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What was home and family like in Paleolithic Europe? How did mobile hunter-gatherer families live, work, and play together in the fourteenth millennium BP? What were the functional and spatial constraints and markers of their domesticity—the processes that create and sustain a household? Despite the long recognized absence of comprehensive archaeological data on such ancient homes and hearths, the archaeologists in this volume begin unraveling the domesticity of the Upper Paleolithic by drawing on both an immense trove of new material evidence and comparative site data, and a range of incisive and illuminating ethnographic analogies, theoretical models, and simulations. Five Late Magdaleni...
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how urbanization first emerged in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The pursuit for universally applicable definitions of the terms urban and city has frequently distracted scholars from scrutinizing processes of how ancient nucleated settlements evolved and developed. Based on the premise that similar social dynamics to a great extent governed nucleation trajectories throughout human history, Coming Together focuses on both prehistoric aggregated and early urban settlements. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how nucleation unfolded in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The major themes of the volume are nucleations origins, pathways to sustainability, and the transformative role of these sites in sociopolitical and cultural change.
Regional approaches to past human adaptations have generated much new knowledge and understanding. Researchers working on problems of adaptations in the Holocene, from those of simple hunter-gatherers to those of complex sociopolitical entities like the state, have found this approach suitable for comprehension of both ecological and social aspects of human behavior. This research focus has, however, until recently left virtually un touched a major spatial and temporaI segment of prehistory-the Old World during the Pleistocene. Extant literature on this period, by and large, presents either detailed site speeific accounts or offers continental or even global syntheses that tend to compile si...
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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...
Investigations of archaeological intrasite spatial patterns have generally taken one of two directions: studies that introduced and explored methods for the analysis of archaeological spatial patterns or those that described and analyzed the for mation of spatial patterns in actuaiistic-ethnographic, experimental, or natu ral-contexts. The archaeological studies were largely quantitative in nature, concerned with the recognition and definition of patterns; the actualistic efforts were often oriented more toward interpretation, dealing with how patterns formed and what they meant. Our research group on archaeological spatial analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been working for...
This book tells the story of women in archaeology worldwide and their dedication to advancing knowledge and human understanding. In their own voices, they present themselves as archaeologists working in academia or the private and public sector across 33 countries. The chapters in this volume reconstruct the history of archaeology while honoring those female scholars and their pivotal research who are no longer with us. Many scholars in this volume fiercely explore non-traditional research areas in archaeology. The chapters bear witness to their valuable and unique contributions to reconstructing the past through innovative theoretical and methodological approaches. In doing so, they share the inherent difficulties of practicing archaeology, not only because they, too, are mothers, sisters, and wives but also because of the context in which they are writing. This volume may interest researchers in archaeology, history of science, gender studies, and feminist theory. Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Life-writing is a vital part of the history of archaeology, and a growing field of scholarship within the discipline. The lives of archaeologists are entangled with histories of museums and collections, developments in science and scholarship, and narratives of nationalism and colonialism into the present. In recent years life-writing has played an important role in the surge of new research in the history of archaeology, including ground-breaking studies of discipline formation, institutionalisation, and social and intellectual networks. Sources such as diaries, wills, film, and the growing body of digital records are powerful tools for highlighting the contributions of hitherto marginalise...
The Celtic World is a detailed and comprehensive study of the Celts from the first evidence of them in the archaeological and historical record to the early post-Roman period. The strength of this volume lies in its breadth - it looks at archaeology, language, literature, towns, warfare, rural life, art, religion and myth, trade and industry, political organisations, society and technology. The Celtic World draws together material from all over pagan Celtic Europe and includes contributions from British, European and American scholars. Much of the material is new research which is previously unpublished. The book addresses some important issues - Who were the ancient Celts? Can we speak of them as the first Europeans? In what form does the Celtic identity exist today and how does this relate to the ancient Celts? For anyone interested in the Celts, and for students and academics alike, The Celtic World will be a valuable resource and a fascinating read.
A fantastic voyage through 15,000 years of history that laid the foundations for civilisation as we know it by award-winning science writer Steven Mithen. Twenty thousand years ago Earth was in the midst of an ice age. Then global warming arrived, leading to massive floods, the spread of forests and the retreat of the deserts. By 5,000 BC a radically different human world had appeared. In place of hunters and gatherers there were farmers; in place of transient campsites there were towns. The foundations of our modern world had been laid and nothing that came after - the Industrial Revolution, the atomic age, the internet - have ever matched the significance of those events. AFTER THE ICE tells the story of climate change's impact during this momentous period - one that also saw the colonisation of the Americas and mass extinctions of animals throughout the world. Drawing on the latest cutting-edge research in archaeology, cognitive science, palaeontology, geology and the evolutionary sciences, Steven Mithen creates an evocative, original and remarkably complete picture of minds, cultures, lives and landscapes through 15,000 years of history.