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Virtually all aspects of human behavior show enormous variation both within and between cultural groups, including material culture, social organization and language. Using a Darwinian approach, this book seeks to explain this rich cultural variation.

This collection of original articles compares various key archaeological topics-agency, violence, social groups, diffusion-from evolutionary and interpretive perspectives.

Using examples as diverse as Egyptian mummies, Celtic tombs, Native American ceremonial bundles, and contemporary African textiles, twelve archaeologist and anthropologist contributors show how acts of wrapping and unwrapping are embedded in beliefs and thoughts of a particular time and place.

This volume reevaluates the role and social significance of plain pottery traditions in a range of early complex societies of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean from both historically specific perspectives and from a comparative point of view.

Using a combination of historical, archaeological, and scientific techniques is not an uncommon practice in archaeological interpretation. Rarely found, however, is a more overt critical consideration of how these data relate to each other. This volume provides such a critical consideration.

Contributors to this volume explore how the sense of touch can be utilized in museums and other cultural institutions to facilitate understanding and learning.

Rarely do archaeological studies provide critical consideration of how historical, archaeological, and scientific data relate to each other, or explicit attempts at demonstrating successful strategies for these kinds of interdisciplinary research. The authors in this volume provide such a critical consideration, examining a wide range of cultures, time periods, and materials.

Dame Kathleen Kenyon has always been a larger-than-life figure, likely the influential woman archaeologist of the 20th century. This biography of Kenyon recounts not only her many achievements in the field but also her personal side, known to very few of her contemporaries.

A long overdue advancement in ceramic studies, this volume sheds new light on the adoption and dispersal of pottery by non-agricultural societies of prehistoric Eurasia. Major contributions from Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia make this a truly international work that brings together different theories and material for the first time.

In this book contributions by archaeologists and numismatists from six countries address different aspects of how silver was used in both Scandinavia and the wider Viking world during the 8th to 11th centuries AD.

The haunting funerary paintings on wood coffins found in Roman Egypt still represent some of the most vivid images that come to us from the ancient world. Acting as a reference for scholars and general audiences, this title presents an authoritative presentation of the restored collection.

Examines a neglected period in the history of Egyptology, from the Moslem annexation of Egypt in the 7th century CE until the Ottoman conquest in the 16th century. This book is aimed at academics and students of archaeology, Islamic studies and Egyptology, as well as anyone with a general interest in Egyptian history.

Tackles the fundamental and broad-scale questions concerning the spread of early animal herding from its origins in the Near East into Europe beginning in the mid-10th millennium BC. Original work by more than 30 leading international researchers synthesises of our current knowledge about the origins and spread of animal domestication.

A long overdue advancement in ceramic studies, this volume sheds new light on the adoption and dispersal of pottery by non-agricultural societies of prehistoric Eurasia. Major contributions from Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia make this a truly international work that brings together different theories and material for the first time.

This book questions the value of the concept of 'agency', a term used in sociological and philosophical literature to refer to individual free will in archaeology using examples from European and Asian prehistory, classical Greece and Rome, the Inka and other Andean cultures.

The first major synthesis of African archaeobotany in decades, this book significantly advances our knowledge of relationship between agriculture and social complexity.

Authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in ancient Africa were made and unmade in their intersection with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power.

Provides a collection of papers focusing on the links between archaeology and the study of geological sediments and soils.

This volume of original chapters written by experts in the field offers a snapshot of how historical built spaces, past cultural landscapes, and archaeological distributions are currently being explored through computational social science.

A collection of research articles by European scholars assessing the state of environmental archaeology and its relationship to the field; along with discussions on how to present environmental issues in prehistory to the public.

A collection of papers connecting theory and method of archaeology with related disciplines of neoecology, paleoecology, and environmental science.

This volume is a set of a dozen case studies of innovative programs designed to attract the public to both archaeological sites and exhibits of archaeological artifacts. Papers deal with general issues of interpretation and presentation and cover British, Australian, European, and American settings.

The volume describes methods of identifying parenchymous remains of roots and tubers in archaeological sites as a way of analyzing diet among ancient peoples.

Explores the evidence left by the use of axes on wooden beams and tools found in waterlogged archaeological sites dating over 2000 years old.

This volume serves the reader as a family biography, a slice of the English colonial history, and an important introduction to the history of anthropology.

Written by one of the most renowned South American archaeologists, this book presents a study of the last ""undiscovered"" people of the Amazon. Through a comprehensive ethno-archaeological portrait of material culture ""in the making"", it makes methodological and conceptual advances in the interpretation of hunter-gather societies.

How archaeologists communicate their research to the public through the media and how the media view archaeologists has become an important feature in the contemporary world of academic and professional archaeologists. In this volume, a group of archaeologists, many with media backgrounds, address the wide range of questions in this intersection of fields.