Current Approaches To Tells In The Prehistoric Old World

Deeply stratified settlements are a distinctive site type featuring prominently in diverse later prehistoric landscapes of the Old World. Their massive materiality has attracted the curiosity of lay people and archaeologists alike. Nowadays a wide variety of archaeological projects are tracking the lifestyles and social practices that led to the building-up of such superimposed artificial hills. However, prehistoric tell-dwelling communities are too often approached from narrow local perspectives or discussed within strict time- and culture-specific debates. There is a great potential to learn from such ubiquitous archaeological manifestations as the physical outcome of cross-cutting dynamics and comparable underlying forces irrespective of time and space. This volume tackles tells and tell-like sites as a transversal phenomenon whose commonalities and divergences are poorly understood yet may benefit from cross-cultural comparison. Thus, the book intends to assemble a representative range of ongoing theory – and science –based fieldwork projects targeting this kind of sites. With the aim of encompassing a variety of social and material dynamics, the volume’s scope is diachronic – from the Earliest Neolithic up to the Iron Age–, and covers a very large region, from Iberia in Western Europe to Syria in the Middle East. The core of the volume comprises a selection of the most remarkable contributions to the session with a similar title celebrated in the European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting held at Barcelona in 2018. In addition, the book includes invited chapters to round out underrepresented areas and periods in the EAA session with relevant research programmes in the Old World. To accomplish such a cross-cultural course, the book takes a case-based approach, with contributions disparate both in their theoretical foundations – from household archaeology, social agency and formation theory – and their research strategies – including geophysical survey, microarchaeology and high-resolution excavation and dating.

Fourteen papers take advantage of advances in archaeological methods and theory to explore the role of the built environment in expressing and shaping community organization and identity at prehistoric and historic nucleated settlements and early cities in the Old World.

This is the second part of a study on Bronze Age tells and on our approaches towards an understanding of this fascinating way of life, drawing on the material remains of long-term architectural stability and references back to ancestral place.

Richard Bradley's latest thought provoking re-examination of familiar monumental archaeology drawing on latest discussions of multi-temporality and the implications of new levels of analysis afforded by developments in archaeological sciences such as DNA, radiocarbon dating and isotopes. This book is concerned with the origins, uses and subsequent histories of monuments. It emphasises the time scales illustrated by these structures, and their implications for archaeological research. It is concerned with the archaeology of Western and Northern Europe, with an emphasis on structures in Britain and Ireland, and the period between the Mesolithic and the Viking Age. It begins with two famous groups of monuments and introduces the problem of multiple time scales. It also considers how they influence the display of those sites today – they belong to both the present and the past. Monuments played a role from the moment they were created, but approaches to their archaeology led in opposite directions. They might have been directed to a future that their builders could not control. These structures could be adapted, destroyed, or left to decay once their significance was lost. Another perspective was to claim them as relics of a forgotten past. In that case they had to be reinterpreted. The first part of this book considers the rarity of monumental structures among hunter-gatherers, and the choice of building materials for Neolithic houses and tombs. It emphasises the difference between structures whose erection ended the use of significant places, and those whose histories could extend into the future. It also discusses ‘megalithic astronomy’ and ancient notions of time. Part Two is concerned with the reuse of ancient monuments and asks whether they really were expressions of social memory. Did links with an ‘ancestral past’ have much factual basis? It contrasts developments during the Beaker phase with those of the early medieval period. The development of monumental architecture is compared with the composition of oral literature.

This book considers the meaning of the term, considers the value and characteristics of Google Earth, and discusses the main driving forces of landscape change. Google Earth provides a means whereby one can identify changes in the landscapes of Earth over recent decades. This has been a time of great human activity, and landscapes have been transformed as a result of such factors as land use and land-cover change, climate change, the intensive harnessing of new energy sources, population pressures, and globalization. Many geologists now believe that the whole Earth System is being changed and that there is thus a need to introduce the concept of the Anthropocene. It then looks at specific landscape types, including rivers, coasts, lakes, deserts, tundra, and glaciers.

The Great Houses of the prehistoric and early medieval periods were enormous structures whose forms were modelled on those of domestic dwellings. Most were built of wood rather than stone; they were used over comparatively short periods; they were frequently replaced in the same positions; and some were associated with exceptional groups of artefacts. Their construction made considerable demands on human labour and approached the limits of what was possible at the time. They seem to have played specialised roles in ancient society, but they have been difficult to interpret. Were they public buildings or the dwellings of important people? Were they temples or military bases, and why were they erected during times of crisis or change? How were their sites selected, and how were they related to the remains of a more ancient past? Although their currency extended from the time of the first farmers to the Viking Age, the similarities between the Great Houses are as striking as the differences. This study focuses on the monumental buildings of northern and northwestern Europe, but draws on structures over a wide area, extending from Anatolia as far as Brittany and Norway. It employs ethnography as a source of ideas and discusses the concept of the House Society and its usefulness in archaeology. The main examples are taken from the Neolithic and Iron Age periods, but this account also draws on the archaeology of the first millennium AD. The book emphasises the importance of comparing archaeological sequences with one another rather than identifying ideal social types. In doing so, it features a range of famous and less famous sites, from Stonehenge to the Hill of Tara, and from Old Uppsala to Yeavering.

This book examines spatialised practices of remembrance and its role in reshaping societies from prehistory to today; it presents a reflection on the creation of memories through the organisation and use of landscapes and spaces that explicitly considers the multiplicity of meanings of the past.