New Studies in Archaeology – serie
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51 produkter
51 produkter
523 kr
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Any explanation of political collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all complex societies in both the present and future. Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses.
587 kr
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This 1999 book re-examines traditional assumptions about the nature of social relationships in Greek households during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Through detailed exploration of archaeological evidence from individual houses, Lisa Nevett identifies a recognisable concept of the citizen household as a social unit, and suggests that this was present in numerous Greek cities. She argues that in such households relations between men and women, traditionally perceived as dominating the domestic environment, should be placed within the wider context of domestic activity. Although gender was an important cultural factor which helped to shape the organisation of the house, this was balanced against other influences, notably the relationship between household members and outsiders. At the same time the role of the household in relation to the wider social structures of the polis, or city state, changed rapidly through time, with the house itself coming to represent an important symbol of personal prestige.
776 kr
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This book studies the formation of complex societies in prehistoric China during the Neolithic and early state periods, c. 7000-1500 BC. Archaeological materials are interpreted through anthropological perspectives, using systematic analytic methods in settlement and burial patterns. Both agency and process are considered in the development of chiefdoms and in the emergence of early states in the Yellow River region. Interrelationships between factors such as mortuary practice, craft specialization, ritual activities, warfare, exchange of elite goods, climatic fluctuations, and environmental changes are emphasized. This study offers a critical evaluation of current archaeological data from Chinese sources, and argues that, although some general tendencies are noted, social changes were affected by multiple factors in no pre-determined sequence. In this most comprehensive study to date, Li Liu attempts to reconstruct developmental trajectories toward early states in Chinese civilization and discusses theoretical implications of Chinese archaeology for the understanding of social evolution.
631 kr
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Drawing on evidence from several disciplines, Ann Brower Stahl reconstructs the daily lives of Banda villagers of west central Ghana, from the time that they were drawn into the Niger trade (around AD 1300) until British overrule was established early in the twentieth century. The case study aims to closely integrate perspectives drawn from archaeology, history and anthropology in African studies.
385 kr
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In this study Roland Fletcher argues that the built environment becomes a constraint on the long-term development of a settlement. It is costly to move settlements, or to demolish and rebuild from scratch, so the initial layout and buildings, and the forms of communication that result, may come to shackle further development and also to place constraints on social and political change. Using this theoretical framework, Dr Fletcher reviews worldwide settlement growth over the past 15,000 years, and concludes with a major discussion of the great transformations of human settlements - from mobile to sedentary, sedentary to urban, and urban to industrial. This book is an ambitious contribution to archaeological theory, and the questions it raises also have implications for the future of urban settlement.
357 kr
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Jacques Cauvin has spent many years researching the beginnings of the Neolithic in the Near East, excavating key sites and developing new ideas to explain the hugely significant cultural, social and economic changes which transformed mobile hunter-gatherers into the first village societies and farmers in the world. In this book, first published in 2000, the synthesis of his mature understanding of the process beginning around 14,000 years ago challenges ecological and materialist interpretations, arguing for a quite different kind of understanding influenced by ideas of structuralist archaeologists and members of the French Annales school of historians. Defining the Neolithic Revolution as essentially a restructuring of the human mentality, expressed in terms of new religious ideas and symbols, the survey ends around nine thousand years ago, when the developed religious ideology, the social practice of village life and the economy of mixed farming had become established throughout the Near East and east Mediterranean, and spreading powerfully into Europe.
Stylistic Variation in Prehistoric Ceramics
Design Analysis in the American Southwest
Häftad, Engelska, 2008
493 kr
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Using data drawn primarily from the American Southwest, Stephen Plog shows that there are basic problems with the methods archaeologists traditionally use to classify and analyse prehistoric pottery. Archaeologists have studied the painted designs and other stylistic (that is, non-functional) characteristics on different types of prehistoric artifacts in order to infer information about prehistoric social organization and cultural change. Such studies usually argue that the degree of similarity between the designs found on ceramic vessels at different prehistoric sites were occupied or from the amount of interaction between the people who occupied them. In Stylistic Variation in Prehistoric Ceramics, the author proposes that many factors, rather than just two, cause design or stylistic variation on artifacts. He demonstrates flaws in the logic and method of previous studies and suggests that the ways in which designs have been classified and understood are often inappropriate. Employing archaeological information from the Chevelon Canyon area of east-central Arizona, he constructs his own proposal for a new analytic framework. Professor Plog's study provides a major contribution to archaeological method and theory and should be of interest to a broad range of archaeologists.
Maya Postclassic State Formation
Segmentary Lineage Migration in Advancing Frontiers
Häftad, Engelska, 2008
466 kr
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John Fox here offers a fresh and persuasive view of the crucial Classic-Postclassic transition that determined the shape of the later Maya state. Drawing this data from ethnographic analogy and native chronicles as well as archaeology, he identifies segmentary lineage organisation as the key to understanding both the political organisation and the long-distance migrations observed among the Quiche Maya of Guatemala and Mexico. The first part of the book traces the origins of the Quiche, Itza and Xiu to the homeland on the Mexican Gulf coast where they acquired their potent Toltec mythology and identifies early segmentary lineages that developed as a result of social forces in the frontier zone. Dr Fox then matches the known anthropological characteristics of segmentary lineages against the Mayan kinship relationships described in documents and deduced from the spatial patterning within Quiche towns and cities. His conclusion, that the inherently fissile nature of segmentary lineages caused the leapfrogging migrations of up to 500km observed amongst the Maya, offers a convincing solution to a problem that has long puzzled scholars.
520 kr
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Thoughtful Foragers is about hunter-gatherer decision making. The author explores the implications of the human mind as a product of biological evolution for the way in which humans solve foraging problems. He draws on studies form ethology, psychology and ethnography prior to turning his attention to prehistoric hunter-gatherers. He attempts to construct explanations for patterns in the archaeological record by an explicit focus on decision making by individuals. Thoughtful Foragers will appeal to specialists in European prehistory as well as to those interested in archaeological theory and method. It makes some very significant advances, which will be of real importance for the field of evolutionary theory in relation to human evolution and the evaluation of human social systems.
The Iron Age Community of Osteria dell'Osa
A Study of Socio-political Development in Central Tyrrhenian Italy
Häftad, Engelska, 2008
506 kr
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Anna Maria Bietti Sestieri, one of the finest Italian protohistorians, deals in this monograph with a major archaeological site, the Iron Age cemetery of Osteria dell'Osa, near Rome. The cemetery materials provide rich insights into the emergence of the city-state in central Italy in the crucial period 900-580 BC. Paying particular attention to the causes of variation in burials - ritual, gender, age, status - Dr Bietti Sestieri is able to develop a convincing picture of the late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Latium vetus in the wider context of southern Etruria and Campania.
Forest Farmers and Stockherders
Early Agriculture and its Consequences in North-Central Europe
Häftad, Engelska, 2008
466 kr
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Drawing extensively on anthropological theory and ecological models of human adaptation, Forest Farmers and Stockherders explores the single most radical transformation in all European prehistory - the growth of a food-producing economy in the period 5000-3000 BC. Dr Bogucki seeks to develop a coherent view of the introduction of food production to north-central Europe, identifying new environmental zones being exploited for the first time and new ecological adaptations being adopted by both indigenous and colonizing populations. He lays particular emphasis on the strategies developed by Neolithic communities for coping with the environmental risks and uncertainties inherent in the introduction of new economic systems and the social implications of these strategies for the organization of human behaviour.
The Birth of Prehistoric Chronology
Dating Methods and Dating Systems in Nineteenth-Century Scandinavian Archaeology
Häftad, Engelska, 2008
466 kr
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The development of European archaeology as a scholarly discipline in the nineteenth century was closely connected with the appearance of systematic methods for dating archaeological materials and these methods evolved largely in Scandinavia. Professor Gräslund's book is the first in-depth study of what is now recognised as a crucial stage in the history of archaeology. Beginning with an analysis of the basic elements of archaeological dating systems, he traces the origin and subsequent development of these systems, examining in detail how they were built up and refined. The Three Age System, methods of dating by find associations and the applications of typology for relative dating are themes that receive particular attention. Individuals, however, are never lost from sight. Throughout the book the author seeks to assess the contribution of the often colourful personalities involved and the volume concludes with a valuable biographical appendix.
466 kr
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Problems in Neolithic Archaeology is a notable contribution to the debate about how we can write prehistory. Drawing on both processual and post-processual approaches, it reaffirms the central role of theory and interpretation while accepting as permanent the uncertainty which makes the testing of archaeological hypotheses difficult or even impossible. Dr Whittle asserts in particular the need for greater self-confidence and for the formulation of new theory and questions more appropriate to the archaeological record. The book's specific strength lies, however, in a close contextual study of the Neolithic period in western and central Europe. In this respect it provides an admirable complement to his textbook Neolithic Europe.
466 kr
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The aim of Artefacts as Categories is to ask what we can learn about a society from the variability of the objects it produces. Dr Miller presents a comprehensive analysis of the pottery produced in a single village in central India, drawing together and analysing a whole range of aspects - technology, function, design, symbolism and ideology - that are usually studied separately. Using the concepts of 'pragmatics', 'framing' and 'ideology', the author points to the insufficiency of many ethnographic accounts of symbolism and underlines the need to consider both the social positioning of the interpreter and the context of the interpretation when looking at artefacts. His invigorating study cogently questions many assumptions in material culture studies and offers a whole range of fresh explanations. Archaeologists in particular will welcome the discussion of familiar materials such as pottery rim shapes, body forms and decoration. However, the book will have a broad appeal to researchers in cultural studies, social anthropology and psychology and will attract all those interested in the problem of relating objects and society.
466 kr
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Originally published in 1986, the aim of this important study was to develop methods for reconstructing the processes of prehistoric exchange. Previous archaeological work had concentrated on mapping obsidian finds relative to source areas using trace-element analysis and on investigating the effect of trade on particular cultural groups. Dr Torrence, in contrast, drew extensively on ethnographic analogy to develop an approach that uses differences in the level of efficiency for the acquisition of raw materials and the production of goods to infer the type of exchange. Regional patterns of tool manufacture, specialist craft production at central places and quarrying are analysed in detail in the context of the prehistoric Aegean and previous ideas about the importance of trade in the growth of civilisations are re-assessed. The methodology developed will be applicable to a wide range of artefact types and the book will therefore be of value to archaeologists working in many different places and periods.
466 kr
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Material culture - the objects made by man - provides the primary data from which archaeologists have to infer the economies, technologies, social organization and ritual practices of extinct societies. The analysis and interpretation ofmaterial culture is therefore central to any concern with archaeological theory and methodology, and in order to understand better the relationship between material culture and human behaviour, archaeologists need to draw upon models derived from the study of ethnographic societies. First published in 1982, this book presents the results of a series of field investigations carried out in Kenya, Zambia and the Sudan into the 'archaeological' remains and material culture of contemporary small-scale societies, and demonstrates the way in which objects are used as symbols within social action and within particular world views and ideologies.
Emerging Complexity
The Later Prehistory of South-East Spain, Iberia and the West Mediterranean
Häftad, Engelska, 2009
520 kr
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How, when and why did inherited differences of wealth, status and power arise in human communities? At the heart of Emerging Complexity is the thesis that complex societies developed independently during the Copper and Bronze Ages in south-east Spain, and in the wider context of the Iberian peninsula and the west Mediterranean. Chapman rejects the concept of diffusion from the Aegean and east Mediterranean, until recently seen as the cradle of complex society in later prehistoric Europe. The unprecedented amount of new data on south-east Spain since the 1970s unavailable to many prehistorians. This detailed synthesis is therefore valuable as a general introduction to the area, as well as being important for prehistorians concerned with the emergence of complexity in the Aegean and throughout Europe.
452 kr
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This book is about post-Pleistocene adaptive change among the aboriginal cultures of the mountains and deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. Conceived essentially as a natural science alternative to the prevailing culture history paradigm, it offers both a general theoretical framework for interpreting the archaeological record of the American South-West and a persuasive evolutionary model for the shift from a hunter-gatherer economy to horticulture at the Mogollon/Anasazi interface. Technical, architectural and settlement adaptations are examined and the rise of matrilineality, ethnic groupings and clans are modelled using ecological and ethnographic data and the innovative idea of anticipated cultural response. In the last part of the book, Dr Hunter-Anderson evaluates the 'fit' between her model and the archaeological record and argues vigorously for research into the evolution of ethnicity in the adaptive context of regional competition.
Three Thousand Years in Africa
Man and his environment in the Lake Chad region of Nigeria
Häftad, Engelska, 2009
466 kr
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The Lake Chad region of Nigeria is an extreme environment: virtually treeless sand and a broiling clay plain in the fierce heat of the dry season, then much of it inundated and impassable in the wet season as whole areas turn into shallow lakes or marsh. Yet even this hostile landscape and climate have sustained human communities in continuous occupation for some three hundred years. Professor Connah traces the story of human adaptation to and exploitation of this unusual environment from prehistoric to modern times. He presents a natural history of Man in the region, based largely on archaeological data but drawing also on written evidence, ethnography and oral tradition to reconstruct human history and experience in this largely unknown area. This ecological approach therefore cuts across the conventional boundaries between academic disciplines and the book is intended for students of African history as well as of archaeology. It provides too the historical context in which modern development programmes for the region can be set and to some extent judged. The book is amply and well illustrated.
506 kr
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Cunobelin, Shakespeare's Cymbeline, ruled much of south-east Britain in the years before Claudius' legions arrived, creating the Roman province of Britannia. But what do we know of him and his rule, and that of competing dynasties in south-east Britain? This book examines the background to these, the first individuals in British history. It explores the way in which rulers bolstered their power through the use of imagery on coins, myths, language and material culture. After the visit of Caesar in 55 and 54 BC, the shadow of Rome played a fundamental role in this process. Combining the archaeological, literary and numismatic evidence, John Creighton paints a vivid picture of how people in late Iron Age Britain reacted to the changing world around them.
Stylistic Variation in Prehistoric Ceramics
Design Analysis in the American Southwest
Inbunden, Engelska, 1980
1 342 kr
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Using data drawn primarily from the American Southwest, Stephen Plog shows that there are basic problems with the methods archaeologists traditionally use to classify and analyse prehistoric pottery. Archaeologists have studied the painted designs and other stylistic (that is, non-functional) characteristics on different types of prehistoric artifacts in order to infer information about prehistoric social organization and cultural change. Such studies usually argue that the degree of similarity between the designs found on ceramic vessels at different prehistoric sites were occupied or from the amount of interaction between the people who occupied them. In Stylistic Variation in Prehistoric Ceramics, the author proposes that many factors, rather than just two, cause design or stylistic variation on artifacts. He demonstrates flaws in the logic and method of previous studies and suggests that the ways in which designs have been classified and understood are often inappropriate. Employing archaeological information from the Chevelon Canyon area of east-central Arizona, he constructs his own proposal for a new analytic framework. Professor Plog's study provides a major contribution to archaeological method and theory and should be of interest to a broad range of archaeologists.
574 kr
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Drawing upon his own extensive knowledge of European archaeology, Graeme Barker has impressively integrated the full range of archaeological data to produce in this book a masterly account of prehistoric farming in Europe on a unique scale. He makes use of modern archaeological techniques to reconstruct the lives of prehistoric farmers in remarkable detail. Not only do we now have a vivid picture of the prehistoric farmyard, but we know what animals were kept, how they were fed and why they were bred. Evidence for crops grown and techniques of cultivation and husbandry helps recreate the prehistoric landscape. Even the social organisation that determined the use of resources, and provided the crucial stimulus for agricultural change, can be relived. Graeme Barker develops his argument through analogies with the agricultural history of classical and medieval Europe and concludes that today's industrial farmers can learn much from the successes and failures of early European farming.
398 kr
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This much-praised book aims to develop a theory of ceramics which will elucidate the complex relationship between ceramics and culture and society. Drawing upon the theoretical perspectives of systems theory, cybernetics and cultural ecology, Dr Arnold develops cross-cultural generalizations to explain the origins and evolution of the craft of pottery making. These processes are organized into a series of feedback mechanisms which limit or stimulate the initial production of pottery and its transition from a part-time to a full-time specialized activity. The author provides extensive ethnographic documentation, taken from a wide-ranging synthesis of the available literature and employing many data from his own fieldwork in Peru, Guatemala and Mexico, to illustrate the existence of these feedback relationships in societies around the world. Each mechanism is viewed, not as a relationship which exists in a few of the world's cultures, but as a universal generalization often based on some unique physical or chemical aspect of the pottery itself. Ceramic theory and cultural process is an innovative approach to the archaeological interpretation of ceramics which significantly extends our understanding of the social, cultural and environmental processes of ceramic production.
803 kr
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This is an archaeological perspective on the elaborate system of chiefdoms found in the islands of Polynesia. While the growth and development of complex social and political systems in this region have long interested anthropologists and ethnographers, the islands' rich sources of archaeological data have since been exploited. The author combines this fresh archaeological data with comparative ethnographic and linguistic materials to present an innovative and perceptive account of the processes of culture change in the islands over three millennia. Using comparative ethnography, lexical reconstruction and direct archaeological evidence, the author reconstructs the broad outlines of Ancestral Polynesian Society, from which the diverse societies of the Polynesian region descended. Major processes of cultural change are analysed in detail, including colonization, adaptation to changing environments, development of intensive production and social conflict and competition.
466 kr
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Since the 1950s, when the phrase 'industrial archaeology' was coined, there has been an enormous growth of interest in what have come to be seen as the monuments of our more recent past. One result of this is that all kinds of old industrial plant, once valued only for what it could produce or do, have been accorded an intrinsic value often tinged with a somewhat incongruous nostalgia. In this book Kenneth Hudson sets out to restore these monuments to their place at the centre of the wider history they embody, social and economic as well as technical. Less than this, he claims, cannot properly be called industrial archaeology. Taking each major industry in turn Mr Hudson provides fully illustrated examples from many countries. By making this a study of world industrial archaeology, Mr Hudson escapes from the idea that the subject is confined to a period roughly denoted by the Industrial Revolution in England.
695 kr
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Archaeology has made enormous advances recently, both in volume of discoveries and in its character as an intellectual discipline; new techniques have helped to further the range and rigour of enquiry, and encouraged interdisciplinary communication. The aim of this series is to make available to a wider audience the results of these developments. The coverage will be world-wide and will extend from the earliest period to medieval and industrial archaeology.
466 kr
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This 1976 text is a pioneering study in the applications to archaeology of modern statistical and quantitative techniques. The authors show how these techniques, when sensitively employed, can dramatically extend and refine the information presented in distribution maps and other analyses of spatial relationships. Techniques of interpretation 'by inspection' can now be made more powerful and rigorous; at the same time interest has turned from the examination of such sites and artefacts as 'things' to the spatial relationships between such things, their relationships to one another and to landscape features, soils and other resources. This book was the first to apply the available techniques systematically to the special problems and interests of archaeologists. It also demonstrates to geographers and other social scientists who may be familiar with analogous applications in their own fields the exciting interdisciplinary developments this facilitates, for example in studies of exchange networks, trade and settlement patterns, and cultural history.
466 kr
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'Living archaeology,' says Richard Gould, 'is ethnoarchaeology in the active voice'. Using as case studies his own observations of Australian Aborigines, and those of others, the author presents a unified theory of ethnoarchaeology. He demonstrates a reliable way to infer adaptive behavior in prehistoric communities by studying adaptive behavior in a contemporary society and noting the evidence of this behavior in material discards. Gould examines and dismisses the argument by analogy, long accepted as fundamental in earlier archaeological studies of this kind, and, as an alternative, he proposes the argument by anomaly. The book starts by recording a day in the life of a traditional Australian Desert Aborigine camp. the author identifies many social, verbal, and ideational interactions that would be difficult, if not impossible, to infer directly from the typical 'archaeological' remains of this non-material behavior. The book examines differences between actual as opposed to anticipated human behavior and suggests that understanding the reasons for these contrasts is what characterizes ethnoarchaeology at its best.
614 kr
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Religion and Empire is an innovative and provocative study of the two largest states of the Precolumbian Americas, the Aztec and Inca Empires. By examining the causes of the formation and expansion of these two empires, the authors identify similar patterns and processes underlying their rise and decline. They demonstrate that in both examples among the critical elements in the transition from marginal people to imperial power to disintegrating society were changes in traditional religion, including the elaboration of Aztec human sacrifice and Inca worship of the corpses of their kings. The authors show that the complex interaction between such ideological shifts and political and economic factors generated the spectacular historical trajectories of these Pre-Colombian empires.
506 kr
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This study of the changing relationships between burial rituals and social structure in Early Iron Age Greece will be required reading for all archaeologists working with burial evidence, in whatever period. This book differs from many topical studies of state formation in that unique and particular developments are given as much weight as those factors which are common to all early states. The ancient literary evidence and the relevant historical and anthropological comparisons are extensively drawn on in an attempt to explain the transition to the city-state, a development which was to have decisive effects for the subsequent development of European society.