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...

Dieses Buch behandelt die Frage, ob und wie sich soziale Identitäten in der deutschen Mittelgebirgszone zum Ende des 3. Jahrtausends v. Chr. veränderten. Es wird davon ausgegangen, dass die Veränderungen der Bestattungssitten im Übergang vom Spät- zum Endneolithikum von Migrationsprozessen aus der nordpontischen Steppenlandschaft beeinflusst wurden.

Um die Frage der Auswirkungen dieser Migrationsprozesse auf den Wandel der sozialen Identitäten und Bestattungssitten zu beantworten, werde...

Seeufersiedlungen mit Feuchtbodenerhaltung sind für die Erforschung des Neolithikums des Alpenvorlandes von herausragender Bedeutung. Die ausserordentlich gute Erhaltung der Siedlungsschichten lässt weitgehende Einblicke in die Lebensweise der prähistorischen Menschen zu. Das Hinterland der grossen Seen ist im Gegensatz dazu weniger gut untersucht. Eine Schlüsselrolle bei dessen Erforschung nehmen die zahlreichen Kleinseen des Schweizerischen Mittellandes ein. Auch an deren Ufern finden s...

Social inequality is a subject of contemporary concerns. Life capabilities and the access to resources vary significantly in rich and poor countries, between elites and others. Furthermore, inequalities based on bio-anthropological and non-bio-anthropological causes are almost universal. Accordingly, inequality was also inherent in past societies and archaeologists have continually examined and interpreted social inequalities in sources such as burial grounds.

This book continues such analyse...

The problem of the social dimension of technology and transformation seen in the perspective of the habitus has been repeatedly undertaken in various works. However, the complexity of these phenomena causes subsequent attempts to be presented and explained again in new contexts, bringing interesting observations.

The edited volume aims to contribute to our better understanding of a system of embodied dispositions hidden under the term 'habitus'. This will be achieved by presenting the latest ...

This work synthesizes art-historical and anthropological methods in the analysis of a large corpus of indigenous figure pendants, commonly called “amulets,” from the Greater Antilles and Bahamas. Figure pendants, ubiquitous in Caribbean collections, are small carvings of spirit beings perforated for suspension against the body. The data are drawn from new photographs, measurements, and observations of 535 specimens compiled by the author during 2011-2018 in research visits to 34 museums a...

This book examines the mutual influence of architecture and human action during a key period of history: the Hellenistic age. During this era, the profound transformations in the Mediterranean's archaeological and historical record are detectable, pointing to a conscious intertwining of the physical (landscape, architecture, bodies) and social (practice) components of built space.

Compiling the outcomes of a conference held in Kiel in 2018, the volume assembles contributions focusing on Hellen...