Monographs

New Titles

Bones for tools- tools for bones: the interplay between objects and objectives
Bones for tools- tools for bones: the interplay between objects and objectives

edited by Krish Seetah and Brad Gravina

Krish Seetah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. His zooarchaeological research focuses on butchering and the socio-economic context of food.

Brad Gravina is a member of the laboratory Préhistoire a l'Actuel: Cultures, Evironment et Anthropologie (PACEA) at the University of Bordeaux. His research focuses on the final Middle Palaeolithic of Western Europe with an emphasis on lithic technology and taphonomy.

Animal procurement and tool production form two of the most tightly connected components of human behaviour. They are tied to our emergence as a genus, were fundamental to the dispersal of our species, and underpin the development of our societies. The interaction between these fundamental activities has been a subject of archaeological inference from the earliest days of the discipline, yet the pursuit of each has tended to encourage and entrench specialist study. As a result, our understanding of them has developed in full-view but in general isolation of one from the other. This volume begins the process of integrating what have all too often become isolated archaeological and interpretative domains. Exposing and exploring contexts spanning much of prehistory, and drawing data from a wide range of environmental settings, the book covers both sides of the complex inter-relationship between animals, the technologies used to procure them and those arising from them. In taking a more inclusive approach to the material, technological and social dynamics of early human subsistence we have returned to the earliest of those archaeological associations: that between stone tools and animal bones. In revealing the inter-dependence of their relationship, this volume takes what we hope will be a first step towards a revitalized understanding of the scope of past interactions between humans and the world around them.

Hardback | £45/US$90 | ISBN 978-1-902937-59-5 | xii+164 pp. | 286 × 220 mm | 99 figs., 26 tables | December 2012

Contents (.pdf)
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Being an Islander: Production and Identity at Quoygrew, Orkney, AD 900-1600
Being an Islander: Production and Identity at Quoygrew, Orkney, AD 900-1600

edited by James H Barrett
Quoygrew – a settlement of farmers and fishers on the island of Westray in Orkney – was continuously occupied from the tenth century until 1937. Focusing on the archaeology of its first 700 years, this volume explores how ‘small worlds’ both reflected and impacted the fundamental pan-European watersheds of the Middle Ages: the growth of population, economic production and trade from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries and the subsequent economic and demographic retrenchment of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. Concurrently, it addresses the nature of island societies, with distinctive identities shaped by the interplay of isolation and interconnectedness.

James Barrett specializes in medieval archaeology and historical ecology, with particular interests in the Viking Age, political economy, migration and the comparative study of maritime societies. He is Deputy Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Reader in Medieval Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

ISBN 978-1-902937-61-8, hardback, £56; 416pp., 156 ills. (McDonald Institute monograph, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2012)
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The Global Origins (and Development) of Seafaring

The Global Origins (and Development) of Seafaring

Edited by Atholl Anderson, James Barrett & Katie Boyle

When and in what circumstances did seafaring begin and how is it understood from the perspectives of maritime technology?

This volume explores key themes in maritime prehistory from the perspective of seafaring, discussing the circumstances and incentives of seafaring development, its patterning in relation to periods of migration and trade and the relationship between sailing and society.

The sea was dangerous and difficult to predict, but from at least the Middle Palaeolithic people sought its resources and attempted to move on its surface or beneath.

The evolution of watercraft facilitated coastal foraging, fishing, hunting and travel, and the later development of sailing allowed long offshore passages, fundamental to all other sea-borne activities and interests.

Increasing maritime exploration, migration, trade and colonialism together stimulated the integrating effects of globalization, describe a developing reach and complexity in human affairs that is comparable with, and in various ways holds up a mirror to, the course of terrestrial prehistory across the late Quaternary.

The history of the sea, no less than that of the land, speaks to the development of modern humanity and the discussions in Global Origins of Seafaring will make a strong contribution to the construction of a better theoretical framework for seafaring studies.

ISBN 978-1-902937-52-6 Hardback, 320 pp., 115 figs £44
Publication date July 2010

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The Cognitive Life of Things
The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting Boundaries of the Mind edited by Lambros Malafouris and Coin Renfrew

Things have a social life. They also lead cognitive lives, working subtly in our minds. But just how is it that human thought has become so deeply involved in and expressed through material things? There is today a wide recognition that material culture regulates and shapes the ways in which people perceive, think and act. But just how does that work? This is one of the most challenging research topics for the archaeology and anthropology of human cognition. The understanding of the working of past and present material culture – its cognitive efficacy – is becoming a key issue in the cognitive and social sciences more widely.

This volume, with innovative case studies ranging from prehistory to the present, seeks to establish a cross-disciplinary framework and to set out future directions for research. Its aim is to redress the balance of the cognitive equation by at last bringing materiality firmly into the cognitive fold. But how can we integrate artefacts – material culture – into existing theories of human cognition? How do we understand the significant role of the human use of the things we have ourselves created in the development of human intelligence? The distinguished contributors here argue that the boundaries of the mind must now be understood as extending beyond the individual and to include the world of the artefact if we are fully to grasp how interactions among people, things, space and time have come, over thousands of years, to shape the transformations in human cognition that have made us what we are.

Published March 2010.

ISBN-13: 978-1-902937-51-9; 208p, 53 figs. Hardback, £30 (The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2010)

About the Editors

Lambros Malafouris is a former Balzan Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cognitive Archaeology at the McDonald Institute, Cambridge University.
Colin Renfrew is a Senior Fellow of the McDonald Institute and Emeritus Disney Professor of Archaeology in the University of Cambridge.

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simulations_genetics
Mortuary Customs in Prehistoric Malta: Excavations at the Brochtorff Circle at Xaghra, Gozo (1987-94)

edited by Caroline Malone, Simon Stoddart, Anthony Bonnano and David Trump, with Tancred Gouder and Anthony Pace.

“The Brochtorff Circle is an outstandingly important site and this publication will make a major and long-lasting contribution to understandings of Mediterranean prehistory”
Professor Ruth Whitehouse
Emeritus Professor of Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, University College London

Amongst the earliest stone architecture in the world, the Neolithic temples and hypogea of Malta testify to a sophisticated island culture. Explored in the early twentieth century, the subterranean burial temple, the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, was cleared of its burials and artefacts without detailed record. Late in the twentieth century, excavation at Xaghra on Gozo rediscovered a second cave cemetery that provides a unique comparison through the investigation of a substantial portion of the buried site using modern scientific techniques. This revealed one of the largest prehistoric burial assemblages of human remains yet discovered in the Mediterranean, amounting to some 220,000 bones, together with a rich assemblage of animal bone, figurative sculpture, symbolic artefacts and architectural remains.

The detailed factual and interpretative report on this site, supported by fresh scientific data on raw materials, landsnails and environment, isotopes, radiometric dating and statistical analysis, is placed in the broader framework of the domestic and ritual landscape of the Maltese islands. The result is one of the most comprehensive studies of the incipient complexity of this mature, agricultural, but non-urban, island society so far published. 424p, 300 illus. (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2009)

Hardback | £95 & US$170 | ISBN 978-1-902937-49-6 | 424 pp. | 300 ills. | Price GB £95.00 publication date November 2009
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News item
Malta book launches at the Ministry for Gozo