Geographical Information Systems has moved from the domain of the computer specialist into the wider archaeological community, providing it with an exciting new research method. This clearly written but rigorous book provides a comprehensive guide to that use. Topics covered include: the theoretical context and the basics of GIS; data acquisition including database design; interpolation of elevation models; exploratory data analysis including spatial queries; statistical spatial analysis; map...

Technology refers to any set of standardised procedures for transforming raw materials into finished products. Innovation consists of any change in technology which has tangible and lasting effect on human practices, whether or not it provides utilitarian advantages. Prehistoric societies were never static, but the tempo of innovation occasionally increased to the point that we can refer to transformation taking place. Prehistorians must therefore identify factors promoting or hindering innov...

At the end of the 5th millennium BCE, some of the vastest settlements of the time emerged on the forest steppe north of the Black Sea. The largest of these sites were found between the Southern Bug and Dnieper river. There they occur only tens of kilometres apart and are assumed to be partly coeval. The Trypillia 'mega-sites' reached sizes of up to 320 hectares with up to 3000 buildings in one place. During their peak times as many as 11.000 people could have lived in one of those settlements.

But how did people come together in these Trypillia 'mega-sites' with several thousand dwellings? How long were such sites inhabited, and how many people lived there? Were these settlements the first towns, preceding the Mesopotamian development? To address these questions, this book presents the results of the investigations at the Maidanets'ke 'mega-site'...

This volume is a collection of 19 articles in three sections reporting on recent research on the archaeology of shipwrecks, harbours, and maritime landscapes in the Mediterranean region. The shipwrecks section looks at excavated vessels from Mazotos, Modi Island, the port of Rhodes, Naples, and Narbonne, as well as a sailing reconstruction of the Ma‘agan Mikhael ship.

The harbours section includes articles on areas from the Levant to Seville looking at a variety of harbour defence systems a...

One of the most puzzling phenomena of the European Bronze Age, is that many communities buried or otherwise hid large numbers of valuable bronze objects, but never returned to retrieve them. This book focuses on the metal finds of one small European region, the southern Netherlands and the adjacent part of North Belgium.Fontijn considers the question of why so many elaborate bronze objects have been found in watery locations in this landscape, such as rivers, streams, and marshes, while so fe...

This volume collects papers on the pre-Corded Ware horizon in central Europe and adjacent areas (i.e. from c. 3500 – 2800 BC). This phase is very patchily researched, partly also because certain kinds of evidence, notably domestic architecture and burials, are rare or absent in many regions. This has occasionally been interpreted as signs of a major crisis and population bottleneck, which in turn facilitated the migration of new populations from the steppe, bringing with them amongst others...

An Introduction to Museum Archaeology provides a comprehensive survey and synthesis of all aspects of current museum practice in relation to the discipline of archaeology. Drawing heavily on examples it deconstructs the different challenges posed by trying to tell archaeological stories in museum buildings, and on related sites. The final section sums up the state of museum archaeology in the early 21st century and discusses the major issues it is currently confronting.

There is also a detail...

Een onderzoek naar de overgang van jagen en verzamelen naar landbouw, het zogenoemde neolithisatieproces.

Het begrip van het neolithisatieproces is in de laatste decennia in Nederland aanzienlijk toegenomen. Een samenhangend overzicht van het archeobotanisch onderzoek naar de overgang van jagen en verzamelen naar landbouw, ontbrak tot nu toe.

Dit proefschrift heeft tot doel een beter begrip van het neolithisatieproces in de Nederlandse 'wetlands' te bieden. De auteur doet dit door middel van d...

Aegean archaeology has mainly concentrated on Prehistoric and Greco-Roman times and has provided relatively little information on human activity and material culture in the medieval period. Historical research concerning the medieval era is sufficiently developed but archaeological research on the medieval Aegean has mainly focused on matters of art and architecture. In fact, we have an overall picture of the medieval and post-medieval periods for only a few islands of the Aegean. This ASLU v...

This 43th volume of the ASLU series presents a useful GIS procedure to study settlement patterns in landscape archaeology. In several Mediterranean regions archaeological sites have been mapped by fieldwalking surveys, producing large amounts of data. These legacy site-based survey data represent an important resource to study ancient settlement organization. Methodological procedures are necessary to cope with the limits of these data, and more importantly with the distortions on data patter...