Along Prehistoric Lines

A revolutionary approach to how we view Europe's prehistoric culture The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places—and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience. How Ancient Europeans Saw the World offers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe's pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.

Inhabited for over 5,000 years before European colonization, the site of La Tiza in Peru’s Nasca Desert provides an unprecedented opportunity to examine the dynamics of ancient complex societies. This volume takes a long temporal perspective on La Tiza from the Preceramic through the Inca era, studying the site within the context of broader developments such as the rise of Nasca culture, subsequent conquest by the Wari Empire, collapse, abandonment, and the reformation of a new society. Christina Conlee synthesizes data she obtained while directing a multi-year excavation at the site with data from other investigations to reconstruct the development of social complexity over time. She includes detailed descriptions of the stratigraphy and artifacts, carefully separating materials from each period. Exploring how political integration, religious practices, economics, and the environment shaped societal transformations at La Tiza, Conlee offers patterns that can be found in other areas and can be used to understand the development of other long-lasting civilizations.

This book presents cutting-edge archaeological materials from Xinjiang, from the Bronze Age to the early Iron Age. Through a systematic topological study of major archaeological cemeteries and sites, it establishes chronologies and cultural sequences for three main regions in Xinjiang, namely the circum-Eastern Tianshan region, the circum-Dzungarian Basin region and the circum-Tarim Basin region. It also discusses the origins and local variants of prehistoric archaeological cultures in these regions and the mutual relationships between them and neighboring cultures. By doing so, the book offers a panoramic view of the socio-cultural changes that took place in prehistoric Xinjiang from pastoral-agricultural societies to the mobile nomadic-pastoralist states in the steppe regions and the agricultural states of the oasis, making it a must-read for researchers and general readers who are interested in the archaeology of Xinjiang.

This volume presents the results of archaeological investigations on the Newquay Strategic Road and goes on to discuss the complexity of the archaeology, review the evidence for ‘special’ deposits and explore evidence for the deliberate closure of buildings especially in later prehistoric and Roman period Cornwall.