Archaeology

This book provides the first modern synthesis of the archaeology of Skye and Western Isles: a region with some of the finest and best-preserved archaeological monuments in Europe. Our understanding of the region has been transformed in recent years through the results of new archaeological excavations, field surveys, and reassessments of earlier work from the nineteenth century onwards. From the ritual monuments of the Neolithic period, notably the great stone circles at Calanais in Lewis, to the spectacular Iron Age brochs and wheelhouses of the Iron Age, the exceptional preservation of key monuments offers insights into the broader currents of British and European prehistory. In later periods, the arrival of the Vikings in the Outer Hebrides is marked by a series of important archaeological discoveries casting new light on the nature and extent of cultural change. As well as covering the periods before the emergence of detailed written history, the book also addresses the archaeology of later periods, exploring the history of human settlement and society from earliest prehistory to the Clearances.

Archaeological artifacts have become a traded commodity in large part because the global reach of Western society allows easy access to the world's archaeological heritage. Acquired by the world's leading museums and private collectors, antiquities have been removed from archaeological sites, monuments, or cultural institutions and illegally traded. This book investigates the ways that commodifying artifacts fuels the destruction of archaeological heritage and considers what can be done to protect it. Despite growing national and international legislation to protect cultural heritage, increasing numbers of archaeological sites—among them, war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq—are subject to pillage as the monetary value of artifacts rises. Offering examinations of archaeological site looting, the antiquities trade, the ruin of cultural heritage resources, and the international efforts to combat their destruction, the chapters argue that the antiquities market impacts cultural heritage around the world and is a burgeoning global crisis.

As a discipline, archaeology often provides amazing insights into the past. But it can also illuminate the present, especially when investigations are undertaken to better examine the history of institutions such as colleges and universities. This book offers a series of case studies to reveal the ways archaeology can offer a more objective view of changes and transformations that have taken place on college campuses in the United States. From the tennis courts of the College of William and Mary to the “iconic paths, lawns, and well-ordered brick buildings” of Harvard University, this volume attempts to change the ways readers look at their alma maters — and at archaeology. Also included are studies of Michigan State, Notre Dame, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Illinois, North Carolina, Washington & Lee, Santa Clara, California, and Stanford.

The volume presents a broad array of bioarchaeological techniques that can illuminate the lives of individuals in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East and the promise of bioarchaeological research in this region. The authors present their results in a contextualized manner, considering a region's unique geographic, cultural, and historical situation throughout antiquity. The book's organization around specific research topics (mortuary practices and society, population movement and migration, health, disease, and diet), rather than specific methods, emphasizes the problem-oriented nature of these projects. This arrangement makes the book more accessible to archaeologists and historians wishing to familiarize themselves with bioarchaeology's potential, in addition to introducing bioarchaeologists working in other regions to the growing body of research in the Near East.

During the second millennium B.C. hundreds of villages were founded in peninsular India. The people of the Deccan Chalcolithic period relied on farming drought-resistant barley and wheat. They raised cattle, sheep, and goats; maintained hunting and foraging traditions; and utilized the resources gathered from local lakes and forest habitats for subsistence, construction, and fuel. Throughout this time, Chalcolithic people successfully colonized the peninsula despite the challenges of living in a semi-arid climate and unpredictable monsoon rainfall. By 1400 B.C. their settlements were thriving, populations were growing, and large regional centers were established. Yet, around 1000 B.C., the majority of these settlements were deserted. This book uses evidence from paleoclimate research, archaeology, and human skeletal material to examine life and death at three villages occupied during this time. Innovative methods of bioarchaeological analysis reveal complexity in the interactions between humans and their environment and suggest a new model for understanding this period of India's prehistory. Questions about human interactions with the environment thousands of years ago in India are interesting from an academic standpoint, but the insights we gain into the past are relevant in a contemporary context as we face the consequences of continued population growth, unsustainable lifestyles, degradation of local environments, and large-scale climate change. Having a longer view of the challenges, strategies, and consequences of human–environment interactions may prove helpful as we all develop strategies for dealing with contemporary environmental change.

This book represents an important shift in the interpretation of skeletal remains in the Americas. Until recently, bioarchaeology has focused on interpreting and analyzing populations. The chapters here examine how individuals fit into those larger populations. The overall aim is to demonstrate how bioarchaeologists can uniquely contribute to our understanding of the formation, representation, and repercussions of identity. The book combines historical and archaeological data with population-genetic analyses, biogeochemical analyses of human tooth enamel and bones, mortuary patterns, and body modifications. Case studies drawn from North, Central, and South American mortuary remains from AD 500 to the Colonial period examine a wide range of factors that make up identity, including ethnicity, age, gender, and social, political, and religious constructions. By adding a valuable biological element to the study of culture—a topic traditionally associated with social theorists, ethnographers, and historical archaeologies—the book aims to highlight the importance of skeletal evidence in helping us better understand our past.

This book is a compilation of osteobiographies: life histories of individuals whose remains were recovered from archaeological sites all over the world. The essays include contributions by some forty individuals and provide richly textured accounts of life in the past and of the process of bioarchaeological inquiry. Skeletal and dental analysis is augmented by information from oral history and legends, sagas, ethnography and ethnohistory, ancient DNA, bone chemistry, and the abundance of the archaeological record-all carefully woven into interpretations of the lives of artisans, healers, craftsmen, and farmers. Amply illustrated, the chapters present research results in a manner accessible to students and non-professionals, without glossing over the scientific aspects of the methods or oversimplifying the problems and limitations inherent in the research. The range of research methods and trajectories presented in these chapters exemplifies the creative, interdisciplinary nature of bioarchaeology and the unique contribution of this field to our understanding of the breadth of human experience.

Featuring a wealth of case studies on human skulls recovered from ethnographic and archaeological contexts around the world, this book focuses on the question of whose skulls and heads were collected and modified and why, whether as ancestors or enemies, as insiders or outsiders, as males, females or children. This volume includes discussions of osteological examinations, visual descriptions, iconography, taphonomy, and DNA, x-ray and isotope analyses to determine, for example, whether the skulls belonged to ancestors or enemies, as local or non-local residents. Emphasizing social identity and the use of the body in ritual, this book includes varied approaches to heads and skulls as both biological objects and as material culture. Bioarchaeological discussions of these skulls shed light on questions of identity as well as on cultural, economic, and political practices within past societies. Whether decorated, disembodied, or deformed, collected for display or hidden, or otherwise modified or curated, skulls, and their study serve to illustrate the potential of the abundance of information that can be obtained from a combined analysis of this notable part of the human body.

Bioarchaeology provides a body of theory, method, and data to investigate the origins and evolution of social violence in human groups going back in time for thousands of years. Case studies from different time periods and different cultures demonstrate the commonalities and differences among human groups with respect to the ways that culturally sanctioned violence is used. These richly detailed studies provide ways to examine the relationship between violence and lived experience, and between lived experience and cultural processes. The chapter authors use a variety of theoretical approaches to explain the human behaviors that maintain and perpetuate violent encounters within groups, as well as between groups. It is important to document long chronologies of human behavior because it becomes clearer how change can bring on violent responses (changes such as droughts, population pressure, resource acquisition, or status). These kinds of studies can be used to better understand how to prevent or eradicate violence in human groups today. This volume compels readers to view culturally sanctioned violence not as a necessary evil or an abhorrent behavior but as a way that human groups solve problems that they perceive they have. Ritual violence as part of ceremonies to bring people together, or male coalitions that go out and raid other groups for women and resources are examples where violence aids in solving problems within the culture. Anthropological perspectives on violence using bioarchaeological data from the past are a unique and valuable resource for those wishing to understand violence in all of its manifestations.

Cahokia is located in the northern expanse of the American Bottom, the largest of the Mississippian flood plains, and opposite St. Louis, Missouri. This book overturns the current political characterization of this largest known North American prehistoric site north of Mexico. Rather than treating Cahokia as the seat of a dominant Native American polity, a “paramount chiefdom”, the book argues that it must be given a religious characterization as a world renewal cult center. Furthermore, the social and economic powers that it manifests must not be seen to reside in Cahokia itself but in multiple world renewal cults distributed across the American Bottom and in the nearby upland regions. It also argues that Cahokia can be thought of as an affiliation of mutually autonomous cults that pooled their labor and other resources and established their collective mission as the performance of world renewal rituals by which to maintain and enhance the sacred powers of the cosmos. The cults, the book argues, adopted two forms of sacrifice: one was the incrementally staged manipulation of the deceased (burial, disinterment, bone cleaning, and reburial), with each unfolding step constituting a mortuary act having different and greater world renewal sacrificial force. The other was lethal human sacrifice—probably correlated with long distance warfare by which to procure victims.