John F. Cherry – författare

Pausanias, the Greek historian and traveler, lived and wrote around the second century AD, during the period when Greece had fallen peacefully to the Roman Empire. While fragments from this period abound, Pausanias'' Periegesis ("description") of Greece is the only fully preserved text of travel writing to have survived. This collection uses Pausanias as a multifaceted lens yielding indispensable information about the cultural world of Roman Greece.

Thirteen leading archaeologists have contributed to this innovative study of the socio-political processes - notably imitation, competition, warfare, and the exchange of material goods and information - that can be observed within early complex societies, particularly those just emerging into statehood. The common aim is to explain the remarkable formal similarities that exist between institutions, ideologies and material remains in a variety of cultures characterised by independent political centres yet to be brought under the control of a single, unified jurisdiction. A major statement of the conceptual approach is followed by ten case studies from a wide variety of times and places, including Minoan Crete, early historic Greece and Japan, the classic Maya, the American Mid - west in the Hopewellian period, Europe in the Early Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, and the British Isles in the late Neolithic.

This volume expands on an online lecture series at Brown University that was organized to help fill the gap, created by the Covid-19 pandemic, of in-person Caribbean archaeology lectures and conferences. From an initial group of six presentations, the present volume has been expanded to include 11 chapters written by a range of scholars with diverse interests, geographical foci, and personal experiences. These contributions highlight research that encompasses new data and types of site, fresh approaches and novel methods of analysis (e.g., to past foodways and pre-contact art), and involvement with pressing issues in the field, such as impacts of climate change, migration, ethics, community engagement, and social justice. From the outset, the series was deliberately broad in scope, bringing together research from the pre-contact and historical periods, locations throughout the Antillean archipelago, as well as perspectives from areas as diverse as chemistry, art history, anthropology, and community activism.The volume begins with a contribution by the co-editors, which introduces and contextualizes many of the themes addressed in the chapters that follow, also providing some quantitative analysis of trends in Caribbean archaeology over the past 60 or more years. This meta-scholarly work is followed by 8 research chapters presenting new data, approaches, and syntheses under the broad umbrella of Caribbean archaeology. The book concludes with two reflective responses to the preceding chapters—one by a Caribbean historian, the other by an environmental archaeologist. In its early decades, the small and still-developing field of Caribbean archaeology was (understandably) focused on issues of classification, terminology, and relative chronology. Some 75 years later and at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, it will be instructive—both now and as a marker for the future—to provide an overview of the current state of the field and indications of some new directions in which it may be heading.