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Werner Herzog's 2011 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the painted caves at Chauvet, France brought a glimpse of Europe's extraordinary prehistory to a popular audience. But paleolithic cave paintings, stunning as they are, form just a part of a story that begins with the arrival of the first humans to Europe 1.3 million years ago, and culminates in the achievements of Greece and Rome. In Europe before Rome, T. Douglas Price takes readers on a guided tour through dozens of the most important prehistoric sites on the continent, from very recent discoveries to some of the most famous and puzzling places in the world, like Chauvet, Stonehenge, and Knossos. This volume focuses on more than 60...
Is wealth inequality a universal feature of human societies, or did early peoples live an egalitarian existence? How did inequality develop before the modern era? Did inequalities in wealth increase as people settled into a way of life dominated by farming and herding? Why in general do such disparities increase, and how recent are the high levels of wealth inequality now experienced in many developed nations? How can archaeologists tell? Ten Thousand Years of Inequality addresses these and other questions by presenting the first set of consistent quantitative measurements of ancient wealth inequality. The authors are archaeologists who have adapted the Gini index, a statistical measure of w...
An exploration of life in the early medieval West, using pigs as a lens to investigate agriculture, ecology, economy, and philosophy From North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture in the early medieval period. Jamie Kreiner examines how this ubiquitous species was integrated into early medieval ecologies and transformed the way that people thought about the world around them. In this world, even the smallest things could have far‑reaching consequences. Kreiner tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans by drawing on textual and visual evidence, bioarchaeology and settlement archaeology, and mammal biology. She shows how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals—and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities. In the end, even the pig’s own identity was transformed: by the close of the early Middle Ages, it had become a riveting metaphor for Christianity itself.
This thesis presents recent developments in magnetic coupling phenomena of ferrimagnetic rare-earth transition-metal Tb-Fe alloys and coupled systems consisting of ferri-/ferromagnetic heterostructures. Taking advantage of the tunability of the exchange coupling between ferrimagnetic and ferromagnetic layers by means of stoichiometry of the Tb-Fe layer, the variable number of repetitions in the Co/Pt multilayer as well as the thickness of an interlayer spacer, it is demonstrated that large perpendicular unidirectional anisotropy can be induced at room temperature. This robust perpendicular exchange bias at room temperature opens up a path towards applications in spintronics.
Leading scholars demonstrate the importance of archaeobotanical evidence in the understanding of the spread of agriculture in southwest Asia and Europe.
In recent years, storage has come to the fore as a central aspect of ancient economies. However studies have hitherto focused on urban and military storage. Although archaeological excavations of rural granaries are numerous, their evidence has yet to be fully taken into account. Such is the ambition of Rural Granaries in Northern Gaul (Sixth Century BCE – Fourth Century CE). Focusing on northern Gaul, this volume starts by discussing at length the possibility of quantifying storage capacities and, through them, agrarian production. Building on this first part, the second half of the book sketches the evolution of rural storage in Gaul from the Iron Age to Late Antiquity, setting firmly archaeological evidence in the historical context of the Roman Empire.
"Greek archaeologist Soultana Maria Valamoti takes readers on a culinary journey in her synthesis of plant foods and culinary practices of Neolithic and Bronze Age Greece. Plant foods were the main ingredients of daily meals in prehistoric Greece and most likely of special dishes prepared for feasts and rituals. For more than thirty years, Valamoti has been analyzing a large body of archaeobotanic data that spans 7,000 years from the Neolithic to Bronze Age and that was retrieved from nearly one hundred sites in mainland Greece and the Greek islands. This book also reflects experimentation and research of ancient written sources. Her approach allows an exploration of culinary variability thr...