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Written in Stone: The Multiple Dimensions of Lithic Analysis
demonstrates the vitality of contemporary lithics analysis by
examining material from a variety of geographical locations. This
edited collection is primarily concerned with the link between
craft production and social complexity, the nature of trade, and
the delineation of settlement patterns and manipulation of
landscape. While deconstructing the present to reconstruct the
past, each chapter incorporates a technological dimension shaped by
the type of analysis utilized. Methods include microwear analysis,
which adds significant understanding of stone tool function, to the
identification of obsidian sources, which illustrates the potential
of lithic provenance studies for reconstructing trade. This book
verifies and expands on the notion that lithics play an integral
role in our understanding of past societies at all levels of
complexity, from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to archaic states.
Montserrat is a small island in the Leeward islands of the eastern
Caribbean and at present a British Overseas Territory. It has
suffered greatly in recent times, first from the devastations of
Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and since 1995 from the still-ongoing
eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano that has caused two-thirds
of the island's population to emigrate and left half the island a
dangerous exclusion zone. Archaeological research here began only
in the late 1970s, but work over the past four decades has now made
it possible to present an archaeological history of Montserrat,
from the earliest known traces of human activity on the island
about 5,000 years ago to the present. This book draws on all the
available archaeological evidence (including that from the
co-authors' own island-wide survey and excavation project since
2010), as well as newly available archival documents, to trace this
little island's long history and heritage. This is not the story of
an isolated and remote island: Montserrat is shown rather to be a
place intricately connected to the flows of people and goods that
have travelled between islands and across the Atlantic at various
points in time, both Amerindian and historical. Despite its small
size and seeming irrelevance, Montserrat has in fact always been
networked into regional and global systems of connectivity. An
underlying theme of this volume is resilience. It presents insights
from the archaeological and documentary evidence on how the
island's inhabitants have coped with often adverse conditions
throughout the course of its history - hurricanes, volcanic
eruptions, slavery, disease, invasions, and impoverishment - all
while remaining proudly connected to heritage that celebrates the
accomplishments of island residents.
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.
Pausanias, the Greek historian and traveler, lived and wrote around the second century AD, during the period when Greece had fallen peacefully to the Roman Empire. While fragments from this period abound, Pausanias' Periegesis ("description") of Greece is the only fully preserved text of travel writing to have survived. This collection uses Pausanias as a multifaceted lens yielding indispensable information about the cultural world of Roman Greece.
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