Between History and Archaeology: Papers in honour of Jacek Lech


Book Description

A collection of forty-six papers papers in honour of Professor Jacek Lech, compiled in recognition of his research and academic career as well as his inquiry into the study of prehistoric flint mining, Neolithic flint tools (and beyond), and the history of archaeology.




The Oxford Handbook of the History of Archaeology


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Archaeology offers comprehensive perspectives on the origins and developments of the discipline of archaeology and the direction of future advances in the field. Written by thirty-six archaeologists and historians from all over the world, it covers a wide range of themes and debates, including biographical accounts of key figures, scientific techniques and archaeological fieldwork practices, institutional contexts, and the effects of religion, nationalism, and colonialism on the development of archaeology.




Prehistoric Flint Mines in Europe


Book Description

This volume offers a review of major flint mines dating from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. The 18 articles were contributed by archaeologists from Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden, using the same framework to propose a uniform view of the mining phenomenon.




Mining and Quarrying in Neolithic Europe


Book Description

The social processes involved in acquiring flint and stone in the Neolithic began to be considered over thirty years ago, promoting a more dynamic view of past extraction processes. Whether by quarrying, mining or surface retrieval, the geographic source locations of raw materials and their resultant archaeological sites have been approached from different methodological and theoretical perspectives. In recent years this has included the exploration of previously undiscovered sites, refined radiocarbon dating, comparative ethnographic analysis and novel analytical approaches to stone tool manufacture and provenancing. The aim of this volume in the Neolithic Studies Group Papers is to explore these new findings on extraction sites and their products. How did the acquisition of raw materials fit into other aspects of Neolithic life and social networks? How did these activities merge in creating material items that underpinned cosmology, status and identity? What are the geographic similarities, constraints and variables between the various raw materials, and how does the practise of stone extraction in the UK relate to wider extractive traditions in northwestern Europe? Eight papers address these questions and act as a useful overview of the current state of research on the topic.




Geoarchaeology and Archaeological Mineralogy


Book Description

This book of Springer Proceedings in Geoarchaeology and Archaeological Mineralogy contains selected papers presented at the 7th Geoarchaeology Conference, which took place during October 19–23, 2020, at the South Urals Federal Research Center, Ural Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Miass, Russia. The Proceedings combine studies in archeometry, geoarchaeology, and ancient North Eurasian technologies, including paleometallurgy, stone tools investigation, past exploitation of geological resources, bioarchaeology, residue analysis, pottery, and lithics studies. This book also specializes in various non-organic materials, rocks, minerals, ores, and metals, especially copper and metallurgical slags. Many types of research also use modern analytical methods of isotopic, chemical, and mineralogical analysis to address the composition and structure of ancient materials and the technological practices of past human populations of modern Russia, Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Mongolia. This book is intended for archaeologists, historians, museum workers, and geologists, as well as students, researchers from other disciplines, and the general public interested in the interdisciplinary research in the field of archaeology and archaeological materials, strategies and techniques of past quarrying, mining, metallurgy and lithic technologies at different chronological periods in Eurasian steppe and adjacent forest zone.




Coming Together


Book Description

Archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how urbanization first emerged in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The pursuit for universally applicable definitions of the terms “urban” and “city” has frequently distracted scholars from scrutinizing processes of how ancient nucleated settlements evolved and developed. Based on the premise that similar social dynamics to a great extent governed nucleation trajectories throughout human history, Coming Together focuses on both prehistoric aggregated and early urban settlements. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how nucleation unfolded in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The major themes of the volume are nucleation’s origins, pathways to sustainability, and the transformative role of these sites in sociopolitical and cultural change.




Power from Below in Premodern Societies


Book Description

This volume challenges previous views of social organization focused on elites by offering innovative perspectives on 'power from below.' Using a variety of archaeological, anthropological, and historical data to question traditional narratives of complexity as inextricably linked to top-down power structures, it exemplifies how commoners have developed strategies to sustain non-hierarchical networks and contest the rise of inequalities. Through case studies from around the world – ranging from Europe to New Guinea, and from Mesoamerica to China – an international team of contributors explores the diverse and dynamic nature of power relations in premodern societies. The theoretical models discussed throughout the volume include a reassessment of key concepts such as heterarchy, collective action, and resistance. Thus, the book adds considerable nuance to our understanding of power in the past, and also opens new avenues of reflection that can help inform discussions about our collective present and future.




Women in Archaeology


Book Description

This book tells the story of women in archaeology worldwide and their dedication to advancing knowledge and human understanding. In their own voices, they present themselves as archaeologists working in academia or the private and public sector across 33 countries. The chapters in this volume reconstruct the history of archaeology while honoring those female scholars and their pivotal research who are no longer with us. Many scholars in this volume fiercely explore non-traditional research areas in archaeology. The chapters bear witness to their valuable and unique contributions to reconstructing the past through innovative theoretical and methodological approaches. In doing so, they share the inherent difficulties of practicing archaeology, not only because they, too, are mothers, sisters, and wives but also because of the context in which they are writing. This volume may interest researchers in archaeology, history of science, gender studies, and feminist theory. Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.




From Mine to User: Production and Procurement Systems of Siliceous Rocks in the European Neolithic and Bronze Age


Book Description

Presents papers from Parts 1 and 2 of Session XXXIII of the 18th UISPP World Congress (Paris, June 2018). The first part, 'Siliceous rocks: procurement and distribution systems', looks at production systems and the diffusion of mining products, while the second, 'Flint mines and chipping floors...', focuses on knapping activities.




Where Do Cities Come From and Where Are They Going To? Modelling Past and Present Agglomerations to Understand Urban Ways of Life


Book Description

Over the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in urbanization and economic development, sparked by the realization that making urban life sustainable is one of the greatest challenges facing us in the 21st century (this is now one of the core sustainable development goals of the United Nations). This has exerted considerable pressure on researchers to come up with more scientific ways of studying urbanism and economic activity over the long run, which has resulted not only in the development of new theoretical frameworks, but also in the collection of vast amounts of data from a range of settings. This has led to the realization that, although there are significant differences between settlements in different settings, there are nonetheless important regularities and commonalities between a diverse group of settlements in range of geographical and historical contexts, including both ancient and modern ones. This suggests that a common feature of settlements is their ability to generate increased social connectivity, greater division of labour and specialization, and enhanced technological invention and innovation, albeit with costs to levels of equality, quality of life, and standards of living, as well as impacts on the environment, which cannot be separated from the emergence of confederations and states and the creation of settlement systems, hierarchies and networks. We believe that this field of enquiry now stands at a critical juncture. Although it is now feasible to talk about many aspects of ancient and modern urbanism with relative confidence, such as the numbers of cities or their sizes, much of the discussion of these themes within historical and archaeological circles has been on a discursive or qualitative level, while it is often difficult to harmonize the different models that have been applied to date into a consistent empirical and theoretical framework. A new approach to settlements throughout different contexts should now be within our grasp, however, thanks to both the ease with which information can be disseminated and the facilities that recent developments in IT offer us to model, analyse, and statistically test data.