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.

By AD 1000, the Colla controlled the high-altitude plains near Lake Titicaca in southern Peru. They fought over the region for many centuries before becoming a subject people of the Inca (who described them as the most formidible foes they faced) circa 1450, and then of the Spanish in the sixteenth century. Like any people at war, the Colla were not engaged in active conflict all of the time. But frequent warfare (perhaps over limited natural resources), along with drought and environmental changes, powerfully influenced the society's settlement choices and physical defenses, as well as their interaction with the landscape. By focusing on the pre-Inca society in this key region of the Andes, Elizabeth Arkush demonstrates how a thorough archaeological investigation of these hillfort towns reveals new ways to study the sociopolitical organization of pre-Columbian societies.

Prehistoric Florida societies, particularly those of the peninsula, have been largely ignored or given only minor consideration in overviews of the Mississippian southeast (A.D. 1000-1600). This groundbreaking volume lifts the veil of uniformity frequently draped over these regions in the literature, providing the first comprehensive examination of Mississippi-period archaeology in the state. Featuring contributions from some of the most prominent researchers in the field, this collection describes and synthesizes the latest data from excavations throughout Florida. In doing so, it reveals a diverse and vibrant collection of cleared-field maize farmers, part-time gardeners, hunter-gatherers, and coastal and riverine fisher/shellfish collectors who formed a distinctive part of the Mississippian southeast.

How did small-scale societies in the past experience and respond to sea-level rise? What happened when their dwellings, hunting grounds and ancestral lands were lost under an advancing tide? This book asks these questions in relation to the hunter-gatherer inhabitants of a lost prehistoric land; a land that became entirely inundated and now lies beneath the North Sea. It seeks to understand how these people viewed and responded to their changing environment, suggesting that people were not struggling against nature, but simply getting on with life - with all its trials and hardships, satisfactions and pleasures, and with a multitude of choices available. At the same time, this loss of land - the loss of places and familiar locales where myths were created and identities formed - would have profoundly affected people's sense of being. This book moves beyond the static approach normally applied to environmental change in the past to capture its nuances. Through this, a richer and more complex story of past sea-level rise develops; a story that may just have resonance for us today.

Recent archaeobotanical results from early Neolithic sites on Cyprus have put the island in the forefront of debates on the spread of Near Eastern agriculture, with domestic crops appearing on the island shortly after they evolved. The results from these early sites changed what was known about the timing of the introduction of farming to the island. However, what happened after the introduction of agriculture to Cyprus has been less discussed. This book explores the role of new crop introductions, local agricultural developments, and intensification in subsequent economic and social developments on Cyprus corresponding with the island's evidence of ongoing social transformations and changing off-island patterns of contacts. In addition to contributing to discussions on the origins and spread of Near Eastern agriculture, it contributes to current archaeological debates on external contact and the influence of the broader Near East on the development of the island's unique prehistoric economy. This research is a chronological and regional analysis of the botanical record of Cyprus and a comparison of data from similarly dated sites in the Levantine mainland, Turkey, and Egypt. Further, it includes data from four recently excavated Cypriot prehistoric sites, Krittou Marottou-'Ais Yiorkis, Kissonerga-Skalia, Souskiou-Laona, and Prastion-Mesorotsos.

Thisstudyexploresthechangingrelationshipbetweenhumansandtwoimportantanimals, pigsandcattle, duringtheMesolithicandNeolithicperiodsinBritain.FaunalremainsfromprehistoricsitesinsouthernBritainwerestudiedinordertounderstandchangesinthesizeandshapeofanimals, changesinpopulationstructureandotherinformationusefulforunderstandingchanginghumanmotivations.ItsresultscontributetoourunderstandingofNeolithisationprocessinBritain, earlyanimalhusbandrypracticesinthestudyareaandtherolethatpigsandcattlehadinMesolithicandNeolithicsociety."

Professor Rodrigo de Balbin has played a major role in advancing our knowledge of Palaeolithic art, and the occasion of his retirement provides an excellent opportunity to assess the value of prehistoric art studies as a factor in the study of the culture of those human groups which produced this imagery. The diverse papers in this volume, published in Professor de Balbin's honour, cover a wide variety of the decorated caves which traditionally defined Palaeolithic art, as well as the open-air art of the period, a subject in which he has done pioneering work at Siega Verde and elsewhere. The result is a new and more realistic assessment of the social and symbolic framework of human groups from 40,000 BP onwards.

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.

Archaeologists have long acknowledged the absence of a regular and recurrent burial rite in the British Iron Age, and have looked to rites such as cremation and scattering of remains to explain the minimal impact of funerary practices on the archaeological record. Pit-burials or the deposit of disarticulated bones in settlements have been dismissed as casual disposal or the remains of social outcasts. In Death and Burial in Iron Age Britain, Harding examines the deposition of human and animal remains from the period - from whole skeletons to disarticulated fragments - and challenges the assumption that there should have been any regular form of cemetery in prehistory, arguing that the dead were more commonly integrated into settlements of the living than segregated into dedicated cemeteries. Even where cemeteries are known, they may yet represent no more than a minority of the total population, so that other forms of disposal must still have been practised. A further example of this can be found in hillforts which, in addition to domestic and agricultural settlements, evidently played an important role in funerary ritual, as secure community centres where excarnation and display of the dead may have made them a potent symbol of identity. The volume evaluates the evidence for violent death, sacrifice, and cannibalism, as well as age and gender distinctions, and associations with animal burials, and reveals that 'formal' cemetery burial or cremation was for most regions a minority practice in Britain until the eve of the Roman conquest.

The author has undertaken a technological and typological analysis of lithic assemblages from southern Oman dating between 10,000 to 7,000 years before present (BP). These assemblages are characterized by the production of blades (leptoliths) using varied core reduction modalities exemplified throughout the book. These blade technologies are accompanied by formal tools such as tanged projectiles, burins, endscrapers and pseude-backed knifes. The chronological and techno-typological characterization of these blade assemblages warrants its individual status as a lithic industry of the Late Palaeolithic in its own right. The name 'Khashabian' is given by the author to this industry, which has little resemblance to those found outside of Arabia, enforcing the local origin of the Early Holocene Populations of the South Arabian Highlands.

In 2002-2003, the construction of a new road to bypass the village of Toomebridge, Co Antrim, through which the main Belfast to Derry Road (A6) passed, was commenced by Roads Service; an Agency within the Department of Regional Development. As part of the overall planning permission for the Toomebridge Bypass, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) raised a requirement for archaeological mitigation. Northern Archaeological Consultancy Ltd was appointed to undertake the archaeological excavation of this site. In the course of topsoil stripping a small drumlin on part of the road scheme 2,100 flint artefacts were uncovered. While the majority (approximately 70%) of these dated from the Late Mesolithic, the Earlier Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age periods were also represented. Archaeology was uncovered on the western side of the drumlin. It formed 14 discrete areas (Features 1-14). The features were for the most part structures and ranged in date from the Mid-Mesolithic (Features 1-4), through the Late Mesolithic (Features 5-8), the Bronze Age (Features 9-11), and the late Bronze Age or Iron Age (Feature 13) and the 19th to 20th centuries (Feature 14).

This volume gathers the individual presentations from The International Meeting: Recent Prehistory Enclosures and Funerary Practices. From England to Germany, from Portugal to Italy, the individual papers present this cohesive European trend in Prehistory, that of enclosing, and the particular relationship between enclosures and prehistoric funerary practices and manipulations of the human body. Through a plurality of approaches, the volume covers several European regions, providing an overview of how prehistoric Europeans dealt with their dead, and how they experienced and organized their world. From cremating to dismembering bodies, from skulls used as cups to naturalistic anthropomorphic ivory figurines, from fragmented pottery to animal limbs, from deviance to collectiveness, this volume ranges all the different practices currently discussed in European Prehistory. The first paper, by Alasdair Whittle, poses as an introduction to the theme of enclosures throughout Europe, focusing his approach on time and timing of enclosure. Alex Gibson then takes us through the middle and late Neolithic British enclosures and Jean-Noel Guyodo and Audrey Blanchard through those of Western France. The Portuguese enclosures follow, with papers both on walled and ditched enclosures, by the hand of Antonio Valera, Ana Maria Silva, Claudia Cunha, Filipa Rodrigues, Michael Kunst, Anna Waterman, Joao Luis Cardoso and Susana Oliveira Jorge. Moving East, Andrea Zeeb-Lanz discusses the cannibalistic premise regarding the funerary remains from the Neolithic site of Herxheim (Germany). Andre Spatzier, Marcus Stecher, Kurt W. Alt. and Francois Bertemes, on the other hand, focusing on the remains from a henge like enclosure near Magdeburg (Germany), explore the premise of violence and war-like scenarios. To the south, Alberto Cazzella and Giullia Recchia write about a copper age enclosure near Conelle di Acervia (Italy) and Patricia Rios, Corina Liesau and Concepcion Blasco take through the funerary practices of Camino de las Yeseras (Spain).

By examining the stunning stone buildings and dynamic spaces of the royal estate of Chinchero, Nair brings to light the rich complexity of Inca architecture. This investigation ranges from the paradigms of Inca scholarship and a summary of Inca cultural practices to the key events of Topa Inca's reign and the many individual elements of Chinchero's extraordinary built environment. What emerges are the subtle, often sophisticated ways in which the Inca manipulated space and architecture in order to impose their authority, identity, and agenda. The remains of grand buildings, as well as a series of deft architectural gestures in the landscape, reveal the unique places that were created within the royal estate and how one space deeply informed the other. These dynamic settings created private places for an aging ruler to spend time with a preferred wife and son, while also providing impressive spaces for imperial theatrics that reiterated the power of Topa Inca, the choice of his preferred heir, and the ruler's close relationship with sacred forces. This careful study of architectural details also exposes several false paradigms that have profoundly misguided how we understand Inca architecture, including the belief that it ended with the arrival of Spaniards in the Andes. Instead, Nair reveals how, amidst the entanglement and violence of the European encounter, an indigenous town emerged that was rooted in Inca ways of understanding space, place, and architecture and that paid homage to a landscape that defined home for Topa Inca.

Researches in Stone Age prehistory from Bihar (NE India) have been reported from as early as the end of the nineteenth century. Despite these reports a sharp picture of the cultural transformation in this area has not emerged clearly. This study attempts to shed light on the various aspects of the cultural transformation processes from all the districts of Bihar.

This revised and expanded edition of the classic 1999 edited book includes all the chapters from the original volume plus a new, updated, introduction and several new chapters. The current book is an up-to-date review of research into Mycenaean palatial systems with chapters by archaeologists and Linear B specialists that will be useful to scholars, instructors, and advanced students. This book aims to define more accurately the term"palace"in light of both recent archaeological research in the Aegean and current anthropological thinking on the structure and origin of early states. Regional centers do not exist as independent entities. They articulate with more extensive sociopolitical systems. The concept of palace needs to be incorporated into enhanced models of Mycenaean state organization, ones that more completely integrate primary centers with networks of regional settlement and economy.

The book publishes the proceedings of the workshop held in Rome in March 2012 that was intended to bring together archaeologists, scientists and students involved in the study of use-wear traces on prehistoric stone tools and/or in the identification of micro residues that might be present in them in order to hypothesize their function. Use-wear analysis carried out with microscopic analysis at low or high magnification is, at present, a settled procedure. The individuation and identification of residues is attempted using morphological and chemical techniques, these latter divided between invasive and non-invasive. Each employed technique has its own advantages and limitations. Both traces and residues analysis require a comparison to useful replicas. Even with regard to the making of replicas, no shared protocol exists.

MOLA (formerly Northamptonshire Archaeology), has undertaken intermittent archaeological work within Bozeat Quarry over a twenty-year period from 1995-2016 covering an area of 59ha. The earliest archaeological features lay in the extreme northern area where a Bronze Age to Iron Age cremation burial was possibly contemporary with an adjacent late Bronze Age/early Iron Age pit alignment. In the middle to late Iron Age a settlement was established at the southern part of the site over a c170m by 150m area. It was a well organised farmstead, mostly open in plan with two roundhouses, routeway, enclosures, boundary ditches and pits. In the early 1st century AD, cAD 30, two separate settlements lay c0.5km apart. The former southern Iron Age farmstead had perhaps shifted location c150m to the north-west and a there was new farmstead to the north. Both settlements were located on a west facing slope of a valley side and were sited on sands and gravels at between 64m and 66m aOD. The Northern Settlement was only occupied for about 150 years and was involved in pastoral farming, but local coarseware pottery production was of some importance with a group of 12 pottery kilns dated to the middle to late 1st century AD. This is seemingly the largest number of pottery kilns from a single settlement of this period yet found in the regionally important Upper Nene Valley pottery producing area. The Southern Settlement was larger and continued to the end of the Roman period. In this area there was a notable scatter of 12 Iron Age and 1st century AD Roman coins as well as 24 contemporary brooches found over an area measuring c170m by c130m. This collection of finds may suggest the presence of a shrine or temple located in the area. It is perhaps significant that in 1964 directly to the west of the excavation, a middle Roman round stone building was found, perhaps an associated shrine. Within the excavation area in the latest Iron Age to early Roman period there was a possible roundhouse, a large oval enclosure and a field system. The latter largely related to pastoral farming including areas where paddocks were linked to routeways suggesting significant separation of livestock had occurred. Four cremation burials, including one deposited in a box, and an inhumation lay in three locations. Pastoral farming was a significant activity throughout the Roman period with enclosures, paddocks and linked routeways uncovered. In the late 2nd to 4th century there were two stone buildings and a stone malt oven at the extreme western extent of the site, within 50m to the east of the probably contemporary shrine recorded in 1964. There was minor evidence of early to middle Saxon occupation within the area of the former middle to late Iron Age settlement. No structures were found, although a few pits may date to this period and mark short stay visits. A small cemetery of five individuals respected the former Roman field system and probably dated to the late 6th to 7th centuries. The burials included a decapitation and a burial with a knife and a buckle. The site was then not re-occupied and became part of the fields of Bozeat medieval and post-medieval settlements.