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.
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.
Balkan prehistory conjures up images of the Exotic and the Other in comparison with the better-known prehistory of Western Europe - often written in unfamiliar languages about lesser known places. ...Combined with the information revolution in archaeology, these factors have meant that no new synthesis of Old Europe has been written in the last 20 years. This has left a backlog of rich settlement data and object-rich landscapes which have rarely been presented in theoretically challenging ways. This material is an important, and greatly neglected, part of European prehistory.This research monograph is a synthesis of the archaeology of South East, Central and Eastern Europe over four millennia (7000 - 3000 BC). The varied cultural development of the region is treated as a mosaic of local prehistories, in which people responded to major change and, in at least two cases - the development of farming and metallurgy - profound structural change through modifications of all the dimensions of their identities. Informed by a gendered perspective, this book seeks to structure the Mesolithic, Neolithic and the Chalcolithic periods in terms of a nested set of identities - the person, the household, the settlement and the regional network. This book is intended for all those prehistorians who seek to expand their general knowledge of Old Europe, as well as undergraduates, postgraduates and specialists in Balkan prehistory. The book will also attract social anthropologists and sociologists with an interest in the creation and maintenance of nested social identities in the past.
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.
Dolmens are iconic international monumental constructions which represent the first megalithic architecture (after menhirs) in north-west Europe. These monuments are characterised by an enormous ...capstone balanced on top of smaller uprights. However, previous investigations of these extraordinary monuments have focussed on three main areas of debate. First, typology has been a dominant feature of discussion, particularly the position of dolmens in the ordering of chambered tombs. Second, attention has been placed not on how they were built but how they were used. Finally much debate has centred on their visual appearance (whether they were covered by mounds or cairns). This book provides a reappraisal of the ‘dolmen’ as an architectural entity and provides an alternative perspective on function. This is achieved through a re-theorising of the nature of megalithic architecture grounded in the results of a new research/fieldwork project covering Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia. It is argued that instead of understanding dolmen simply as chambered tombs these were multi-faceted monuments whose construction was as much to do with enchantment and captivation as it was with containing the dead. Consequently, the presence of human remains within dolmens is also critically evaluated and a new interpretation offered.
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.
The transformation of societies from mobile hunter-gatherers into farming communities living in permanent villages represents one of the most essential revolutions in human history. The dispersal of ...this new Neolithic way of life from one of the core zones in central Anatolia into the west forms the focus of this book. The 13 contributions collected in this volume present a diverse and mosaic-like scenario of the Neolithic transformation processes and allow for the re-evaluation of long-established models in the field of Neolithic archaeology.
Often characterized by distinctive chipped-stone technology, the Calf Creek cultural horizon made its first appearance in the central and southern plains of North America some six thousand years ago. ...Distributed over a known area of more than 500,000 square miles, it is one of the largest post-Paleoindian archaeological cultural complexes identified to date. One of the most notable aspects of Calf Creek culture is its distinctive, deeply notched bifaces, many of which show evidence of heat-treating. Recent targeted dating suggests that these unique traits, which required exacting knapping and other techniques for production, arose in a relatively narrow window, sometime around 5,950–5,700 calendar years before the present. Given the wide geographical distribution of Calf Creek artifacts, however, researchers surmise that these technological innovations, once adopted, spread fairly quickly throughout the associated cultural groups. Editors Jon C. Lohse, Marjorie A. Duncan, and Don G. Wyckoff have collected in this comprehensive volume much of what is currently known about the Calf Creek cultural horizon. In a collaboration involving professional and academic archaeologists, landowners, and avocationalists, The Calf Creek Horizon brings together for the first time in a single source fine details of geographic distribution, regional variability, typology, and technological aspects of Calf Creek material culture. This first-ever “big picture” view will inform and direct related research for years to come.
