Download or read book The Social Organization of Early Copper Age Tribes on the Great Hungarian Plain written by William A. Parkinson and published by BAR International Series. This book was released on 2006 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The research presented in this study focuses upon a 2,000 sq km area in the Körös River Valley, in northern Békés County, eastern Hungary. Within this region, the author analyzes two separate lines of evidence that relate to the changing patterns of social interaction and integration during the Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age periods. Chapter 1 details the scope of the project Chapter 2 develops the theoretical framework. Chapter Three discusses the methodological correlates of this theoretical framework, and addresses the archaeological problem of inferring dynamic social systems from static material remains. The middle range theory and bridging arguments are presented and the problems of measuring social interaction and integration in prehistoric contexts are discussed. Chapter Four presents the archaeological background necessary for understanding the radical social changes that occurred on the Great Hungarian Plain, ca. 4,500 BC. Chapter Five presents the specific research design. Chapter Six provides an overview of the study area and presents the sites and assemblage included in the subsequent analyses. Chapter Seven details the analysis of integration throughout the study area, based upon the spatial data and Chapter Eight lays out the analyses of Early Copper Age interaction, based upon the stylistic data from the Early Copper Age ceramic assemblages. Chapter Nine integrates the analyses presented in Chapters Seven and Eight into a coherent model and attempts to place the study area into the wider temporal and geographic context of the Great Hungarian Plain, and into the wider context of anthropological archaeology.
Download or read book The Social Organization of Early Copper Age Tribes on the Great Hungarian Plain written by William A. Parkinson and published by British Archaeological Reports Oxford Limited. This book was released on 2006 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The research presented in this study focuses upon a 2,000 sq km area in the Körös River Valley, in northern Békés County, eastern Hungary. Within this region, the author analyzes two separate lines of evidence that relate to the changing patterns of social interaction and integration during the Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age periods. Chapter 1 details the scope of the project Chapter 2 develops the theoretical framework. Chapter Three discusses the methodological correlates of this theoretical framework, and addresses the archaeological problem of inferring dynamic social systems from static material remains. The middle range theory and bridging arguments are presented and the problems of measuring social interaction and integration in prehistoric contexts are discussed. Chapter Four presents the archaeological background necessary for understanding the radical social changes that occurred on the Great Hungarian Plain, ca. 4,500 BC. Chapter Five presents the specific research design. Chapter Six provides an overview of the study area and presents the sites and assemblage included in the subsequent analyses. Chapter Seven details the analysis of integration throughout the study area, based upon the spatial data and Chapter Eight lays out the analyses of Early Copper Age interaction, based upon the stylistic data from the Early Copper Age ceramic assemblages. Chapter Nine integrates the analyses presented in Chapters Seven and Eight into a coherent model and attempts to place the study area into the wider temporal and geographic context of the Great Hungarian Plain, and into the wider context of anthropological archaeology.
Download or read book From Prehistoric Villages to Cities written by Jennifer Birch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the evolution of village societies and the transition to a ‘Neolithic’ way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities. Between these two landmarks in human cultural development lies a critical stage in social and political evolution. Throughout world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities have come together into larger and more complex social formations. These community aggregates were, essentially, middle-range; situated between the earliest villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. This volume explores the social processes involved in the creation and maintenance of aggregated communities and how they brought about revolutionary transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture. While there have been a number of studies that address coalescence from a regional perspective, less is understood about how aggregated communities functioned internally. The key premise explored in this volume is that large-scale, long-term cultural transformations were ultimately enacted in the context of daily practices, interactions, and what might be otherwise considered the mundane aspects of everyday life. How did these processes play out "on the ground" in diverse and historically contingent settings? What are the strategies and mechanisms that people adopt in order to facilitate living in larger social formations? What changes in social relations occur when people come together? This volume employs a broadly cross-cultural approach to interrogating these questions, employing case studies which span four continents and more than 10,000 years of human history.
Download or read book Reimagining Regional Analyses written by Tina L. Thurston and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reimagining Regional Analysis explores the interplay between different methodological and theoretical approaches to regional analysis in archaeology. The past decades have seen significant advances in methods and instrumental techniques, including geographic information systems, the new availability of aerial and satellite images, and greater emphasis on non-traditional data, such as pollen, soil chemistry and botanical remains. At the same time, there are new insights into human impacts on ancient environments and increased recognition of the importance of micro-scale changes in human society. These factors combine to compel a reimagining of regional archaeology. The authors in this volume focus on understanding individual trajectories and the historically contingent relationships between the social, the economic, the political and the sacred as reflected regionally. Among topics considered are the social construction of landscape; use of spatial patterning to interpret social variability; paleoenvironmental reconstruction and human impacts; and social memory and social practice. This book opens a discourse around the spatial patterning of the contingent, recursive relationships between people, their social activities and the environment.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Inequality written by Orlando Cerasuolo and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Archaeology of Inequality explores the different aspects of social boundaries and articulation by comparing several interdisciplinary approaches for the analysis of the archaeological data, as well as actual case studies from the Prehistory to the Classical world. The book explores slavery, gender, ethnicity and economy as intersecting areas of study within the larger framework of inequality and exemplifies to what degree archaeologists can identify and analyze different patterns of inequality.
Download or read book CAA2014 21st Century Archaeology written by F. Giligny and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a selection of papers proposed for the Proceedings of the 42nd Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference (CAA), hosted at Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University from 22nd to 25th April 2014.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Tribal Societies written by William A. Parkinson and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2002-03-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropological archaeologists have long attempted to develop models that will let them better understand the evolution of human social organization. In our search to understand how chiefdoms and states evolve, and how those societies differ from egalitarian 'bands', we have neglected to develop models that will aid the understanding of the wide range of variability that exists between them. This volume attempts to fill this gap by exploring social organization in tribal - or 'autonomous village' - societies from several different ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological contexts - from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period in the Near East to the contemporary Jivaro of Amazonia.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Nucleation in the Old World written by Attila Gyucha and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen papers take advantage of advances in archaeological methods and theory to explore the role of the built environment in expressing and shaping community organization and identity at prehistoric and historic nucleated settlements and early cities in the Old World.
Download or read book Bronze Age Tell Communities in Context An Exploration into Culture Society and the Study of European Prehistory Part 2 written by Tobias L. Kienlin and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2020-12-31 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second part of a study on Bronze Age tells and on our approaches towards an understanding of this fascinating way of life, drawing on the material remains of long-term architectural stability and references back to ancestral place.
Download or read book Coming Together written by Attila Gyucha and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 nucleations origins, pathways to sustainability, and the transformative role of these sites in sociopolitical and cultural change.
Download or read book Current Approaches to Tells in the Prehistoric Old World written by Antonio Blanco-González and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deeply stratified settlements are a distinctive site type featuring prominently in diverse later prehistoric landscapes of the Old World. Their massive materiality has attracted the curiosity of lay people and archaeologists alike. Nowadays a wide variety of archaeological projects are tracking the lifestyles and social practices that led to the building-up of such superimposed artificial hills. However, prehistoric tell-dwelling communities are too often approached from narrow local perspectives or discussed within strict time- and culture-specific debates. There is a great potential to learn from such ubiquitous archaeological manifestations as the physical outcome of cross-cutting dynamics and comparable underlying forces irrespective of time and space. This volume tackles tells and tell-like sites as a transversal phenomenon whose commonalities and divergences are poorly understood yet may benefit from cross-cultural comparison. Thus, the book intends to assemble a representative range of ongoing theory – and science –based fieldwork projects targeting this kind of sites. With the aim of encompassing a variety of social and material dynamics, the volume’s scope is diachronic – from the Earliest Neolithic up to the Iron Age–, and covers a very large region, from Iberia in Western Europe to Syria in the Middle East. The core of the volume comprises a selection of the most remarkable contributions to the session with a similar title celebrated in the European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting held at Barcelona in 2018. In addition, the book includes invited chapters to round out underrepresented areas and periods in the EAA session with relevant research programmes in the Old World. To accomplish such a cross-cultural course, the book takes a case-based approach, with contributions disparate both in their theoretical foundations – from household archaeology, social agency and formation theory – and their research strategies – including geophysical survey, microarchaeology and high-resolution excavation and dating.
Download or read book Bronze Age Tell Communities in Context An Exploration Into Culture Society and the Study of European Prehistory Part 1 written by Tobias L. Kienlin and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study challenges current modelling of Bronze Age tell communities in the Carpathian Basin in terms of the evolution of functionally-differentiated, hierarchical or 'proto-urban' society under the influence of Mediterranean palatial centres.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe written by Chris Fowler and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2015 with total page 1201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe' provides a comprehensive, geographically extensive, thematic overview of the European Neolithic - from Iberia to Russia and from Norway to Malta - offering both a general introduction and a clear exploration of key issues and current debates surrounding evidence and interpretation.
Download or read book Archaeometallurgy in Global Perspective written by Benjamin W. Roberts and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of ancient metals in their social and cultural contexts has been a topic of considerable interest in archaeology and ancient history for decades, partly due to the modern dependence on technology and man-made materials. The formal study of Archaeometallurgy began in the 1970s-1980s, and has seen a recent growth in techniques, data, and theoretical movements. This comprehensive sourcebook on Archaeometallurgy provides an overview of earlier research as well as a review of modern techniques, written in an approachable way. Covering an extensive range of archaeological time-periods and regions, this volume will be a valuable resource for those studying archaeology worldwide. It provides a clear, straightforward look at the available methodologies, including: • Smelting processes • Slag analysis • Technical Ceramics • Archaeology of Mining and Field Survey • Ethnoarchaeology • Chemical Analysis and Provenance Studies • Conservation Studies With chapters focused on most geographic regions of Archaeometallurgical inquiry, researchers will find practical applications for metallurgical techniques in any area of their study. Ben Roberts is a specialist in the early metallurgy and later prehistoric archaeology of Europe. He was the Curator of the European Copper and Bronze Age collections at the British Museum between 2007 and 2012 and is now a Lecturer in Prehistoric Europe in the Departm ent of Archaeology at the Durham University, UK. Chris Thornton is a specialist in the ancient metallurgy of the Middle East, combining anthropological theory with archaeometrical analysis to understand the development and diffusion of metallurgical technologies throughout Eurasia. He is currently a Consulting Scholar of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, where he received his PhD in 2009, and the Lead Program Officer of research grants at the National Geographic Society.
Download or read book Is There a British Chalcolithic written by Michael J. Allen and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2012-06-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chalcolithic, the phase in prehistory when the important technical development of adding tin to copper to produce bronze had not yet taken place, is not a term generally used by British prehistorians and whether there is even a definable phase is debated. Is there a British Chalcolithic? brings together many leading authorities in 20 papers that address this question. Papers are grouped under several headings. Definitions, Issues and Debate considers whether appropriate criteria apply that define a distinctive period (c. 2450 - 2150 cal BC) in cultural, social, and temporal terms with particular emphasis on the role and status of metal artefacts and Beaker pottery. Continental Perspectives addresses various aspects of comparative regions of Europe where a Chalcolithic has been defined. Around Britain and Ireland presents a series of large-scale regional case studies where authors argue for and against the adoption of the term. The final section Economy, Landscapes and Monuments , looks at aspects of economy, land-use and burial tradition and provides a detailed consideration of the Stonehenge and Avebury landscapes during the period in question. The volume contains much detailed information on sites and artefacts, and comprehensive radiocarbon datasets that will be invaluable to scholars and students studying this enigmatic but pivotal episode of British Prehistory.
Download or read book Bringing Down the Iron Curtain written by Klára Šabatová and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the fall of communism, archaeological research in Central and Eastern European countries has seen a large influx of new projects and ideas, fueled by bilateral contacts, Europe-wide circulation of scholars and access to research literature. This volume is the first study which relates these issues specifically to Bronze Age Archaeology.
Download or read book Trypillia Mega Sites and European Prehistory written by Johannes Müller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-22 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In European prehistory population agglomerations of more than 10,000 inhabitants per site are a seldom phenomenon. A big surprise to the archaeological community was the discovery of Trypillia mega-sites of more than 250 hectares and with remains of more than 2000 houses by a multidisciplinary approach of Soviet and Ukrainian archaeology, including aerial photography, geophysical prospection and excavations nearly 50 years ago. The extraordinary development took place at the border of the North Pontic Forest Steppe and Steppe zone ca. 4100–3400 BCE. Since then many questions arose which are of main relevance: Why, how and under which environmental conditions did Trypillia mega-sites develop? How long did they last? Were social and/or ecological reasons responsible for this social experiment? Are Trypillia and the similar sized settlement of Uruk two different concepts of social behaviour? Paradigm change in fieldwork and excavation strategies enabled research teams during the last decade to analyse the mega-sites in their spatial and social complexity. High precision geophysics, target excavations and a new design of systematic field strategies deliver empirical data representative for the large sites. Archaeological research contributed immensely to aspects of anthropogenic induced steppe development and subsistence concepts that did not reach the carrying capacities. Probabilistic models based on 14C-dates made the contemporaneity of the mega-site house structures most probable. In consequence, Trypillia mega-sites are an independent European phenomenon that contrasts both concepts of urbanism and social stratification that is seen with similar demographic figures in Mesopotamia. The new Trypillia research can be read as the methodological progress in European archaeology.
