Download or read book Geology for Archaeologists written by J.R.L. Allen and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-10-11 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This short introduction aims to provide archaeologists of all backgrounds with a grounding in the principles, materials, and methods of geology. Each chapter ends with a short reading list, and many have selected case-histories in illustration of the points made. Included is a glossary of technical terms.
Download or read book Geological Methods for Archaeology written by Norman Herz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written as a survey text covering appropriate techniques and methods from geology, geophysics, geochemistry and geochronology, this book shows the practicality and importance of techniques used in solving archaeological problems.
Download or read book Obsidian written by M. Steven Shackley and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obsidian was long valued by ancient peoples as a raw material for producing stone tools, and archaeologists have increasingly come to view obsidian studies as a crucial aid in understanding the past. Steven Shackley now shows how the geochemical and contextual analyses of archaeological obsidian can be applied to the interpretation of social and economic organization in the ancient Southwest. This book, the capstone of decades of investigation, integrates a wealth of obsidian research in one volume. It covers advances in analytical chemistry and field petrology that have enhanced our understanding of obsidian source heterogeneity, presents the most recent data on and interpretations of archaeological obsidian sources in the Southwest, and explores the ethnohistorical and contemporary background for obsidian use in indigenous societies. Shackley provides a thorough examination of the geological origin of obsidian in the region and the methods used to collect raw material and determine its chemical composition, and descriptions of obsidian sources throughout the Southwest. He then describes the occurrence of obsidian artifacts and shows how their geochemical fingerprints allow archaeologists to make conclusions regarding the procurement of obsidian. The book presents three groundbreaking applications of obsidian source studies. It first discusses an application to early Preceramic groups, showing how obsidian sources can reflect the range they inhabited over time as well as their social relationships during the Archaic period. It then offers an examination of the Late Classic Salado in Arizona's Tonto Basin, where obsidian data, along with ceramic and architectural evidence, suggest that Mogollon migrants lived in economic and social harmony with the Hohokam, all the while maintaining relationships with their homeland. Finally, it provides an intensive look at social identity and gender differences in the Preclassic Hohokam of central Arizona, where obsidian source provenance and projectile point styles suggest that male Hohokam sought to create a stylistically defined identity in at least three areas of the Hohokam core area. These male "sodalities" were organized quite differently from female ceramic production groups. Today, obsidian research in the American Southwest enjoys an equal standing with ceramic, faunal, and floral studies as a method of revealing social process and change in prehistory. Shackley's book discusses the ways in which archaeologists should approach obsidian research, no matter what the region, offering a thorough survey of archaeological obsidian studies that will have methodological and theoretical applications worldwide. The volume includes an extensive glossary created specifically for archaeologists.
Download or read book Earth Sciences and Archaeology written by Paul Goldberg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together contributions from an experienced group of archaeologists and geologists whose common objective is to present thorough and current reviews of the diverse ways in which methods from the earth sciences can contribute to archaeological research. Many areas of research are addressed here, including artifact analysis and sourcing, landscape reconstruction and site formation analysis, soil micromorphology and geophysical exploration of buried sites.
Download or read book Techniques in Archaeological Geology written by Erv Garrison and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The archaeological geology of the Quaternary or the geological epoch during which humankind evolved is a scientific endeavor with much to offer in the fields of archaeology and palaeoanthropology. Earth science techniques offer diverse ways of characterizing the elements of past landscapes and archaeological facies. This book is a survey of techniques used in archaeological geology for the study of soils, sediments, rocks and minerals. The techniques presented represent those most commonly used today. They are discussed in detail and examples are provided, in many cases, to demonstrate their usefulness to archaeologists.
Download or read book The Archaeology Book written by David Down and published by New Leaf Publishing Group. This book was released on 2010-02-01 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developed with three educational levels in mind, The Archaeology Book takes you on an exciting exploration of history and ancient cultures. You'll learn both the techniques of the archaeologist and the accounts of some of the richest discoveries of the Middle East that demonstrate the accuracy and historicity of the Bible. In The Archaeology Book you will unearth: How archaeologists know what life was like in the past Why broken pottery can tell more than gold or treasure can Some of the difficulties in dating ancient artifacts How the brilliance of ancient cultures demonstrates God's creation History of ancient cultures, including the Hittites, Babylonians, and Egyptians The early development of the alphabet and its impact on discovery The numerous archaeological finds that confirm biblical history Why the Dead Sea scrolls are considered such a vital breakthrough Filled with vivid full-color photos, detailed drawings, and maps, you will have access to some of the greatest biblical mysteries ever uncovered. With the enhanced educational format of this book and the unique color-coded, multi-age design, it allows the ease of teaching the fundamentals of archaeology through complex insights to three distinct grade levels. Free downloadable study guide at www.masterbooks.org
Download or read book Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy written by Edward C. Harris and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2014-06-28 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the only text devoted entirely to archaeological stratigraphy, a subject of fundamental importance to most studies in archaeology. The first edition appeared in 1979 as a result of the invention, by the author, of the Harris Matrix--a method for analyzing and presenting the stratigraphic sequences of archaeological sites. The method is now widely used in archaeology all over the world. The opening chapters of this edition discuss the historical development of the ideas of archaeological stratigraphy. The central chapters examine the laws and basic concepts of the subject, and the last few chapters look at methods of recording stratification, constructing stratigraphic sequences, and the analysis of stratification and artifacts. The final chapter, which is followed by a glossary of stratigraphic terms, gives an outline of a modern system for recording stratification on archaeological sites. This book is written in a simple style suitable for the student or amateur. The radical ideas set out should also give the professional archaeologist food for thought. - Covers a basic principle of all archaeological excavations - Provides a data description and analysis tool for all such digs, which is now widely accepted and used - Gives extra information
Download or read book Practical and Theoretical Geoarchaeology written by Paul Goldberg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-03 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practical and Theoretical Geoarchaeology provides an invaluable overview of geoarchaeology and how it can be used effectively in the study of archaeological sites and contexts. Taking a pragmatic and functional approach, this book presents: a fundamental, broad-based perspective of the essentials of modern geoarchaeology in order to demonstrate the breadth of the approaches and the depth of the problems that it can tackle. the rapid advances made in the area in recent years, but also gives the reader a firm grasp of conventional approaches. covers traditional topics with the emphasis on landscapes, as well as anthropogenic site formation processes and their investigation. provides guidelines for the presentation of field and laboratory methods and the reporting of geoarchaeological results. essential reading for archaeology undergraduate and graduate students, practicing archaeologists and geoscientists who need to understand and apply geoarchaeological methodologies. Artwork from the book is available to instructors online at: www.blackwellpublishing.com/goldberg “This is one of the best textbooks that I have read in years. I enjoyed reviewing it, and found it well-written and thorough in its coverage of the traditional earth science aspects of geoarchaeology. The non-traditional aspects were intriguing and equally thorough... I predict that this book will become the textbook of choice for geoarchaeology classes for several years.” Geomorphology 101 (2008) 740–743
Download or read book Archaeomineralogy written by George R. Rapp and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2002-05-14 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1.1 Prologue What is archaeomineralogy? The term has been used at least once before (Mitchell 1985), but this volume is the first publication to lay down the scientific basis and systematics for this subdiscipline. Students sometimes call an introductory archaeology course "stones and bones." Archaeomineralogy covers the stones component of this phrase. Of course, archaeology consists of a great deal more than just stones and bones. Contemporary archaeology is based on stratigraphy, geomorphology, chronometry, behavioral inferences, and a host of additional disciplines in addition to those devoted to stones and bones. To hazard a definition: archaeomineralogy is the study of the minerals and rocks used by ancient societies over space and time, as implements, orna ments, building materials, and raw materials for ceramics and other processed products. Archaeomineralogy also attempts to date, source, or otherwise char acterize an artifact or feature, or to interpret past depositional alteration of archaeological contexts. Unlike geoarchaeology, archaeomineralogy is not, and is not likely to become, a recognized subdiscipline. Practitioners of archaeomineralogy are mostly geoarchaeologists who specialize in geology and have a strong background in mineralogy or petrology (the study of the origin ofrocks).
Download or read book The Archaeological and Forensic Applications of Microfossils A Deeper Understanding of Human History The Archaeological and Forensic Applications of Microfossils written by M. Williams and published by Geological Society of London. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Microfossils are an abundant component of the sedimentary rock record. Their analysis can reveal not only the environments in which the rocks were deposited, but also their age. When combined, the spatial and temporal distribution patterns of microfossils offer enormous utility for archaeological and forensic investigations. Their presence can act as a geological ‘fingerprint’ and the tiniest fragment of material, such as a broken Iron Age potsherd, can contain a microfossil signature that reveals the geographical source of the materials under investigation. This book explores how microfossils are employed as tools to interpret human society and habitation throughout history. Examples include microfossil evidence associated with Palaeolithic human occupation at Boxgrove in Sussex, alongside investigations into human-induced landscape change during the Holocene. Further examples include the use of microfossils to provenance the source materials of Iron Age ceramics, Roman mosaics and Minoan pottery, in addition to their application to help solve modern murder cases, highlighting the diverse applications of microfossils to improving our understanding of human history.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology written by Allan S. Gilbert and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geoarchaeology is the archaeological subfield that focuses on archaeological information retrieval and problem solving utilizing the methods of geological investigation. Archaeological recovery and analysis are already geoarchaeological in the most fundamental sense because buried remains are contained within and removed from an essentially geological context. Yet geoarchaeological research goes beyond this simple relationship and attempts to build collaborative links between specialists in archaeology and the earth sciences to produce new knowledge about past human behavior using the technical information and methods of the geosciences. The principal goals of geoarchaeology lie in understanding the relationships between humans and their environment. These goals include (1) how cultures adjust to their ecosystem through time, (2) what earth science factors were related to the evolutionary emergence of humankind, and (3) which methodological tools involving analysis of sediments and landforms, documentation and explanation of change in buried materials, and measurement of time will allow access to new aspects of the past. This encyclopedia defines terms, introduces problems, describes techniques, and discusses theory and strategy, all in a format designed to make specialized details accessible to the public as well as practitioners. It covers subjects in environmental archaeology, dating, materials analysis, and paleoecology, all of which represent different sources of specialist knowledge that must be shared in order to reconstruct, analyze, and explain the record of the human past. It will not specifically cover sites, civilizations, and ancient cultures, etc., that are better described in other encyclopedias of world archaeology. The Editor Allan S. Gilbert is Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. He holds a B.A. from Rutgers University, and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. were earned at Columbia University. His areas of research interest include the Near East (late prehistory and early historic periods) as well as the Middle Atlantic region of the U.S. (historical archaeology). His specializations are in archaeozoology of the Near East and geoarchaeology, especially mineralogy and compositional analysis of pottery and building materials. Publications have covered a range of subjects, including ancient pastoralism, faunal quantification, skeletal microanatomy, brick geochemistry, and two co-edited volumes on the marine geology and geoarchaeology of the Black Sea basin.
Download or read book Inscriptions of Nature written by Pratik Chakrabarti and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn how the deep history of nature became a dominant paradigm of historical thinking, through a study of landscapes of India. Winner of the BSHS Pickstone Prize by the British Society for the History of Science, Shortlisted for the Pfizer Award for an Outstanding Book in the History of Science by the History of Science Society In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging—often for sewage, transport, or minerals—revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants—past, present, and future. In Inscriptions of Nature, Pratik Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality. Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.
Download or read book Archaeological Chemistry written by A Mark Pollard and published by Royal Society of Chemistry. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The application of chemistry within archaeology is an important and fascinating area. It allows the archaeologist to answer such questions as "what is this artefact made of?", "where did it come from?" and "how has it been changed through burial in the ground?", providing pointers to the earliest history of mankind. Archaeological Chemistry begins with a brief description of the goals and history of archaeological science, and the place of chemistry within it. It sets out the most widely used analytical techniques in archaeology and compares them in the light of relevant applications. The book includes an analysis of several specific archaeological investigations in which chemistry has been employed in tracing the origins of or in preserving artefacts. The choice of these investigations conforms to themes based on analytical techniques, and includes chapters on obsidian, ceramics, glass, metals and resins. Finally, it suggests a future role for chemical and biochemical applications in archaeology. Archaeological Chemistry enables scientists to tackle the fundamental issues of chemical change in the archaeological materials, in order to advance the study of the past. It will prove an essential companion to students in archaeological science and chemistry, field and museum archaeologists, and all those involved in conserving human artefacts.
Download or read book A Geology of Media written by Jussi Parikka and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-03-27 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Media history is millions, even billions, of years old. That is the premise of this pioneering and provocative book, which argues that to adequately understand contemporary media culture we must set out from material realities that precede media themselves—Earth’s history, geological formations, minerals, and energy. And to do so, writes Jussi Parikka, is to confront the profound environmental and social implications of this ubiquitous, but hardly ephemeral, realm of modern-day life. Exploring the resource depletion and material resourcing required for us to use our devices to live networked lives, Parikka grounds his analysis in Siegfried Zielinski’s widely discussed notion of deep time—but takes it back millennia. Not only are rare earth minerals and many other materials needed to make our digital media machines work, he observes, but used and obsolete media technologies return to the earth as residue of digital culture, contributing to growing layers of toxic waste for future archaeologists to ponder. He shows that these materials must be considered alongside the often dangerous and exploitative labor processes that refine them into the devices underlying our seemingly virtual or immaterial practices. A Geology of Media demonstrates that the environment does not just surround our media cultural world—it runs through it, enables it, and hosts it in an era of unprecedented climate change. While looking backward to Earth’s distant past, it also looks forward to a more expansive media theory—and, implicitly, media activism—to come.
Download or read book Geology for Archaeologists written by John R. L. Allen and published by Archaeopress Archaeology. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This short introduction aims to provide archaeologists of all backgrounds with a grounding in the principles, materials, and methods of geology. Sections include coverage of main rock-forming minerals and classes of rocks. Geological maps and structures are introduced, and the elements of geological stratigraphy and dating are explained and related to archaeological experience. Fluvial and coastal environments are important archaeological landscapes and their formation processes, sediments and topography are outlined. Stone for building, implement-making, tool-making, and making mortar are all discussed, followed by an introduction to clays and ceramics. A final chapter introduces metallurgical landscapes: metalliferous ores, mining and smelting, and metal-making industries. Each chapter ends with a short reading list, and many have selected case-histories in illustration of the points made. Included is a glossary of technical terms.
Download or read book Forbidden Archeology written by Michael A. Cremo and published by Bhaktivedanta Book Trust. This book was released on 1998 with total page 968 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the centuries, researchers have found bones and artifacts proving that humans like us have existed for millions of years. Mainstream science, however, has supppressed these facts. Prejudices based on current scientific theory act as a knowledge filter, giving us a picture of prehistory that is largely incorrect.
Download or read book Rock Bone and Ruin written by Adrian Currie and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-02-16 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that we should be optimistic about the capacity of “methodologically omnivorous” geologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists to uncover truths about the deep past. The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidence they have to work with offers mere traces of the past? In Rock, Bone, and Ruin, Adrian Currie explains that these scientists are “methodological omnivores,” with a variety of strategies and techniques at their disposal, and that this gives us every reason to be optimistic about their capacity to uncover truths about prehistory. Creative and opportunistic paleontologists, for example, discovered and described a new species of prehistoric duck-billed platypus from a single fossilized tooth. Examining the complex reasoning processes of historical science, Currie also considers philosophical and scientific reflection on the relationship between past and present, the nature of evidence, contingency, and scientific progress. Currie draws on varied examples from across the historical sciences, from Mayan ritual sacrifice to giant Mesozoic fleas to Mars's mysterious watery past, to develop an account of the nature of, and resources available to, historical science. He presents two major case studies: the emerging explanation of sauropod size, and the “snowball earth” hypothesis that accounts for signs of glaciation in Neoproterozoic tropics. He develops the Ripple Model of Evidence to analyze “unlucky circumstances” in scientific investigation; examines and refutes arguments for pessimism about the capacity of the historical sciences, defending the role of analogy and arguing that simulations have an experiment-like function. Currie argues for a creative, open-ended approach, “empirically grounded” speculation.
