Archaeology

Farmers made a sudden and dramatic appearance in Greece around 7000 BC, bringing with them new ceramics and crafts, and establishing settled villages. They were Europe's first farmers, and their settlements provide the link between the first agricultural...

Several decades of research into the archaeology of contact in North America have laid the foundations for the global exploration of the archaeology of European colonization. It is significant, however, that archaeologists, unlike historians and...

In this book, Benoit Dubreuil explores the creation and destruction of hierarchies in human evolution. Combining the methods of archaeology, anthropology, cognitive neuroscience and primatology, he offers a natural history of hierarchies from the point...

The Colonial Caribbean is an archaeological analysis of the Jamaican plantation system at the turn of the nineteenth century. Focused specifically on coffee plantation landscapes and framed by Marxist theory, the analysis considers plantation landscapes...

This book is an ambitious synthesis of the social, economic, political and cultural interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks in the Mediterranean world during the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods. Instead of traditional and static...

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...

This book explores the relationship between the city of Rome and the Aurelian Wall during the six centuries following its construction in the 270s AD, a period when the city changed and contracted almost beyond recognition, as it evolved from imperial...

In both South and Southeast Asia, many upland groups make a living - in whole or part - through gathering and hunting, producing not only subsistence goods but commodities destined for regional and even world markets. These forager-traders have had an...

Three terms, Order, Legitimacy and Wealth, delineate a comparative approach to ancient civilizations initially developed by John Baines, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford, and Norman Yoffee, Professor of Archaeology and Near Eastern...

In this 1996 volume, Jerry D. Moore discusses public architecture in the context of the cultural, political and religious life of the pre-hispanic Andes. Archaeologists have invested enormous effort in excavating and documenting prehistoric buildings,...

This is the first general study of the impact of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. Timothy Insoll charts the historical background as well as the archaeological evidence attesting to the spread of Islam across the Sudan, Ethiopia, Eastern Africa, Southern...

Widely known as an innovative figure in contemporary archaeology, Michael Shanks has written a challenging contribution to recent debates on the emergence of the Greek city states in the first millennium BC. He interprets the art and archaeological...

All archaeological sites have been abandoned, but people abandoned sites in many different ways, and for different reasons. What they did when leaving a settlement, structure, or activity area had a direct effect on the kind and quality of the cultural...

In the tenth century AD, a remarkable cultural development took place in the harsh and forbidding San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico. From small-scale, simply organised, prehistoric Pueblo societies, a complex and socially differentiated political...

In this 1996 volume, Jerry D. Moore discusses public architecture in the context of the cultural, political and religious life of the pre-hispanic Andes. Archaeologists have invested enormous effort in excavating and documenting prehistoric buildings,...

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Demography in Archaeology, first published in 2006, is a review of current theory and method in the reconstruction of populations from archaeological data. Starting with a summary of demographic concepts and methods, the book examines historical and...

In this innovative study, James Whitley examines the relationship between the development of pot style and social changes in the Dark Age of Greece (1100-700 BC). He focuses on Athens where the Protogeometric and Geometric styles first appeared. He...

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This pioneering ethnoarchaeological study is of contemporary ceramic production and consumption in several villages in the Los Tuxtlas region of Mexico. While many archaeologists have identified ceramic production zones in the archaeological record,...

Following the theoretical perspective of his earlier book, Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process (1985), Dean Arnold's ethnoarchaeological study explores the relationships of ceramic production to society and its environment in the Peruvian Andes. The book...

The Early Settlement of North America is an examination of the first recognisable culture in the New World: the Clovis complex. Gary Haynes begins his analysis with a discussion of the archaeology of Clovis fluted points in North America and a review of...

In The Archaeology of Lydia, from Gyges to Alexander, Christopher Roosevelt provides the first overview of the regional archaeology of Lydia in western Turkey, including much previously unpublished evidence as well as a fresh synthesis of the archaeology...

The relief slabs that decorated the palaces of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which emphasized military conquest and royal prowess, have traditionally been understood as statements of imperial propaganda that glorified the Assyrian king. In this book,...

In this survey of the burial and settlement evidence of late Iron Age Etruria, Corinna Riva offers a new reading of the socio-political transformations that led to the formation of urban centres in Tyrrhenian central Italy. Through a close examination of...

Archaeology has often been put to political use, particularly by nationalists. The case studies in this timely collection range from the propaganda purposes served by archaeology in the Nazi state, through the complex interplay of official dogma and...

The lowland American tropics have posed great challenges for archaeologists. Working in awkward terrain, in humid conditions where preservation is difficult, modern scholars pioneered new methods that increasingly influence archaeological practice...

The archaeology of classical Greece developed in the shadow of Greek historical scholarship, and it has restricted itself too modestly to the study of individual artefacts. A wide variety of modern developments in archaeology have been neglected, and...

How, asks John Terrell in this richly illustrated and original book, can we best account for the remarkable diversity of the Pacific Islanders in biology, language, and custom? Traditionally scholars have recognized a simple racial division between...

China is the birthplace of one of the world's most ancient civilisations and an immense quantity and variety of cultural relics have been preserved on China's vast territory. Utilising a wealth of archaeological evidence, China's Cultural Relics provides...

Part of a resurgence in the comparative study of ancient societies, this book presents a variety of methods and approaches to comparative analysis through the examination of wide-ranging case studies. Each chapter is a comparative study, and the diverse...

Paul G. Bahn provides a richly illustrated overview of prehistoric rock art and cave art from around the world. Summarizing the recent advances in our understanding of this extraordinary visual record, he discusses new discoveries, new approaches to...

The presence of ancient road networks in the New World is a puzzle, because they predate the use of wheeled transport vehicles. But whatever their diverse functions may have been, they remain the only tangible indication of how extinct American societies...

This bold and illuminating study examines the role of archaeology in the formation of the modern Japanese nation and explores the processes by which archaeological practice is shaped by national social and intellectual discourse. Leading Japanese...

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This book is an account of an almost completely neglected archaeological epic, the uncovering and restoration of all the classical monuments of Rome during the French occupation (1809-14). This was the first large-scale archaeological programme in the...

The aim of Artefacts as Categories is to ask what we can learn about a society from the variability of the objects it produces. Dr Miller presents a comprehensive analysis of the pottery produced in a single village in central India, drawing together and...

Problems in Neolithic Archaeology is a notable contribution to the debate about how we can write prehistory. Drawing on both processual and post-processual approaches, it reaffirms the central role of theory and interpretation while accepting as...

Thoughtful Foragers is about hunter-gatherer decision making. The author explores the implications of the human mind as a product of biological evolution for the way in which humans solve foraging problems. He draws on studies form ethology, psychology...

How, when and why did inherited differences of wealth, status and power arise in human communities? At the heart of Emerging Complexity is the thesis that complex societies developed independently during the Copper and Bronze Ages in south-east Spain,...