The Power of Ritual in Prehistory is the first book in nearly a century to deal with traditional secret societies from a comparative perspective and the first from an archaeological viewpoint. Providing a clear definition, as well as the material signatures, of ethnographic secret societies, Brian Hayden demonstrates how they worked, what motivated their organizers, and what tactics they used to obtain what they wanted. He shows that far from working for the welfare of their communities, traditional secret societies emerged as predatory organizations operated for the benefit of their own members. Moreover, and contrary to the prevailing ideas that prehistoric rituals were used to integrate communities, Hayden demonstrates how traditional secret societies created divisiveness and inequalities. They were one of the key tools for increasing political control leading to chiefdoms, states, and world religions. Hayden's conclusions will be eye-opening, not only for archaeologists, but also for anthropologists, political scientists, and scholars of religion.

Throughout prehistory the Circumpolar World was inhabited by hunter-gatherers. Pottery-making would have been extremely difficult in these cold, northern environments, and the craft should never have been able to disperse into this region. However, archaeologists are now aware that pottery traditions were adopted widely across the Northern World and went on to play a key role in subsistence and social life. This book sheds light on the human motivations that lay behind the adoption of pottery, the challenges that had to be overcome in order to produce it, and the solutions that emerged. Including essays by an international team of scholars, the volume offers a compelling portrait of the role that pottery cooking technologies played in northern lifeways, both in the prehistoric past and in more recent ethnographic times.

Despite notable explorations of past dynamics, much of the archaeological literature on mobility remains dominated by accounts of earlier prehistoric gatherer-hunters, or the long-distance exchange of materials. Refinements of scientific dating techniques, isotope, trace element and aDNA analyses, in conjunction with phenomenological investigation, computer-aided landscape modelling and GIS-style approaches to large data sets, allow us to follow the movement of people, animals and objects in the past with greater precision and conviction. One route into exploring mobility in the past may be through exploring the movements and biographies of artefacts. Challenges lie not only in tracing the origins and final destinations of objects but in the less tangible ‘in between’ journeys and the hands they passed through. Biographical approaches to artefacts include the recognition that culture contact and hybridity affect material culture in meaningful ways. Furthermore, discrete and bounded ‘sites’ still dominate archaeological inquiry, leaving the spaces and connectivities between features and settlements unmapped. These are linked to an under-explored middle-spectrum of mobility, a range nestled between everyday movements and one-off ambitious voyages. We wish to explore how these travels involved entangled meshworks of people, animals, objects, knowledge sets and identities. By crossing and re-crossing cultural, contextual and tenurial boundaries, such journeys could create diasporic and novel communities, ideas and materialities.

Named after an archaeological site discovered in 1951 in Zhengzhou, China, the Erligang civilization arose in the Yellow River valley around the middle of the second millennium BCE. Shortly thereafter, its distinctive elite material culture spread to a large part of China's Central Plain, in the south reaching as far as the banks of the Yangzi River. The Erligang culture is best known for the remains of an immense walled city at Zhengzhou, a smaller site at Panlongcheng in Hubei, and a large-scale bronze industry of remarkable artistic and technological sophistication.

This richly illustrated book is the first in a western language devoted to the Erligang culture. It brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines, including art history and archaeology, to explore what is known about the culture and its spectacular bronze industry. The opening chapters introduce the history of the discovery of the culture and its most important archaeological sites. Subsequent essays address a variety of important methodological issues related to the study of Erligang, including how to define the culture, the usefulness of cross-cultural comparative study, and the difficulty of reconciling traditional Chinese historiography with archaeological discoveries. The book closes by examining the role the Erligang civilization played in the emergence of the first bronze-using societies in south China and the importance of bronze studies in the training of Chinese art historians.

The contributors are Robert Bagley, John Baines, Maggie Bickford, Rod Campbell, Li Yung-ti, Robin McNeal, Kyle Steinke, Wang Haicheng, and Zhang Changping.

In Everyday Life in the Aztec World, Frances Berdan and Michael E. Smith offer a view into the lives of real people, doing very human things, in the unique cultural world of Aztec central Mexico. The first section focuses on people from an array of social classes - the emperor, a priest, a feather worker, a merchant, a farmer, and a slave - who interacted in the economic, social and religious realms of the Aztec world. In the second section, the authors examine four important life events where the lives of these and others intersected: the birth and naming of a child, market day, a day at court, and a battle. Through the microscopic views of individual types of lives, and interweaving of those lives into the broader Aztec world, Berdan and Smith recreate everyday life in the final years of the Aztec Empire.

12,000 years ago the area that now forms the southern North Sea was dry land: a vast plain populated by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. By 5,500 BC the entire area had disappeared beneath the sea as a consequence of rising sea levels. Until now, this unique landscape remained hidden from view and almost entirely unknown. The North Sea Palaeolandscape Project, funded by the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, have mapped 23,000 km2 of this lost world using seismic data collected for mineral exploration. Mapping Doggerland demonstrates that the North Sea covers one of the largest and best preserved prehistoric landscapes in Europe. In mapping this exceptional landscape the project has begun to provide an insight into the historic impact of the last great phase of global warming experienced by modern man and to assess the significance of the massive loss of European land that occurred as a consequence of climate change. Contents: 1) Mapping Doggerland Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson; 2) Coordinating Marine Survey Data Sources (Mark Bunch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson); 3) 3D Seismic Reflection Data, Associated Technologies and the Development of the Project Methodology (Kenneth Thomson and Vincent Gaffney); 4. Merging Technologies: The integration and visualisation of spatial data sets used in the project (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson); 5) A Geomorphological Investigation of Submerged Depositional Features within the Outer Silver Pit, Southern North Sea (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson; 6) Salt Tectonics in the Southern North Sea: Controls on Late Pleistocene-Holocene Geomorphology (Simon Holford, Kenneth Thomson and Vincent Gaffney); 7) AnAtlas of the Palaeolandscapes of the Southern North Sea (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney, Kenneth Thomson with Kate Briggs, Mark Bunch and Simon Holford); 8) The Potential of the Organic Archive for Environmental Reconstruction: An Assessment of Selected Borehole Sediments from the Southern North Sea (David Smith, Simon Fitch, Ben Gearey, Tom Hill, Simon Holford, Andy Howard and Christina Jolliffe); 9) Heritage Management and the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson).

The Earliest Europeans explores a fundamental question: how did Europe's first hominin occupants cope with the year-round practical challenges of life. To do so, the book adopts a 'year in the life' perspective that draws on the increasingly rich and robust archaeological and Quaternary Science records for the European Lower Palaeolithic, combined with insights from modern ethnography and zoological studies. By exploring potential survival strategies and behaviours, Hosfield offers new insights into the character of Europe's earliest occupations across more than 1 million years, and ultimately asks: what sorts of 'humans' were these hominins? The innovative season-by-season structure of the book explores cyclical fluctuations in resources and weather conditions. From the depths of cold winters to the bountiful foods of late summer, it considers the implications of these variations for hominin behaviours. Hosfield draws on a range of supporting examples and evidence from Lower Palaeolithic sites across Europe, spanning technology, palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, hominin life history, and plant and animal food resources. In doing so, The Earliest Europeans highlights both the current and future potential of Europe's earliest archaeological record.

The results of the excavation of an Early Bronze Age cemetery - including 37 tombs and an associated rectangular Minoan building - at Gournes in north-central Crete revealed strong relations with the Cyclades during the time of the Kampos Cultural Group, as exemplified by the distinctive style of pottery and other types of burial objects such as obsidian pieces and metal items. The discussion of burial practices at Gournes involves both the significance of several features of the funerary architecture and the consideration of the character and deposition of offerings in the tombs. The burial architecture and artifacts are profusely illustrated and tables of data are presented. The cemetery is compared with other Early Bronze Age sites within and outside Crete to investigate links among Prepalatial funerary practices and also to look into settlement sites that display similar characteristics that may reveal possible intercultural relations in the Aegean. Their interconnections confirm the existence, since the Early Minoan I period, of a dense social network including the Cycladic islands and contacts with distant areas of Crete. The Minoan building was used from Early Minoan III to Late Minoan IA, and its ritual character in association with the funerary context suggests that it was originally constructed as a house tomb and was reused later as a support building for rituals after the abandonment of the Early Minoan IB cemetery.

Waterlands: Prehistoric Life at Bar Pasture, Pode Hole Quarry, Peterborough recounts a decade-long archaeological investigation at Bar Pasture Farm, Pode Hole Quarry, Peterborough, and represents one of the most significant landscape excavations carried out in recent years. The 55-hectare archaeological dig was the scene of human activity on the fenland edge from the Mesolithic through to the Late Iron Age, although the majority of the evidence covered the period from the Early Neolithic through to the Middle Bronze Age. Throughout prehistory, the fen edge has represented a landscape at the margins of human habitation and exploitation. During the Early Neolithic, a substantial waterhole complex with signs of later visitation was established on the fen edge. Traces of several Beaker buildings provided elusive evidence of slightly later activity further inland, whilst during the Early Bronze Age proper, a number of impressive burial mounds were constructed within a dedicated ‘Barrow Field’. One barrow contained the nationally significant remains of an infant burial on a birch bark mat with associated grave goods. The Middle Bronze Age saw the entire re-organisation of the surrounding landscape by the creation of an extensive, rectilinear field system, served by multiple droveways and associated with a classic enclosed farmstead. The placement of later Middle Bronze Age cremation burials within the remains of earlier burial monuments bears witness to the intimate connection of this small community to their ancestors’ sacred landscape. By the 4th century BC, settlement was all but abandoned due to marine inundations, although one slightly elevated part of the landscape formed an area of refuge for an Iron Age smith and his family, who created an isolated and significant smithy.

This excavation of a Late Bronze Age town on the island of Mochlos in northeastern Crete includes the House of the Metal Merchant (with two large bronze hoards) and 13 other structures. Each building is described with its stratigraphy, architecture, small finds, ecofactual materials, function, and room use. This is a two volume set. Volume 1 contains the text and Volume 2 contains the Concordance, Tables, Figures, and Plates.

In the late 1800s, archaeologists began discovering engraved stone plaques in Neolithic (3500-2500 BC) graves in southern Portugal and Spain. About the size of one's palm, usually made of slate, and incised with geometric or, more rarely, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic designs, these plaques have mystified generations of researchers. What do their symbols signify? How were the plaques produced? Were they worn during an individual's lifetime, or only made at the time of their death? Why, indeed, were the plaques made at all? Employing an eclectic range of theoretical and methodological lenses, Katina Lillios surveys all that is currently known about the Iberian engraved stone plaques and advances her own carefully considered hypotheses about their manufacture and meanings. After analyzing data on the plaques' workmanship and distribution, she builds a convincing case that the majority of the Iberian plaques were genealogical records of the dead that served as durable markers of regional and local group identities. Such records, she argues, would have contributed toward legitimating and perpetuating an ideology of inherited social difference in the Iberian Late Neolithic.

Excavations at Middle Barn, Selhurst Park, Eartham uncovered a Middle Iron Age to early Roman farmstead, sitting upon the southern slopes of the South Downs in West Sussex, and overlooking the Sussex coastal plain. Few such excavations have been undertaken on the Downs in recent decades and even less on such a large-scale. While the structural remains were unremarkable for a site of this type, consisting of the probable remains of three roundhouses, surrounded by a network of ditched enclosures, the recovered artefact assemblages were substantial and important. Of particular note were three large pits, cut into the chalk, and backfilled with structured deposits of pottery, animal bone, grain and fired clay. Not only do these bear testimony to notable Iron Age feasting events, but their assemblages fill significant gaps in our understanding of regional pottery traditions and agricultural practices from the Middle to the Late Iron Age. These results can now be compared with those coming from the surge in developer-funded excavations on the coastal plain below. The resulting wealth of new evidence relating to Iron Age and Roman occupation there provides a whole new backdrop for the understanding of what was happening on the Downs to the north. It is hoped that the publication of the results from these excavations will contribute to the debate over how these two topographies interrelated, particularly in the context of expanding cross-channel trade during the later Iron Age. The excavation project at Middle Barn was carried out in 2005-2008 by volunteers under the direction of Chichester District Council's Heritage Outreach Officer.

Household Economy at Wall Ridge tells the story of a Native American household that occupied a lodge on the eastern Plains border during the early 1300s AD. Contributors use cutting-edge methods and the site's unparalleled archaeological record to shed light on the daily technological, subsistence, and dietary aspects of the occupants' lives. This work represents the first comprehensive study of a prehistoric Central Plains household in over half a century. The research covers archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, dating, ceramics, lithics, bone and shell tools, diet, climate, ecology, and more. The study of plant and animal usage from the lodge stands as a tour de force of analytical methods, including stable isotope data that permit the discovery of dietary items missed by traditional studies. Many of these items have never been reported before from Central Plains sites. The book firmly sets the site's occupancy at AD 1305, with a margin of error of only a few years. This result, based on high-precision dating methods, exceeds in accuracy all previously dated Plains lodges and provides a temporal backdrop for evaluating household activities.

In Everyday Life in the Aztec World, Frances Berdan and Michael E. Smith offer a view into the lives of real people, doing very human things, in the unique cultural world of Aztec central Mexico. The first section focuses on people from an array of social classes - the emperor, a priest, a feather worker, a merchant, a farmer, and a slave - who interacted in the economic, social and religious realms of the Aztec world. In the second section, the authors examine four important life events where the lives of these and others intersected: the birth and naming of a child, market day, a day at court, and a battle. Through the microscopic views of individual types of lives, and interweaving of those lives into the broader Aztec world, Berdan and Smith recreate everyday life in the final years of the Aztec Empire.

Alepotrypa Cave at Diros Bay, Lakonia, Greece, is a massive karstic formation of consecutive chambers ending at a lake. The cave was excavated by G. Papathanassopoulos from 1970 to 2006. In conjunction with the surrounding area, it was used as a complementary habitation area, burial site, and place for ceremonial activity during the Neolithic c 6000 to 3200 BC. As a sealed, single-component, archaeological site, the Neolithic settlement complex of Alepotrypa Cave is one of the richest sites in Greece and Europe in terms of number of artifacts, preservation of biological materials, volume of undisturbed deposits, and horizontal exposure of archaeological surfaces of past human activity and this publication is an important contribution to ongoing archaeological research of the Neolithic Age in Greece in particular, but also in Anatolia, the Balkans and Europe in general. This edited volume offers a full scholarly interdisciplinary study and interpretation of the results of approximately 40 years of excavation and analysis. It includes numerous chemical analyses and a much needed long series of radiocarbon dates, the corresponding microstratigraphic, stratigraphic and ceramic sequence, the human burials, stone and bone tools, faunal and floral remains, isotopic analyses, specific locations of human activities and ceremonies inside the cave, as well as a site description and the history of the excavation conducted by G. Papathanasopoulos.

Visual Culture, Heritage and Identity: Using Rock Art to Reconnect Past and Present sets out a fresh perspective on rock art by considering how ancient images function in the present. In recent decades, archaeological approaches to rock paintings and engravings have significantly advanced our understanding of rock art in regional and global terms. On the other hand, however, little research has been done on contemporary uses of rock art. How does ancient rock art heritage influence contemporary cultural phenomena? And how do past images function in the present, especially in contemporary art and other media? In the past, archaeologists usually concentrated more on reconstructing the semantic and social contexts of the ancient images. This volume, on the other hand, focuses on how this ancient heritage is recognised and reified in the modern world, and how this art stimulates contemporary processes of cultural identity-making. The authors, who are based all over the world, off er attractive and compelling case studies situated in diverse cultural and geographical contexts.

Understanding and Accessibility of Pre-and Protohistorical Research Issues: Sites, Museums and Communication Strategies presents the papers from Session XXXV-1 of the 18th UISPP World Congress (Paris, June 2018). Museums are increasingly seen as the place where scientific research and heritage education meet, rather than being simply a location for exhibitions. The eight contributions from Italy, the United Kingdom, Senegal, Spain and the Netherlands address the following related issues: the mediation of language from research usage to public usage, making the museum visit an educational experience, universal accessibility, involvement of the local community in the management of the sites and museums, use of media and new technology to bring scientific content to the public.

For the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, and unimportant. According to this view, it was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization.

Building on much fascinating archeological and historical research and offering an astute comparison of warfare in civilized and prehistoric societies, from modern European states to the Plains Indians of North America, Keeley convincingly demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was in fact more deadly, more frequent, and more ruthless than modern war. He cites evidence of ancient massacres in many areas of the world, and surveys the prevalence of looting, destruction, and trophy-taking in all kinds of warfare, again finding little moral distinction between ancient warriors and civilized armies. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, he examines the evidence of cannibalism among some preliterate peoples.

But Keeley goes beyond grisly facts to address the larger moral and philosophical issues raised by his work. What are the causes of war? Are human beings inherently violent? How can we ensure peace in our own time? Challenging some of our most dearly held beliefs, Keeley's conclusions are bound to stir controversy.

Signalling and Performance: Ancient Rock Art in Britain and Ireland presents a state of the art survey of the ancient rock art of Britain and Ireland, bringing together new discoveries and new interpretations. Ancient rock art offers unique insights into the mindsets of its makers and the landscapes in which they lived. The making of rock art was not just an aesthetic practice, but an activity informed by deep social and cultural meanings held by its makers - meanings that they were compelled to express on rocks in Britain and Ireland, through mostly abstract images, for thousands of years. For a long time, ancient rock art remained a topic on the fringes of Archaeology. Since the 1960s, however, there has been sustained recording and research into ancient rock art. Increased publicity has evoked growing interest in British and Irish rock art, with professional and amateur archaeologists and the public, with the latter being responsible for many discoveries. In 2007, Aron Mazel, George Nash and Clive Waddington published the first edited volume focusing on ancient British rock art, entitled Art as Metaphor. Since then, there have been a number of publications covering this topic. Building on the increased interest in rock art, this lavishly illustrated volume constructed of thirteen thought-provoking chapters and an Introduction will do much to further enhance of understanding of this fascinating and meaningful resource. It will further establish ancient British and Irish rock art as a significant archaeological assemblage worthy of attention and additional study.

Sustainability strives to meet the needs of the present without compromising the future, but increasingly recognizes the tradeoffs among these many needs. Who benefits? Who bears the burden? How are these difficult decisions made? Are people aware of these hard choices? This timely volume brings the perspectives of ethnography and archaeology to bear on these questions by examining case studies from around the world. Written especially for this volume, the essays by an international team of scholars offer archaeological and ethnographic examples from the southwestern United States, the Maya region of Mexico, Africa, India, and the North Atlantic, among other regions. Collectively, they explore the benefits and consequences of growth and development, the social costs of ecological sustainability, and tensions between food and military security.

This book presents the results of the study of the wall paintings from the Northeast Bastion at Ayia Irini, situating them within the wider social context of the island of Kea and the Aegean world. Like the spectacularly well-preserved town of Akrotiri on Thera, with which these paintings are contemporary, Ayia Irini thrived 3,500 years ago. But unlike Akrotiri, Ayia Irini was not protected by a layer of volcanic ash. When the site was excavated in the 1960s-1970s by the University of Cincinnati under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the paintings had long since collapsed, fracturing into thousands of small pieces and becoming mixed with stones, broken pottery, and accumulated debris. This study attempts to bring the wall paintings back to life through the best-preserved fragments. Within the Northeast Bastion was a miniature frieze and, in the adjacent room, large-scale panels of plants. Human action set within townscapes, landscapes, and the sea presents a vivid account of the social life and environment of the people for whom this harbor town was vital within the trading network of the time. In this book the social implications of the fascinating and often unique iconography is explored, and the setting within a fortification wall is quite extraordinary. The volume contains many catalog entries, which contain color images of the fragments, and it is also abundantly illustrated with color drawings, visualizations, and photographs.

The Neolithic of Europe comprises eighteen specially commissioned papers on prehistoric archaeology, written by leading international scholars. The coverage is broad, ranging geographically from south-east Europe to Britain and Ireland and chronologically from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, but with a decided focus on the former. Several papers discuss new scientific approaches to key questions in Neolithic research, while others offer interpretive accounts of aspects of the archaeological record. Thematically, the main foci are on Neolithisation; the archaeology of Neolithic daily life, settlements and subsistence; as well as monuments and aspects of worldview. A number of contributions highlight the recent impact of techniques such as isotopic analysis and statistically modelled radiocarbon dates on our understanding of mobility, diet, lifestyles, events and historical processes. The volume is presented to celebrate the enormous impact that Alasdair Whittle has had on the study of prehistory, especially the European and British Neolithic, and his rich career in archaeology.

Earthen Construction Technology presents the papers from Session IV-5 of the 18th UISPP World Congress (Paris, June 2018). The archaeological study of earthen construction has until now focused on typology and conservation, rather than on its anthropological importance. Earth is the permanent building material of humankind, and was used by the world’s earliest civilizations for their first urban programmes. The architectural and engineering know-how required to carry out these monumental achievements can only be obtained through archaeological research: extensive excavations with attention to architectural and structural features, and their collapse, coupled with typological, mineralogical, micromorphological, botanical, chemical, and mechanical studies of building materials. This line of research is recent, starting in the 1980s in Europe, but is rapidly growing and illustrated in this volume.

Iron Age marsh-forts are large, monumental structures located in low-lying waterscapes. Although they share chronological and architectural similarities with their hillfort counterparts, their locations suggest that they may have played a specific and alternative role in Iron Age society. Despite the availability of a rich palaeoenvironmental archive at many sites, little is known about these enigmatic structures, and until recently, the only acknowledged candidate was the unusual, dual-enclosure monument at Sutton Common, near Doncaster. Assessing Iron Age Marsh-Forts considers marsh-forts as a separate phenomenon within Iron Age society through an understanding of their landscape context and palaeoenvironmental development. At the national level, a range of Iron Age wetland monuments has been compared to Sutton Common to generate a gazetteer of potential marsh-forts. At the local level, a multi-disciplinary case-study is presented of the Berth marsh-fort in North Shropshire, incorporating GIS-based landscape modelling and multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental analysis (plant macrofossils, beetles and pollen). The results of both the gazetteer and the Berth case-study challenge the view that marsh-forts are simply a topographical phenomenon. These substantial Iron Age monuments appear to have been deliberately constructed to control areas of marginal wetland and may have played an important role in the ritual landscape.