley contends that it is still a vital area for research. He argues that it is only through a combination of oral tradition and the experience of encountering ancient material culture that people were able to formulate a sense of their own pasts without written records.
The Past in Prehistoric Societies presents case studies which extend from the Palaeolithic to the early Middle Ages and from the Alps to Scandinavia. It examines how archaeologists might study the origin of myths and the different ways in which prehistoric people would have inherited artefacts from the past. It also investigates the ways in which ancient remains might have been invested with new meanings long after their original significance had been forgotten. Finally, the author compares the procedures of excavation and field survey in the light of these examples.
The work includes a large number of detailed case studies, is fully illustrated and has been written in an extremely accessible style.

K'Oben traces the Maya kitchen and its associated hardware, ingredients, and cooking styles from the earliest times for which we have archaeological evidence through today's culinary tourism in the area. It focuses not only on what was eaten and how it was cooked, but the people involved: who grew or sourced the foods, who cooked them, who ate them. Additionally, the authors examine how Maya foodways and the people involved fit into the social system, particularly in how food is incorporated into culture, economy, and society. The authors provide a detailed literature review of hard-to-find sources including: out of print centuries old cookbooks, archaeological field notes, ethnographies and ethnohistories out of circulation and not available in English, thesis documents only available in Spanish and in university archives as well as current field research on the Maya. The more recent Maya foodways can be studied from cookbooks, ethnographies and ethnohistorical documentation. Between the two of us, we have assembled a small but representative collection of cookbooks, some self-published and rare, that were available in Merida and elsewhere in Mexico during the late 20th century. Some are quite old, and all reflect local traditional foodways. Geographically, the book concentrates on Yucatan, Tabasco and Chiapas in Mexico, but will include Pre-Classic and Classic evidence from Guatemala and El Salvador, whose foodways are influenced by Maya traditions.

The subject of the present volume, in essence is the hand and hand's extensions. We cannot insist too strongly that in the evolution of life the "decisive moment" arrived when a living being - who became man - adopted the erect attitude, thus freeing his hands, and when the industrious activity was inauguarted which this freedom made possible. In the use of the hand as an instrument, we have the manifestation of an important physical progress and the promise of further progress.

Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens--small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay--represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.

Since prehistoric times, Andean societies have been organized around the ayllu, a grouping of real or ceremonial kinspeople who share labor, resources, and ritual obligations. Many Andean scholars believe that the ayllu is as ancient as Andean culture itself, possibly dating back as far as 6000 B.C., and that it arose to alleviate the hardships of farming in the mountainous Andean environment. In this boldly revisionist book, however, William Isbell persuasively argues that the ayllu developed during the latter half of the Early Intermediate Period (around A.D. 200) as a means of resistance to the process of state formation. Drawing on archaeological evidence, as well as records of Inca life taken from the chroniclers, Isbell asserts that prehistoric ayllus were organized around the veneration of deceased ancestors, whose mummified bodies were housed in open sepulchers, or challups, where they could be visited by descendants seeking approval and favors. By charting the temporal and spatial distribution of chullpa ruins, Isbell offers a convincing new explanation of where, when, and why the ayllu developed.

The period from 6500 to 2500 BC was one of the most dynamic eras of the prehistory of south-eastern Europe, for it saw many fundamental changes in the ways in which people lived their lives. This up-to-date and authoritative synthesis both describes the best excavated relevant Balkan sites and interprets long-term trends in the central themes of settlement, burial, material culture and economy. Prominence is given to the ways people organized themselves, the houses and landscapes where they lived and the objects, plants and animals that they kept. The key developments are seen as the creation of new social environments through the construction of houses and villages, and a new materiality of life which filled the built environment with a wide variety of objects. Against the prevailing trends in European prehistory, the author argues for a prehistoric past riven with tension and conflict, where hoarding and exclusion of people was just as frequent as sharing and helping. "Balkan Prehistory" provides a much-needed guide to a period which has previously been inaccessible to western scholars.;It should be a useful resource for undergraduates, advanced students and scholars.

Douglass Bailey's volume fills the huge gap that existed for a comprehensive synthesis, in English, of the archaeology of the Balkans between 6,500 and 2,000 BC; much research on the prehistory of Eastern Europe was inaccessible to a western audience before now, because of linguistic barriers.
Bailey argues against traditional interpretations of the period, which focus on the origins of agriculture and animal breeding. He demonstrates that this was a period when monumental social and material changes occurred in the lives of the people in this region, with new technologies and ways of displaying identity.
Balkan Prehistory will be required reading for everyone studying the Neolithic, Copper and early Bronze Ages of Eastern Europe.

In the first published synthesis of the subject, Caroline Earwood traces the changing styles and manufacturing techniques of wooden domestic artefacts in Britain and Ireland from the Neolithic age to the time of the Vikings. A surprising number of these items have survived - some as ancient as 6000 years old - in wet and waterlogged places such as wells and bogs.

The book atempts to answer questions about who made the many and varied objects, who used them and ow theirstyle and deecoration compare with potery, maetal and stone artefacts from the same period. It also examines the continues use of ancient tehniques as late as the 20th century.