EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book The Evolution of Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscapes

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.

Book The Evolution of Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscapes

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.

Book The Cultural Landscape

    Book Details:
  • Author : Hilary H. Birks
  • Publisher : Cambridge University Press
  • Release : 1988
  • ISBN : 9780521344357
  • Pages : 544 pages

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.

Book A Bronze Age Landscape in the Russian Steppes

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.

Book A Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscape in Northamptonshire

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.

Book Neolithic Landscapes

Download or read book Neolithic Landscapes written by Peter Topping and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2002-12-01 with total page 340 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'.

Book Marshland Communities and Cultural Landscapes

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.

Book A Living Landscape

    Book Details:
  • Author : Stijn Arnoldussen
  • Publisher : Sidestone Press
  • Release : 2008
  • ISBN : 9088900108
  • Pages : 538 pages

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.

Book Prehistoric and Roman Landscapes

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.

Book STONE WORLDS

    Book Details:
  • Author : Barbara Bender
  • Publisher : Left Coast Press
  • Release : 2007
  • ISBN : 1598742191
  • Pages : 477 pages

Download or read book STONE WORLDS written by Barbara Bender and published by Left Coast Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 477 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, that of the Neolithic and Bronze Age landscapes on Bodmin Moor of Southwest England.

Book Bronze Age Landscapes

Download or read book Bronze Age Landscapes written by Joanna Bruck and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2002-02-01 with total page 503 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

Book Monuments and Landscape in Atlantic Europe

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.

Book The Ceremonial Development and Reuse of Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscapes

Download or read book The Ceremonial Development and Reuse of Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscapes written by Rachel Ford and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Beyond Barrows

    Book Details:
  • Author : David R. Fontijn
  • Publisher : Sidestone Press
  • Release : 2013
  • ISBN : 9088901082
  • Pages : 284 pages

Download or read book Beyond Barrows written by David R. Fontijn and published by Sidestone Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe is dotted with tens of thousands of prehistoric barrows. In spite of their ubiquity, little is known on the role they had in pre- and protohistoric landscapes. In 2010, an international group of archaeologists came together at the conference of the European Association of Archaeologists in The Hague to discuss and review current research on this topic. This book presents the proceedings of that session. The focus is on the prehistory of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, but also includes an excursion to huge prehistoric mounds in the southeast of North America. One contribution presents new evidence on how the immediate environment of Neolithic Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture megaliths was ordered, another one discusses the role of remarkable single and double post alignments around Bronze and Iron Age burial mounds. Zooming out, several chapters deal with the place of barrows in the broader landscape. The significance of humanly-managed heath in relation to barrow groups is discussed, and one contribution emphasizes how barrow orderings not only reflect spatial organization, but are also important as conceptual anchors structuring prehistoric perception. Other authors, dealing with Early Neolithic persistent places and with Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age urnfields, argue that we should also look beyond monumentality in order to understand long-term use of "ritual landscapes". The book contains an important contribution by the well-known Swedish archaeologist Tore Artelius on how Bronze Age barrows were structurally re-used by pre-Christian Vikings. This is his last article, written briefly before his death. This book is dedicated to his memory. This publication is part of the Ancestral Mounds Research Project of the University of Leiden.

Book Landscape and Identity

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kurt D. Springs
  • Publisher : British Archaeological Reports Oxford Limited
  • Release : 2015
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 128 pages

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.

Book Appendices to A Living Landscape

Download or read book Appendices to A Living Landscape written by Stijn Arnoldussen and published by Sidestone Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication contains the six main appendices to the PhD thesis "A Living Landscape: Bronze Age settlement sites in the Dutch river area (c. 2000-800 BC)" by Stijn Arnoldussen which was published by Sidestone Press in 2008. That study comprises an analysis of the nature (i.e. the constituent components) and dynamics (i.e. diachronic approaches to settlement dynamics) of the settlement sites. It aims to integrate and synthesize interpretations of Bronze Age settlements based on a number of large-scale excavations. The discussion of the archaeological and geological research on these sites, as well as more detailed source criticism and long-term overviews of the occupation histories of six (c. 30 km2) macro-regions around them, could for sake of conciseness not be incorporated into the main stud's text. However, such discussions contain critical information necessary to interpret the results and to evaluate their representativeness, and this information is now made available in this separate publication. While these texts are primarily appendices to the thesis, they can be read separately by those who are particularly interested in the the excavations at Zijderveld, Rumpt - Eigenblok, Wijk bij Duurstede, Meteren - De Bogen, Lienden - Kesteren or Dodewaard, which have been published in Dutch. In addition, the appendices provide a recent overview of the palaeogeographical development and occupation history of six large macro-regions in the Dutch river area. This information may be of relevance to those studying other sites within these macro-regions for the period under study (c. 2000-800 BC). Stijn Arnoldussen studied the prehistory of northwestern Europe at Leiden University and won the 'W. A. van Es' award for the best Dutch archaeological MA thesis. From 2003 to 2007 he was involved in a research project that focused on the Bronze Age cultural landscape in the Dutch river area. The present book is a result of this project. Stijn Arnoldussen is also co-editor of the book 'Bronze Age settlements in the Low Countries' (Oxbow Books, 2008). He is presently employed as a senior researcher with the Dutch National Service for Archaeology, Cultural Landscape and Built Heritage (RACM) and starting November 2008, he will be employed as a lecturer in later prehistory at the University of Groningen.

Book Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland

Download or read book Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland written by Gabriel Cooney and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 2000 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, the issue of local, regional and wider identities is used to place Neolithic Ireland in a wider west European context."--BOOK JACKET.