The origins of religion and ritual in humans have been the focus of centuries of thought in archaeology, anthropology, theology, evolutionary psychology and more. Play and ritual have many aspects in common, and ritual is a key component of the early cult practices that underlie the religious systems of the first complex societies in all parts of the world. This book examines the formative cults and the roots of religious practice from the earliest times until the development of early religion in the Near East, in China, in Peru, in Mesoamerica and beyond. Here, leading prehistorians and other specialists bring a fresh approach to the early practices that underlie the faiths and religions of the world. They demonstrate the profound role of play ritual and belief systems and offer powerful new insights into the emergence of early civilization.

The archaeology of the Maltese archipelago is remarkable. Lying at the heart of the central Mediterranean, ancient lives were, at times, moulded by isolation and harsh elements and the landscape is shaped by millennia of intensive land use. Ancient finds from the islands are rare, and those held in the British Museum form an important collection. Represented is a wide cultural range, spanning the Early and Late Neolithic, the Bronze Age, Roman and more recent historic periods. From the early 1880s, Malta attracted a fascinating array of historians, collectors and travellers and, on one level, the British Museum's holdings represent their activities, but on another, the collections reflect the complex path antiquarianism has played out in Malta as it moved steadily toward fledgling archaeological investigations. Significantly, artefacts excavated by notable Maltese archaeologist, Sir Themistocles Zammit, at the key Neolithic site of Tarxien, and those uncovered by Margaret Murray at Borg in-Nadur form a crucial part of the collection.

An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrative Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family-all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction. Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the "barbarians" who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.

* Designed for the general reader and visitor to Newgrange* A guided tour of the best example of a passage tomb in Western EuropeNewgrange is the most visited archaeological site in Ireland. Every year around 250,000 people come to the see this Neolithic passage tomb. Designed for the general reader with an interest in Irish prehistory, this book explains the results of decades of excavation and analysis in one volume. It is written in a lively style that seeks at the same time to be authoritative and thorough.Aside from its accessibility and good state of preservation, Newgrange's solstice phenomenon, in particular, has made it famous throughout the world. While it is the best-known ancient site in Ireland, many aspects of Newgrange are not clearly understood; other aspects are just taken for granted: why is there a three meter high quartz wall around its entrance; how does the roof box work; what was the inspiration for its art and architecture? The book is arranged in such a way as to replicate a visit to the site. It pauses over points of art and construction that the visitor will not have had time to examine in detail on a conventional guided tour. Newgrange is the synthesis of years of excavation and research at home and abroad; from the detailed reports stemming from the excavations of M.J. O'Kelly to the current international debate about its construction and reconstruction. This is the first book on Newgrange to draw on O'Kelly's private papers and to incorporate the results of more recent and as yet unpublished excavations. This book will clarify many complex issues that have been addressed in widely scattered publications, using original illustrations to assist the reader, and more importantly, it places the monument in its broader cultural context.

In the context of current debates about global warming, archaeology contributes important insights for understanding environmental changes in prehistory, and the consequences and responses of past populations to them. In Indian archaeology, climate change and monsoon variability are often invoked to explain major demographic transitions, cultural changes, and migrations of prehistoric populations. During the late Holocene (1400-700 B.C.), agricultural communities flourished in a semiarid region of the Indian subcontinent, until they precipitously collapsed. Gwen Robbins Schug integrates the most recent paleoclimate reconstructions with an innovative analysis of skeletal remains from one of the last abandoned villages to provide a new interpretation of the archaeological record of this period. Robbins Schug's biocultural synthesis provides us with a new way of looking at the adaptive, social, and cultural transformations that took place in this region during the first and second millennia B.C. Her work clearly and compellingly usurps the climate change paradigm, demonstrating the complexity of human-environmental transformations. This original and significant contribution to bioarchaeological research and methodology enriches our understanding of both global climate change and South Asian prehistory.

Winner, LASA Mexico Humanities Book Prize, 2017 Among the surviving documents from the colonial period in Mexico are rare Maya-authored manuscript compilations of Christian texts, translated and adapted into the Maya language and worldview, which were used to evangelize the local population. The Morely Manuscript is well known to scholars, and now The Teabo Manuscript introduces an additional example of what Mark Z. Christensen terms a Maya Christian copybook. Recently discovered in the archives of Brigham Young University, the Teabo Manuscript represents a Yucatecan Maya recounting of various aspects of Christian doctrine, including the creation of the world, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the genealogy of Christ. The Teabo Manuscript presents the first English translation and analysis of this late colonial Maya-language document, a facsimile and transcription of which are also included in the book. Working through the manuscript section by section, Christensen makes a strong case for its native authorship, as well as its connections with other European and Maya religious texts, including the Morely Manuscript and the Books of Chilam Balam. He uses the Teabo Manuscript as a platform to explore various topics, such as the evangelization of the Maya, their literary compositions, and the aspects of Christianity that they deemed important enough to write about and preserve. This pioneering research offers important new insights into how the Maya negotiated their precontact intellectual traditions within a Spanish and Catholic colonial world.

During recent years new excavations at a number of Neolithic locations in the Central Zagros by German, British and Iranian archaeologists have revealed a series of important results. Notable are the Early Neolithic sites of Choga Golan, Jani, Sheikh-e Abad, and East Chia Sabz, all discovered and excavated within the last ten years. In this volume Hojjat Darabi gives a survey of the discoveries on which our knowledge is based. The book is set in a chronological frame, in an environmental context, and in a regional and theoretical perspective. It is illustrated by a number of useful photos, drawings charts and diagrams. The book is a presentation of our knowledge about Neolithic Revolution as it appears right now; in addition, its provides an outline of further steps for future research.

The Burnley and Pendle districts of East Lancashire hold a wealth of archaeological secrets. This South Pennine area is particularly rich in prehistoric evidence and here in PART TWO (the second of a two part series) we see the lives of our Bronze Age and Iron Age forbears as never before. The book is very well illustrated with over 200 B&W plans, maps, diagrams and photographs.

Humanity's written history stretches back only 5,000 years, a mere blip on the timeline of our existence. If you want to know what it really means to be fully human, to see the whole story, you need to go back. Way, way back. Prehistoric humans couldn't write, but they were adept at telling their own stories. On every continent and outpost where they gained a foothold, they left signs for modern man to decipher. From the Middle Bronze Age settlement of Arkaim on the Kazakh Steppes to the temples of the Olmec in Mexico; from one of the first European proto-cities at Nebelivka in Ukraine to the neolithic henges of Avebury and Stonehenge; from the dolmens of Antequera in the heart of Andalucia to the megalithic culture that thrived in isolation on Indonesia's tiny Nias Island.

Initially, the aim of this study was to examine technological, cognitive and symbolic aspects of metallurgy in southern Norway in the Bronze Age, i.e. 1700-500 cal. BC. To contextualize and understand the Norwegian data material, the scope was soon widened geographically as well as chronologically. As a result, evidence from the whole Nordic region has been considered and the time frame extended to the beginning of the Late Neolithic, i.e. c. 2400 cal. BC. In unexpected ways, the investigation ended up as an exploration of ideas, ideas belonging to the present as well as ideas belonging to the past. Basically, two sets of ideas are scrutinized: 1) ideas that have governed and still govern archaeological concepts of the Bronze Age, and 2) ideas that moulded Bronze Age mentality, arising, it is argued, from physical experience with metallurgy. In keeping with this, the 'webs of significance' - a phrase borrowed from Clifford Geertz (1973) - are to be understood as, on the one hand, the changing scientific discourses within which current archaeological ideas about Bronze Age metallurgy have evolved, and on the other, the prehistoric contexts and relations which gave meaning to metallurgy in the Bronze Age.

The aim of this work was to examine land-use and settlement on the Berkshire Downs from the Bronze Age to the end of the Romano-British period. Earlier research in this region had presented a landscape history that was in contrast to elsewhere on the Wessex chalklands and rather than a land that grew organically over 2.5 millennia, the area is seen as one which was sporadically occupied, worked, and possibly abandoned. In the west of the region late Bronze Age linear ditches mark a major reorganization in the scale of the landscape, but only a small number of contemporary settlements are known, and field systems appear to be absent. This is followed by an apparent hiatus until the establishment of organised farming communities in the Romano-British period engaged in large-scale cereal production. In the east, Segsbury Camp is seen to signal the emergence of early Iron Age occupation into an area of previously unoccupied and unused land, with later settlement on the Downs continuing into the late Iron Age. Beyond this period little is known and the fragmentary field systems in this region remain undated. It is proposed that these interpretations are illusory, created by large-scale Romano-British arable expansion in the west masking earlier occupation, and post Roman land-use in the east destroying upstanding monuments and creating a bias in our interpretation. Today, these former landscapes, some of which survived into the 20th century, are mostly plough-levelled. As such, further understanding lies beyond the limit of many conventional fieldwork methods. A multi-disciplinary approach was used to rebuild this landscape. Aerial transcription from the National Mapping Programme is used to provide a view of the landscape before its destruction through modern agriculture, while maps and documents, lidar, woodland survey, geophysics and metal detected finds are used to create a theoretical account of activity across this region.

Over the last 30 years, there has been extensive new research on Neolithic Long Barrows. David Field describes the origin of the monuments and their construction, including the pits, standing stones, and posts found beneath the later mounds, their location within the country side and what this might mean for contemporary society. He also discusses the nature of platforms, pavements, internal cairns, and earthen round mounds. Evidence of feasting and ceremony is assessed. Emphasis is placed on the new finds that have been made from the air and on the use that was made of earthen barrows by later civilizations.

Archaeobotanical investigation was conducted on a total of thirty two thousand (n=32,000) pot fragments, baked clay and fired clay collected from different sites belonging to five Cultural Groups in Eastern Sudan. The Cultural Groups include Amm Adam, Butana, Gash, Jebel Mokram, and Hagiz. Soil samples (6 kilos) were also analyzed from various excavation spots at Mahal Teglinos, a major site that rendered data on Butana, Gash, Jebel Mokram and Hagiz Groups. The objective of the study was to reconstruct ancient food systems of the pre-historic inhabitants of a region of Northeast Africa and its environmental milieu. The result of the study demonstrated the subsistence bases of the inhabitants from ca. 6,000 B.C. to 200/300 A.D. Crops like the small seeded millets (Setaria sp., Eleusine sp., Paspalum sp., Echinochloa sp., Pennisetum sp.), Sorghum verticilliflorum, Sorghum bicolor bicolor, Hordeum sp., Triticum monococcum/dicoccum, and seeds and fruit stones (Vigna unguiculata, Grewia bicolor Juss., Ziziphus sp. (mainly Ziziphus spina christi) and Celtis integrifolia) were cultivated for consumption during this period. The study has also shed new light on the domestication history of Sorghum bicolor. The wild Sorghum, Sorghum bicolor verticilliflorum and its cultivated variety, Sorghum bicolor were simultaneously exploited by the Jebel Mokram Group people between 2,000 B.C. and 1,000 B.C. One of the oldest domesticated morphotype of Sorghum bicolor, i.e. an intermediary phase between the wild progenitor and its domesticated variety was revealed by the same investigation. Morphological change that has occurred while the species was evolving from wild to cultivated is measured using a Leica Qwin software.

This research focuses on the Bronze Age in selected areas of Korea; Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi province. Two forms of evidence - settlements and monuments - are taken into account to identify their relationship with landscape and the social changes occurring between ca. 1500 to 400 cal BC. Life and death in the Bronze Age in Korea has not been synthetically investigated before, due to the lack of evidence from settlements. However, since academic and rescue excavations have increased, it is now possible to examine the relationship between settlements and monuments on a broad scale and over a long-term sequence, although there are still limitations in the archaeological evidence. The results of GIS (Geographical Information System) analysis and Bayesian modelling of the radiocarbon dates from this region can be interpreted as suggesting that Bronze Age people in the mid-Korean peninsula had certain preferences for their habitation and mortuary places. The locations of two archaeological sites were identified and statistical significance was generated for their positioning on soil that was associated with agriculture. It was found that settlements tended to be located at a higher elevation with fine views and that monuments tended to be situated in the border zones between mountains and plains and also within the boundary of a 5km site catchment adjusted for energy expenditure, centring on each settlement. This configuration is reminiscent of the concept of the auspicious location, as set out in the traditional geomantic theory of Pungsu. It can be argued that Bronze Age people chose the place for the living and the dead with a holistic perspective and a metaphysical approach that placed human interaction with the natural world at the centre of their decision-making processes. These concepts were formed out of the process of a practical adaptation to the Bronze Age landscape and environment in order to practice agriculture as a subsistence economy, but they also exerted a profound influence upon later Korean peoples and their identities.

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.

The Nasca Lines are one of the world's great enigmas. Who etched the more than 1,000 animal, human, and geometric figures that cover 400 square miles of barren pampa in southern Peru? How did the makers create lifelike images of monkeys, birds, and spiders without an aerial vantage point from which to view these giant figures that stretch across thousands of square yards? Most puzzling of all, why did the ancient Nasca lay out these lines and images in the desert? These are the questions that pioneering archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni seeks to answer in this book. Writing for a wide public audience, Aveni begins by establishing the Nasca Lines as a true wonder of the ancient world. He describes how viewers across the centuries have tried to interpret the lines and debunks the wilder theories. Then he vividly recounts his own years of exploration at Nasca in collaboration with other investigators and the discoveries that have answered many of the riddles about who made the Nasca Lines, when, and for what purposes. This fascinating overview of what the leading expert and his colleagues currently understand about the lines is required reading for everyone intrigued by ancient mysteries.

As the Ice Age came to an end, North America lost a stunning variety of animals. Mammoths, mastodons, ground-dwelling sloths the size of elephants, beavers the size of bears, pronghorn antelope the size of poodles, llamas, and carnivores to chase them-sabertooth cats, dire wolves, American lions and cheetahs; these and many more were gone by 10,000 years ago. Giant Sloths and Sabertooth Cats surveys all these animals, with a particular focus on the Great Basin. The book also explores the major attempts to explain the extinctions. Because some believe that they were due to the activities of human hunters, the author also reviews the archaeological evidence left by the earliest known human occupants of the Great Basin, showing that people were here at the same time and in the same places as many of the extinct animals. Were these animals abundant in the Great Basin? A detailed analysis of the distinctive assemblages of plants that now live in this region leads to a surprising, and perhaps controversial, conclusion about those abundances.

Presents analysis and catalogue of finds from graves excavated in 2001-2003 as part of the archaeological excavations at the hillfort of Dragisic, located in the region of the Iron Age Liburnians (present-day Croatian Littoral region). Typology and chronology is presented for the following groupings: fibulae; pins; rings and other circlet-shaped jewellery; bracelets; pendants; elements of attire and toiletry accessories; buttons and appliques; temple-rings, hair-pins, and earrings; glass beads; cowry shell; Roman glass vessels and pottery finds.

Since the first explorations of causewayed enclosures, archaeologists have attempted to define these early Neolithic monuments in relation to territorial patterns, pottery typologies, and ultimately though the concept of structured deposition. While these concepts have been important in advancing our knowledge of causewayed enclosures, the interpretations of the material from the enclosures ditch segments and other areas of these sites have failed to take into account the importance of how objects and materials came to be at the sites, were produced and used there, preceding deposition. This book argues that activities at enclosures should not be categorically separated from the everyday activities of those who visited the enclosures; that by looking in detail at the spatial and temporal distribution of objects in association with chronology that the practical activities people engaged in at enclosures have been overshadowed by interpretations stressing the ritual nature of structured deposits. These activities had a direct relationship with enclosures and local landscapes. This argues that perhaps more deposits within causewayed enclosures were the result of everyday activities which occurred while people gathered at these sites and not necessarily the result of a 'ritual' act. A re-interpretation of the detail from nine causewayed enclosures within three 'regions' of the British Isles (East Anglia, Sussex and Wessex) are examined. This theoretical approach to activity goes beyond the deposition of objects and also includes enclosure construction, object modification such as flint knapping, animal butchery, and the use of pottery and wood. On a micro scale this indicates that each community who constructed an enclosure deposited objects in a unique and 'personal' manner which was acceptable within their defined social system. On a macro scale, this indicates that although all British causewayed enclosures seem to 'function' in the same way, the individual sites were constructed, modified and used in distinctive ways. Some enclosures seem to have existed quite independently from their neighbours while other enclosures within close proximity to each other had a specialised role to play. These specialised roles indicate that some enclosures may have been constructed and used by groups who primarily came to them in order to carry out a specific set of activities which were then defined through deposition.