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This book provides a concise overview of human prehistory. It shows how an understanding of the distant past offers new perspectives on present-day challenges facing our species - and how we can build a sustainable future for all life on planet Earth. Deborah Barsky tells a fascinating story of the long-term evolution of human culture and provides up-to-date examples from the archaeological record to illustrate the different phases of human history. Barsky also presents a refreshing and original analysis about issues plaguing modern globalized society, such as racism, institutionalized religion, the digital revolution, human migrations, terrorism, and war. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Human Prehistory is aimed at an introductory-level audience. Students will acquire a comprehensive understanding of the interdisciplinary, scientific study of human prehistory, as well as the theoretical interpretations of human evolutionary processes that are used in contemporary archaeological practice. Definitions, tables, and illustrations accompany the text.
"To be human means to need things. Even more human is to need more and more of them. In this engaging, charming book, archaeologist, curator, and writer Chip Colwell takes us around the world, covering topics as wide-ranging as the dawn of tool making, the earliest cave paintings, the complexities of clothing, the Industrial Revolution, the torrent of gizmos invented to bring us closer and supposedly make our lives easier, and, finally, the mountains of unwanted stuff in dumps. Along the way, he raises questions such as: Why is a treasured keepsake sacred to one person but meaningless to another? What do we go through when we clean out the belongings of the dearly departed? And what is the point of storing things in museums? The book is organized around three historical phases: (1) the invention of tools; (2) the dawn of the belief that things mean something beyond their immediate use (around 50,000 years ago); and (3) the Industrial Revolution and the age of mass consumption. Colwell takes us on a tour across millions of years to explain how humans have arrived at this moment-a world that both requires things and is suffering because of them"--
Reconstructions of diet provide valuable insights into the ecology and evolutionary history of animals and humans in the fossil record, and the history of relationships between animals and humans. Reconstruction of past diets allows tracking numerous ecological and behavioural aspects through time and across diverse geographic areas, such as, but not limited to: trophic position, niche sharing and niche partitioning, past vegetation, migration patterns, ontogenetic and individual diet choices, and adaptations to changing environment. It also is a useful tool to track climatic change. More broadly, these insights are key to reconstructing and understanding the structure, composition, and function of past ecosystems. Multiple approaches have been proposed to infer paleodiets, including the integration of multiple proxy approaches.
"The Genesis of Israel and Egypt" examines the earliest phase of historical consciousness in the ancient Near East, looking in particular at the mysterious origins of Egypt's civilization and its links with Mesopotamia and the early Hebrews. The book takes a radically alternative view of the rise of high civilization in the Near East and the forces which propelled it. The author, Emmet Sweeney, finds that the early civilizations developed amidst a background of massive and repeated natural catastrophes, events which had a profound effect upon the ancient peoples and left its mark upon their myths, legends, customs and religions. Ideas found in all corners of the globe, concepts such as drago...
Ancient religions are definitely complex systems of gods, which resist our understanding. Divine names provide fundamental keys to gain access to the multiples ways gods were conceived, characterized, and organized. Among the names given to the gods many of them refer to spaces: cities, landscapes, sanctuaries, houses, cosmic elements. They reflect mental maps which need to be explored in order to gain new knowledge on both the structure of the pantheons and the human agency in the cultic dimension. By considering the intersection between naming and mapping, this book opens up new perspectives on how tradition and innovation, appropriation and creation play a role in the making of polytheist...
Ocean is an ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic Ocean, a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, which provided a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonisation of the New World. John Haywood argues that the perception that Atlantic history begins with the first voyage of the celebrated Genoese navigator is a mistaken one, and that the seafaring and shipbuilding skills that enabled European global exploration and expansion did not arrive fully formed in the fifteenth century, but were learned over centuries and millennia in the...
This volume brings together presentations from two sessions organized for the XVII World UISPP Conference: The scientific value of 3D archaeology, and Detecting the Landscape(s).
A visit to Ankara, Turkey, would include a trip to Anitkabir, the burial site of Turkey’s founder and first president, Ataturk. The massive stone building houses numerous sculptures and a large ceremonial plaza and is surrounded by an elaborate park. Ataturk is far from the only former leader to be remembered by such decorative means. Since the beginning of human history, societies have built tombs and mausoleums to house the remains of people who changed the course of history. These grave sites exist not only as sites of memory for different cultures, but also serve the political needs of subsequent regimes. Tracing the development of the political burial places since the Bronze Age tumul...