Stone tools are the least familiar objects that archaeologists recover from their excavations, and predictably, they struggle to understand them. Eastern Africa alone boasts a 3.4 million-year-long archaeological record but its stone tool evidence still remains disorganized, unsynthesized, and all-but-impenetrable to non-experts, and especially so to students from Eastern African countries. In this book, John J. Shea offers a simple, straightforward, and richly illustrated introduction in how to read stone tools. An experienced stone tool analyst and an expert stoneworker, he synthesizes the Eastern African stone tool evidence for the first time. Shea presents the EAST Typology, a new framework for describing stone tools specifically designed to allow archaeologists to do what they currently cannot: compare stone tool evidence across the full sweep of Eastern African prehistory. He also includes a series of short, fictional, and humorous vignettes set on an Eastern African archaeological excavation, which illustrate the major issues and controversies in research about stone tools.

Originally published in 1949, this book presents an account of the progress of research into the prehistory of the area then known as Southern Rhodesia during the first half of the twentieth century. The text avoids a consecutive account of Stone Age cultures in favour of an arrangement whereby the different localities selected for description are allowed to tell their own story. Numerous illustrative figures and a glossary are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in prehistoric man and archaeology.

In Home Francis Pryor, author of The Making of the British Landscape, archaeologist and broadcaster, takes us on his lifetime's quest: to discover the origins of family life in prehistoric Britain Francis Pryor's search for the origins of our island story has been the quest of a lifetime. In Home, the Time Team expert explores the first nine thousand years of life in Britain, from the retreat of the glaciers to the Romans' departure. Tracing the settlement of domestic communities, he shows how archaeology enables us to reconstruct the evolution of habits, traditions and customs. But this, too, is Francis Pryor's own story: of his passion for unearthing our past, from Yorkshire to the west country, Lincolnshire to Wales, digging in freezing winters, arid summers, mud and hurricanes, through frustrated journeys and euphoric discoveries. Evocative and intimate, Home shows how, in going about their daily existence, our prehistoric ancestors created the institution that remains at the heart of the way we live now: the family. 'Under his gaze, the land starts to fill with tribes and clans wandering this way and that, leaving traces that can still be seen today . . . Pryor feels the land rather than simply knowing it' - Guardian

The Bell Beaker Culture in All its Forms contains the proceedings of the 22nd meeting of the 'Archeologie et Gobelets' Association which took place in Geneva, Switzerland in January 2021. The book is structured in three parts: Archaeological Material demonstrates how ceramics, lithics, wrist guards, and metal artifacts contribute to our understanding of the Bell Beaker Culture. Funerary Archaeology and Anthropology considers how the particular context of death and the human skeleton can be employed to gain information on Bell Beaker populations. The final section, Reconstructing Bell Beaker Society, builds upon archaeological evidence to discuss site interpretations as well as the wide-reaching topics of ritual, culture, and symbolism. With the publication of these proceedings, it is hoped that the conference interactions can facilitate future research and discussions on Bell Beaker societies and their roles within Neolithic Europe and beyond.

Down the Bright Stream: The Prehistory of Woodcock Corner and the Tregurra Valley reports on a series of fieldwork projects carried out in the Tregurra Valley, to the east of Truro, Cornwall. The work was undertaken over a period of seven years between 2009 and 2015, predominantly by the Cornwall Archaeological Unit, as a response to the development of the valley. The fieldwork led to the identification of a large number of pits and hearths across the site, the majority of which that have proved dateable spanning the Early Neolithic to the end of the Early Bronze Age. One concentration of pits included one dating to the Late Neolithic containing a remarkable engraved slate disc. Other pits contained evidence for tin processing at the start of the Bronze Age. An enclosure formed by a segmented ditch was dated to the Early Bronze Age. Of considerable note was the identification of buried soils and colluvial layers pre-dating much of the prehistoric activity and found across the site. There was an apparent absence of activity in the valley between the end of the Early Bronze Age and the start of the Iron Age, when much of the valley was enclosed with field boundary ditches and activities recorded include crop processing, charcoal burning and iron smelting. The charcoal burning continued into the medieval period. Later activity in the valley including brickmaking, stone quarrying, and small-scale mineral prospection, is reported on elsewhere.

Color versions of select print images available on the Resources tab (or here: www.cambridge.org/heymans). This book shows how money emerged and spread in the eastern Mediterranean, centuries before the invention of coinage. While the invention of coinage in Ancient Lydia around 630 BCE is widely regarded as one of the defining innovations of the ancient world, money itself was never invented. It gained critical weight in the Iron Age (ca. 1200 - 600 BCE) as a social and economic tool, most dominantly in the form of precious metal bullion. This book is the first study to comprehensively engage with the early history of money in the Iron Age Mediterranean, tracing its development in the Levant and the Aegean. Building on a detailed study of precious metal hoards, Elon D. Heymans deploys a wide range of sources, both textual and material, to rethink money's role and origins in the history of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Neolithic in Britain was a period of fundamental change: human communities were transformed, collectively owning domesticated plants and animals, and inhabiting a richer world of material things: timber houses and halls, pottery vessels, polished flint and stone axes, and massive monuments of earth and stone. Equally important was the development of a suite of new social practices, with an emphasis on descent, continuity and inheritance. These innovations set in train social processes that culminated with the construction of Stonehenge, the most remarkable surviving structure from prehistoric Europe. Neolithic Britain provides an up-to-date, concise introduction to the period of British prehistory from c. 4000-2200 BCE. Written on the basis of a new appreciation of the chronology of the period, the result reflects both on the way that archaeologists write narratives of the Neolithic, and how Neolithic people constructed histories of their own. Incorporating new insights from the extraordinary pace of archaeological discoveries in recent years, a world emerges which is unfamiliar, complex and challenging, and yet played a decisive role in forging the landscape of contemporary Britain. Important recent developments have resulted in a dual realisation: firstly, highly focused research into individual site chronologies can indicate precise and particular time narratives; and secondly, this new awareness of time implies original insights about the fabric of Neolithic society, embracing matters of inheritance, kinship and social ties, and the 'descent' of cultural practices. Moreover, our understanding of Neolithic society has been radically affected by individual discoveries and investigative projects, whether in the Stonehenge area, on mainland Orkney, or in less well-known localities across the British Isles. The new perspective provided in this volume stems from a greater awareness of the ways in which unfolding events and transformations in societies depend upon the changing relations between individuals and groups, mediated by objects and architecture. This concise panorama into Neolithic Britain offers new conclusions and an academically-stimulating but accessible overview. It covers key material and social developments, and reflects on the nature of cultural practices, tradition, genealogy, and society across nearly two millennia.

For more than a century, the study of hunting and gathering societies has been central to the development of both archaeology and anthropology as academic disciplines, and has also generated widespread public interest and debate. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies to date, including critical engagements with older debates, new theoretical perspectives, and renewed obligations for greater engagement between researchers and indigenous communities. Chapters provide in-depth archaeological, historical, and anthropological case-studies, and examine far-reaching questions about human social relations, attitudes to technology, ecology, and management of resources and the environment, as well as issues of diet, health, and gender relations - all central topics in hunter-gatherer research, but also themes that have great relevance for modern global society and its future challenges. The Handbook also provides a strategic vision for how the integration of new methods, approaches, and study regions can ensure that future research into the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers will continue to deliver penetrating insights into the factors that underlie all human diversity.

Who were the Druids? What do we know about them? Do they still exist today? The Druids first came into focus in Western Europe - Gaul, Britain, and Ireland - in the second century BC. They are a popular subject; they have been known and discussed for over 2,000 years and few figures flit so elusively through history. They are enigmatic and puzzling, partly because of the lack of knowledge about them has resulted in a wide spectrum of interpretations. Barry Cunliffe takes the reader through the evidence relating to the Druids, trying to decide what can be said and what can't be said about them. He examines why the nature of the druid caste changed quite dramatically over time, and how successive generations have interpreted the phenomenon in very different ways. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Huaca Prieta-one the world's best-known, yet least understood, early maritime mound sites-and other Preceramic sites on the north coast of Peru bear witness to the beginnings of civilization in the Americas. Across more than fourteen millennia of human occupation, the coalescence of maritime, agricultural, and pastoral economies in the north coast settlements set in motion long-term biological and cultural transformations that led to increased social complexity and food production, and later the emergence of preindustrial states and urbanism. These developments make Huaca Prieta a site of global importance in world archaeology. This landmark volume presents the findings of a major archaeological investigation carried out at Huaca Prieta, the nearby mound Paredones, and several Preceramic domestic sites in the lower Chicama Valley between 2006 and 2013 by an interdisciplinary team of more than fifty international specialists. The book's contributors report on and analyze the extensive material records from the sites, including data on the architecture and spatial patterns; floral, faunal, and lithic remains; textiles; basketry; and more. Using this rich data, they build new models of the social, economic, and ontological practices of these early peoples, who appear to have favored cooperation and living in harmony with the environment over the accumulation of power and the development of ruling elites. This discovery adds a crucial new dimension to our understanding of emergent social complexity, cosmology, and religion in the Neolithic period.

In this comprehensive book Michael Witzel persuasively demonstrates the prehistoric origins of most of the mythologies of Eurasia and the Americas ('Laurasia'). By comparing these myths with others indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa, Melanesia, and Australia ('Gondwana Land') Witzel is able to access some of the earliest myths told by humans. The Laurasian mythologies share a common story line that dates the world's creation to a mythic time and recounts the fortunes of generations of deities across four or five ages and human beings' creation and fall, culminating in the end of the universe and, occasionally, hope for a new world. These stories are contrasted with the 'southern' mythologies, which lack most of these features. Witzel's investigations are buttressed by archaeological data, as well as by comparative linguistics, and human population genetics. All suggest the African origins of anatomically modern humans and their subsequent journey along Indian Ocean shores, up to Australia and southern China, around 60,000 BCE. These itinerants' early mythology survives partly in sub-Saharan Africa and points along the path - the Andaman Islands, Melansia, and Australia. Laurasian mythology, Witzel shows, developed along this vast trail, probably in southwest Asia, around 40,000 BCE. Identifying features shared by virtually all mythologies of the globe, Witzel suggests that these features probably informed myths recounted by the communities of the 'African Eve.' As such, they are the earliest substantiation of our ultimate ancestors' spirituality. Moreover the Laurasian myths' key features, Witzel shows, survive today in all major religions and their multiple ideological offshoots.

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.

From Mine to User: Production and Procurement Systems of Siliceous Rocks in the European Neolithic and Bronze Age presents the papers from Session XXXIII of the 18th UISPP World Congress (Paris, June 2018). 23 authors contribute nine papers from Parts 1 and 2 of the Session. The first session ‘Siliceous rocks: procurement and distribution systems’ was aimed at analysing one of the central research issues related to mining, i.e. the production systems and the diffusion of mining products. The impact of extraction on the environment, group mobility and the numbers involved in the exploitation phase were considered; mining products were also examined with a view to identifying local and imported/exported products and the underlying social organization relating to the different fields of activity. The second session ‘Flint mines and chipping floors from prehistory to the beginning of the nineteenth century’ focused on knapping activities. The significance of the identification of knapping workshops in the immediate vicinity of mine shafts and of their presence in villages as well as in intermediary places between the two was considered in the analysis of chaîne opératoire sequences. The potential of product quality and artefact distribution to contribute to the understanding of the social organisation of the communities being studied was also examined.

This book is the first of a two-volume final report on the excavation of the Minoan cemetery and associated finds at Livari Skiadi in the south-eastern end of Crete. This volume deals with the excavation of the site and its architecture, pottery, and other small finds, dating to the Prepalatial, Neopalatial, and Late Hellenistic/Early Roman periods.

The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places--and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience.

"How Ancient Europeans Saw the World" offers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe's pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.

Today the Upper Thames Valley is a region of green pastures and well-managed farmland, interspersed with pretty villages and intersected by a meandering river. The discovery in 1989 of a mammoth tusk in river gravels at Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, revealed the very different ancient past of this landscape. Here, some 200,000 years ago, mammoths, straight-tusked elephants, lions, and other animals roamed across grasslands with scattered trees, occasionally disturbed by small bands of Neanderthals. The pit where the tusk was discovered, destined to become a waste disposal site, provided a rare opportunity to conduct intensive excavations that extended over a period of 10 years. This work resulted in the recording and recovery of more than 1500 vertebrate fossils and an abundance of other biological material, including insects, molluscs, and plant remains, together with 36 stone artefacts attributable to Neanderthals. The well-preserved plant remains include leaves, nuts, twigs and large oak logs. Vertebrate remains notably include the most comprehensive known assemblage of a distinctive small form of the steppe mammoth, Mammuthus trogontherii, that is characteristic of an interglacial period equated with marine isotope stage 7 (MIS 7). Richly illustrated throughout, Mammoths and Neanderthals in the Thames Valley offers a detailed account of all these finds and will be of interest to Quaternary specialists and students alike.

Stones can serve an infinite array of functions both when they are worked and when they are left in a 'raw' state. Depending on their function, stones can also be meaningful objects especially when they act as vehicles of ideas or instruments of representation. And it is, therefore, in their functional context, that the meaning of stones can be best grasped. The stones dealt with in this study are non-figural (or aniconic) or, sometimes, semi-figural. They come from ritual contexts and, as such, act as a material representation of divine presence in their role as betyls. But it is not mainly the representational aspect of these stones that this study seeks to highlight. As material representations of divine presence that are also worshipped, these particular stones form part of a phenomenon that seems to know no geographical or temporal boundaries. They are of a universal character. It is this universal character of theirs that seems to qualify these stones as elements forming part of the phenomenon of continuity: continuity across different cultures and in different places along several centuries. It is this phenomenon which this study seeks to highlight through a study of these stones. The Maltese islands are presented as a case study to demonstrate the phenomenon of continuity through a study of these stones. Worship of stones in representation of divine presence is found on the Maltese islands since prehistoric times. But the practice survived several centuries under different cultures represented by unknown communities during the islands' prehistory and the Phoenicians / Carthaginians and the Romans in early historic times.

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.

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 remains of hunter-gatherer groups are the most commonly discovered archaeological resources in the world, and their study constitutes much of the archaeological research done in North America. In spite of paradigm-shifting discoveries elsewhere in the world that may indicate that hunter-gatherer societies were more complex than simple remnants of a prehistoric past, North American archaeology by and large hasn't embraced these theories, instead maintaining its general neoevolutionary track. This book will change that.
Combining the latest empirical studies of archaeological practice with the latest conceptual tools of anthropological and historical theory, this volume seeks to set a new course for hunter-gatherer archaeology by organizing the chapters around three themes. The first section offers diverse views of the role of human agency, challenging the premise that hunter-gatherer societies were bound by their interactions with the natural world. The second section considers how society and culture are constituted. Chapters in the final section take the long view of the historical process, examining how cultural diversity arises out of interaction and the continuity of ritual practices.
A closing commentary by H. Martin Wobst underscores the promise of an archaeology of foragers that does not associate foraging with any particular ideology or social structure but instead invites inquiry into counterintuitive alternatives. "Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process" seeks to blur the divisions between prehistory and history, between primitive and modern, and between hunter-gatherers and people in other societies. Because it offers alternatives to the dominant discourse and contributes to the agenda of hunter-gatherer research, this book will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of foraging peoples.

Symposium in Stamna both as a concept and as a process involved the presence of prominent citizens of the social establishment as testified by the large cauldrons, the tripod jars and the tripod vessels present. To Die in Style! The residential lifestyle of feasting and dying in Iron Age Stamna, Greece re-examines the cemeteries studied to date, isolating tombs with unique architecture or peculiar structures with individual features, in order to investigate the complex identity of the elite group ideologies. The finding and studying of such a large number of PRG tombs (c. 500), presents a remarkable representative example for the discussion on the perception of death, confronting it through the mourning ritual, but also examining the creation of an individual and collective memory of the population that operated in this privileged geographic installation, redefining as such the cultural landscape of the Protogeometric era. The pre-existing theoretical framework, the methodology of managing and displaying of grief and their correlation with already studied and exalted geographical parallels, integrate Stamna into the cultural chain of the populations ruled by an overall-systematic design of a particular cultural ideology.

This collection presents, for the first time, a much-needed synthesis of the major research themes and findings that characterize the Woodland Period in the southeastern United States.
The Woodland Period (ca. 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1000) has been the subject of a great deal of archaeological research over the past 25 years. Researchers have learned that in this approximately 2000-year era the peoples of the Southeast experienced increasing sedentism, population growth, and organizational complexity. At the beginning of the period, people are assumed to have been living in small groups, loosely bound by collective burial rituals. But by the first millennium A.D., some parts of the region had densely packed civic ceremonial centers ruled by hereditary elites. Maize was now the primary food crop. Perhaps most importantly, the ancient animal-focused and hunting-based religion and cosmology were being replaced by solar and warfare iconography, consistent with societies dependent on agriculture, and whose elites were increasingly in competition with one another. This volume synthesizes the research on what happened during this era and how these changes came about while analyzing the period's archaeological record.
In gathering the latest research available on the Woodland Period, the editors have included contributions from the full range of specialists working in the field, highlighted major themes, and directed readers to the proper primary sources. Of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, both professional and amateur, this will be a valuable reference work essential to understanding the Woodland Period in the Southeast.

Sited at the furthest limits of the Neolithic revolution and standing at the confluence of the two great sea routes of prehistory, Britain and Ireland are distinct from continental Europe for much of the prehistoric sequence. In this landmark study, Richard Bradley offers an interpretation of the unique archaeological record of these islands. Highlighting the achievements of its inhabitants, Bradley surveys the entire archaeological sequence over a 5,000 year period, from the last hunter-gatherers and the adoption of agriculture in the Neolithic period, to the discovery of Britain and Ireland by travellers from the Mediterranean during the later pre-Roman Iron Age. His study places special emphasis on landscapes, settlements, monuments, and ritual practices. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated. The text takes account of recent developments in archaeological science, such as isotopic analyses of human and animal bone, recovery of ancient DNA, and more subtle and precise methods of radiocarbon dating.

Archaeologists have yet to consider seriously the impact of slaving and enslavement on socio-cultural developments in Iron Age Europe. Commonly treated as a mere byproduct of incessant tribal warfare, it is generally held that slavery was not a significant phenomenon in temperate Europe before the Roman era. This is a curious state of affairs considering the clear cross-paradigmatic recognition of competition and conflict as prime movers of historical transformation. How is it that prehistorians see evidence for social stratification and inter-group conflict in so many contexts, yet grant slavery so little attention? If slaving and enslavement can be shown to have been a significant transformative phenomena in Iron Age Europe, how would this affect the interpretation of (old and new) archaeological evidence, and how would this change ideas about broader socio-cultural developments that have long been considered known by those who have looked at these things through the lens of 'acculturation' or 'complexification'? Comparative research shows how slavery is a multifaceted phenomenon with complex interrelated material, behavioral, and ideological dimensions. Therefore, any meaningful archaeological study has to take a multi-thread approach whereby a wide range of material categories and domains of social practice are examined, contextually, relationally, and comparatively. In taking such an approach, this exploratory study of the dynamics of Iron Age slaving and enslaving in Northwest Europe contributes to a complex but neglected topic.

This illistrated guide, written by experts, offers up-to-date descriptions and plans of all the major and minor archaeological sites in England, dating from prehistoric times to the end of the middle ages. There is extensive background information on each site and on the general history and archaeology of England in these periods.