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.

Due to the regional division of this fieldwork, the book has two main categories. The first, Part I, deals with the Ice Age in southwestern Kashmir including Sind, Liddar, Pir Panjal, Jammu and Ladakh and the second, Part II, III, IV and V, studies the Pleistocene and archaeological studies in other parts of India, mainly Potwar and Indus regions and Central and Peninsular India. This arrangement will enable the reader to first get acquainted with the classical cycle in the Himalayas and then understand the Pleistocene stratigraphy of the adjoining plains. The work, originally published in 1939, has long been out-of-print and is being reissued in a limited edition. It is hoped that this book will facilitate an understanding of Pleistocene geology and prehistory in Asia and encourage the development of a border science, in which geologists and archaeologists jointly study human evolution.

Based on the author's thesis, this study presents a series of period-based reconstructions of the occupation and exploitation of the Wolds in East Yorkshire from the late Bronze Age to the early medieval period. Tracing the transformation and re-orientation of the landscape during this long time-frame, Fenton-Thomas reveals a cyclical pattern of change primarily concerned with an increase in land division and an expansion of settlement from the Wold edge to the interior alongside or due to shifts in land-use practices and social change.

In accordance with European Science Foundation regulations, Exploratory Workshops with a maximum of 20 participants were designed to encourage researchers from across Europe to put forward innovative and creative ideas in European research. The workshop 'Lower Palaeolithic small tools in Europe and the Levant' was accordingly held in Liege (Belgium) between September 3 - 7, 2001 (in cooperation with the XIVth Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences). Since the famous 1960s' excavations in Vertesszolos (Hungary), Lower Palaeolithic assemblages of very small tools have been known in Europe and referred to as microlithic assemblages. They were so different from the known European Lower Palaeolithic assemblages, that the Hungarian archaeologist L. Vertes introduced the new generic name 'Buda Industry', and sparked a wider interest in this whole area of study. This volume (bringing together the current knowledge on a topic that includes the oldest hunting weapons known in the world: the Schoningen (Lower Saxony, Germany) wooden spears) includes the 15 papers that were prepared for the Workshop.Taking the main theme of the Workshop (the comparative technological and stylistic analysis of small tool assemblages in Europe and Asia) as a starting point, the 15 papers presented here (ordered spatially from west to east and temporally from the Lower to the Middle Palaeolithic: c. 1000 - 300 kyr BP), as well as discussing the "Buda Industry", also extend to cover such areas of interest as the "Lower Palaeolithic Microlithic Tradition", the "Colombanian", the "Archaic Industries" or "Taubachian", etc: (1) Lower Palaeolithic Sites at Schoningen, Lower Saxony; (2) Bilzingsleben - Homo erectus, his culture and his environment; (3) The small flint tool industry from Bilzingsleben - Steinrinne; (4) Lower Palaeolithic sites with small artefacts in Poland; (5) A new Lower Palaeolithic site with a small toolset at Raeinives (Central Bohemia); (6) Changing environment - unchanged culture at Vertesszolos, Hungary; (7) The small tools of Evron-Quarry, western Galilee, Israel; (8) The use of raw material at the Lower Palaeolithic site of Bizat Ruhama, Israel; (9) Small instruments of the Lower Palaeolithic site Kuldara and their geoarchaeological meaning; (10) The role of raw material in explaining tool assemblage variability in Palaeolithic China; (11) Some Observations on Microlithic Assemblages in Central Europe during the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Kulna and Pooedmosti II (Czech Republic); (12) The Taubachian, a Middle Palaeolithic Small Tool Industry in the Czech Republic and Slovakia; (13) The Middle Palaeolithic Microlithic Assemblage from Wroc3 aw,Southwest Poland; (14) Palaeolithic micro-industries: value and significance; (15) Research problems of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic small tool assemblages.

"Champions of the Cherokees" is the story of two extraordinary Northern Baptist missionaries, father and son, who lived with the Cherokee Indians from 1821 to 1876. Told largely in the words of these outspoken and compassionate men, this is also a narrative of the Cherokees' sufferings at the hands of the United States government and white frontier dwellers. In addition, it is an analysis of the complexity of interracial relations in the United States, for the Cherokees adopted the white man's custom of black chattel slavery. This fascinating biography reveals the unusual extent to which Evan and John B. Jones challenged prevailing federal Indian policies: unlike most other missionaries, they supported the Indians' right to retain their own identity and national autonomy. William McLoughlin vividly describes the "trail of tears" over which the Cherokees and Evan Jones traveled eight hundred miles through the dead of winter--from Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina to a new home in Oklahoma. He examines the difficulties that Jones encountered when, alone among all the missionaries, he expelled Cherokee slaveholders from his mission churches. This book depicts the Joneses' experiences during the Civil War, including their chaplaincy of two Cherokee regiments who fought with the Northern side. Finally, McLoughlin tells how these "champions of the Cherokees" were adopted into the Cherokee nation and helped them fight detribalization.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

El cerro de Alarcos (Ciudad Real): Formación y desarrollo de un oppidum ibérico presents the results of archaeological work which has been carried out since 1997 in so-called Sector III of the Alarcos site, located on a hill next to the Guadiana river, a few kilometres from Ciudad Real. These archaeological campaigns have made it possible to obtain essential information to understand the communities that, from the end of the Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age, inhabited this large town and its surrounding area. An interesting set of structures and other evidence of material culture have been recovered, which allow us to characterize the daily activities of people between the 10th-11th century BC and, in addition, they enable us to understand the paleoenvironment of this territory and the nature of the economy and the food transformation activities of these protohistoric populations. The use of this territory has been determined over the centuries, being originally a residential area which later, in Iberian times, assumed economic functionality, as it was intended for grain storage, grinding and cooking food. The documentation of a wide and varied repertoire of ceramic materials and an interesting set of foreign ceramics corroborates the dynamism this settlement achieved, during both the Pre-Iberian period and the full Iberian period.

The archaeological sites of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula are among the most visited ancient cities of the Americas. Archaeologists have recently made great advances in our understanding of the social and political milieu of the northern Maya lowlands. However, such advances have been under-represented in both scholarly and popular literature until now. 'The Ancient Maya of Mexico' presents the results of new and important archaeological, epigraphic, and art historical research in the Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. Ranging across the Middle Preclassic to the Modern periods, the volume explores how new archaeological data has transformed our understanding of Maya history. 'The Ancient Maya of Mexico' will be invaluable to students and scholars of archaeology and anthropology, and all those interested in the society, rituals and economic organisation of the Maya region.

Includes 164 b/w figures and 18 tables. Gesher is a small Middle Bronze Age IIA cemetery site located in the central Jordan Valley in Israel. Initial excavations in 1986-1987 indicated the site's importance for examining population and settlement in the interior of Canaan in the early second millennium BCE. In particular, the nature of the interments and the early date of the site's material culture highlighted the importance of Gesher for studies of MB IIA development. Three additional seasons of excavations were conducted from 2002-2004, which were designed to gain further data regarding the mortuary customs, material culture, and social and economic developments of this population in MB IIA Canaan. During the five seasons of excavation, a total of 23 interments were excavated in the cemetery, together with their associated grave goods, consisting of ceramic vessels, bronze weapons, and one bronze toggle pin. This final report presents the burials and material culture from the cemetery and compares the data with other Middle Bronze Age sites in Canaan. It contributes valuable information regarding Canaanite mortuary customs and increases the corpus of material culture dating to early MB IIA. The burials and material culture from the Gesher cemetery date to the earliest phases of the MB IIA, while also preserving traditions and forms of the preceding EB IV/MB I period in Palestine. As such, Gesher provides a window into the transitional period between EB IV/MB I and MB IIA which is rarely attested at other sites, to date, and thus has significant implications for knowledge concerning this cultural era in Canaan.

There have been many books, movies, and even TV commercials featuring Neandertals-some serious, some comical. But what was it really like to be a Neandertal? How were their lives similar to or different from ours? In How to Think Like a Neandertal, archaeologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge team up to provide a brilliant account of the mental life of Neandertals, drawing on the most recent fossil and archaeological remains. Indeed, some Neandertal remains are not fossilized, allowing scientists to recover samples of their genes-one specimen had the gene for red hair and, more provocatively, all had a gene called FOXP2, which is thought to be related to speech. Given the differences between their faces and ours, their voices probably sounded a bit different, and the range of consonants and vowels they could generate might have been different. But they could talk, and they had a large (perhaps huge) vocabulary-words for places, routes, techniques, individuals, and emotions. Extensive archaeological remains of stone tools and living sites (and, yes, they did often live in caves) indicate that Neandertals relied on complex technical procedures and spent most of their lives in small family groups. The authors sift the evidence that Neandertals had a symbolic culture-looking at their treatment of corpses, the use of fire, and possible body coloring-and conclude that they probably did not have a sense of the supernatural. The book explores the brutal nature of their lives, especially in northwestern Europe, where men and women with spears hunted together for mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses. They were pain tolerant, very likely taciturn, and not easy to excite. Wynn and Coolidge offer here an eye-opening portrait of Neandertals, painting a remarkable picture of these long-vanished people and providing insight, as they go along, into our own minds and culture.

Between the Murray and the Sea: Aboriginal Archaeology in South-eastern Australia explores Indigenous archaeology around the Murray River.

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-72) was a British archaeologist, naturalist and palaeoanthropologist who made a significant contribution to the study of human evolutionary development. First published in 1931, this work presents the results of two periods of excavation by the East African Archaeological Expedition during 1926-7 and 1928-9. As noted in the preface, the findings of these excavations enabled the Expedition 'to work out a number of clear subdivisions in Pleistocene and recent times, based upon climatic changes, and to establish in most cases the relation of the cultures found to these time divisions.' The text contains numerous illustrative figures, including original drawings and photographs. Numerous appendices are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in archaeology, anthropology and East Africa.

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.

Based on ten years of surveys and excavations in Nyiyaparli country in the eastern Chichester Ranges, north-west Australia, Crafting Country provides a unique synthesis of Holocene archaeology in the Pilbara region. The analysis of about 1000 sites, including surface artefact scatters and 19 excavated rock shelters, as well as thousands of isolated artefacts, takes a broad view of the landscape, examining the distribution of archaeological remains in time and space. Heritage compliance archaeology commonly focuses on individual sites, but this study reconsiders the evidence at different scales a at the level of artefact, site, locality, and region a to show how Aboriginal people interacted with the land and made their mark on it.Crafting Country shows that the Nyiyaparli acrafted' their country, building structures and supplying key sites with grindstones, raw material and flaked stone cores. In so doing, they created a taskscape of interwoven activities linked by paths of movement.

Oceania was the last region on earth to be permanently inhabited, with the final settlers reaching Aotearoa/New Zealand approximately AD 1300. This is about the same time that related Polynesian populations began erecting Easter Island's gigantic statues, farming the valley slopes of Tahiti and similar islands, and moving finely made basalt tools over several thousand kilometers of open ocean between Hawai'i, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, and archipelagos in between. The remarkable prehistory of Polynesia is one chapter of Oceania's human story. Almost 50,000 years prior, people entered Oceania for the first time, arriving in New Guinea and its northern offshore islands shortly thereafter, a biogeographic region labelled Near Oceania and including parts of Melanesia. Near Oceania saw the independent development of agriculture and has a complex history resulting in the greatest linguistic diversity in the world. Beginning 1000 BC, after millennia of gradually accelerating cultural change in Near Oceania, some groups sailed east from this space of inter-visible islands and entered Remote Oceania, rapidly colonizing the widely separated separated archipelagos from Vanuatu to SAmoa with purposeful, return voyages, and carrying an intricately decorated pottery called Lapita. From this common cultural foundation these populations developed separate, but occasionally connected, cultural traditions over the next 3000 years. Western Micronesia, the archipelagos of Palau, Guam and the Marianas, was also colonized around 1500 BC by canoes arriving from the west, beginning equally long sequences of increasingly complex social formations, exchange relationships and monumental constructions. All of these topics and others are presented in The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania, written by Oceania's leading archaeologists and allied researchers. Chapters describe the cultural sequences of the region's major island groups, provide the most recent explanations for diversity and change in Oceanic prehistory, and lay the foundation for the next generation of research.

A. Bowdoin Van Riper provides an account of how Victorian scientists raised and resolved the question of human antiquity. During the early part of the 19th century, scientists divided the history of the earth into a series of "former worlds," populated by mammoths and other prehistoric animals, and a "modern world," in which humans lived. According to this view, the human race was no older than 6000 years. The discovery of tools with mammoth bones, however, prompted a group of British geologists to argue in 1859 that the origin of humankind dated back to prehistoric times. The idea of prehistoric human origins threatened long-cherished religious beliefs and set off an intense debate among scientists as well as members of the clergy and the educated public. Van Riper chronicles this debate within the context of Victorian science, showing how the notion of human antiquity forced Victorians to redefine their assumptions about human evolution and the relationship of science to Christianity. The new study of human prehistory also crossed the boundaries of scientific disciplines, and the once-distinct fields of geology, archaeology and anthropology were drawn together to study early human life. Van Riper shows how, from the beginning, the study of human prehistory was an interdisciplinary endeavour.

In the past, Bronze Age painted plaster in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean has been studied from a range of different but isolated viewpoints. One of the current questions about this material is its direction of transfer. This volume brings both technological and iconographic (and other) approaches closer together: 1) by completing certain gaps in the literature on technology and 2) by investigating how and why technological transfer has developed and what broader impact this had on the wider social dynamics of the late Middle and Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean. This study approaches the topic of painted plaster by a multidisciplinary methodology. Moreover, when human actors and their interactions are placed in the centre of the scene, it demonstrates the human forces through which transfer was enabled and how multiple social identities and the inter-relationships of these actors with each other and their material world were expressed through their craft production and organization. The investigated data from sixteen sites has been contextualized within a wider framework of Bronze Age interconnections both in time and space because studying painted plaster in the Aegean cannot be considered separate from similar traditions both in Egypt and in the Near East. This study makes clear that it is not possible to deduce a one-way directional transfer of this painting tradition. Furthermore, by integrating both technology and iconography with its hybrid character, a clear technological style was defined in the predominant al fresco work found on these specific sites. The author suggests that the technological transfer most likely moved from west to east. This has important implications in the broader politico-economic and social dynamics of the eastern Mediterranean during the LBA. Since this art/craft was very much elite-owned, it shows how the smaller states in the LBA, such as the regions of the Aegean, were capable of staying within the large trade and exchange network that comprised the large powers of the East and Egypt. The painted plaster reflects a very visible presence in the archaeological record and, because it cannot be transported without its artisans, it suggests specific interactions of royal courts in the East with the Aegean peoples. The painted plaster as an immovable feature required at least temporary presence of a small team of painters and plasterers. Exactly this factor forms an argument in support of travelling artisans, who, in turn, shed light onto broader aspects of contact, trade and exchange mechanisms during the late MBA and LBA.

Copper is the first metal to play a large part in human history. This work is devoted to the history of metallurgical production in Northern Eurasia during the Bronze Age, based on experiments carried out by the author and analyses of ancient slag, ore and metal. It should be noted that archaeometallurgical studies include a huge range of works reflecting different fields of activity of ancient metallurgists. Often, all that unites these is the term 'metallurgy'. This work considers the problems of proper metallurgy, i.e. extracting metal from ore. A number of accompanying operations are closely connected with it, such as charcoal-burning, ore dressing, furnace constructing, and preparation of crucibles. In some instances the author touches upon these operations; however the main topic of the work is the smelting process. The closing stage of the metallurgical production is metalworking including various casting and forging operations, and also auxiliary operations: making of crucibles, casting molds, stone tools for metal forging. These problems are, as a rule, out of frameworks of this research.

The Bronze Age is frequently framed in social evolutionary terms. Viewed as the period which saw the emergence of social differentiation, the development of long-distance trade, and the intensification of agricultural production, it is seen as the precursor and origin-point for significant aspects of the modern world. This book presents a very different image of Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. Drawing on the wealth of material from recent excavations, as well as a long history of research, it explores the impact of the post-Enlightenment 'othering' of the non-human on our understanding of Bronze Age society. There is much to suggest that the conceptual boundary between the active human subject and the passive world of objects, so familiar from our own cultural context, was not drawn in this categorical way in the Bronze Age; the self was constructed in relational rather than individualistic terms, and aspects of the non-human world such as pots, houses, and mountains were considered animate entities with their own spirit or soul. In a series of thematic chapters on the human body, artefacts, settlements, and landscapes, this book considers the character of Bronze Age personhood, the relationship between individual and society, and ideas around agency and social power. The treatment and deposition of things such as querns, axes, and human remains provides insights into the meanings and values ascribed to objects and places, and the ways in which such items acted as social agents in the Bronze Age world.

In the ancient civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, textiles were generally much more costly than foodstuffs, animals or bronzes; it is very likely that the same was the case throughout prehistoric Europe. In this study, the first for over seventy years, Klavs Randsborg examines completely preserved woollen dresses, both female and male, from Danish oak coffin graves of the early second millennium BC. These garments, matched in age and superb preservation only by finds from Ancient Egypt, along with related artefacts such as images and figurines, are used to build up a rich picture of Bronze Age society and culture in the context of archaeological, ethnographical and historical information from Europe and beyond.

Since their initial discovery in the nineteenth century, the enigmatic prehistoric lake-dwellings of the Circum-Alpine region have captured the imagination of the public and archaeologists alike. Over 150 years of research have identified hundreds of lacustrine settlements spanning from the Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age, when apparently, they ceased to be built. Studies of Bronze Age material across Europe have often superficially identified bronze objects as being of 'Alpine lake-dwelling origin' or 'lake-dwelling style'. Through a combination of material culture studies, multiple correspondence analysis, and the principle of object biographies, the role of the Late Bronze Age lake-dwelling communities in Central European exchange networks is addressed. Were the lake-dwellers production specialists? Did they control material flow across the Alps? Did their participation in exchange routes result in cultural assimilation and the ultimate decline of their settlement tradition? Travelling Objects: Changing Values offers insights and answers to such questions.

Africa has the longest record - some 2.5 million years - of human occupation of any continent. For nearly all of this time, its inhabitants have made tools from stone and have acquired their food from its rich wild plant and animal resources. Archaeological research in Africa is crucial for understanding the origins of humans and the diversity of hunter-gatherer ways of life. This book is a synthesis of the record left by Africa's earliest hominin inhabitants and hunter-gatherers, combining the insights of archaeology with those of other disciplines, such as genetics and palaeo-environmental science. African evidence is critical to important debates, such as the origins of stone tool making, the emergence of recognisably modern forms of cognition and behaviour, and the expansion of successive hominins from Africa to other parts of the world.

For centuries scholars have pondered and speculated over the uses of the chipped stone implements uncovered at archaeological sites. Recently a number of researchers have attempted to determine prehistoric tool function through experimentation and through observation of the few remaining human groups who still retain this knowledge. Learning how stone tools were made and used in the past can tell us a great deal about ancient economic systems, exchange networks, and the social and political structure of prehistoric societies. Suzanne M. Lewenstein used the artifacts from Cerros, an important Late Preclassic (200 BC-AD 200) Mayan site in northern Belize, to study stone tool function. Through a comprehensive program of experimentation with stone tool replicas, she was able not only to infer the tasks performed by individual tool specimens but also to recognize a wide variety of past activities for which stone tools were used. Unlike previous works that focused on hunter-gatherer groups, Stone Tool Use at Cerros is the first comprehensive experimental study of tool use in an agricultural society. The lithic data are used in an economic interpretation of a lowland Mayan community within a hierarchically complex society. Apart from its significance to Mayan studies, this innovative work offers the beginnings of a reference collection of identifiable tool functions that may be documented for sedentary, complex society. It will be of major interest to all archaeologists and anthropologists, as well as those interested in economic specialization and artisanry in complex societies.

One spring morning two men cutting peat in a Danish bog uncovered a well-preserved body of a man with a noose around his neck. Thinking they had stumbled upon a murder victim, they reported their discovery to the police, who were baffled until they consulted the famous archaeologist P.V. Glob. Glob identified the body as that of a two-thousand-year-old man, ritually murdered and thrown in the bog as a sacrifice to the goddess of fertility.

Written in the guise of a scientific detective story, this classic of archaeological history--a best-seller when it was published in England but out of print for many years--is a thoroughly engrossing and still reliable account of the religion, culture, and daily life of the European Iron Age.

Includes 76 black-and-white photographs.

The discovery of archaeological structures in North Uist in 1974 after storm damage led to the identification by Iain Crawford of a kerb cairn complex, with a cist and human remains. Six years later he went back, and over the next three years excavated another cist with human remains in its kerbed cairn, many bowl pits dug into the blown sand, and down to two late Neolithic structures and a ritual complex. He intensively studied the environmental conditions affecting the site and was among the first archaeologists in Scotland to understand the climate changes taking place at the transition between late Neolithic and the early Bronze Age. The deposition of blown sand and the start of the machair in the Western Isles, including the rise in sea-level and inundations into inhabited and farmed landscapes, are all part of the complex story of natural events and human activities. Radiocarbon dating and modern scientific analyses provide the detail of the story of periods of starvation suffered by the people that were buried on the site, of the movement away of the community, of their attempts of bringing the 'new' land back into cultivation, of a temporary tent-like structure, and of marking their territory by the construction of enduring monuments to the dead.

Twenty-five thousand years ago, sea level fell more than 400 feet below its present position as a consequence of the growth of immense ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. A dry plain stretching 1,000 miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Aleutians became exposed between northeast Asia and Alaska, and across that plain, most likely, walked the first people of the New World. This book describes what is known about these people and the now partly submerged land, named Beringia, which they settled during the final millennia of the Ice Age.

Humans first occupied Beringia during a twilight period when rising sea levels had not yet caught up with warming climates. Although the land bridge between northeast Asia and Alaska was still present, warmer and wetter climates were rapidly transforming the Beringian steppe into shrub tundra. This volume synthesizes current research-some previously unpublished-on the archaeological sites and rapidly changing climates and biota of the period, suggesting that the absence of woody shrubs to help fire bone fuel may have been the barrier to earlier settlement, and that from the outset the Beringians developed a postglacial economy similar to that of later northern interior peoples.

The book opens with a review of current research and the major problems and debates regarding the environment and archaeology of Beringia. It then describes Beringian environments and the controversies surrounding their interpretation; traces the evolving adaptations of early humans to the cold environments of northern Eurasia, which set the stage for the settlement of Beringia; and provides a detailed account of the archaeological record in three chapters, each of which is focused on a specific slice of time between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago. In conclusion, the authors present an interpretive summary of the human ecology of Beringia and discuss its relationship to the wider problem of the peopling of the New World.