Download or read book The Evolution of Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscapes written by Alex Carnes and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2014-07-18 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the heart of this book is a comparative study of the stone rows of Dartmoor and northern Scotland, a rare, putatively Bronze Age megalithic typology that has mystified archaeologists for over a century.
Download or read book The Evolution of Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscapes written by Alexander Carnes and published by Archaeopress Archaeology. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the heart of this book is a comparative study of the stone rows of Dartmoor and northern Scotland, a rare, putatively Bronze Age megalithic typology that has mystified archaeologists for over a century. It is argued that these are 'symbols' of Neolithic long mounds, a circumstance that accounts for the interregional similarities; other aspects of their semantic structures are also analysed using rigorous semiotic theory. The research presented here takes an evolutionary approach, drawing on biological theory to explain the active role of these monuments in social evolution and to investigate the processes at work in the development of prehistoric landscapes. New theory is developed for analysing such archaeological sequences, and for understanding and explaining material culture more generally. The local sequences are contextualised by examining European megalithic origins, tracing the long mound concept back to the LBK longhouses. It is argued that all of these related forms - longhouses, long mounds, and stone rows - are implicated in a process of competitively asserting ancestral affinities, which explains the constraint on cultural variation, and thus the formation of remarkably stable monument traditions, that led to the convergence between Dartmoor and northern Scotland in the Early Bronze Age.
Download or read book A Bronze Age Landscape in the Russian Steppes written by David W. Anthony and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2016-12-31 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language monograph that describes seasonal and permanent Late Bronze Age settlements in the Russian steppes, this is the final report of the Samara Valley Project, a US-Russian archaeological investigation conducted between 1995 and 2002. It explores the changing organization and subsistence resources of pastoral steppe economies from the Eneolithic (4500 BC) through the Late Bronze Age (1900-1200 BC) across a steppe-and-river valley landscape in the middle Volga region, with particular attention to the role of agriculture during the unusual episode of sedentary, settled pastoralism that spread across the Eurasian steppes with the Srubnaya and Andronovo cultures (1900-1200 BC). Three astonishing discoveries were made by the SVP archaeologists: agriculture played no role in the LBA diet across the region, a surprise given the settled residential pattern; a unique winter ritual was practiced at Krasnosamarskoe involving dog and wolf sacrifices, possibly related to male initiation ceremonies; and overlapping spheres of obligation, cooperation, and affiliation operated at different scales to integrate groups defined by politics, economics, and ritual behaviors.
Download or read book A Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscape in Northamptonshire written by Jan Harding and published by English Heritage. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 976 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Raunds Area Project investigated more than 20 Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in the Nene Valley. From c 5000 BC to the early 1st millennium cal BC a succession of ritual mounds and burial mounds were built as settlement along the valley sides increased and woodland was cleared. Starting as a regular stopping-place for flint knapping and domestic tasks, first the Long Mound, and then Long Barrow, the north part of the Turf Mound and the Avenue were built in the 5th millennium BC. With the addition of the Long Enclosure, the Causewayed Ring Ditch, and the Southern Enclosure, there was a chain of five or six diverse monuments stretched along the river bank by c 3000 cal BC. Later, a timber platform, the Riverside Structure, was built and the focus of ceremonial activity shifted to the Cotton 'Henge', two concentric ditches on the occupied valley side. From c 2200 cal BC monument building accelerated and included the Segmented Ditch Circle and at least 20 round barrows, almost all containing burials, at first inhumations, then cremations down to c 1000 cal BC, by which time two overlapping systems of paddocks and droveways had been laid out. Finally, the terrace began to be settled when these had gone out of use, in the early 1st millennium cal BC. This second volume of the Raunds Area Project, published as a CD, comprises the detailed reports on the environmental archaeology, artefact studies, geophysics and chronology.
Download or read book The Cultural Landscape written by Hilary H. Birks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cultural Landscape - Past, Present and Future considers different aspects of man's intervention with natural vegetation and the landscape resulting from a long equilibrium of co-existence. These landscapes are not stable, and the recent and ever accelerating changes in technology and life-style have increasingly affected many ancient landscapes, as old land-use practices are abandoned and traditions forgotten. The papers in this book describe and trace the development of cultural landscapes in different climatic and biogeographical regions in Europe. Remnants of traditional land-use still remaining are described, particularly from Western Norway, where traditions have lingered because the rugged topography of the region is inimicable to high-technology. Each chapter is by an expert in the field. The topics cover the documentation of present cultural landscapes, their maintenance and restoration, and the history of the development of cultural landscapes from the Stone Age onwards, linking the intensity of landscape utilization with population dynamics and technological attainments. The disciplines involved include vegetation science, vegetation history, ecology, palaeoecology, archaeology, sociology, geography and history.
Download or read book Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland written by Gabriel Cooney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland is the first volume to be devoted solely to the Irish Neolithic, using an innovative landscape and anthropological perspective to provide significant new insights on the period. Gabriel Cooney argues that the archaeological evidence demonstrates a much more complex picture than the current orthodoxy on Neolithic Europe, with its assumption of mobile lifestyles, suggests. He integrates the study of landscape, settlement, agriculture, material culture and burial practice to offer a rounded, realistic picture of the complexities and the realities of Neolithic lives and societies in Ireland.
Download or read book Neolithic Landscapes written by Peter Topping and published by . This book was released on 2002-12-01 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint of another classic Neolithic Studies Group volume. 'It is a sign of the intellectual health of a specialist study group that its deliberations can generate collections of papers of general interest. The topical issue of landscape is addressed, although with the added complication of attempting to focus on the domestic as opposed to ceremonial aspects of Neolithic life.
Download or read book Prehistoric and Roman Landscapes written by Andrew J. Fleming and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the essays in this book demonstrate, Prehistoric and Romano-British landscape studies have come a long way since Hoskins, whose work reflected the prevailing 'Celtic' ethnological narrative of Britain before the medieval period. The contributors present a stimulating survey of the subject as it is in the early twenty-first century, and provide some sense of a research frontier where new conceptualisations of 'otherness' and new research techniques are transforming our understanding.
Download or read book Bronze Age Landscapes written by Joanna Bruck and published by . This book was released on 2002-02-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of essays, which exemplify the range and diversity of work currently being undertaken on the regional landscapes of the British Bronze Age and the progress which has been made in both theoretical and interpretive debate. Together these papers reflect the vibrancy of current research and promote a closer marriage of landscape, site and material culture studies. CONTENTS: Settlement in Scotland during the Second Millennium BC (P Ashmore) ; Place and Space in the Cambridgeshire Bronze Age (T Malim) ; Exploring Bronze Age Norfolk: Longham and Bittering (T Ashwin) ; Ritual Activity at the Foot of the Gog Magog Hills, Cambridge (M Hinman) ; The Bronze Age of Manchester Airport: Runway 2 (D Garner) ; Place and Memory in Bronze Age Wessex (D Field) ; Bronze Age Agricultural Intensification in the Thames Valley and Estuary (D Yates) ; The 'Community of Builders': The Barleycroft Post Alignments (C Evans and M Knight) ; 'Breaking New Ground': Land Tenure and Fieldstone Clearance during the Bronze Age (R Johnston) ; Tenure and Territoriality in the British Bronze Age: A Question of Varying Social and Geographical Scales (W Kitchen) ; A Later Bronze Age Landscape on the Avon Levels: Settlement: Settlement, Shelters and Saltmarsh at Cabot Park (M Locock) ; Reading Business Park: The Results of Phases 1 and 2 (A Brossler) ; Leaving Home in the Cornish Bronze Age: Insights into Planned Abandonment Processes (J A Nowakowski) ; Body Metaphors and Technologies of Transformation in the English Middle and Late Bronze Age (J Bruck) ; A Time and a Place for Bronze (M Barber) ; Firstly, Let's get Rid of Ritual (C Pendleton) ; Mining and Prospection for Metals in Early Bronze Age Britain - Making Claims within the Archaeological Landscape (S Timberlake) ; The Times, They are a Changin': Experiencing Continuity and Development in the Early Bronze Age Funerary Rituals of Southwestern Britain (M A Owoc) ; Round Barrows in a Circular World: Monumentalising Landscapes in Early Bronze Age Wessex (A Watson) ; Enduring Images? Image Production and Memory in Earlier Bronze Age Scotland (A Jones) ; Afterward: Back to the Bronze Age
Download or read book Stone Worlds written by Barbara Bender and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents an innovative experiment in presenting the results of a large-scale, multidisciplinary archaeological project. The well-known authors and their team examined the Neolithic and Bronze Age landscapes on Bodmin Moor of Southwest England, especially the site of Leskernick. The result is a multivocal, multidisciplinary telling of the stories of Bodmin Moor—both ancient and modern—using a large number of literary genres and academic disciplines. Dialogue, storytelling, poetry, photo essays and museum exhibits all appear in the volume, along with contributions from archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, geologists, and ecologists. The result is a major synthesis of the Bronze Age settlements and ritual sites of the Moor, contextualized within the Bronze Ages of southwestern and central Britain, and a tracing of the changing meaning of this landscape over the past five thousand years. Of obvious interest to those in British prehistory, this is a substantial presentation of a groundbreaking project that will also be of interest to many concerned with the interpretation of social landscapes and the public presentation of archaeology.
Download or read book Monuments and Landscape in Atlantic Europe written by Chris Scarre and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Atlantic Europe is the zone par excellence of megalithic monuments, which encompass a wide range of earthen and stone constructions from inpressive stone circles to modest chambered tombs. A single basic concept lies behind this volume - that the intrinsic qualities encountered within the diverse landscapes pf Atlantic Europe both informed the settings chosen for the monuments and played a role in determining their form and visual appearance. Monuments and Landscape in Atlantic Europe goes significantly beyond the limits of existing debate by inviting archaeologists from different countries with the Atlantic zone (including Britain, France, Ireland, Spain and Sweden) to examine the relationship between landscape features and prehistoric monuments in their specialist regions. By placing the issue within a broader regional and intellectual context, the authors illustrate the diversity of current archaeological ideas and approaches converging around this central theme.
Download or read book A Living Landscape written by Stijn Arnoldussen and published by Sidestone Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, half the Netherlands is below sea level. Because of this, water-management is of key importance when it comes to maintaining present-day habitation of the Dutch low-lands. In prehistory, however, large parts of the Dutch landscape were highly dynamic due to ongoing fluvial sedimentation. Vast deltaic areas with ceaseless river activity formed the backdrop against which prehistoric occupation took place. Although such landscapes may seem inhospitable, the often excellently preserved archaeological evidence indicates that people lived in these lowlands throughout prehistory. This book describes why Bronze Age farmers were keen to settle here and how these prehistoric communities structured the landscape around their house-sites at various scales. Using a vast body of evidence from several large-scale excavations in the Dutch river area, the author reconstructs the changes in the cultural landscape over time. Starting from the Middle Neolithic, changing preferences for settlement site locations and changes in domestic architecture are traced in detail to the Iron Age. However, for proper understanding of the cultural landscape, not only settlements but also graves and patterns of object deposition - and their landscape characteristics - are discussed. By using evidence from over 50 major excavations, yielding over 300 house plans, this book contains by far the richest data-set on Dutch Bronze Age settlements. Most of these results have not previously been published in English, making this book of over 500 pages a true academic treasure for an international audience. The in-depth presentation of Bronze Age settlement sites, as well as the critical discussion of models and premises current in later prehistoric settlement archaeology, have an important relevance stretching beyond the Dutch lowland areas on which it is based. The wealth of high-quality Dutch data is presented as a synthesized (yet well-annotated) narrative, that rises above mere site interpretation, even more so due to its landscape-scale focus. Therefore this book is a must-have for those interested in later prehistoric cultural landscapes and settlement archaeology.
Download or read book Landscape and Identity written by Kurt D. Springs and published by British Archaeological Reports Oxford Limited. This book was released on 2015 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chalcolithic wedge tombs of Ireland represent a dramatic re-emergence of megalithism over a millennium after most Neolithic megaliths were built and many centuries after most had gone out of use. This resurgence of building monuments associated with the dead may well have been associated with a period of social instability caused by the expansion of exchange networks and associated with the introduction of metallurgy. Regional, group, and individual identities all seem to have undergone change at this time, probably in a dynamic demographic context. Variations in the distribution and scale of wedge tombs in Co. Clare, on the west coast of Ireland, provide an interesting study that may reveal a pattern of clan affiliations, status competition, and enduring links to an important and ancient locale.
Download or read book Marshland Communities and Cultural Landscapes written by Christopher Evans and published by Haddenham Project. This book was released on 2006 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the context of Haddenham project's innovative landscape surveys, this book covers four sites excavated at Haddenham, providing insights into death and ritual in a changing prehistoric environment. Moving on to later periods, it reveals how Iron Age and Romano-British communities adapted to the wetland environment.
Download or read book Social Orders and Social Landscapes written by Charles W. Hartley and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-10 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Orders and Social Landscapes marks a new direction in research for Eurasian archaeology that focuses on how people lived in their local environment and interacted with their near and distant neighbours, rather than on overarching comparisons of archaeological culture complexes. Stemming from the 2005 University of Chicago Eurasian Archaeology Conference, the papers collected here reflect this new research agenda, though the way in which each author addressed the theme of the conference, and thus the book, was strikingly varied. This diversity arises out of the field’s intellectual flux driven by the principled engagement of the rich analytical traditions of the Soviet/CIS, Anglo-American, and European schools. Despite the variability in approaches and subject matter, several key themes emerged: 1) the reinterpretation culture categories by examining particular aspects of social life; 2) the role social memory plays in the production of landscape and place; 3) the influence of the built environment on societies; and 4) the ways in which economic considerations affect social orders and landscapes. The result is a book that helps to re-image Eurasia as a complex landscape fragmented by historically contingent and shifting ecological and social boundaries rather than a bounded mosaic of culture areas or environmental zones. “Scholarly research on Eurasia was transformed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Entire areas and fields of research became accessible to European and American scholars for the first time, resulting in the emergence of new centers specializing in primary field investigations throughout the vast, politically transformed landmass of Eurasia. One such center is the University of Chicago that has recently sponsored two large international conferences on Eurasian archaeology. Social Orders and Social Landscapes is the product of the second Chicago conference held in spring 2005. The editors of the volume should be proud of their efforts that have resulted in such a broad ranging and prompt publication. The articles encompass a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including archaeology, history, art history, palynology, and zooarchaeology; extend chronologically from Neolithic and Bronze Age times to the formation of national identity in Turkey in the early 20th century; and range geographically from Europe to China. Several articles reconstruct basic subsistence activities; others analyze distinctive settlement types and political and cultural frontiers, including the assimilation and emergence of new, self-defined ethnic groups and the selective adoption of new systems of religious belief. What unites this diverse collection is their consistent emphasis on the social construction of reality and the production of social landscapes and memories that altered perceptions of the physical world and mediated the practical activities that here have been convincingly reconstructed from the archaeological record. In so doing, rigid stereotypes are questioned and novel interpretations persuasively advanced. Early Bronze Age pastoralism on the south Russian steppes did not consist exclusively of herding animals nor was it combined, as it was later in the Iron Age, with the pursuit of agriculture; rather, D. Anthony and D. Brown suggest that at least in the Samara river valley the herding of animals occurred along side the intensive gathering of wild, nutritionally rich plants. The kalas of ancient Chorasmia are not cities, nor even proto-urban formations, but rather are large, heavily fortified enclosures meant to repel attacks of armed nomadic cavalry. They represent a continuation of a distinct Central Asian settlement pattern that began in the Bronze Age and that formed the center of a landscape divided into contiguous, self-contained oases. The Mongols not only herded livestock, but also farmed, fished, hunted, and traded throughout the vast area that they had conquered, uniting most of Eurasia into a single, economically integrated system. New perspectives proliferate throughout this richly detailed and extremely broad ranging collected volume.” — Phil Kohl, Professor of Anthropology and the Kathryn W. Davis Professor of Slavic Studies at Wellesley College “ “Social Orders and Social Landscapes” is a stimulating addition to the still small literature in English making the rich datasets from the archaeology of Eurasia widely accessible to Western scholars. The authors of the eighteen chapters analyze data from China to the Mediterranean, from the fourth millennium BCE through the fourteenth century CE, with the tools of art and architectural history, text analysis, paleobotany and paleozoology, and anthropological theory, among others. The product of a conference at the University of Chicago, this book fulfils the goal of the graduate student organizers to apply interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the archaeology and history of the Eurasian landmass in local terms through a focus on “how people lived in their local environments.” In the decade and a half since the end of the Soviet Union, scholarly communication has broadened and the mutual influences have stimulated many new and thought provoking views on the Eurasian past. This book is an exemplary product of the new scholarly discourse.” — Karen S. Rubinson, Research Scholar, Department of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University
Download or read book Past Landscapes written by Annette Haug and published by . This book was released on 2018-12-14 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Past Landscapes presents theoretical and practical attempts of scholars and scientists, who were and are active within the Kiel Graduate School "Human Development in Landscapes" (GSHDL), in order to disentangle a wide scope of research efforts on past landscapes. Landscapes are understood as products of human-environmental interaction. At the same time, they are arenas, in which societal and cultural activities as well as receptions of environments and human developments take place. Thus, environmental processes are interwoven into human constraints and advances. This book presents theories, concepts, approaches and case studies dealing with human development in landscapes. On the one hand, it becomes evident that only an interdisciplinary approach can cover the manifold aspects of the topic. On the other hand, this also implies that the very different approaches cannot be reduced to a simplistic uniform definition of landscape. This shortcoming proves nevertheless to be an important strength. The umbrella term 'landscape' proves to be highly stimulating for a large variety of different approaches. The first part of our book deals with a number of theories and concepts, the second part is concerned with approaches to landscapes, whereas the third part introduces case studies for human development in landscapes. As intended by the GSHDL, the reader might follow our approach to delve into the multi-faceted theories, concepts and practices on past landscapes: from events, processes and structures in environmental and produced spaces to theories, concepts and practices concerning past societies.
Download or read book Places of Special Virtue written by Vicki Cummings and published by . This book was released on 2017-02-20 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the landscape settings of megalithic chambered monuments in Wales. Set against a broader theoretical discussion on the significance of the landscape, the authors consider the role of visual landscapes in prehistory, meanings attached to the landscape, and the values and beliefs invested in it. Wales is rich in Neolithic monuments, but the general absence of certain classic monumental forms found in the rest of Britain and Ireland, such as causewayed enclosures, henges, and cursus monuments, seems to have marginalised the Welsh record from many wider discussions on the Neolithic. Instead of seeing Wales as an area which lacks many of these 'classic' components, Cummings and Whittle argue that Wales has its own unique and individual Neolithic which is simply different from the Neolithic found further to the east. It is suggested that this difference may relate to an essentially mobile existence, with strong links back to the Mesolithic period. The authors present three detailed case studies, examining the settings of sites in south-west, north-west and south-east Wales. They outline the history of research for each region, including the previous classification of the monuments and any excavations, and describe the specific landscape settings of the monuments. They assess the significance of a variety of landscape features which would have been visible from the monuments, in particular emphasising the mythological and symbolic significance of the sea, rivers and mountains. An illustrated inventory of sites completes the volume.
