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Paradigm Found brings together papers by renowned researchers from
across Europe, Asia and America to discuss a selection of pressing
issues in current archaeological theory and method. The book also
reviews the effects and potential of various theoretical stances in
the context of prehistoric archaeology. The 23 papers provide a
discussion of the issues currently re-appearing in the focal point
of theoretical debates in archaeology such as the role of the
discipline in the present-day society, problems of interpretation
in archaeology, approaches to the study of social evolution, as
well as current insights into issues in classification and
construction of typologies. Taking a fresh, and often provocative,
look at the challenges contemporary archaeology is facing, the
contributors evaluate the effects of past developments and discuss
the impact they are likely to have on future directions in
archaeology as an internationally connected discipline. In its
final part the volume reflects on current thinking on prehistory,
using case-studies from a number of European regions and the
Mediterranean, from the Neolithic to the Roman Period. The volume
represents a tribute to the lifetime achievements of Professor
Evzen Neustupny, a distinguished Czech archaeologist who
contributed to the advancement of prehistoric studies in Europe and
to archaeological theory and method in particular.
Social Transformations in Archaeology explores the relevance of
archaeology to the study of long-term change and to the
understanding of our contemporary world. The articles are divided
into:
* broader theoretical issues
* post-colonial issues in a wide range of contexts
* archaeological examination of colonialism with case studies from
the Mediterranean in the first millenium BC and historical Africa.
This volume brings together a series of papers which define the
relevance of archaeology to the study of long term change and to
the understanding of our contemporary world. It re-evaluates the
premises and epistemologies which underlie the study of archaeology
and looks at the ways discoveries about the past have a direct
bearing oncontemporary beliefs and actions. The major theoretical
ideologies which have influenced archaeology since the mid-1970s
are considered: functionalism, determinism, structural Marxism,
world systems theory, postmodernism and postprocessual archaeology.
The papers in this volume, however, concentrate on the study of
structures as far as the archaeological record brings new or
different insight to their functioning in the long term. The volume
also remains committed to the possibility of an historical
reconstruction of social realities. The text is a compilation of
papers in theoretical archaeology and should appeal to academics
and postgraduates in archaeology, anthropology and history.
This book provides the first global analysis of the relationship
between trade and civilisation from the beginning of civilisation
3000 BC until the modern era 1600 AD. Encompassing the various
networks including the Silk Road, the Indian Ocean trade, Near
Eastern family traders of the Bronze Age, and the Medieval
Hanseatic League, it examines the role of the individual merchant,
the products of trade, the role of the state, and the technical
conditions for land and sea transport that created diverging
systems of trade and in the development of global trade networks.
Trade networks, however, were not durable. The book focuses on the
establishment and decline of great trading network systems, and how
they related to the expansion of civilisation, and to different
forms of social and economic exploitation. Case studies focus on
local conditions as well as global networks until the sixteenth
century when the whole globe was connected by trade.
This collaborative volume is concerned with long-term social
change. Envisaging individual societies as interlinked and
interdependent parts of a global social system, the aim of the
contributors is to determine the extent to which ancient societies
were shaped over time by their incorporation in - or resistance to
- the larger system. Their particular concern is the dependent
relationship between technically and socially more developed
societies with a strong state ideology at the centre and the
simpler societies that functioned principally as sources of raw
materials and manpower on the periphery of the system. The papers
in the first part of the book are all concerned with political
developments in the Ancient Near East and the notion of a regional
system as a framework for analysis. Part 2 examines the problems of
conceptualising local societies as discrete centres of development
in the context of both the Near East and prehistoric Europe during
the second millennium BC. Part 3 then presents a comprehensive
analytical study of the Roman Empire as a single system showing how
its component parts often relate to each other in uneven, even
contradictory, ways.
Recent developments in aDNA has reshaped our understanding of later
European prehistory, and at the same time also opened up for more
fruitful collaborations between archaeologists and historical
linguists. Two revolutionary genetic studies, published
independently in Nature, 2015, showed that prehistoric Europe
underwent two successive waves of migration, one from Anatolia
consistent with the introduction of agriculture, and a later influx
from the Pontic-Caspian steppes which without any reasonable doubt
pinpoints the archaeological Yamnaya complex as the cradle of
(Core-)Indo-European languages. Now, for the first time, when the
preliminaries are clear, it is possible for the fields of genetics,
archaeology and historical linguistics to cooperate in a
constructive fashion to refine our knowledge of the Indo-European
homeland, migrations, society and language. For the
historical-comparative linguists, this opens up a wealth of
exciting perspectives and new working fields in the intersections
between linguistics and neighbouring disciplines, for the
archaeologists and geneticists, on the other hand, the linguistic
contributions help to endow the material findings with a voice from
the past. The present selection of papers illustrate the importance
of an open interdisciplinary discussion which will gradually help
us in our quest of Tracing the Indo-Europeans.
Trade before Civilization explores the role that long-distance
exchange played in the establishment and/or maintenance of social
complexity, and its role in the transformation of societies from
egalitarian to non-egalitarian. Bringing together research by an
international and methodologically diverse team of scholars, it
analyses the relationship between long-distance trade and the rise
of inequality. The volume illustrates how elites used exotic
prestige goods to enhance and maintain their elevated social
positions in society. Global in scope, it offers case studies of
early societies and sites in Europe, Asia, Oceania, North America,
and Mesoamerica. Deploying a range of inter-disciplinary and
cutting-edge theoretical approaches from a cross-cultural
framework, the volume offers new insights and enhances our
understanding of socio-political evolution. It will appeal to
archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, conflict theorists, and
ethnohistorians, as well as economists seeking to understand the
nexus between imported luxury items and cultural evolution.
This book examines the impact of ancient DNA research and
scientific evidence on our understanding of the emergence of
Indo-European languages in prehistory. Offering cutting-edge
contributions from an international team of scholars, it considers
the driving forces behind the Indo-European migrations during the
3rd and 2nd millenia BC. The volume explores the rise of the
world's first pastoral nomads the Yamnaya Culture in the Russian
Pontic steppe including their social organization, expansions, and
the transition from nomadism to semi-sedentism when entering
Europe. It also traces the chariot conquest in the late Bronze Age
and its impact on the expansion of the Indo-Iranian languages into
Central Asia. In the final section, the volumes consider the
development of hierarchical societies and the origins of slavery. A
landmark synthesis of recent, exciting discoveries, the book also
includes an extensive theoretical discussion regarding the
integration of linguistics, genetics, and archaeology, and the
importance of interdisciplinary research in the study of ancient
migration.
This Element was written to meet the theoretical and methodological
challenge raised by the third science revolution and its
implications for how to study and interpret European prehistory.
The first section is therefore devoted to a historical and
theoretical discussion of how to practice interdisciplinarity in
this new age, and following from that, how to define some crucial,
but undertheorized categories, such as culture, ethnicity and
various forms of migration. The author thus integrates the new
results from archaeogenetics into an archaeological frame of
reference, to produce a new and theoretically informed historical
narrative, one that also invites debate, but also one that
identifies areas of uncertainty, where more research is needed.
In this volume, which is the outcome of the four-year long
collaboration project SARA (Scandinavian and Atlantic Rock Art)
between the archaeology department at University of Gothenburg and
the Laboratory of Heritage of Spanish National Research Council,
nine papers summarize new excavation and survey results, advanced
studies of iconography and intriguing landscape studies. It
addresses topics such as human activities in the vicinity and
surroundings of rock-art panels, movement and communication, ritual
and symbolism, and finally representations and constructions of
landscapes. The book is a sophisticated study of the rock art of
two major regions of prehistoric Europe, but one with implications
for research over a much wider area. It is wide-ranging, topical
and will no doubt also be controversial. Contributors include Per
Nilsson, Manuel Santos Estevez, Yolanda Seoane Veiga, Johan Ling,
Asa C. Fredell, Marco Garcia Quintela, Kristian Kristiansen, Lasse
Bengtsson and Felipe Criado Boado.
Warfare in Bronze Age Society takes a fresh look at warfare and its
role in reshaping Bronze Age society. The Bronze Age represents the
global emergence of a militarized society with a martial culture,
materialized in a package of new efficient weapons that remained in
use for millennia to come. Warfare became institutionalized and
professionalized during the Bronze Age, and a new class of warriors
made their appearance. Evidence for this development is reflected
in the ostentatious display of weapons in burials and hoards, and
in iconography, from rock art to palace frescoes. These new
manifestations of martial culture constructed the warrior as a
'Hero' and warfare as 'Heroic'. The case studies, written by an
international team of scholars, discuss these and other new aspects
of Bronze Age warfare. Moreover, the essays show that warriors also
facilitated mobility and innovation as new weapons would have
quickly spread from the Mediterranean to northern Europe.
The Bronze Age was a formative period in European history when the
organisation of landscapes, settlements, and economy reached a new
level of complexity. This book presents the first in-depth,
comparative study of household economy and settlement in three
micro-regions: the Mediterranean (Sicily), Central Europe
(Hungary), and Northern Europe (South Scandinavia). The results are
based on ten years of fieldwork in a similar method of
documentation, and scientific analyses were used in each of the
regional studies, making controlled comparisons possible. The new
evidence demonstrates how differences in settlement organisation
and household economies were counterbalanced by similarities in the
organised use of the landscape in an economy dominated by the
herding of large flocks of sheep and cattle. This book's innovative
theoretical and methodological approaches will be of relevance to
all researchers of landscape and settlement history.
The Bronze Age was a formative period in European history when the
organisation of landscapes, settlements, and economy reached a new
level of complexity. This book presents the first in-depth,
comparative study of household economy and settlement in three
micro-regions: the Mediterranean (Sicily), Central Europe
(Hungary), and Northern Europe (South Scandinavia). The results are
based on ten years of fieldwork in a similar method of
documentation, and scientific analyses were used in each of the
regional studies, making controlled comparisons possible. The new
evidence demonstrates how differences in settlement organisation
and household economies were counterbalanced by similarities in the
organised use of the landscape in an economy dominated by the
herding of large flocks of sheep and cattle. This book's innovative
theoretical and methodological approaches will be of relevance to
all researchers of landscape and settlement history.
Beginning with state formation and urbanization in the Near East
c.3000 BC and ending in Central and Northern Europe c.1000-500 BC,
the Bronze Age marks an heroic age of travels and transformations
throughout Europe. In this 2005 book, Kristian Kristiansen and
Thomas Larsson reconstruct the travel and transmission of knowledge
that took place between the Near East, the Mediterranean and
Europe. They explore how religious, political and social
conceptions of Bronze Age people were informed by long-distance
connections and alliances between local elites. The book integrates
the hitherto separate research fields of European and Mediterranean
(classical) archaeology and provides the reader with an alternative
to the traditional approach of diffusionism. Examining data from
across the region, the book presents an important new
interpretation of social change in the Bronze Age, making it
essential reading for students of archaeology, of anthropology and
of the development of early European society.
The societies of the European Bronze Age produced elaborate artifacts and were drawn into a wide trade network extending over the whole of Europe, yet they were economically and politically undiversified. Kristian Kristiansen attempts to explain this paradox using a world-systems analysis, and provides a rich body of evidence to support his case. The result is a coherent overview of this period of European prehistory that addresses some of the larger questions raised in the study of the period.
This collection of papers, articles and essays explores the
neolithisation of Denmark from various disciplines, including
archaeology, physical anthropology, botany, zoology, sociology,
environmental studies, history and the hard sciences.
The thirteen papers in this volume discuss theoretical and
methodological questions in European prehistory, with a number of
case studies taken from a wide range of areas and periods.
Contributors include: M Rowlands (The ideology and politics of
European Iron Age studies); K Kristiansen (The emergence of the
European World System in the Bronze Age); J Collis (Reconstructing
Iron Age Society); S Frankenstein (The Phoenicians in Iberia); P
Brun (From Hallstatt to La T?ne in the perspective of the
Medetirranean World Economy); L Pauli (Case Studies in Celtic
archaeology); H Thrane (Centres of wealth in northern Europe); T
Champion (Socio-economic development in eastern England); S
Champion (Regional studies: a question of scale).
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