Modern archaeology has amassed considerable evidence for the disposal of the dead through burials, cemeteries and other monuments. Drawing on this body of evidence, this book offers fresh insight into how early human societies conceived of death and the afterlife. The twenty-seven essays in this volume consider the rituals and responses to death in prehistoric societies across the world, from eastern Asia through Europe to the Americas, and from the very earliest times before developed religious beliefs offered scriptural answers to these questions. Compiled and written by leading prehistorians and archaeologists, this volume traces the emergence of death as a concept in early times, as well as a contributing factor to the formation of communities and social hierarchies, and sometimes the creation of divinities.

From two of the best-known archaeological writers in the trade, this outstanding resource provides a thorough survey of the key ideas in archaeology, and how they impact on archaeological thinking and method. Clearly written, and easy to follow, Archaeology: The Key Concepts collates entries written specifically by field specialists, and each entry offers a definition of the term, its origins and development, and all the major figures involved in the area. The entries include: thinking about landscape archaeology of cult and religion cultural evolution concepts of time urban societies the antiquity of humankind archaeology of gender feminist archaeology experimental archaeology multiregional evolution. With guides to further reading, extensive cross-referencing, and accessibly written for even beginner students, this book is a superb guide for anyone studying, teaching, or with any interest in this fascinating subject.

From two of the best-known archaeological writers in the trade, this outstanding resource provides a thorough survey of the key ideas in archaeology, and how they impact on archaeological thinking and method. Clearly written, and easy to follow, Archaeology: The Key Concepts collates entries written specifically by field specialists, and each entry offers a definition of the term, its origins and development, and all the major figures involved in the area. The entries include: thinking about landscape archaeology of cult and religion cultural evolution concepts of time urban societies the antiquity of humankind archaeology of gender feminist archaeology experimental archaeology multiregional evolution. With guides to further reading, extensive cross-referencing, and accessibly written for even beginner students, this book is a superb guide for anyone studying, teaching, or with any interest in this fascinating subject.

The site of Dhaskalio Kavos, on the remote Cycladic island of Keros, was extensively looted in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Investigations starting in1963 then revealed large quantities of fractured marble bowls, broken marble figures and smashed pottery of the Early Cycladic period from around 2500 BC. This report of the subsequent survey and rescue excavations of 1987-88 reveals the extraordinary richness of the site, now confirmed as one of the most prolific in lite goods of the entire Aegean early bronze age. Was it an unprecedentedly rich Early Cycladic cemetery, recently wrecked by looters? Or was the damage deliberately produced during early bronze age times in some procedure of ritual breakage and ceremonial deposition? Here the survey of the site and the rescue excavations undertaken within the looted area are documented in detail, with a full account of the finds. Alternative explanations for this extraordinary deposit are explored. What has been termed 'the Keros Enigma', in the light of the finds at the site, can now be reconsidered with the full documentation which this volume offers.

The Cambridge World Prehistory provides a systematic and authoritative examination of the prehistory of every region around the world from the early days of human origins in Africa two million years ago to the beginnings of written history, which in some areas started only two centuries ago. Written by a team of leading international scholars, the volumes include both traditional topics and cutting-edge approaches, such as archaeolinguistics and molecular genetics, and examine the essential questions of human development around the world. The volumes are organized geographically, exploring the evolution of hominins and their expansion from Africa, as well as the formation of states and development in each region of different technologies such as seafaring, metallurgy, and food production. The Cambridge World Prehistory reveals a rich and complex history of the world. It will be an invaluable resource for any student or scholar of archaeology and related disciplines looking to research a particular topic, tradition, region, or period within prehistory.

Modern archaeology has amassed considerable evidence for the disposal of the dead through burials, cemeteries and other monuments. Drawing on this body of evidence, this book offers fresh insight into how early human societies conceived of death and the afterlife. The twenty-seven essays in this volume consider the rituals and responses to death in prehistoric societies across the world, from eastern Asia through Europe to the Americas, and from the very earliest times before developed religious beliefs offered scriptural answers to these questions. Compiled and written by leading prehistorians and archaeologists, this volume traces the emergence of death as a concept in early times, as well as a contributing factor to the formation of communities and social hierarchies, and sometimes the creation of divinities.

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 construction of formal measurement systems underlies the development of science and technology, economy, and new ways of understanding and explaining the world. Human societies have developed such systems in different ways in different places and at different times, and recent archaeological investigations highlight the importance of these activities for fundamental aspects of human life. The construction of measurement systems constituted new means for recognising and engaging with the material world, and their implications, and the motivations behind them, also extend beyond the material world. Developments such as the precise reckoning of the passage of time highlighted patterns and causal relationships in nature. Measurement systems have provided the structure for addressing key concerns of cosmological belief systems, as well as the means for articulating relationships between the human form, human action, and the world - and new understandings of relationships between events in the terrestrial world and beyond. The Archaeology of Measurement explores the archaeological evidence for the development of measuring activities in numerous ancient societies, as well as the implications of these discoveries for an understanding of their worlds and beliefs. Featuring contributions from a cast of internationally renowned scholars, it analyzes the relationships between measurement, economy, architecture, symbolism, time, cosmology, ritual, and religion among prehistoric and early historic societies throughout the world.

Thirteen leading archaeologists have contributed to this innovative study of the socio-political processes - notably imitation, competition, warfare, and the exchange of material goods and information - that can be observed within early complex societies, particularly those just emerging into statehood. The common aim is to explain the remarkable formal similarities that exist between institutions, ideologies and material remains in a variety of cultures characterised by independent political centres yet to be brought under the control of a single, unified jurisdiction. A major statement of the conceptual approach is followed by ten case studies from a wide variety of times and places, including Minoan Crete, early historic Greece and Japan, the classic Maya, the American Mid - west in the Hopewellian period, Europe in the Early Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, and the British Isles in the late Neolithic.

The Upper Palaeolithic era of Europe has left an abundance of evidence for symbolic activities, such as direct representations of animals and other features of the natural world, personal adornments, and elaborate burials, as well as other vestiges that are more abstract and cryptic. These behaviours are also exhibited by populations throughout the world, from the prehistoric period through to the present day. How can we interpret these activities? What do they tell us about the beliefs and priorities of the people who carried them out? How do these behaviours relate to ideologies, cosmology, and understanding of the world? What can they tell us about the emergence of ritual and religious thought? And how do the activities of humans in prehistoric Europe compare with those of their predecessors there and elsewhere? In this volume, fifteen internationally renowned scholars contribute essays that explore the relationship between symbolism, spirituality, and humanity in the prehistoric societies of Europe and traditional societies elsewhere. The volume is richly illustrated with 50 halftones and 24 colour plates.

Ranked societies are characterized by disparities in personal status that are often accompanied by the concentration of power and authority in the hands of a few dominant individuals. They stand between the sophistication of developed, states and the relative simplicity of most hunter-gatherer groups and early agriculturalists. In some places and times they represented relatively brief phases of transition to more complex forms of organization; in others they existed as stable forms of adaptation for thousands of years. They are thus of great interest for archaeologists seeking to understand the dynamics of cultural evolution.

The Greek island of Melos in the Cyclades has been inhabited for at least five thousand years. Two periods of its history are well documented: the late Bronze Age, when it supported an important urban centre at Phylakopi and the late fifth century BC, when as an independent city-state it briefly defied and was then destroyed by the expansionist power of Athens. The case of Melos is thus relevant to the understanding of the processes of early state-formation and of the integration of small-scale societies into larger political units. As the contributors to this volume show, a small island provides a very suitable area - clearly defined, self-contained - in which to examine the processes of social, cultural and economic change and the forces - sometimes gradual and almost imperceptible in their effect, sometimes sudden and dramatic - by which changes are initiated.

The dawn of art is sometimes equated with the birth of the human spirit. But when and how did figuration - sculpture, painting, drawing - actually begin? And did these first figurative creations coincide with the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens ? Is figuration a general and fundamental feature of the human condition? In this challenging volume leading experts review the evidence now available from the worldwide practice of prehistoric archaeology, and go on to formulate some important conclusions. The scope of this work is global. It sets out to explore the first stirrings of artistic endeavour and of figurative imagery on each continent, and to consider the social context in which they arose. It will be a fundamental resource for all those seeking to understand the origins of art and the beginnings of human spirituality.

Data from molecular genetics have changed our views on the origin, spread and timescale of our species across this planet. But how can we reveal more detail about the demography of ancient human populations? For example, is it possible to determine when and how many people arrived at a certain continent, and which route they took from a choice of geographically plausible options? One of the most promising tools for such investigation is computer simulation incorporating various demographic scenarios. The simulation outcomes must be evaluated by teams with archaeological expertise, since archaeological evidence is generally the best evidence currently available on the population histories of geographical regions. This book is a summary of the landmark conference held in Cambridge in 2005, where specialists in simulations and molecular genetics as well as archaeologists came together to present and evaluate the state of the art, and to discuss future possibilities.

The Cycladic Islands of Greece played a central role in Aegean prehistory, and many new discoveries have been made in recent years at sites ranging in date from the Mesolithic period to the end of the Bronze Age. In the well-illustrated chapters of this book, based on the recent conference held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge, international scholars including leading Greek archaeologists offer new information about recent developments, many arising from hitherto unpublished excavations. The book contains novel theoretical insights into the workings of culture process in the prehistoric cultures of the islands. It will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars interested in the prehistory of the Aegean and in the contributions made to its development by the prehistoric inhabitants of the Cyclades.

Evolutionary ('phylogenetic') trees were first used to infer lost histories nearly two centuries ago by manuscript scholars reconstructing original texts. Today, computer methods are enabling phylogenetic trees to transform genetics, historical linguistics and even the archaeological study of artefact shapes and styles. But which phylogenetic methods are best suited to retracing the evolution of languages? And which types of language data are most informative about deep prehistory? In this book, leading specialists engage with these key questions. Essential reading for linguists, geneticists, and archaeologists, these studies demonstrate how phylogenetic tools are illuminating previously intractable questions about language prehistory. This innovative volume arose from a conference of linguists, geneticists, and archaeologists held at Cambridge in 2004.

The Upper Palaeolithic era of Europe has left an abundance of evidence for symbolic activities, such as direct representations of animals and other features of the natural world, personal adornments, and elaborate burials, as well as other vestiges that are more abstract and cryptic. These behaviours are also exhibited by populations throughout the world, from the prehistoric period through to the present day. How can we interpret these activities? What do they tell us about the beliefs and priorities of the people who carried them out? How do these behaviours relate to ideologies, cosmology, and understanding of the world? What can they tell us about the emergence of ritual and religious thought? And how do the activities of humans in prehistoric Europe compare with those of their predecessors there and elsewhere? In this volume, fifteen internationally renowned scholars contribute essays that explore the relationship between symbolism, spirituality, and humanity in the prehistoric societies of Europe and traditional societies elsewhere. The volume is richly illustrated with 50 halftones and 24 colour plates.

One of the most troubling problems in archaeology is to determine the manner and content of prehistoric thought. A fundamental challenge is to develop the theory, methodology and tools to understand human cognition. Cognitive archaeology as a subject is still in its infancy, and archaeologists are adopting a variety of approaches--literary, linguistic, and scientific. The contributors to The Ancient Mind develop a new direction in prehistoric cognitive research that is rooted in the scientific tradition and in an empirical methodology. Together, they begin to develop a science of cognitive archaeology.

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 turn of the twenty-first century has seen a new era in the cognitive and brain sciences that allows us to address the age-old question of what it means to be human from a whole new range of different perspectives. Our knowledge of the workings of the human brain increases day by day and so does our understanding of the extended, distributed, embodied and culturally mediated character of the human mind. The problem is that these major ways of thinking about human cognition and the threads of evidence that they carry with them often seem to diverge, rather than confront one another.
The Sapient Mind channels the huge emerging analytic potential of current neuroscientific research in the direction of a common integrated programme targeting the big picture of human cognitive evolution. Up to now, working in isolation, both archaeology and neuroscience have made a number of important contributions to the study of human intelligence. Archaeology, for instance has given us a good idea about where, and an approximate idea about when, Homo sapiens appeared - in Africa somewhere between 100 000 and 200 000 years ago. Neuroscience, on the other hand, has given us a good indication about where in the human brain modern human capacities (e.g. language, symbolic capacity, representational ability, theory of mind (ToM), causal belief, intentionality, sense of selfhood) can be identified and the possible neural networks and cognitive mechanisms that support them. The challenge facing us then is how do we put all these different facets and threads of evidence about the human condition back together again?
This book presents the work of leading researchers from archaeology and the brain sciences, showing how a new framework that integrates two hithero isolated disciplines can provide us with a much deeper, more informative, account of where we came from, and why we developed as we did.

The Settlement at Dhaskalio is the first volume in the series The Sanctuary on Keros: Excavations at Dhaskalio and Dhaskalio Kavos, 2006-2008, edited by Colin Renfrew, Olga Philaniotou, Neil Brodie, Giorgos Gavalas and Michael Boyd. Here the findings are presented from the well-stratified settlement of Dhaskalio, today an islet near the Cycladic island of Keros, Greece. A series of radiocarbon dates situates the duration of the settlement from around 2750 to 2300 BC. The volume begins with a discussion of the geological setting of Keros and of sea-level change, concluding that Dhaskalio was in the third millennium BC linked to Keros by a narrow causeway. The excavation and finds (excluding the pottery, discussed in later volumes) are fully documented, with consideration of stratigraphy, geomorphology, organic remains, and the evidence for metallurgy. It is concluded that there was a small permanent population of around 20, increased periodically by up to 400 visitors who would have participated in the rituals of deposition occurring at the Sanctuary at Kavos, situated opposite, on Keros itself, for which the detailed evidence (including abundant fragmented pottery, marble vessels and sculptures) will be presented in Volumes II and III.

Linguistic diversity is one of the most puzzling and challenging features of humankind. Why are there some six thousand different languages spoken in the world today? Why are some, like Chinese or English, spoken by millions over vast territories, while others are restricted to just a few thousand speakers in a limited area? The farming/language dispersal hypothesis makes the radical and controversial proposal that the present-day distributions of many of the world's languages and language families can be traced back to the early developments and dispersals of farming from the several nuclear areas where animal and plant domestication emerged. For instance, the Indo-European and Austronesian language families may owe their current vast distributions to the spread of food plants and of farmers (speaking the relevant proto-language) following the Neolithic revolutions which took place in the Near East and in Eastern Asia respectively, thousands of years ago. In this challenging book, international experts in historical linguistics, prehistoric archaeology, molecular genetics and human ecology bring their specialisms to bear upon this intractable problem, using a range of interdisciplinary approaches. There are signs that a new synthesis between these fields may now be emerging. This path-breaking volume opens new perspectives and indicates some of the directions which future research is likely to follow.

This volume of essays examines the claim that a linguistic macrofamily can be identified which includes not only the Indo-European and Afroasiatic language families but also the Kartvelian, Uralic,Altaic and Dravidian families. The Nostratic case was put by Aharon Dolgopolsky in his The Nostratic Macrofamily and Linguitic Palaeontology , and it is here evaluated critically by linguists specialising in the language families concerned. Contents include: The Nostratic Macrofamily (A. Bomhard); Nostratic Languages: Internal and External Relationship (V. Shevoroshkin); Beyond Nostratic in Time and Space (G. Decsy); Nostratic and Linguistic Palaeontology in Methodological Perspective (L. Campbell); Family Trees and Favourite Daughters (A. McMahon, M. Lohr & R. McMahon); Linguistis Palaeontology: For and Against (I. Hegedus); Afroasiatic and the Nostratic Hypothesis (D. Appleyard); The Dravidian Perspective (K. Zvelebil); Altaic Evidence for Nostratic (A. Vovin); On Semitohamitic Comparison (R. Voight); Toward a Future History of Macrofamily Research (D. Sinor).

New to this Edition * Updated treatment of postcolonial approaches and indigenous archaeology, with coverage of the ontological turn in archaeology, and new examples of community archaeology in southern Africa and Australia. * New discoveries and research across the globe, such as archaeological evidence of social hierarchies at the ancient city of Liangzhu, China, and recent evidence of Neanderthal art in France and Spain. * A more inclusive picture of archaeology, raising the profile of women in the discipline's history, and describing the development of archaeology in China and Japan. * In Chapter Five, updated treatment of social organization, with critical evaluations of Service's model, and new coverage of heterarchies. * New box features include: forensic archaeology; change in the Amazon; ancient microbes; paleoproteomics; Must Farm; evidence of feasting at Stonehenge; Neanderthal art; and ceramic styles and learning. * New book design, including, for each chapter, distinct introductions that offer a general overview of each topic covered.