Search results for ""cotsen institute of archaeology""

Kirikongo is an archaeological site composed of thirteen remarkably well-preserved discrete mounds occupied continually from the early first to the mid second millennium AD. It spans a dynamic era that saw the growth of large settlement communities and regional socio-political formations, development of economic specializations, intensification in interregional commercial networks, and the effects of the Black Death pandemic. The extraordinary preservation of architectural units, activity areas and industrial zones provides a unique opportunity to discern the cultural practices that created stratified mounds (tells) in this part of West Africa. Building from a new detailed zooarchaeological analysis and refinements in stratigraphic precision, this book argues that repeated ritual activity was a significant factor in the accumulation of stratified archaeological deposits. The book details consistencies in form and content of discrete loci containing animal bones, food remains, and broken and unbroken objects and suggests that these are the remnants of sequential ancestor shrines created when domestic spaces were converted to tombs or dedicated mortuary monuments were constructed. Continuities and transformations in ancestral rituals at Kirikongo inform on earlier West African ritual practices from the second millennium BC as well as political and social transformations at the site. More broadly, this case study provides new insights on anthropogenic mound (tell) formation processes, social zooarchaeology, material culture theory, historical ontology, and the analysis of ritual and religion in the archaeological record. Winner of the 2023 SAfA Book Prize for "a book that has been successful in taking African archaeology to a world audience"

Read more less

This book is a study of the Lapita Cultural Complex, a region spanning both Melanesia and Western Polynesia. The Lapita culture has been interpreted as the archaeological manifestation of a diaspora of Austronesian-speaking people (specifically of Proto-Oceanic language) who rapidly expanded from the New Guinea region into Remote Oceania. The Lapita Cultural Complex--first uncovered in the mid-20th century as a widespread archaeological complex spanning both Melanesia and Western Polynesia--has subsequently become recognized as of fundamental importance to Oceanic prehistory. Notable for its highly distinctive, elaborate, dentate-stamped pottery, Lapita sites date to between 3500-2700 BP, spanning the geographic range from the Bismarck Archipelago to Tonga and Samoa. The Lapita culture has been interpreted as the archaeological manifestation of a diaspora of Austronesian-speaking people (specifically of Proto-Oceanic language) who rapidly expanded from Near Oceania (the New Guinea-Bismarcks region) into Remote Oceania, where no humans had previously ventured. Lapita is thus a foundational culture throughout much of the southwestern Pacific, ancestral to much of the later, ethnographically-attested cultural diversity of the region.

Read more less

Tangatatau Rockshelter on Mangaia Island in the Southern Cook Islands, excavated by a multidisciplinary team in 1989-1991, produced one of the richest stratigraphic sequences of artifacts, faunal assemblages, and archaeobotanical materials in Eastern Polynesia. More than seventy radiocarbon dates provide a tight chronology from AD 1000 to European contact in about 1800. The faunal assemblage provides compelling evidence for dramatic reductions in indigenous bird life following Polynesian colonization, one of the best documented cases for human-induced impacts on island biota. Tangatatau is unique among Polynesian archaeological sites in the extent to which fishing was dominated by freshwater fishes and eels. The site also yielded an extensive suite of carbonized plant materials, including sweet potato tubers, demonstrating that this South American domesticate had reached Eastern Polynesia by AD 1400. Mangaia illustrates the often far-reaching consequences of human land use and resource exploitation on small and vulnerable islands.

Read more less

This festschrift honors UCLA professor emerita Susan Downey and her meticulous scholarship on religious architecture and imagery in the Roman/Hellenistic world. The iconography of gods and goddesses, the analysis of sacred imagery in the context of ancient cult practices, and the design and decoration of sacred spaces are the main themes of the book. Authors examine such subjects as painting from Dura-Europos, Hellenistic sculpture at Saqqara in Egypt, Roman cameo glass, Pompeian fresco, and aspects of Venus in portrait sculpture. The essays on Dura-Europos are especially valuable in light of the present turmoil in the region. Professor Downey's influence shines through in these discussions, which echo her mentorship of several generations of art history and archaeology students and recognize her scholarly achievements. The broad temporal and geographic parameters of the volume are expansive, and the juxtaposition of images and analyses leads to surprising new conclusions.

Read more less

Archaeology of the Chinese Bronze Age is a synthesis of recent Chinese archaeological work on the second millennium BCE--the period associated with China's first dynasties and East Asia's first"states."With a focus on early China's great metropolitan centers in the Central Plains and their hinterlands, this work attempts to contextualize them within their wider zones of interaction from the Yangtze to the edge of the Mongolian steppe, and from the Yellow Sea to the Tibetan plateau and the Gansu corridor. Analyzing the complexity of early Chinese culture history, and the variety and development of its urban formations, Roderick Campbell explores East Asia's divergent developmental paths and re-examines its deep past to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of China's Early Bronze Age.

Read more less

Data spanning the Archaic to Early Postclassic are presented, with particular analytical focus given to the end of the Early Classic through the Late and Terminal Classic and the geopolitical tumult that defined this period. Cast in the framework of political ecology, together these studies not only shed light on specific class histories of the region. They also advance a theory for understanding the contributions of non-elites to political growth and change over time. Classic Maya Political Ecology opens a window into pre-Columbian political processes grounded in environmental productivity and a mutual interdependence that defined class relations in northwestern Belize. This volume also outlines a theoretical approach that defines commoners and elites alike as political actors, people who contributed to the long term success and adaptability of local and regional political communities and the networks that sustained them.

Read more less

One of the most significant differences between the New World's major areas of high culture is that Mesoamerica had no beasts of burden and wool, while the Andes had both. Four members of the camelid family--wild guanacos and vicunas, and domestic llamas and alpacas--were native to the Andes. South American peoples relied on these animals for meat and wool, and as beasts of burden to transport goods all over the Andes. In this book, Duccio Bonavia tackles major questions about these camelids, from their domestication to their distribution at the time of the Spanish conquest. One of Bonavia's hypotheses is that the arrival of the Europeans and their introduced Old World animals forced the Andean camelids away from the Pacific coast, creating the (mistaken) impression that camelids were exclusively high-altitude animals. Bonavia also addresses the diseases of camelids and their population density, suggesting that the original camelid populations suffered from a different type of mange than that introduced by the Europeans. This new mange, he believes, was one of the causes behind the great morbidity of camelids in Colonial times. In terms of domestication, while Bonavia believes that the major centers must have been the puna zone intermediate zones, he adds that the process should not be seen as restricted to a single environmental zone. Bonavia's landmark study of the South American camelids is now available for the first time in English. This new edition features an updated analysis and comprehensive bibliography. In the Spanish edition of this book, Bonavia lamented the fact that the zooarchaeological data from R. S. MacNeish's Ayacucho Project had yet to be published. In response, the Ayacucho's Project's faunal analysts, Elizabeth S. Wing and Kent V. Flannery, have added appendices on the Ayacucho results to this English edition. This book will be of broad interest to archaeologists, zoologists, social anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and a wide range of students.

Read more less

This volume brings together a diverse set of new studies--archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic--that focus on agricultural intensification and hydraulic systems around the world. Fifteen chapters--written by many of the world's leading experts--combine extensive regional overviews of agricultural histories with in-depth case studies. In this volume are chapters on agriculture in the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, Oceania, Mesoamerica, and South America. A wide range of theoretical perspectives and approaches are used to provide a framework for agricultural land-use and water management in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. This book covers the co-evolutionary relationships among sociopolitical structure, agriculture, land-use, and water control. Agricultural Strategies is an invaluable resource for those engaged in ongoing debates about the role of intensification and agriculture in the past and present.

Read more less

This volume brings together the work of some of the most prominent archaeologists to document the impact of Jeffrey R. Parsons on contemporary archaeological method and theory. Parsons is a central figure in the development of settlement pattern archaeology, in which the goal is the study of whole social systems at the scale of regions. In recent decades, regional archaeology has revolutionized how we understand the past, contributing new data and theoretical insights on topics such as early urbanism, social interactions among cities, towns and villages, and long-term population and agricultural change, among many other topics relevant to the study of early civilizations and the evolution of social complexity. Over the past 40 years, the application of these methods by Parsons and others has profoundly changed how we understand the evolution of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican civilization, and now similar methods are being applied in other world areas. The book's emphasis is on the contribution of settlement pattern archaeology to research in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, but its authors also point to the value of regional research in South America, South Asia, and China. Topics addressed include early urbanism, household and gender, agricultural and craft production, migration, ethnogenesis, the evolution of early chiefdoms, and the emergence of pre-modern world-systems.

Read more less

For more than four thousand years, empires have been geographically the largest polities on Earth, shaping in many respects the human past and present in different epochs and on different continents. Covering the time span from the second millennium B.C.E. to the sixteenth century C.E., and geographic areas from China to South America, the case studies included in this volume demonstrate the necessity to combine perspectives from the longue duree and global comparativism with the theory of agency and an understanding of specific contexts for human actions. Contributions from leading scholars examine salient aspects of the Hittite, Assyrian, Ancient Egyptian, Achaemenid and Sasanian Iranian, Zhou to Han Dynasty Chinese, Inka, and Mughal empires.

Read more less

Every part of archaeological practice is intimately tied to digital technologies. But how deeply do we really understand the ways these technologies impact the theoretical trends in archaeology, how these trends affect the adoption of these technologies, or how the use of technology alters our interactions with the human past? This volume suggests a critical approach to archaeology in a digital world, a purposeful and systematic application of digital tools in archaeology. This is a call to pay attention to your digital tools, to be explicit about how you are using them, and to understand how they work and impact your own practice. The book demonstrates how this critical, reflexive approach to archaeology in the digital age can be accomplished, touching on topics that include 3D data, predictive and procedural modelling, digital publishing, digital archiving, public and community engagement, ethics, and global sustainability. The scale and scope of this research demonstrates how necessary it is for all archaeological practitioners to approach this digital age with a critical perspective and to be purposeful in our use of digital technologies.

Read more less

Archaeology Outside the Box makes contemporary archaeology germane to the general public as well as to researchers in other disciplines. In thirty-one richly illustrated chapters, a wide variety of projects is presented by an international group of anthropologists, archaeologists, architects and artists. These aim to broaden the applicability of archaeology by reflecting on archaeological remains in novel ways, or by addressing contemporary concerns with archaeological theory and research methods. Demonstrating the fascinating and pertinent nature of archaeology, the authors go far beyond its definition as a discipline that unearths objects of ancient material culture. Many chapters also provide arguments relevant to the soul-searching discussions currently taking place within archaeology worldwide and accelerated by the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent Covid-19 pandemic.

Read more less

Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award. Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize. Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.

Read more less

Recipient of the G. Ernest Wright Award for Best Archaeological Publication, American Schools of Oriental Research, 2011 In 2007 the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project (JCHP) was established as a joint research endeavor of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among the project's diverse aims is the publication of numerous excavations conducted in Jaffa since 1948 under the auspices of various governmental and research institutions such as the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums and its successor, the Israel Antiquities Authority, as well as the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project. This, the first volume in the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project series, lays the groundwork for this initiative. Part I provides the historical, economic, and legal context for the JCHP's development, while outlining its objectives and the unique opportunities that Jaffa offers researchers. The history of Jaffa and its region, and the major episodes of cultural change that affected the site and region are explored through a series of articles in Part II, including an illustrated discussion of historical maps of Jaffa from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent archaeological discoveries from Jaffa are included in Part III, while Part IV provides a first glimpse of the JCHP's efforts to publish the Jacob Kaplan and Haya Ritter-Kaplan legacy from Jaffa. Together the twenty-five contributions to this work constitute the first major book-length publication to address the archaeology of Jaffa in more than sixty years since excavations were initiated at the site.

Read more less

The Neolithic in Egypt is thought to have arrived via diffusion from an origin in southwest Asia. In this volume, the authors advocate an alternative approach to understanding the development of food production in Egypt based on the results of new fieldwork in the Fayum. They present a detailed study of the Fayum archaeological landscape using an expanded version of low-level food production to organize observations concerning paleoenvironment, socioeconomy, settlement, and mobility. While domestic plants and animals were indeed introduced to the Fayum from elsewhere, when a number of aspects of the archaeological record are compared, a settlement system is suggested that has no obvious analogues with the Neolithic in southwest Asia. The results obtained from the Fayum are used to assess other contemporary sites in Egypt.

Read more less

This is a final report of the excavation of Tell Umm el-Marra in northern Syria, conducted in 1994--2010. It is likely the site of ancient Tuba, capital of a small kingdom in the Early and Middle Bronze periods, in the Jabbul plain between Aleppo and northern Mesopotamia.

Read more less

The Archaeology of Political Organization is an examination of settlement in the rich coastal plain of lowland Mesoamerica, a region which was wealthy by Mesoamerican values, with fertile soil and tropical commodities such as jaguars, cacao, avian species with bright plumage, and cotton. The book provides basic archaeological data about regional settlement from three decades of survey research in south-central Veracruz in the western lower Papaloapan basin, a region with low density urbanism. The data reveals political and social change, with consolidation of wealth by elite families during the Late Classic period. The political analysis considers archaeological evidence related to several organizational principles: collective versus autocratic, corporate versus exclusionary/network, and segmentary (unspecialized versus specialized). Many variables related to these principles used by other scholars are either suited to historically documented states, not archaeological ones, or ambiguous. Many published studies either focus on a particular city or use documents or other evidence drawn from the top of the settlement hierarchy, characterizing the whole society politically from a biased sample. This political analysis is regional in scope and attentive to variation in the settlement hierarchy, providing a guidepost to analysis of political principles with archaeological data.

Read more less

Grotta Scaloria, a cave in Apulia, was first discovered and explored in 1931, excavated briefly in 1967, and then excavated extensively from 1978 to 1980 by a joint UCLA-University of Genoa team, but it was never fully published. The Save Scaloria Project was organized to locate this legacy data and to enhance that information by application of the newest methods of archaeological and scientific analysis. This significant site is finally published in one comprehensive volume (and in an online archive of additional data and photographs) that gathers together the archaeological data from the upper and lower chambers of the cave. These data indicate intense ritual and quotidian use during the Neolithic period (circa 5600-5300 BCE). The Grotta Scaloria project is also important as historiography, since it illustrates a changing trajectory of research spanning three generations of European and American archaeology.

Read more less

This book presents the results of the extensive excavation of a small, rural village from the period of emerging cities in upper Mesopotamia (modern northeast Syria) in the early to middle third millennium BC. Prior studies of early Near Eastern urban societies generally focused on the cities and elites, neglecting the rural component of urbanization. This research represents part of a move to rectify that imbalance. Reports on the architecture, pottery, animal bones, plant remains, and other varieties of artifacts and ecofacts enhance our understanding of the role of villages in the formation of urban societies, the economic relationship between small rural sites and urban centers, and status and economic differentiation in villages. Among the significant results are the extensive exposure of a large segment of the village area, revealing details of spatial and social organization and household economics. The predominance of large-scale grain storage and processing leads to questions of staple finance, economic relations with pastoralists, and connections to developing urban centers.

Read more less

The Soconusco region, a narrow strip of the Pacific coast of Mexico and Guatemala, is the location of some of the earliest pottery-using villages of ancient Mesoamerica. Mobile early inhabitants of the area harvested marsh clams in the estuaries, leaving behind vast mounds of shell. With the introduction of pottery and the establishment of permanent villages (from 1900 B.C.), use of the resource-rich estuary changed. The archaeological manifestation of that new estuary adaptation is a dramatic pattern of inter-site variability in pottery vessel forms. Vessels at sites within the estuary were about seventy percent neckless jars --"tecomates"-- while vessels at contemporaneous sites a few kilometers inland were seventy percent open dishes. The pattern is well-known, but the the settlement arrangements or subsistence practices that produced it have remained unclear. Archaeological investigations at El Varal, a special-purpose estuary site of the later Early Formative (1250-1000 B.C.) expand possibilities for an anthropological understanding of the archaeological patterns. The goal of this volume is to describe excavations and finds at the site and to propose, based on a variety of analyses, a new understanding of Early Formative assemblage variability.

Read more less

Lake Titicaca - the world's highest navigable lake - was home to some of the greatest civilizations in the ancient world. This lavishly illustrated book provides an indispensable guide for any visitor who has an interest in archaeology, history and culture, and for any reader wnating to know more about this fascinating place.

Read more less

Case study of excavations at an early (ca. 2800 B.C.) pastoral site in the Negev, providing detailed analyses and a synthetic overview of a seasonal encampment from this early period in the evolution of desert pastoral societies. The first detailed analysis of this culture and includes materials previously unreported for the region and period.

Read more less

The Soconusco region, a narrow strip of the Pacific coast of Mexico and Guatemala, is the location of some of the earliest pottery-using villages of ancient Mesoamerica. Mobile early inhabitants of the area harvested marsh clams in the estuaries, leaving behind vast mounds of shell. With the introduction of pottery and the establishment of permanent villages (from 1900 B.C.), use of the resource-rich estuary changed. The archaeological manifestation of that new estuary adaptation is a dramatic pattern of inter-site variability in pottery vessel forms. Vessels at sites within the estuary were about seventy percent neckless jars --"tecomates"-- while vessels at contemporaneous sites a few kilometers inland were seventy percent open dishes. The pattern is well-known, but the the settlement arrangements or subsistence practices that produced it have remained unclear. Archaeological investigations at El Varal, a special-purpose estuary site of the later Early Formative (1250-1000 B.C.) expand possibilities for an anthropological understanding of the archaeological patterns. The goal of this volume is to describe excavations and finds at the site and to propose, based on a variety of analyses, a new understanding of Early Formative assemblage variability.

Read more less

Over the last decades, considerable effort has been directed towards the study of early complex societies of northern Peru, and in recent years archaeologists have expressed a strong interest in the art and archaeology of the Moche, Lambayeque and Chimu societies. Yet, comparatively little attention has been paid to the earlier cultural foundations of north coast civilization: the Gallinazo. In the recent years, however, the work of a number of north coast specialists brought about a large quantity of data on the Gallinazo occupation of the coast, but a coherent framework for studying this culture had yet to be defined. The present volume is the result of a round table, which gathered some thirty scholars from Europe and North and South America to discuss the Gallinazo phenomenon. In fourteen chapters, authors with different perspectives and backgrounds reconsider the nature of the Gallinazo culture and its position within north coast cultural history, while addressing wider issues about the development of complex societies in this area and within the Andean region in general. The contributions reveal a diversity of perspectives on north coast archaeology, something that is likely to stimulate methodological and theoretical debates among Andeanists, pre-Columbian specialists and New World archaeologists in general.

Read more less

This volume, the second in a series of studies on the archaeology of the Titicaca Basin, serves as an excellent springboard for broader discussions of the roles of ritual, authority, coercion, and the intensification of resources and trade for the development of archaic states worldwide. Over the last hundred years, scholars have painstakingly pieced together fragments of the incredible cultural history of the Titicaca Basin, an area that encompasses over 50,000 km2, achieving a basic understanding of settlement patterns and chronology. While large-scale surveys will need to continue and areas will need to be revisited to further refine chronologies and knowledge of site-formation processes, the maturation of the field now allows archaeologists to fruitfully invest energy in single locations and specialized topics.

Read more less

This book, the first of a projected three, reports on excavations at Formative-period sites in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico. The transition to the Formative in the relatively high-altitude study region is later than in choice regions for early agriculture elsewhere in Mesoamerica. From 900 BC, however, population growth and sociopolitical development were rapid. A central claim in the research presented here is that a macroregional perspective is essential for understanding the local Formative sequence. In this volume, excavations at three village sites (Amomoloc, Tetel, and Las Mesitas) and one modest regional center (La Laguna) are reported. Ceramics are described in detail. An innovative approach to the classification of figurines is presented, and a Formative chronology for the region is proposed based on seriation of refuse contexts and radiocarbon dates. The work concludes with a macroregional framework to be used in the analysis of subsistence, social relations, and political economy in forthcoming volumes 2 and 3.

Read more less

Warfare, ritual human sacrifice, and the rubber ballgame have been the traditional categories through which scholars have examined organized violence in the artistic and material records of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America. This volume expands those traditional categories to include such concerns as gladiatorial-like boxing combats, investiture rites, trophy-head taking and display, dark shamanism, and the subjective pain inherent in acts of violence. Each author examines organized violence as a set of practices grounded in cultural understandings, even when the violence threatens the limits of those understandings. The authors scrutinize the representation of, and relationships between, different types of organized violence, as well as the implications of those activities, which can include the unexpected, such as violence as a means of determining and curing illness, and the use of violence in negotiation strategies.

Read more less

Moche civilization flourished on the north coast of Peru from AD 200 to 800. Although the Moche had no writing system, they left a vivid artistic record of their beliefs and activities on intricately painted ceramic vessels, several thousand of which are scattered in museums and private collections throughout the world today. Unfortunately, nearly all were looted by grave robbers so their origin and context are unknown. In recent years, however, through a combination of archaeological excavation and stylistic analysis, it has been possible to identify more than 250 painted vessels from the site of San Jose de Moro. To date, this is the largest sample of Moche art from a single place and time. Thus it provides a unique opportunity to identify a distinct sub-style of Moche ceramics, and to assess its range of artistic and technological variation. Moreover, within the sample it is possible to identify multiple paintings by 18 different artists, thus elucidating the range of subject matter that an artist would paint, as well as the variation in the way he would portray the same scene. By discussing and illustrating more than 200 painted vessels from San Jose de Moro, this volume provides insights about a community of ancient Peruvian potters who shared a distinctive painting style and left a fascinating record of their achievement.

Read more less

This volume brings together exciting new field data by more than two dozen Andean scholars who came together to honor their friend, colleague, and mentor. These new studies cover the enormous temporal span of Moseley's own work from the Preceramic era to the Tiwanaku and Moche states to the Inka empire. And, like Moseley's own studies -- from Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization to Chan Chan: The Desert City to Cerro Baul's brewery -- these new studies involve settlements from all over the Andes -- from the far northern highlands to the far southern coast. An invaluable addition to any Andeanist's library, the papers in this book demonstrate the enormous breadth and influence of Moseley's work and the vibrant range of exciting new work by his former students and collaborators in fieldwork.

Read more less

A wide spectrum of scholars, historians, art historians, anthropologists, students of performance, students of religion, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists were all asked to think and comment on how ritual can be traced in archaeology and which ways ritual research can go in that discipline. The product is a fairly accurate representation of research on ritual and the archaeology of ritual: scholars from various disciplines, backgrounds and agendas, arguing mostly in the most logical fashion, yet with little agreement between them. So this book should not be seen as presenting one unified attitude towards ritual and its study in archaeology. It should rather be seen as a reflection of what the discourse in the archaeology of ritual is today. The outcome has been extremely thought-provoking, often controversial, but always of extremely high quality.

Read more less

Recipient of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize This volume publishes the excavation and analysis of the Early Iron Age cemetery at Torone in Chalkidike, in the north Aegean, Greece. Spanning the period between the twelfth or eleventh century down to ca. 850 BC, the cemetery represents one of the few burial grounds of the period in Greece to have been excavated virtually in its entirety (yielding 134 tombs, of which 118 were cremations and 16 inhumations).

Read more less

Settlement archaeology in the Maya area has focused much of its attention on the polar extremes of the settlement continuum. As a result of this urban/rural bias, a whole range of complex rural settlements remain under-explored. The chapters in this volume highlight the variable quality of these"middle level settlements".

Read more less

As the center for the religious cult of Quetzalcoatl, Cholula played a prominent role in shaping events of central Mexico's Postclassic period. Yet confusion over historical events in Cholula itself have limited its place in recent archaeological considerations of Mesoamerica. Since ceramic sequences are the backbone of archaeological chronologies, this confusion ultimately relates to problems in previous attempts to order archaeological time with ceramics. This book provides an innovative new classification of Cholula ceramics, based on artifact assemblages from primary depositional contexts recovered from the UA-1 excavations. A detailed and well-illustrated description of ceramic types is provided to construct a new classification system. These types are then seriated using collections from house floors and trash middens to suggest a new sequence spanning the Tlachihualtepetl (700-1200 CE) and Cholollan (1200-1550 CE) periods. The polychrome ceramics of Cholula have been described as among the most beautiful of Mesoamerica, employing vibrant colors to represent complex religious iconography of the Mixteca-Puebla stylistic tradition. By defining type and subtype variations in the polychrome ceramics, a foundation is created for a refined chronology as well as for recognizing intra-societal variability.

Read more less

Studies of Pompeian material culture have traditionally been dominated by art historical approaches, but recently there has been a renewed and burgeoning interest in Pompeian houses for studies of Roman domestic behaviour. This book is concerned with contextualised Pompeian household artefacts and their role in deepening understanding of household behaviour at Pompeii. It consists of a study of the contents of thirty so-called atrium houses in Pompeii to investigate the spatial distribution of household activities, both within each architectural room type and across the house. It also uses this material to investigate the state of occupancy of these houses at the time of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

Read more less

For over half a millennium, the megalithic ruins of Tiwanaku in the highlands of the Andes mountains have stood as proxy for the desires and ambitions of various empires and political agendas; in the last hundred years, scholars have attempted to answer the question"What was Tiwanaku?"by examining these shattered remains from a distant preliterate past. This volume contains twelve papers from senior scholars, whose contributions discuss subjects from the farthest points of the southern Andes, where the iconic artifacts of Tiwanaku appear as offerings to the departed, to the heralded ruins weathered by time and burdened by centuries of interpretation and speculation. Visions of Tiwanaku stays true to its name by providing a platform for each scholar to present an informed view on the nature of this enigmatic place that seems so familiar, yet continues to elude understanding by falling outside our established models for early cities and states.

Read more less

In commemoration of Lothar von Falkenhausen's 60th birthday, this volume assembles eighteen scholarly essays that explore the intersection between art, economy, and ritual in ancient East Asia. The contributions are clustered into four themes: Ritual Economy, Ritual and Sacrifice, Technology, Community, Interaction, and Objects and Meaning, which collectively reflect the theoretical, methodological, and historical questions that Falkenhausen has been examining via his scholarship, research, and teaching throughout his career. Most of the chapters work with archaeological and textual data from China, but there are also studies of materials from Mongolia, Korea, Southeast Asia and even Egypt, showing the global impact of Falkenhausens work. The chronological range of studies extends from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age in China, into the early imperial, medieval, and early modern periods. The authors discuss art, economy, ritual, interaction, and technology in the broad context of East Asian archaeology and its connection to the world beyond.

Read more less

This monograph reports on large-scale excavations at Paso de la Amada, an archaeological site in the Soconusco region of the Pacific coast of Mexico, which was among the earliest sedentary, ceramic-using villages of Mesoamerica. With an occupation that extended across 140 ha in 1600 BC, it was also one of the largest communities of its era. First settled around 1900 BC, the site was abandoned 600 years later during what appears to have been a period of local political turmoil. The decline of Paso de la Amada corresponded with a rupture in local traditions of material culture and local adoption of the Early Olmec style. Stylistically, the material culture of Paso de la Amada corresponds predominantly to the pre-Olmec Mokaya tradition. Excavations at the site have revealed significant earthen constructions from as early as 1700 BC. Those include the earliest known Mesoamerican ball court and traces of a series of high-status residences. This monograph reports on large-scale excavations in Mounds 1, 12, and 32, as well as soundings in other locations. The volume covers all aspects of excavations and artifacts and includes three lengthy interpretive chapters dealing with the main research questions, which concern subsistence, social inequality, and the organizational history of the site.

Read more less

The rugged highlands of southern Yemen are one of the less archaeologically explored regions of the Near East. This final report of survey and excavations by the Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia (RASA) Project addresses the development of food production and human landscapes, topics of enduring interest as scholarly conceptualizations of the Anthropocene take shape. Along with data from Manayzah, site of the earliest dated remains of clearly domesticated animals in Arabia, the volume also documents some of the earliest water management technologies in Arabia, thereby anchoring regional dates for the beginnings of pastoralism and of potential farming. The authors argue that the initial Holocene inhabitants of Wadi Sana were Arabian hunters who adopted limited pastoral stock in small social groups, then expanded their social collectives through sacrifice and feasts in a sustained pastoral landscape. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience of archaeologists including not only those working in Arabia, but more broadly those interested in the ancient Near East, Africa, South Asia, and in Holocene landscape histories generally.

Read more less

This volume addresses the entanglement between archaeology, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and war. Popular sentiment in the West has tended to embrace the adventure rather than ponder the legacy of archaeological explorers; allegations by imperial powers of"discovering"archaeological sites or"saving"world heritage from neglect or destruction have often provided the pretext for expanding political influence. Consequently, citizens have often fallen victim to the imperial war machine, seeing their lands confiscated, their artifacts looted, and the ancient remains in their midst commercialized. Spanning the globe with case studies from East Asia, Siberia, Australia, North and South America, Europe, and Africa, sixteen contributions written by archaeologists, art historians, and historians from four continents offer unusual breadth and depth in the assessment of various claims to patrimonial heritage, contextualized by the imperial and colonial ventures of the last two centuries and their postcolonial legacy.

Read more less

This book presents a detailed account of authenticity in the visual arts from the Paleolithic to the postmodern. The restoration of works of art can alter the perception of authenticity and may result in the creation of fakes and forgeries. These interactions set the stage for the subject of this book, which initially examines the conservation perspective, then continues with a detailed discussion of notions of authenticity and philosophical background. There is a disputed territory between those who view the present-day cult of authenticity as fundamentally flawed and those who have analyzed its impact upon different cultural milieus, operating across performative, contested, and fragmented ground. The book discusses several case studies where the ideas of conceptual authenticity, aesthetic authenticity, and material authenticity can be incorporated into an informative discourse about art from the ancient to the contemporary, illuminating concerns relating to restoration and art forgery.

Read more less

Situated south of the Dead Sea, near the famous Nabatean capital of Petra, the Faynan region in Jordan contains the largest deposits of copper ore in the southern Levant. The Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP) takes an anthropological-archaeology approach to the deep-time study of culture change in one of the Old World’s most important locales for studying technological development. Using innovative digital tools for data recording, curation, analyses, and dissemination, the researchers focused on ancient mining and metallurgy as the subject of surveys and excavations related to the Iron Age (ca. 1200–500 BCE), when the first local, historical state-level societies appeared in this part of the eastern Mediterranean basin. This comprehensive and important volume challenges the current scholarly consensus concerning the emergence and historicity of the Iron Age polity of biblical Edom and some of its neighbors, such as ancient Israel. Excavations and radiometric dating establish a new chronology for Edom, adding almost 500 more years to the Iron Age, including key periods of biblical history when David, Solomon, and the Egyptian pharaoh Shoshenq I are alleged to have interacted with Edom. Included is a 7 gigabyte DVD with over 55,000 files of additional data and photographs from the project.

Read more less

Recipient of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Scholars from Aristotle to Marx and beyond have been fascinated by the question of what constitutes value. The Construction of Value in the Ancient World makes a significant contribution to this ongoing inquiry, bringing together in one comprehensive volume the perspectives of leading anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, philologists, and sociologists on how value was created, defined, and expressed in a number of ancient societies around the world. Based on the basic premise that value is a social construct defined by the cultural context in which it is situated, the volume explores four overarching but closely interrelated themes: place value, body value, object value, and number value. The questions raised and addressed are of central importance to archaeologists studying ancient civilizations: How can we understand the value that might have been accorded to materials, objects, people, places, and patterns of action by those who produced or used the things that compose the human material record? Taken as a whole, the contributions to this volume demonstrate how the concept of value lies at the intersection of individual and collective tastes, desires, sentiments, and attitudes that inform the ways people select, or give priority to, one thing over another.

Read more less

How does the practice of archaeology benefit from faunal analysis? Michael Glassow and Terry Joslin's Exploring Methods of Faunal Analysis: Insights from California Archaeology addresses this question. Contributors to this volume demonstrate how faunal remains can be used to elucidate subsistence, settlement, technological systems, economic exchange, social organization, adaptation to variability in resource distribution and abundance, and the impacts of historic land use. The sheer prevalence of faunal remains in California archaeological sites means that most archaeologists working in the state inevitably must give these resources their close attention-and yet methodological challenges remain. The chapters in this thoughtfully edited volume tackle these challenges, providing strategies for identifying and mitigating sample bias and recommending quantitative techniques borrowed from a variety of disciplines. The volume also presents examples that illustrate the use of faunal data to test hypotheses derived from microeconomic theory, the applicability of bone and shell chemistry to faunal analysis, and the relevance of faunal data to addressing issues in biology.

Read more less

Recipient of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Occupied from around 7500 BC to 5700 BC, the large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement of Catalhoyuk in Anatolia is composed entirely of domestic buildings; no public buildings have been identified. First excavated in the early 1960s, the site was left untouched until 1993. During the summers of 1997-2003 a team from the University of California at Berkeley (the BACH team) excavated an area at the northern end of the East Mound of Catalhoyuk. The houses there date predominantly to the late Aceramic and early Ceramic Neolithic, around 7000 BC. Last House on the Hill is the final report of the BACH excavations. This volume comprises both interpretive chapters and empirical data from the excavations and their materials. The research of the BACH team focuses on the lives and life histories of houses and people, the use of digital technologies in documenting and sharing the archaeological process, the senses of place, and the nature of cultural heritage and our public responsibilities.

Read more less

This volume brings together exciting new field data by more than two dozen Andean scholars who came together to honor their friend, colleague, and mentor. These new studies cover the enormous temporal span of Moseley's own work from the Preceramic era to the Tiwanaku and Moche states to the Inka empire. And, like Moseley's own studies -- from Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization to Chan Chan: The Desert City to Cerro Baul's brewery -- these new studies involve settlements from all over the Andes -- from the far northern highlands to the far southern coast. An invaluable addition to any Andeanist's library, the papers in this book demonstrate the enormous breadth and influence of Moseley's work and the vibrant range of exciting new work by his former students and collaborators in fieldwork.

Read more less

There have been edited books on the archaeology of nomadism in various regions, and there have been individual archaeological and anthropological monographs, but nothing with the kind of coverage provided in this volume. Its strength and importance lies in the fact that it brings together a worldwide collection of studies of the archaeology of mobility. This book provides a ready-made reference to this worldwide phenomenon and is unique in that it tries to redefine pastoralism within a larger context by the term mobility. It presents many new ideas and thoughtful approaches, especially in the Central Asian region.

Read more less

One of the most significant differences between the New World's major areas of high culture is that Mesoamerica had no beasts of burden and wool, while the Andes had both. Four members of the camelid family--wild guanacos and vicunas, and domestic llamas and alpacas--were native to the Andes. South American peoples relied on these animals for meat and wool, and as beasts of burden to transport goods all over the Andes. In this book, Duccio Bonavia tackles major questions about these camelids, from their domestication to their distribution at the time of the Spanish conquest. One of Bonavia's hypotheses is that the arrival of the Europeans and their introduced Old World animals forced the Andean camelids away from the Pacific coast, creating the (mistaken) impression that camelids were exclusively high-altitude animals. Bonavia also addresses the diseases of camelids and their population density, suggesting that the original camelid populations suffered from a different type of mange than that introduced by the Europeans. This new mange, he believes, was one of the causes behind the great morbidity of camelids in Colonial times. In terms of domestication, while Bonavia believes that the major centers must have been the puna zone intermediate zones, he adds that the process should not be seen as restricted to a single environmental zone. Bonavia's landmark study of the South American camelids is now available for the first time in English. This new edition features an updated analysis and comprehensive bibliography. In the Spanish edition of this book, Bonavia lamented the fact that the zooarchaeological data from R. S. MacNeish's Ayacucho Project had yet to be published. In response, the Ayacucho's Project's faunal analysts, Elizabeth S. Wing and Kent V. Flannery, have added appendices on the Ayacucho results to this English edition. This book will be of broad interest to archaeologists, zoologists, social anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and a wide range of students.

Read more less