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

In this volume, Douglas B. Bamforth offers an archaeological overview of the Great Plains, the vast, open grassland bordered by forests and mountain ranges situated in the heart of North America. Synthesizing a century of scholarship and new archaeological evidence, he focuses on changes in resource use, continental trade connections, social formations, and warfare over a period of 15,000 years. Bamforth investigates how foragers harvested the grasslands more intensively over time, ultimately turning to maize farming, and examines the persistence of industrial mobile bison hunters in much of the region as farmers lived in communities ranging from hamlets to towns with thousands of occupants. He also explores how social groups formed and changed, migrations of peoples in and out of the Plains, and the conflicts that occurred over time and space. Significantly, Bamforth's volume demonstrates how archaeology can be used as the basis for telling long-term, problem-oriented human history.

This book, a guide and companion to the prehistoric archaeology of Greece, is designed for students, travelers, and all general readers interested in archaeology. Greece has perhaps the longest and richest archaeological record in Europe, and this book reviews what is known of Greece from the earliest inhabitants in the Stone Age to the end of the Bronze Age and the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations.
The book describes the prehistoric cultures of Greece in chronological order, and illustrates with 98 detailed drawings each culture's typical artifacts, architecture, burial customs, and art. Written in an informal and accessible style free of scientific jargon, the book can be used in the classroom or as a guide for the traveler, or read simply for pleasure by anyone with a curiosity about the earliest ages of this fascinating region.
Although intended for a wide audience, the book has a solid scientific foundation. The authors are professional archaeologists with more than 25 years of experience in the field and with a first-hand knowledge of the methods and results of contemporary research. There is no other book today that covers the same range of periods and subjects, making it essential reading for anyone interested in the early civilizations that shaped the Greek landscape, laid the foundations for Classical Greek civilization, and contributed in many ways to the formation of the modern Greek world.
The authors have been careful to address the many questions concerning prehistoric Greece that have been asked them by students and visitors to Greece through the years. The illustrations were created especially for this book, showing familiar artifacts and sites from a new perspective, and selecting others for illustration that rarely, if ever, appear in popular publications.

This book, a guide and companion to the prehistoric archaeology of Greece, is designed for students, travelers, and all general readers interested in archaeology. Greece has perhaps the longest and richest archaeological record in Europe, and this book reviews what is known of Greece from the earliest inhabitants in the Stone Age to the end of the Bronze Age and the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations.
The book describes the prehistoric cultures of Greece in chronological order, and illustrates with 98 detailed drawings each culture's typical artifacts, architecture, burial customs, and art. Written in an informal and accessible style free of scientific jargon, the book can be used in the classroom or as a guide for the traveler, or read simply for pleasure by anyone with a curiosity about the earliest ages of this fascinating region.
Although intended for a wide audience, the book has a solid scientific foundation. The authors are professional archaeologists with more than 25 years of experience in the field and with a first-hand knowledge of the methods and results of contemporary research. There is no other book today that covers the same range of periods and subjects, making it essential reading for anyone interested in the early civilizations that shaped the Greek landscape, laid the foundations for Classical Greek civilization, and contributed in many ways to the formation of the modern Greek world.
The authors have been careful to address the many questions concerning prehistoric Greece that have been asked them by students and visitors to Greece through the years. The illustrations were created especially for this book, showing familiar artifacts and sites from a new perspective, and selecting others for illustration that rarely, if ever, appear in popular publications.

Toward the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, during a time known as the Late Cretaceous, a new type of giant predator appeared along the southern coasts of North America. It was a huge species of crocodylian and is called Deinosuchus. Neither a crocodile nor an alligator, it was an ancestor of both modern groups, but it reached weights of many tons and it had some features unique to the species. Average-sized individuals were bigger than the carnivorous dinosaurs with which they cohabited; the largest specimens were the size of a T-rex.;This is the biography of these giant beasts, including the long history of their discovery, research about their makeup, and the first published evidence about their prey. Generations of people have stared at the 6-foot reconstructed skull at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, not realising that the only real bones in the specimen were bits of snout and lower jaw. New fossils and research show that the actual animal was quite different from the reconstruction, and now we can reliably assemble the skull and the remainder of the animal.;The book also deals with the ancient life and geology of the coastal areas where Deinosuchus thrived, in

Study addressing the idea of gradual population increase focussing on northern England, and also examining issues such as resource exploitation and settlement patterns. The author models the changing environment of northern England using GIS and discusses possible human adaptations to these changes and the implications for the concept of gradual population increase.

Jon Gibson confronts the intriguing mystery of Poverty Point, the ruins of a large prehistoric Indian settlement that was home to one of the most fascinating ancient cultures in eastern North America. The 3,500-year-old site in northeastern Louisiana is known for its large, elaborate earthworks - a series of concentric, crescent-shaped dirt rings and bird-shaped mounds. With its imposing 25-mile core, it is one of the largest archaic constructions on American soil. It's also one of the most puzzling - perplexing questions haunt Poverty Point, and archaeologists still speculate about life and culture at the site, its age, how it was created, and if it was at the forefront of an emerging complex society. Gibson's engaging, well-illustrated account of Poverty Point brings to life one of the oldest earthworks of its size in the Western Hemisphere, the hub of a massive exchange network among native American peoples reaching a third of the way across the present-day United States.

Students and travelers to Sicily will welcome this inviting introduction to the archaeology of the Mediterranean's largest island. In the first English-language book on prehistoric Sicily in over forty years, Robert Leighton explores the region's rich archaeological record. He charts the development of Sicily's early cultures from the Palaeolithic onward, concluding with an account of the indigenous society at the time of Greek and Phoenician settlement in the 8th century B.C.

Each chapter in this generously illustrated volume highlights the principal developments of a major chronological period and then addresses social and economic themes. Among the topics discussed are settlement patterns and structures; local autonomy; external influences; cultural expression; and contacts with Italy, nearby satellite islands, and the Mycenaean world. Informed by recent fieldwork and scholarship, this book is a necessary guide to the current state of knowledge on prehistoric Sicily.

This fascicle completes the presentation of the ceramic remains from the Franchthi Cave excavations.

Students and travelers to Sicily will welcome this inviting introduction to the archaeology of the Mediterranean's largest island. In the first English-language book on prehistoric Sicily in over forty years, Robert Leighton explores the region's rich archaeological record. He charts the development of Sicily's early cultures from the Palaeolithic onward, concluding with an account of the indigenous society at the time of Greek and Phoenician settlement in the 8th century B.C.

Each chapter in this generously illustrated volume highlights the principal developments of a major chronological period and then addresses social and economic themes. Among the topics discussed are settlement patterns and structures; local autonomy; external influences; cultural expression; and contacts with Italy, nearby satellite islands, and the Mycenaean world. Informed by recent fieldwork and scholarship, this book is a necessary guide to the current state of knowledge on prehistoric Sicily.

Subtitled, 'decision-making and gender roles in subsistence and settlement strategies', this study questions the central place of big game-hunting in the interpretation of Paleoindian archaeology. It tries to redress the balance by examining subsistence and settlement strategies from the perspective of gender.

Twenty-eight essays by a very distinguished collection of contributors who were invited to speak at a conference in Newcastle in 1993 on a number of themes in terms of evidence for cave and rockshelter use in their areas of the world. The contributors include: Lawrence Straus ( Some human uses of caves and rockshelters ); Pavel Dolukhanov ( Cave vs open-air settlement in the European Upper Palaeolithic ); Marcel Otte ( The Belgian Palaeolithic ); Ann Sieveking ( Cave as context in Palaeolithic art ); Paul Bahn ( Pleistocene cave art ); Erwin Cziesla ( The Weidental cave ); Manuel Gonzalez Morales ( Cantabrian Spain ); Keith Branigan ( Caves as workshops ); Vassily Lubin ( The Caucasus ); Andrea Stone ( Pre-Columbian cave utilization in the Maya area ); Josephine Flood ( Aboriginal use of caves ); Penny Dransart ( Northern Chile ).

Collection of quirky papers from the second Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Catastrophists' Convention held in Cambridge in 1997. The papers bring together thoughts from a wide range of disciplines - physics, astronomy, archaeology, geology, and anthropology - and from around the world. Amos Nur (Stanford University) explains how the collapse of Bronze Age civilisation can be related to a 50-year-long earthquake storm; Gunnar Heinsohn (Universitat Bremen) argues that Bronze Age ritual and blood sacrifice was a response to living in catastrophic times; and Mark E. Bailey (Armagh Observatory) presents a review of recent findings and historical implications in the study of Near-Earth Objects.

This study's main aim is to summarise the available site and ceramic evidence upon which understanding of the Manx Neolithic currently rests, augmented with discussion of the location and topography of the island and the history of Manx research studies.

Pictorial reconstructions of ancient human ancestors have twin purposes: to make sense of shared ancestry and to bring prehistory to life. Stephanie Moser analyzes the close relationship between representations of the past and theories about human evolution, showing how this relationship existed even before a scientific understanding of human origins developed. How did mythological, religious, and historically inspired visions of the past, in existence for centuries, shape this understanding? Moser treats images as primary documents, and her book is lavishly illustrated with engravings, paintings, photographs, and reconstructions. In surveying the iconography of prehistory, Moser explores visions of human creation from their origins in classical, early Christian, and medieval periods through traditions of representation initiated in the Renaissance. She looks closely at the first scientific reconstructions of the nineteenth century, which dramatized and made comprehensible the Darwinian theory of human descent from apes. She considers, as well, the impact of reconstructions on popular literature in Europe and North America, showing that early visualizations of prehistory retained a firm hold on the imagination—a hold that archaeologists and anthropologists have found difficult to shake.

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.

Since prehistoric times, Andean societies have been organized around the ayllu, a grouping of real or ceremonial kinspeople who share labor, resources, and ritual obligations. Many Andean scholars believe that the ayllu is as ancient as Andean culture itself, possibly dating back as far as 6000 B.C., and that it arose to alleviate the hardships of farming in the mountainous Andean environment. In this boldly revisionist book, however, William Isbell persuasively argues that the ayllu developed during the latter half of the Early Intermediate Period (around A.D. 200) as a means of resistance to the process of state formation. Drawing on archaeological evidence, as well as records of Inca life taken from the chroniclers, Isbell asserts that prehistoric ayllus were organized around the veneration of deceased ancestors, whose mummified bodies were housed in open sepulchers, or challups, where they could be visited by descendants seeking approval and favors. By charting the temporal and spatial distribution of chullpa ruins, Isbell offers a convincing new explanation of where, when, and why the ayllu developed.

The simple question "How did the Maya come up with a calendar that had only 260 days?" led Vincent Malmstrom to discover an unexpected "hearth" of Mesoamerican culture. In this boldly revisionist book, he sets forth his challenging, new view of the origin and diffusion of Mesoamerican calendrical systems--the intellectual achievement that gave rise to Mesoamerican civilization and culture.

Malmstrom posits that the 260-day calendar marked the interval between passages of the sun at its zenith over Izapa, an ancient ceremonial center in the Soconusco region of Mexico's Pacific coastal plain. He goes on to show how the calendar developed by the Zoque people of the region in the fourteenth century B.C. gradually diffused through Mesoamerica into the so-called "Olmec metropolitan area" of the Gulf coast and beyond to the Maya in the east and to the plateau of Mexico in the west.

These findings challenge our previous understanding of the origin and diffusion of Mesoamerican civilization. Sure to provoke lively debate in many quarters, this book will be important reading for all students of ancient Mesoamerica--anthropologists, archaeologists, archaeoastronomers, geographers, and the growing public fascinated by all things Maya.

Subtitled the reconstruction of the social organization of a mesolithic culture in Northern Europe', this book is based on a structural analysis of the Ulkestrup Huts in Central Zealand. The distribution patterns of microliths and arrangement of hearths, bark floors and other patterned evidence are compared with all the available evidence from northern Europe to suggest some general patterns and possible future directions for research.

Subtitled a critical review of some archaeological and craniological concepts', this is an innovative and controversial study of the Beaker Culture problem; diffusion or migration into Britain. The first part of the book critically reviews previous work on the problem and suggests that the processualist revolt against migrational explanations might have been an error in this case. The second part presents an original study of English Neolithic and Bronze Age crania which, although inconclusive, moves a step nearer to a migrationist explanatory framework.

A study of the development of settlements in the Hebrides in the period from 1000 BC to 800 AD. Armit proposes a new classification of sites to take account of their particular characteristics; he reasses older excavations in the light of the new classification and comes up with a coherent sequence of settlement and architectural development. He puts forward models for the interpretation of settlement changes in the light of changes in culture and social relationships between the islands and emergent Scotland. Based on an Edinburgh doctoral thesis.

In the first published synthesis of the subject, Caroline Earwood traces the changing styles and manufacturing techniques of wooden domestic artefacts in Britain and Ireland from the Neolithic age to the time of the Vikings. A surprising number of these items have survived - some as ancient as 6000 years old - in wet and waterlogged places such as wells and bogs.

The book atempts to answer questions about who made the many and varied objects, who used them and ow theirstyle and deecoration compare with potery, maetal and stone artefacts from the same period. It also examines the continues use of ancient tehniques as late as the 20th century.

This fascicle is the first of two detailed reports on the more than one million pieces of pottery (and three complete vessels) recovered from Franchthi Cave and Paralia. These accounts will significantly increase our understanding of Neolithic pottery and Neolithic society in southern Greece. The enormous amount of pottery and the detailed stratigraphic sequences at Franchthi have enabled Vitelli to propose finer chronological distinctions than ever before possible and to talk meaningfully about the people who made and used that pottery. Vitelli's report describes a new classification system she developed for Aegean Neolithic ceramics that makes it possible to address questions about social and economic organization in Neolithic Greece. Part I of this volume explains the new classification system developed by Vitelli and its rationale, describes the analyses performed on the sherds, and describes and explains the establishing of ceramic phases within the stratigraphic record. Part II discusses in turn each of the ceramic subphases for the period covered by this volume (Early and Middle Neolithic). of pottery found at the site. Part IV begins the task of assessing the implications of the analyses reported here.

Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens--small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay--represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.