This book explores the roles of agricultural development and advancing social complexity in the processes of state formation in China. Over a period of about 10,000 years, it follows evolutionary ...trajectories of society from the last Palaeolithic hunting-gathering groups, through Neolithic farming villages and on to the Bronze Age Shang dynasty in the latter half of the second millennium BC. Li Liu and Xingcan Chen demonstrate that sociopolitical evolution was multicentric and shaped by inter-polity factionalism and competition, as well as by the many material technologies introduced from other parts of the world. The book illustrates how ancient Chinese societies were transformed during this period from simple to complex, tribal to urban, and preliterate to literate.
This first of two volumes presents the archaeological evidence of a long sequence of settlement and funerary activity from the Beaker period (Early Bronze Age c. 2000 BC) to the Early Iron Age (c. ...500 BC) at the unusually long-occupied site of Cladh Hallan on South Uist in the Western Isles of Scotland. Particular highlights of its sequence are a cremation burial ground and pyre site of the 18th–16th centuries BC and a row of three Late Bronze Age sunken-floored roundhouses constructed in the 10th century BC. Beneath these roundhouses, four inhumation graves contained skeletons, two of which were remains of composite collections of body parts with evidence for post-mortem soft tissue preservation prior to burial. They have proved to be the first evidence for mummification in Bronze Age Britain. Cladh Hallan’s remarkable stratigraphic sequence, preserved in the machair sand of South Uist, includes a unique 500-year sequence of roundhouse life in Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Britain. One of the most important results of the excavation has come from intensive environmental and micro-debris sampling of house floors and outdoor areas to recover patterns of discard and to interpret the spatial use of 15 domestic interiors from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age. From Cladh Hallan’s roundhouse floors we gain intimate insights into how daily life was organized within the house – where people cooked, ate, worked and slept. Such evidence rarely survives from prehistoric houses in Britain or Europe, and the results make a profound contribution to long-running debates about the sunwise organisation of roundhouse activities. Activity at Cladh Hallan ended with the construction and abandonment of two unusual double-roundhouses in the Early Iron Age. One appears to have been a smokery and steam room, and the other was used for metalworking.
In the late 1800s, archaeologists began discovering engraved stone plaques in Neolithic (3500-2500 BC) graves in southwestern Portugal and Spain. About the size of a palm, usually made of slate, and ...incised with geometric or, more rarely, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic designs, these plaques have mystified generations of researchers. What do their symbols signify? How were the plaques produced? Were they worn during an individual's lifetime, or only made at the time of their death? Why, indeed, were the plaques made at all? Employing an eclectic range of theoretical and methodological lenses, Katina Lillios surveys all that is currently known about the Iberian engraved stone plaques and advances her own carefully considered hypotheses about their manufacture and meanings. After analyzing data on the plaques' workmanship and distribution, she builds a convincing case that the majority of the Iberian plaques were genealogical records of the dead that served as durable markers of regional and local group identities. Such records, she argues, would have contributed toward legitimating and perpetuating an ideology of inherited social difference in the Iberian Late Neolithic.
This volume analyses monuments in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia from the early Bronze Age through the Turkic Period. It focuses on the cultural significance of location and viewshed and on the ...monuments' indications of individual intention and collective memory.
Prehistoric human life is a common reference point in contemporary culture, inspiring attempts to become happier, healthier, better people. Back to the Stone Age explores how ideas about race are ...tightly woven into the prehistoric imagination, revealing insights into present-day anxieties and showing that the human past is not set in stone.
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.
Doggerland Amkreutz, Luc; Van der Vaart-Verschoof, Sasja
2022
eBook
This popular-science book tells the story of one of the most important, but least known major archaeological sites in Europe: Doggerland. Few people know that the beaches along the North Sea lie on ...the edge of a vast lost world. A prehistoric landscape that documents almost a million years of human habitation and lay dry for most of that time. Doggerland is where early hominids left the first footprints in northern Europe, more than 900,000 years ago. Later, for hundreds of thousands of years, it was the scene of ice ages. A world of woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, horses and reindeer and the successful Neanderthals who hunted them, including Krijn: the first Neanderthal from Doggerland. At the end of the last Ice Age, the first modern humans also left their traces here, including the famous Leman-and-Ower-Banks spearhead - the first documented Doggerland find - and some of the oldest art in the region. With the onset of the Holocene, our current era, Doggerland's inhabitants were increasingly confronted with climate change and rising sea levels, just as we are today. The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in a rich, but constantly changing world - to which they successfully adapted. Ongoing submergence and a huge tsunami around 6150 BC marked the beginning of the end. A few centuries later, the last islands disappeared under the waves and with them the story of Doggerland was lost in time. This book brings this vanished world back to the surface.
Drawing upon invasion biology and the latest archaeological, skeletal and environment evidence, From Arabia to the Pacific documents the migration of humans into Asia, and explains why we were so ...successful as a colonising species.
The colonisation of Asia by our species was one of the most momentous events in human evolution. Starting around or before 100,000 years ago, humans began to disperse out of Africa and into the Arabian Peninsula, and then across southern Asia through India, Southeast Asia and south China. They learnt to build boats and sail to the islands of Southeast Asia, from which they reached Australia by 50,000 years ago. Around that time, humans also dispersed from the Levant through Iran, Central Asia, southern Siberia, Mongolia, the Tibetan Plateau, north China and the Japanese islands, and they also colonised Siberia as far north as the Arctic Ocean. By 30,000 years ago, humans had colonised the whole of Asia from Arabia to the Pacific, and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean as well as the European Peninsula. In doing so, we replaced all other types of humans such as Neandertals and ended five million years of human diversity.
Using interdisciplinary source material, From Arabia to the Pacific charts this process and draws conclusions as to the factors that made it possible. It will be invaluable to scholars of prehistory, and archaeologists and anthropologists interested in how the human species moved out of Africa and spread throughout Asia.
