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Veteran science writer Michael Balter skillfully weaves together many threads in this fascinating book about one of archaeology’s most legendary sites— Çatalhöyük. First excavated forty years ago, the site is justly revered by prehistorians, art historians, and New Age goddess worshippers alike for its spectacular finds dating almost 10,000 years ago. Archaeological maverick Ian Hodder, leader of the recent re-excavation at this Turkish mound, designated Balter as the project’s biographer. The result is a skillful telling of many stories about both past and present: of the inhabitants of Neolithic Çatalhöyük and the development of human creativity and ingenuity, as revealed in th...
How humanity brought about the climate crisis by departing from its evolutionary trajectory 15,000 years ago—and how we can use evolutionary principles to save ourselves from the worst outcomes. Despite efforts to sustain civilization, humanity faces existential threats from overpopulation, globalized trade and travel, urbanization, and global climate change. In A Darwinian Survival Guide, Daniel Brooks and Salvatore Agosta offer a novel—and hopeful—perspective on how to meet these tremendous challenges by changing the discourse from sustainability to survival. Darwinian evolution, the world’s only theory of survival, is the means by which the biosphere has persisted and renewed itse...
The first major synthesis of African archaeobotany in decades, this book significantly advances our knowledge of relationship between agriculture and social complexity.
This volume of original chapters written by experts in the field offers a snapshot of how historical built spaces, past cultural landscapes, and archaeological distributions are currently being explored through computational social science. It focuses on the continuing importance of spatial and spatio-temporal pattern recognition in the archaeological record, considers more wholly model-based approaches that fix ideas and build theory, and addresses those applications where situated human experience and perception are a core interest. Reflecting the changes in computational technology over the past decade, the authors bring in examples from historic and prehistoric sites in Europe, Asia, and the Americas to demonstrate the variety of applications available to the contemporary researcher.
A long-overdue advancement in ceramic studies, this volume sheds new light on the adoption and dispersal of pottery by non-agricultural societies of prehistoric Eurasia. Major contributions from Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia make this a truly international work that brings together different theories and material for the first time. Researchers and scholars studying the origins and dispersal of pottery, the prehistoric peoples or Eurasia, and flow of ancient technologies will all benefit from this book.
Reanimating Industrial Spaces explores the relationships between people and the places of former industry through approaches that incorporate and critique memory-work. The chapters in this volume consider four broad questions: What is the relationship between industrial heritage and memory? How is memory involved in the process of place-making in regards to industrial spaces? What are the strengths and pitfalls of conducting memory-work? What can be learned from cross-disciplinary perspectives and methods? The contributors have created a set of diverse case studies (including iron-smelting in Uganda, Puerto Rican sugar mills and concrete factories in Albania) which examine differing socio-economic contexts and approaches to industrial spaces both in the past and in contemporary society. A range of memory-work is also illustrated: from ethnography, oral history, digital technologies, excavation, and archival and documentary research.
In her close ethnography of a Dogon village of Mali, Laurence Douny shows how a microcosmology develops from people's embodied daily and ritual practice in a landscape of scarcity. Viewed through the lens of containment practice, she describes how they cope with the shortage of material items central to their lives—water, earth, and millet. Douny’s study is an important addition to ecological anthropology, to the study of West African cultures, to the understanding of material culture, and to anthropological theory.
Stories of the primordial woman who married a bear, appear in matriarchal traditions across the global North from Indigenous North America and Scandinavia to Russia and Korea. In The Woman Who Married the Bear, authors Barbara Alice Mann, a scholar of Indigenous American culture, and Kaarina Kailo, who specializes in the cultures of Northern Europe, join forces to examine these Woman-Bear stories, their common elements, and their meanings in the context of matriarchal culture. The authors reach back 35,000 years to tease out different threads of Indigenous Woman-Bear traditions, using the lens of bear spirituality to uncover the ancient matriarchies found in rock art, caves, ceremonies, ritu...
Leading scholars demonstrate the importance of archaeobotanical evidence in the understanding of the spread of agriculture in southwest Asia and Europe.
This second volume in the Archaeology of Anatolia series offers reports on the most recent discoveries from across the Anatolian peninsula. Periods covered span the Epipalaeolithic to the Islamic, and sites and regions range from the western Anatolian coast to Van, as well as the southeast. Also included here are both reviews of recent work at ongoing excavations and data retrieved from the last several years of survey projects. This series presents a forum in which scholars report their most recent data to a global audience, allowing for productive engagement with others working in and near Anatolia. Published every two years, The Archaeology of Anatolia: Recent Discoveries Series is an invaluable vehicle through which working archaeologists may carry out their most critical task: the presentation of their fieldwork and laboratory research in a timely fashion.