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.

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.

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.