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This volume examines how the household is defined socially, culturally and historically in Neolithic Greece.
Time and History in Prehistory explores the many processes through which time and history are conceptualized and constructed, challenging the perception of prehistoric societies as ahistorical. Drawing equally on contemporary theory and illustrative case studies, and firmly rooted in material evidence, this book rearticulates concepts of time and history, questions the kind of narratives to be written about the past and underlines the fundamentally historical nature of prehistory. From a range of multi-disciplinary perspectives, the authors of this volume address the scales at which archaeological evidence and narrative are interwoven, from a single day to deep history and from a solitary po...
The Neolithic period is noted primarily for the change from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture, domestication and sedentism. This change has been studied in the past by archaeologists observing the movements of plants, animals and people. But has not been examined by looking at the domestic architecture of the time. Along with tracking the movement of sedentism, Neolithic houses are also able to show researchers the beginnings of cultural identity, group representation through the construction and decoration of these structures. Additionally as agriculture moved west and north in this era, the architecture and material culture shows this change and its significance. Chapters are arranged chronologically so that authors can address differences and similarities of their region to neighboring ones. To ensure continuity, authors have framed the chapters around the following considerations: construction materials and architectural characteristics; how houses facilitated or perpetua
This volume presents the results of a multidisciplinary research program (“Balkans 4000”) financed by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and coordinated by the editor between 2007 and 2011, when she was a member of the Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée (Laboratory of Archaeology and Archaeometry). 192 new radiocarbon dates have been produced in the laboratories of Lyon, Saclay and Demokritos, from 34 archaeological sites, spanning the years from the end of the 6th to the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. They shed light on the evolution of human settlement during the late stages of the Neolithic period in Greece and Bulgaria, and more specifically on the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age during the “obscure” 4th millennium BC. Thirty-one scholars, archaeologists as well as radiocarbon scientists, are signing the contributions.
Though archaeologists have long acknowledged the work of social anthropologists, anthropologists have been much less eager to repay the compliment. This volume argues that the time has come to recognise the insights archaeological approaches can bring to anthropology. Archaeology's rigorous approach to evidence and material culture; its ability to develop flexible research methodologies; its readiness to work with large-scale models of comparative social change, and to embrace the latest technology all means that it can offer valuable methods that can enrich and enhance current anthropological thinking. Cross-disciplinary and international in scope, this exciting volume draws together cutting-edge essays on the relationship between the two disciplines, arguing for greater collaboration and pointing to new concepts and approaches for anthropology. With contributions from leading scholars, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of archaeology, anthropology and related disciplines.
Deeply stratified settlements are a distinctive site type featuring prominently in diverse later prehistoric landscapes of the Old World. Their massive materiality has attracted the curiosity of lay people and archaeologists alike. Nowadays a wide variety of archaeological projects are tracking the lifestyles and social practices that led to the building-up of such superimposed artificial hills. However, prehistoric tell-dwelling communities are too often approached from narrow local perspectives or discussed within strict time- and culture-specific debates. There is a great potential to learn from such ubiquitous archaeological manifestations as the physical outcome of cross-cutting dynamic...
Within archaeological studies, land tenure has been mainly studied from the viewpoint of ownership. A host of studies has argued about land ownership on the basis of the simple co-existence of artefacts on the landscape; other studies have tended to extrapolate land ownership from more indirect means. Particularly noteworthy is the tendency to portray land ownership as the driving force behind the emergence of social complexity, a primordial ingredient in the processes that led to the political and economic expansion of prehistoric societies. The association between people and land in all of these interpretive schemata is however less easy to detect analytically. Although various rubrics hav...
Grounded in decades of research, this book covers contemporary matters such as the entanglement of race and nationalism with archaeology.
In Breaking the Surface, Doug Bailey offers a radical alternative for understanding Neolithic houses, providing much-needed insight not just into prehistoric practice, but into another way of doing archaeology. Using his years of fieldwork experience excavating the early Neolithic pit-houses of southeastern Europe, Bailey exposes and elucidates a previously under-theorized aspect of prehistoric pit construction: the actions and consequences of digging defined as breaking the surface of the ground. Breaking the Surface works through the consequences of this redefinition in order to redirect scholarship on the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in Neolithic Europe, offering detailed c...
As a discipline, Archaeology has developed rapidly over the last half-century. The increase in so-called ‘public archaeology,’ with its wide range of television programming, community projects, newspaper articles, and enhanced site-based interpretation has taken archaeology from a closed academic discipline of interest to a tiny minority to a topic of increasing interest to the general public. This book explores how archaeologists share information – with specialists from other disciplines working within archaeology, other archaeologists, and a range of non-specialist groups. It emphasises that to adequately address contemporary levels of interest in their subject, archaeologists must ...