This book provides an overview of Bronze Age societies of Western Eurasia through an investigation of the archaeological record. The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia outlines the long-term processes and ...patterns of interaction that link these groups together in a shared historical trajectory of development. Interactions took the form of the exchange of raw materials and finished goods, the spread and sharing of technologies, and the movements of peoples from one region to another. Kohl reconstructs economic activities from subsistence practices to the production and exchange of metals and other materials. Kohl also argues forcefully that the main task of the archaeologist should be to write culture-history on a spatially and temporally grand scale in an effort to detect large, macrohistorical processes of interaction and shared development.
Roughly half the world’s population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did ...they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization.
1177 B.C Cline, Eric H; Cline, Eric H
2014., 20140323, 2015, 2014, 2014-03-23, 2015-09-22
eBook
In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh's army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as ...did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians. The thriving economy and cultures of the late second millennium B.C., which had stretched from Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, suddenly ceased to exist, along with writing systems, technology, and monumental architecture. But the Sea Peoples alone could not have caused such widespread breakdown. How did it happen?
In this major new account of the causes of this "First Dark Ages," Eric Cline tells the gripping story of how the end was brought about by multiple interconnected failures, ranging from invasion and revolt to earthquakes, drought, and the cutting of international trade routes. Bringing to life the vibrant multicultural world of these great civilizations, he draws a sweeping panorama of the empires and globalized peoples of the Late Bronze Age and shows that it was their very interdependence that hastened their dramatic collapse and ushered in a dark age that lasted centuries.
A compelling combination of narrative and the latest scholarship,1177 B.C.sheds new light on the complex ties that gave rise to, and ultimately destroyed, the flourishing civilizations of the Late Bronze Age-and that set the stage for the emergence of classical Greece.
José C. Martìn de la Cruz es uno de los investigadores más relevantes durante los últimos años del siglo XX y primeros del siglo XXI tanto en la investigación en Prehistoria como de la difusión del ...patrimonio a nivel internacional. Este volumen aspira a servir de homenaje a una trayectoria profesional, al reunir alrededor de medio centenar de investigadores para tratar diferentes ejes temáticos y cronológicos relacionados con la investigación prehistórica y su difusión. Por lo tanto, se trata de un volumen multidisciplinar cuyos especialistas interpretan la prehistoria desde sus orìgenes más remotos hasta el paso previo a las colonizaciones históricas, asì como exploran las diferentes vìas en las que pervive el patrimonio prehistórico. El volumen se estructura en cuatro partes, organizadas de manera cronológica desde lo más reciente hasta lo más antiguo. La primera parte trata sobre las economìas locales desde la Edad del Hierro hasta los contactos interculturales que se producen durante la Edad del Bronce en el ámbito mediterráneo. En un segundo bloque retrocedemos en el tiempo para explorar las últimas investigaciones realizadas sobre historiografìa, secuenciación cronológica, ideologìa y religiosidad de las sociedades calcolìticas y sobre la economìa de las primeras sociedades productoras neolìticas. La tercera parte indaga sobre los primeros pobladores de la penìnsula ibérica, las representaciones artìsticas y su entorno natural. Por último, cierra el volumen un apartado multidisciplinar que aborda la prehistoria desde diversas áreas cientìficas. Al final, esta obra se convierte en punto de encuentro donde se reúnen desde investigadores consolidados hasta jóvenes investigadores, que ofrecen sus investigaciones cientìficas al mismo tiempo que rinden homenaje al profesor Martìn de la Cruz.
This book is the first synthesis of the archaeology of the Urals and Western Siberia. It presents a comprehensive overview of the late prehistoric cultures of these regions, which are of key ...importance for the understanding of long-term changes in Eurasia. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, the Urals and Western Siberia are characterized by great environmental and cultural diversity which is reflected in the variety and richness of their archaeological sites. Based on the latest achievements of Russian archaeologists, this study demonstrates the temporal and geographical range of its subjects starting with a survey of the chronological sequence from the late fourth millennium BC to the early first millennium AD. Recent discoveries contribute to an understanding of issues such as the development of Eurasian metallurgy, technological and ritual innovations, pastoral nomadism and its role in Eurasian interactions, and major sociocultural fluctuations of the Bronze and Iron Ages.
Interaction and mobility have attracted much interest in research within scholarly fields as different as archaeology, history, and more broadly the humanities. Critically assessing some of the most ...widespread views on interaction and its social impact, this book proposes an innovative perspective which combines radical social theory and currently burgeoning network methodologies. Through an in-depth analysis of a wealth of data often difficult to access, and illustrated by many diagrams and maps, the book highlights connections and their social implications at different scales ranging from the individual settlement to the Mediterranean. The resulting diachronic narrative explores social and economic trajectories over some seven centuries and sheds new light on the broad historical trends affecting the life of people living around the Middle Sea.
In ancient and medieval times, the Silk Road was of great importance to the transport of peoples, goods, and ideas between the East and the West. A vast network of trade routes, it connected the ...diverse geographies and populations of China, the Eurasian Steppe, Central Asia, India, Western Asia, and Europe. Although its main use was for importing silk from China, traders moving in the opposite direction carried to China jewelry, glassware, and other exotic goods from the Mediterranean, jade from Khotan, and horses and furs from the nomads of the Steppe. In both directions, technology and ideologies were transmitted. The Silk Road brought together the achievements of the different peoples of Eurasia to advance the Old World as a whole.
The majority of the Silk Road routes passed through the Eurasian Steppe, whose nomadic people were participants and mediators in its economic and cultural exchanges. Until now, the origins of these routes and relationships have not been examined in great detail. InThe Prehistory of the Silk Road, E. E. Kuzmina, renowned Russian archaeologist, looks at the history of this crucial area before the formal establishment of Silk Road trade and diplomacy. From the late Neolithic period to the early Bronze Age, Kuzmina traces the evolution of the material culture of the Steppe and the contact between civilizations that proved critical to the development of the widespread trade that would follow, including nomadic migrations, the domestication and use of the horse and the camel, and the spread of wheeled transport.
The Prehistory of the Silk Roadcombines detailed research in archaeology with evidence from physical anthropology, linguistics, and other fields, incorporating both primary and secondary sources from a range of languages, including a vast accumulation of Russian-language scholarship largely untapped in the West. The book is complemented by an extensive bibliography that will be of great use to scholars.
The Political Machine investigates the essential role that material culture plays in the practices and maintenance of political sovereignty. Through an archaeological exploration of the Bronze Age ...Caucasus, Adam Smith demonstrates that beyond assemblies of people, polities are just as importantly assemblages of things—from ballots and bullets to crowns, regalia, and licenses. Smith looks at the ways that these assemblages help to forge cohesive publics, separate sovereigns from a wider social mass, and formalize governance—and he considers how these developments continue to shape politics today.Smith shows that the formation of polities is as much about the process of manufacturing assemblages as it is about disciplining subjects, and that these material objects or "machines" sustain communities, orders, and institutions. The sensibilities, senses, and sentiments connecting people to things enabled political authority during the Bronze Age and fortify political power even in the contemporary world. Smith provides a detailed account of the transformation of communities in the Caucasus, from small-scale early Bronze Age villages committed to egalitarianism, to Late Bronze Age polities predicated on radical inequality, organized violence, and a centralized apparatus of rule.From Bronze Age traditions of mortuary ritual and divination to current controversies over flag pins and Predator drones, The Political Machine sheds new light on how material goods authorize and defend political order.
The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, ...and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places--and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience.
How Ancient Europeans Saw the Worldoffers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe's pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.
Lost-wax casting is a metalworking technique that has long been regarded as an innovation imported from the eastern Mediterranean and only widely used in Western Europe since the Late Bronze Age. We ...now have evidence that this technique was in fact largely in use from the Middle Bronze Age onwards for the production of copper alloy adornments in the Atlantic area. Along with palstaves, these objects are the most abundant in Atlantic hoards from the 15th to the 13th centuries BC. Thanks to detailed morphological and technological study, combined with an experimental approach and analysis of their elemental composition, we can propose new chaînes opératoires for the manufacture of massive annular bracelets with geometric decoration.
•Lost-wax casting highly mastered as early as the Atlantic Middle Bronze Age.•Western Europe as an innovative area during the 2nd millennium BC.•Unsatisfactory theoretical chaînes opératoires, proposal of new technical processes.•Individually produced adornments using a standardised approach to wax preparation.
