Time, Energy and Stone Tools aims to refocus archaeological and anthropological interest in technology by demonstrating that theory-building is possible if tool manufacture and use are conceived as products of both environmental factors and social needs. Drawing particularly on optimisation theory in ecology, the eleven contributors examine within a broad spatial and temporal framework a wide range of variable including time, energy, raw materials, risk management and information flow and its place in social relationships. Most concentrate on hunter-gatherer adaptation but key papers examining the impact of agriculture and growing social complexity are also included. A challenging overview by Michael Jochim stresses at once the key role of theory in aiding our understanding of early technology and the embeddedness of tool use in the wider behavioural setting.

Cranborne Chase, in central southern England, is the area where British field archaeology developed in its modern form. The site of General Pitt Rivers' pioneering excavations in the nineteenth century, Cranborne Chase also provides a microcosm of virtually all the major types of filed monument present in southern England as a whole. Much of the archaeological material has fortuitously survived, offering the fullest chronological cover of any part of the prehistoric British landscape. Martin Green began working in this region in 1968 and was joined by John Barrett and Richard Bradley in 1977 for a fuller programme of survey and excavation that lasted for nearly ten years. In this important study, they apply some of the questions in prehistory to one of the first regions of the country to be studied in such detail. The book is a regional study of long-term change in British prehistory, and contains a unique collection of data. A landmark in the archaeological literature, it will be essential reading for students and scholars of British prehistory and social and historical geography, and also for all those involved with archaeological methods.

This is a record of two seasons' geological and archaeological fieldwork in the Gebel Akhdar hills, with a summary of prehistoric finds in neighbouring territories. Dr Hey has written the first part of the work, describing the geology of the terraces and other pleistocene deposits of the Cyrenaican coastal areas. Dr McBurney has written the second, on the prehistory of the area. The material described falls into two main parts: the first comprises palaeolithic finds of Pleistocene date, solidly dated on the result of Dr Hey's work and wholly free from the possibility of earlier or later inclusions; the second is a later group of finds bearing on the final period of the Stone Age in the area and the spread of the earliest agricultural and pastoral societies in the region. Read with the other available evidence, the findings of this book suggest unique conclusions about the diffusions of neolithic arts and crafts from their centres of origin in the Near East and bear on the origin and interconnection of the middle and upper palaeolithic hunting cultures in North Africa and the part they may have played in the development of the corresponding cultures in prehistoric Egypt.

Hunters in Transition analyses one of the crucial events in human cultural evolution: the emergence of post-glacial hunter-gatherer communities and the development of farming. Traditionally, the advantages of settled agriculture have been assumed and the transition to farming has been viewed in terms of the simple dispersal of early farming communities northwards across Europe. The contributors to this volume adopt a fresh, more subtle approach. Farming is viewed from a hunter-gatherer perspective as offering both advantages and disadvantages, organisational disruption during the period of transition and far-reaching social consequences for the existing way of life. The hunter-gatherer economy and farming in fact shared a common objective: a guaranteed food supply in a changing natural and social environment. Drawing extensively on research in eastern Europe and temperate Asia, the book argues persuasively for the essential unity of all post-glacial. adaptations whether leading to the dispersal of farming or the retention and elaboration of existing hunter-gatherer strategies.

Grahame Clark's book examines the development of prehistoric archaeology at Cambridge and the achievements of its graduates, placing this theme against the background of the growth of archaeology as an academic discipline worldwide. Prehistory in Cambridge began to be taught formally in 1920 and emerged as a full tripos soon after the Second World War. From the outset it focused on the aims and methods of archaeological research, providing in addition for combinations of study options ranging from early prehistory to the archaeology of the major civilisations of the Old World and the protohistory of Northern Europe. The measure of its success is shown by the achievement of Cambridge graduates at home and overseas in both the study and the field. A significant outcome of their work has been the widespread recognition of archaeology as a subject of broad educational value, not merely for undergraduates, but for human beings the world over.

It has been said that for 99 per cent of their cultural history human societies have made their living through the collection of wild resources. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the study of hunters and gatherers has become an increasingly popular and central topic of research. Within archaeology it has created an international focus for people working in many different areas of the world. At the same time it has provided a meeting ground for a range of disciplines, all concerned in one way or another with aspects of human behaviour. However, analysis of the prehistoric record has inevitably lagged behind the development of fresh theoretical perspectives. Hunter-gatherer economy in prehistory seeks to bridge this gap by combining the discussion of recent developments in ecological and social theory with the analysis of prehistoric data from many of the classic areas of palaeolithic studies in Europe.

Throughout his career Grahame Clark has pioneered on a world scale the use of the archaeological record to document the economic and social life of prehistoric communities. In Europe he was the first to employ the concept of the ecosystem in archaeology and to underscore the necessarily reciprocal relationship that exists between culture and environment. In Britain he has played a major role in moving archaeology away from its preoccupation with typology and spurring on the newly emergent discipline of bioarchaeology. Economic Prehistory reflects all these concerns. Following a comprehensive bibliography of Professor Clark's writing, the volume opens with a series of classic papers on basic subsistence activities such as seal hunting, whaling, fowling, fishing, forest clearance, farming and stock raising. Subsequent sections then deal with world prehistory and the thorny relationship between archaeology, education and society. The volume closes with a retrospective which looks critically at such figures of the past as Gordon Childe and Mortimer Wheeler and to the author's own renowned excavations at the Mesolithic site of Starr Carr.

The Upper Palaeolithic era of Europe has left an abundance of evidence for symbolic activities, such as direct representations of animals and other features of the natural world, personal adornments, and elaborate burials, as well as other vestiges that are more abstract and cryptic. These behaviours are also exhibited by populations throughout the world, from the prehistoric period through to the present day. How can we interpret these activities? What do they tell us about the beliefs and priorities of the people who carried them out? How do these behaviours relate to ideologies, cosmology, and understanding of the world? What can they tell us about the emergence of ritual and religious thought? And how do the activities of humans in prehistoric Europe compare with those of their predecessors there and elsewhere? In this volume, fifteen internationally renowned scholars contribute essays that explore the relationship between symbolism, spirituality, and humanity in the prehistoric societies of Europe and traditional societies elsewhere. The volume is richly illustrated with 50 halftones and 24 colour plates.

First printed in 1982, this is the third and final volume to be published as a result of the British Academy Major Research Project on the Early History of Agriculture, carried out in the Department of Archaeology in Cambridge under the direction of the late Eric Higgs. After his death in 1976, the Project was drawn to its conclusion by his associates, and this book is effectively a summary of the results of the Project. The first two volumes, Papers in Economic Prehistory and Palacoeconomy, argued that the development of agriculture was a much more gradual and widespread phenomenon than had been thought previously. This book now discusses the origins and early development of prehistoric agriculture within the framework of prehistoric subsistence economies in general. Early human economies are viewed in their adaptation to three crucial resource zones: the uplands, the lowlands and the littorals.

Concentrating their attention on the Pacific Islands, the contributors to this book show how the tightly focused social and economic systems of islands offer archaeologists a series of unique opportunities for tracking and explaining prehistoric change. From the 1950s onwards, excavations in such islands as Fiji, Palau and Hawaii revolutionised Oceanic archaeology and, as the major problems of cultural origins and island sequences were resolves, archaeologists came increasingly to study social change and to integrate newly acquired data on material culture with older ethnographic and ethnohistorical materials. The fascinating results of this work, centring on the evolution of complex Oceanic chiefdoms into something very much like classic 'archaic states', are authoritatively surveyed here.

How, when and why did inherited differences of wealth, status and power arise in human communities? At the heart of Emerging Complexity is the thesis that complex societies developed independently during the Copper and Bronze Ages in south-east Spain, and in the wider context of the Iberian peninsula and the west Mediterranean. Chapman rejects the concept of diffusion from the Aegean and east Mediterranean, until recently seen as the cradle of complex society in later prehistoric Europe. The unprecedented amount of new data on south-east Spain since the 1970s unavailable to many prehistorians. This detailed synthesis is therefore valuable as a general introduction to the area, as well as being important for prehistorians concerned with the emergence of complexity in the Aegean and throughout Europe.

Thoughtful Foragers is about hunter-gatherer decision making. The author explores the implications of the human mind as a product of biological evolution for the way in which humans solve foraging problems. He draws on studies form ethology, psychology and ethnography prior to turning his attention to prehistoric hunter-gatherers. He attempts to construct explanations for patterns in the archaeological record by an explicit focus on decision making by individuals. Thoughtful Foragers will appeal to specialists in European prehistory as well as to those interested in archaeological theory and method. It makes some very significant advances, which will be of real importance for the field of evolutionary theory in relation to human evolution and the evaluation of human social systems.

This book was originally published in 1954. Grahame Clark's excavations at Star Carr from 1949 to 1951 have long been regarded as a model of how archaeological investigation should be conducted. In addition to this, the importance of the site itself, the first early mesolithic site in Europe from which a full complement of bone, antler, wood and other organic material was recovered alongside the flint industry, has established for this report on the excavations a permanent place in all archaeological libraries. The book is now reissued.

The Greek island of Melos in the Cyclades has been inhabited for at least five thousand years. Two periods of its history are well documented: the late Bronze Age, when it supported an important urban centre at Phylakopi and the late fifth century BC, when as an independent city-state it briefly defied and was then destroyed by the expansionist power of Athens. The case of Melos is thus relevant to the understanding of the processes of early state-formation and of the integration of small-scale societies into larger political units. As the contributors to this volume show, a small island provides a very suitable area - clearly defined, self-contained - in which to examine the processes of social, cultural and economic change and the forces - sometimes gradual and almost imperceptible in their effect, sometimes sudden and dramatic - by which changes are initiated.

John Fox here offers a fresh and persuasive view of the crucial Classic-Postclassic transition that determined the shape of the later Maya state. Drawing this data from ethnographic analogy and native chronicles as well as archaeology, he identifies segmentary lineage organisation as the key to understanding both the political organisation and the long-distance migrations observed among the Quiche Maya of Guatemala and Mexico. The first part of the book traces the origins of the Quiche, Itza and Xiu to the homeland on the Mexican Gulf coast where they acquired their potent Toltec mythology and identifies early segmentary lineages that developed as a result of social forces in the frontier zone. Dr Fox then matches the known anthropological characteristics of segmentary lineages against the Mayan kinship relationships described in documents and deduced from the spatial patterning within Quiche towns and cities. His conclusion, that the inherently fissile nature of segmentary lineages caused the leapfrogging migrations of up to 500km observed amongst the Maya, offers a convincing solution to a problem that has long puzzled scholars.

Drawing extensively on anthropological theory and ecological models of human adaptation, Forest Farmers and Stockherders explores the single most radical transformation in all European prehistory - the growth of a food-producing economy in the period 5000-3000 BC. Dr Bogucki seeks to develop a coherent view of the introduction of food production to north-central Europe, identifying new environmental zones being exploited for the first time and new ecological adaptations being adopted by both indigenous and colonizing populations. He lays particular emphasis on the strategies developed by Neolithic communities for coping with the environmental risks and uncertainties inherent in the introduction of new economic systems and the social implications of these strategies for the organization of human behaviour.

Anna Maria Bietti Sestieri, one of the finest Italian protohistorians, deals in this monograph with a major archaeological site, the Iron Age cemetery of Osteria dell'Osa, near Rome. The cemetery materials provide rich insights into the emergence of the city-state in central Italy in the crucial period 900 580 BC. Paying particular attention to the causes of variation in burials - ritual, gender, age, status - Dr Bietti Sestieri is able to develop a convincing picture of the late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Latium vetus in the wider context of southern Etruria and Campania.

Problems in Neolithic Archaeology is a notable contribution to the debate about how we can write prehistory. Drawing on both processual and post-processual approaches, it reaffirms the central role of theory and interpretation while accepting as permanent the uncertainty which makes the testing of archaeological hypotheses difficult or even impossible. Dr Whittle asserts in particular the need for greater self-confidence and for the formulation of new theory and questions more appropriate to the archaeological record. The book's specific strength lies, however, in a close contextual study of the Neolithic period in western and central Europe. In this respect it provides an admirable complement to his textbook Neolithic Europe.

This book provides the first analysis and synthesis of the evidence of the earliest inhabitants of Asia before the appearance of modern humans 100,000 years ago. Asia has received far less attention than Africa and Europe in the search for human origins, but is no longer considered of marginal importance. Indeed, a global understanding of human origins cannot be properly understood without a detailed consideration of the largest continent. In this study, Robin Dennell examines a variety of sources, including the archaeological evidence, the fossil hominin record, and the environmental and climatic background from Southwest, Central, South, and Southeast Asia, as well as China. He presents an authoritative and comprehensive framework for investigations of Asia's oldest societies, challenges many long-standing assumptions about its earliest inhabitants, and places Asia centrally in the discussions of human evolution in the past two million years.

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.

Using data drawn primarily from the American Southwest, Stephen Plog shows that there are basic problems with the methods archaeologists traditionally use to classify and analyse prehistoric pottery. Archaeologists have studied the painted designs and other stylistic (that is, non-functional) characteristics on different types of prehistoric artifacts in order to infer information about prehistoric social organization and cultural change. Such studies usually argue that the degree of similarity between the designs found on ceramic vessels at different prehistoric sites were occupied or from the amount of interaction between the people who occupied them. In Stylistic Variation in Prehistoric Ceramics, the author proposes that many factors, rather than just two, cause design or stylistic variation on artifacts. He demonstrates flaws in the logic and method of previous studies and suggests that the ways in which designs have been classified and understood are often inappropriate. Employing archaeological information from the Chevelon Canyon area of east-central Arizona, he constructs his own proposal for a new analytic framework. Professor Plog's study provides a major contribution to archaeological method and theory and should be of interest to a broad range of archaeologists.

Traditions of sacrifice exist in almost every human culture and often embody a society’s most meaningful religious and symbolic acts. Ritual violence was particularly varied and enduring in the prehistoric South American Andes, where human lives, animals, and material objects were sacrificed in secular rites or as offerings to the divine. Spectacular discoveries of sacrificial sites containing the victims of violent rituals have drawn ever-increasing attention to ritual sacrifice within Andean archaeology. Responding to this interest, this volume provides the first regional overview of ritual killing on the pre-Hispanic north coast of Peru, where distinct forms and diverse trajectories of ritual violence developed during the final 1,800 years of prehistory. Presenting original research that blends empirical approaches, iconographic interpretations, and contextual analyses, the contributors address four linked themes—the historical development and regional variation of north coast sacrifice from the early first millennium AD to the European conquest; a continuum of ritual violence that spans people, animals, and objects; the broader ritual world of sacrifice, including rites both before and after violent offering; and the use of diverse scientific tools, archaeological information, and theoretical interpretations to study sacrifice. This research proposes a wide range of new questions that will shape the research agenda in the coming decades, while fostering a nuanced, scientific, and humanized approach to the archaeology of ritual violence that is applicable to archaeological contexts around the world.

This book narrates the story of human biological and cultural evolution, from the earliest beginnings of our zoological family Hominidae, through the emergence of Homo sapiens, to the Agricultural Revolution. It concludes with a brief overview of the subsequent diversification of cultural and technological traditions in all the areas our species inhabits. A particular focus is on the pattern of events/innovations in human biological and cultural evolution, which have tended not to proceed in lockstep. Prior to the emergence of Homo sapiens innovations of this kind were generally sporadic, and rare; since that event their frequency has been steadily increasing. Tattersall draws on his own research to demonstrate that the history of humankind has not been one of a singleminded struggle from primitiveness to perfection, but has rather been one of trial and error, of evolutionary experimentation that as often ended in failure as in success. In the process he thoroughly examines both the fossil and the archaeological records that document our human prehistory. All human beings have a thirst to know where they came from, whether as individuals or as a species. This book responds to this desire for knowledge, whether in the classroom where the subject has a place in history as well as in science curricula or in more informal contexts. There currently exist no high school texts or supplemental readings that treat this subject in an authoritative manner, written by a practicing scientist in the field. This volume will have the advantage of being written by one whose opinions are first hand, and conditioned by direct familiarity with the original evidence.

Archaeologists have traditionally considered islands as distinct physical and social entities. In this book, Paul Rainbird discusses the historical construction of this characterization and questions the basis for such an understanding of island archaeology. Through a series of case studies of prehistoric archaeology in the Mediterranean, Pacific, Baltic, and Atlantic seas and oceans, he argues for a decentering of the land in favor of an emphasis on the archaeology of the sea and, ultimately, a new perspective on the making of maritime communities. The archaeology of islands is thus unshackled from approaches that highlight boundedness and isolation, and replaced with a new set of principles - that boundaries are fuzzy, islanders are distinctive in their expectation of contacts with people from over the seas, and that island life can tell us much about maritime communities. Debating islands, thus, brings to the fore issues of identity and community and a concern with Western construction of other peoples.

This book studies the formation of complex societies in prehistoric China during the Neolithic and early state periods, c. 7000-1500 BC. Archaeological materials are interpreted through anthropological perspectives, using systematic analytic methods in settlement and burial patterns. Both agency and process are considered in the development of chiefdoms and in the emergence of early states in the Yellow River region. Interrelationships between factors such as mortuary practice, craft specialization, ritual activities, warfare, exchange of elite goods, climatic fluctuations, and environmental changes are emphasized. This study offers a critical evaluation of current archaeological data from Chinese sources, and argues that, although some general tendencies are noted, social changes were affected by multiple factors in no pre-determined sequence. In this most comprehensive study to date, Li Liu attempts to reconstruct developmental trajectories toward early states in Chinese civilization and discusses theoretical implications of Chinese archaeology for the understanding of social evolution.