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.
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.
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.
World Prehistory Fagan, Brian M.; Durrani, Nadia
2022, 20211129
eBook
World Prehistory: The Basics tells the compelling story of human prehistory, from our African origins to the spectacular pre-industrial civilizations and cities of the more recent past.
Written in a ...non-technical style by two archaeologists and experienced writers about the past, the story begins with human origins in Africa some 6 million years ago and the spread of our remote ancestors across the Old World. Then we return to Africa and describe the emergence of Homo sapiens (modern humans) over 300,000 years ago, then, much later, their permanent settlement of Europe, Eurasia, Asia, and the Americas. From hunters and foragers, we turn to the origins of farming and animal domestication in different parts of the world after about 11,000 years ago and show how these new economies changed human existence dramatically. Five chapters tell the stories of the great pre-industrial civilizations that emerged after 5000 years before present in the Old World and the Americas, their strengths, volatility, and weaknesses. These chapters describe powerful rulers and their ideologies, also the lives of non-elites. The narratives chronicle the rise and fall of civilizations, and the devastating effects of long droughts on many of them. The closing chapter poses a question: Why is world prehistory important in the modern world? What does it tell us about ourselves?
Providing a simple, but entertaining and stimulating, account of the prehistoric past from human origins to today from a global perspective, World Prehistory: The Basics is the ideal guide to the story of our early human past and its relevance to the modern world.
New perspectives on an important era in Mesoamerican
history
This volume examines shifting social identities, lived
experiences, and networks of interaction in Mexico during the
Mesoamerican ...Formative period (2000 BCE-250 CE), an era that helped
produce some of the world's most renowned complex civilizations.
The chapters offer significant data, innovative methodologies, and
novel perspectives on Mexican archaeology.
Using diverse and non-traditional theoretical approaches,
contributors discuss interregional relationships and the exchange
of ideas in contexts ranging from the Gulf Coast Olmec region to
the site of Tlatilco in Central Mexico to the often-overlooked
cultures of the far western states. Their essays explore identity
formation, cosmological perspectives, the first hints of social
complexity, the underpinnings of Formative period economies, and
the sensorial implications of sociocultural change.
Identities, Experience, and Change in Early Mexican
Villages is one of the first volumes to address the entirety
of this rich and complex era and region, offering a new and
holistic view. Through a wealth of exciting interpretations from
international senior and emerging scholars, this volume shows the
strong influence of cultural exchange as well as the compelling
individuality of local and regional contexts over two thousand
years of history.
Contributors: Catharina E.
Santasilia | Guy
D. Hepp |
Richard A. Diehl
| Jeffrey P.
Blomster | Philip
(Flip) J. Arnold
III | Patricia
Ochoa Castillo | Christopher
Beekman | Tatsuya
Murakami | Jeffrey
S. Brzezinski |
Vanessa Monson |
Arthur A. Joyce
| Sarah B.
Barber | Henri
Noel Bernard| Sara
Ladrón de Guevara|
Mayra Manrique| José
Luis Ruvalcaba
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.
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.
