The present volume shows the archaeological thinking as a form of art, revealing the poetics of the archaeological imagination. It shows that, in their work, archaeologists, without being inspired by contemporary artists, use creative methods, and their analysis of the art of the Past goes beyond the material culture of the art objects, into the realm of the mental processes of creation. Consequently, the purpose of this book is to present the archaeological research functioning as a sort of artistic creation, proposing new perspectives on the archaeological imagination. It offers an exploration of the creative processes, the possibility of finding inspiration in experientiality, and the approach to the act of creation as a subject for archaeological research. When analysing the art of the Past, or when using art methods to approach the Past, we are facing an act of creation where imagination, emotion, and creativity combine under the form of an experiential instrument of investigation. The book offers a vision of archaeological research, a means to understand the complexity of the human nature, and consequently, to approach the human thinking structured on similarity and symbolism, being able to detect cultural and psychological subjects ignored until today, and, at the same time, to offer a series of visions of art, seen from the perspective of archaeology.

Architectures of Fire attempts to present the entanglement between the physical phenomenon of fire, the pyro-technological instrument that it is, its material supports, and the human being. In this perspective, the physical process of combustion, material culture, as well as the development of human action in space, are addressed together. Fire is located at the centre of all pre-modern architecture. It creates the living or technological space. Fire creates architectures since it imposes geometry, from the simple circles of stone or clay, which control its spread (and which are the geometrical figures of its optimal efficiency), to cone trunks, cylinders, half-spheres, half-cylinders or parallelepipeds, circular geometric figures that efficiently control the air-draught process required for combustion. All these forms involving the circle are determined by the control and conservation of thermal energy. We should not imagine that the term 'architecture' evokes only constructed objects that delimit human action. Architecture means not only the built space, but also the experienced space, in the present case around the pyro-instruments. Pyro-instruments involve an ergonomic, kinesthetic and visual relationship, as well as the rhythmic actions of feeding or maintaining fire at a certain technological tempo. The technological agency is structured both by the physics of the combustion phenomenon, and by the type of operation to be performed.

Recycling is a basic anthropological process of humankind. The reutilization of materials or of ideas from the Past is a process determined by various natural or cultural causes. Recycling can be motivated by a crisis or by a complex symbolic cause like the incorporation of the Past into the Present. What archaeology has not insisted upon is the dimensional scale of the process, which operates from the micro-scale of the recycling of the ancestors' material, up to the macro-scale of the landscape. It is well known that there are direct relations between artefacts and landscapes in what concerns the materiality and mobility of objects. An additional relation between artefact and landscape may be the process of recycling. In many ways artefact and landscape can be considered as one aspect of material culture, perceived at a different scale, since both have the same materiality and suffer the same process of reutilisation. This book invites archaeologists to approach the significant process of recycling within the archaeological record at two different levels: of artefacts and of landscape.

Contributions: 1) The experimentation of technologies linked to vegetable food: the production of flour at Bilancino 2) Daily practices of prehistoric Europe during the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition 3) New experimental approaches on lithic projectile macro-wear analysis: A case study 4) Experiments and technological analyses on Neolithic ceramics from Lamezia plain 5) Storage vessels in the Mediterranean area in the late Middle Ages 6) An archaeology of the Iron Age coastal salt industry 7) Experiments with Ancient Copper Smelting Technologies 8) Shropshire Council Experimental Archaeology in Charcoal Burning and Iron Smelting 9) The Minoan Double-V-Necked Dress 10) Using Experimental Archaeology to answer the unanswerable: A case study using Roman Dyeing 11) Traces of fire and pieces of clay: A preliminary approach to landscape through the remains of Neolithic burnt houses

The present volume is mainly the result of two symposia held at the European Archaeological Association meetings in Krakow (2006) and Zadar (2007), respectively, which gathered studies on the function, morphology, materiality, technology, ritual, function and context of figurines, whether made of clay, wood, metal, stone, bone or shell. Contents: Introduction: Small Worlds (Dragos Gheorghiu and Ann Cyphers); 1) Beyond Venus figurines: technical production and social practice in Pavlovian portable art (Rebecca A. Farbstein); 2) Dissentions: magnitude, usability and the oddness of Neolithic figures (Christina Marangou); 3) Neolithic ceramic figurines in the shape of a womanhouse from the Republic of Macedonia (Nikos Chausidis); 4) Cult artifacts from the Neolithic and chalcolithic settlement of Leceia, Oeiras, Portugal (Joao Luis Cardoso); 5) The god-dolly wooden figurine from the Somerset levels, Britain: the context, the place and its meaning (Clive Jonathon Bond); 6) Anthropomorphic antler sculptures in Abora Neolithic settlement (lake Lubans wetland, Latvia) (Ilze Biruta Loze); 7) Ritual technology: an experimental approach to Cucuteni-Tripolye chalcolithic figurines (Dragos Gheorghiu); 8) Problems of identity for Mycenaean figurines (Andrea Vianello); 9) Go figure Creating intertwined worlds in the Scandinavian late Iron Age (AD 5501050) (Ing-Marie Back Danielsson); 10) A cognitive approach to variety in the facial and bodily features of prehistoric Japanese figurines (Naoko Matsumoto and Hideaki Kawabata); 11) Fragmentation practices in central Japan: middle Jomon clay figurines at Shakado (Ilona Bausch); 12) Awaking the symbolic calendar: animal figurines and the conceptualisation of the natural world in the Jomon of northern Japan (Liliana Janik); 13) Can clues from Egypts dynastic period shed light on its predynastic figurines? (Aloisia de Trafford); 14) Artificial cranial vault modification in Olmec figurines: identity, ancestry and politics in early Mesoamerica (Ann Cyphers); 15) The solid terracotta and stone figurines from central region of the Bolanos Canyon in the state of Jalisco, Mexico (Ma. Teresa Cabrero); 16) Figurines in the heart of the Aztec Empire (Cynthia L. Otis Charlton and Thomas H. Charlton).

This volume, containing a selection of nineteen papersfrom a session at the 15th UISPP congress, tries to approach some of the building techniques, methods, and spatial organization of early architecture in Eurasia. Its goal is not to present this subject as a grand narrative of an evolutionary process of Eurasian architecture, but as a series of semiotic case studies of the building process (i.e. as studies of the geometrical forms, in two dimensions or spatial, and of the materials employed), to help the readerunderstand the importance of the materiality of the geographic formative contexts, together with the influence of social changes upon the built forms.

This volumes presents 13 papers based on a session held at the EAA meeting in St Petersburg in 2003, and offers a 'material' perception of fire, which will be approached as an artefact, together with its material support. Contents: 1) Hearth, heat and meat (Ulla Odgaard ); 2) A social instrument: Examining the chaine-operatoire of the hearth (Silje Evjenth Bentsen); 3) Etude du profil thermique d'une structure de combustion en meule (pit kiln): four ou foyer simple ? (Claude Sestier); 4) Preserved in fire, Late Neolithic settlement structures in Western Hungary (Judit Regenye); 5) Chalcolithic pyroinstruments with air-draught - an outline (Dragos Gheorghiu); 6) A re-interpretation of a bronze age ceramic. Was it a cheese mould or a Bunsen burner? (Jacqui Wood); Chalcolithic copper source-material and end-products: Early trade between Israel and Jordan (Sariel Shalev); 7) Iron production in the Northern Eurasian Bronze Age (Stanislav A. Grigoriev); 8) Pyrotechnology of Titelberg Iron Age coin production (Ralph M. Rowlett and Dragana Mladenovic); 9) Fire cult? - The spatial organization of a cooking pit site in Scania (Jes Martens); 10) Ashes to Ashes: The Instrumental Use of Fire in West-Central European Early Iron Age Mortuary Ritual (Seth A. Schneider); 11) Roasters from the Early Medieval hillfort at Stradow, Czarnocin commune, South Poland, in the light of the results of specialist analyses (Bartlomiej Szymon Szmoniewski, Andrzej Kielski, Maria Litynska-Zajac, Krystyna Wodnicka); 13) Pyrotechnology and local resources in Chianti shire: from clay, limestone and wood to bricks, lime and pottery making. Some preliminary notes (Marta Caroscio).

A collection of ten wide-ranging papers from a session on ceramics at the 2002 EAA Thessaloniki conference and from the e-journal Studia Vasorum (2002) on the subject of ceramic studies. The contributors present both theoretical and case study driven papers including those looking at ceramics from late prehistoric north-west Iberia, the Chalcolithic Lower Danube region, Bronze Age Eurasia, Bronze Age north-west Italy, northern Etruria and Greece.

These seven papers from a session held at the XIVth UISSP congress held in Liege in 2001, focus on the little-studied subject of water management on the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age taking case studies from across Europe and the Near East. The contributors define water as an appropriate category for study within prehistoric societies drawing on a range of archaeological, historical, geographical, cultural and ethnographic sources. The case studies cover a broad range of subjects including engineering and water management schemes, the construction of dams and dykes, methods of drawing water, cultural interaction and communication facilitated by water, anthropological models and the impact of the intensified exploitation of water.

'Shamanism' is a term with specific anthropological roots, but which is used more generally to cover a set of interactions between a practitioner or 'shaman' and a spiritual or religious realm beyond the reach of most members of the community. It has often been considered from an anthropological viewpoint, but this book gathers the most recent studies on a subject which has not been comprehensively studied by archaeologists. By putting together experts from two continents who have studied the phenomenon of shamanism, Lands of the Shamans through carefully selected case studies uses the archaeological evidence to construct the shamans' worldview, landscape and cosmology. Recent interdisciplinary studies support the idea of the existence of shamanistic representations as long ago as the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic, but at the same time, do not follow developments during the history of humankind. As ethnographic evidence shows, shamanistic activity represents a complex phenomenon that is extremely diversified, its spiritual activity possessing a large variety of expressions in the material culture. In other words, shamanism could be defined as a series of differing spiritual world views which model the material culture and the landscape. Throughout the archaeological record of all prehistoric and historic periods, there is a series of visual representations and objects and landscape alterations that could be ascribed to these differing world views, many thought to represent shamanistic cognition and activity. The shaman's landscape reveals itself to the world as one of multifaceted spiritual and material activity. Consequently, this first book dedicated completely to the shamanistic landscape presents in fresh perspective the landscapes of the lower and upper worlds as well as their phenomenological experience. Case Studies come from Europe, North America and Asia.

Ten papers, plus an introduction, from a session at the European Association of Archaeologists Fifth Annual Meeting in Bournemouth in 1999. Contents: Les objets et le sens (Marcel Otte); Things moving around a landscape: The symbolism of South Scandinavian Mesolithic portable art (George Nash); Fertility rituals: The Kangjiashimenzi petroglyphs and the Cucuteni dancers (Jeannine Davis-Kimball); Beer and beakers: A tentative analysis (Marc M Vander Linden); Stone axes as tools, valuable and symbols (3300-1900BC) (Jan Turek); Houses, bodies, pots, quernstones: Meaning and metaphor in the English Later Bronze Age (Joanna Brueck); Food as a ritual object in ancient Italy (Marina Ciaraldi); Late Viking period pagan burial in Gotland: The symbolic code (Martin Rundkvist); Scandinavian warrior on the Volga river: Version of reconstruction of destiny

'Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research' aims to expand the field of archaeological research with an anthropological understanding of practices which include artistic methods. The project has come about through a collaborative venture between Dragos Gheorghiu (archaeologist and professional visual artist) and Theodor Barth (anthropologist). This anthology contains articles from professional archaeologists, artists and designers. The contributions cover a scale ranging from theoretical reflections on pre-existing archaeological finds/documentation, to reflective field-practices where acts of 'making' are used to interface with the site. These acts feature a manufacturing range from ceramics, painting, drawing, type-setting and augmented reality (AR). The scope of the anthology - as a book or edited whole - has accordingly been to determine a comparative approach resulting in an identifiable set of common concerns. Accordingly, the book proceeds from a comparative approach to research ontologies, extending the experimental ventures of the contributors, to the hatching of artistic propositions that demonstrably overlap with academic research traditions, of epistemic claims in the making. This comparative approach relies on the notion of transposition: that is an idea of the makeshift relocation of methodological issues - research ontologies at the brink of epistemic claims - and accumulates depth from one article to the next as the reader makes her way through the volume. However, instead of proposing a set method, the book offers a lighter touch in highlighting the role of operators between research and writing, rather entailing a duplication of practice, in moving from artistic ideas to epistemic claims. This, in the lingo of artistic research, is known as exposition. Emphasising the construct of the 'learning theatre' the volume provides a support structure for the contributions to book-project, in the tradition of viewing from natural history. The contributions are hands-on and concrete, while building an agenda for a broader contemporary archaeological discussion.

This volume publishes a collection of papers inspired by the sessions on "The Archaeology of Fire" held at the 6th and 7th European Association of Archaeologists Conferences in Lisbon and Esslington in 2000 and 2001. In archaeological literature the number of studies on fire is minimal. In archaeological research fire seems to have been the forgotten phenomenon, all attention being focussed on material culture. The 15 papers here (covering the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age and regions from Scandinavia to Italy, Spain to the Black Sea) reflect on the approaches to the study of fire, as an essential phenomenon in human evolution. Included are studies of anthracology, ethnoarchaeology, field archaeology, symbolism, technology and experimental archaeology, whose ideas converge to some universals, such as the relationship of fire with environment, materials, human body, its quality of transformability, and its anthropological centrality.

The present book explores the complexity of the past, by analysing the relationships between place, territory, the material value of objects and landscapes, time and ritual, during archaeological investigations. It presents the archaeology of place as a series of interconnecting and interactive relationships. It is clear that things and places do not emerge without some form of agency, usually through the concept of material manipulation, coupled with elaboration, innovation and time. Depending on the raw material used and the process of manipulation and its relationship with the environment, materiality gains value.How do we as modern humans work within the complexity of place, materiality, time, and ritual?Traditional in archaeological discourse is the need to describe place, albeit in an empiricist and banal way. Discourse is sometimes followed by a more fruitful and interpretive account. However, these accounts tend to ignore human emotion that is bound-up in place, for example the ritualized and symbolic meanings that place holds. This book explores the significance of geography, place and the materiality that place holds, and challenges many of the tradition norms that in the past have trivialized landscape archaeology. The book is divided into 14 thought-provoking and crafted chapters and will be an ideal companion to anyone involved in the social sciences.

This work presents the most recent views on a subject of primordial importance for all students of history: the understanding of humankind's process of becoming, viewed through the study of the beginnings of pottery in the late forager, and early farmer societies of Europe. It is a collection of essays, by some of the prominent European scholars and young dynamic archaeologists whose works focus on the early European and Middle Eastern pottery, intended to present a new perspective on the rise of a new technology in prehistory. With the breadth, variety and novelty of the approaches presented, Early farmers, late foragers and ceramic traditions. On the beginning of pottery in Europe is a fascinating read for scholars, as well as for the public at large.