Monographs

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Why cultivate? Anthropological and Archaeological Approaches to Foraging-Farming Transitions in Southeast Asia
Why cultivate? Anthropological and Archaeological Approaches to Foraging-Farming Transitions in Southeast Asia

edited by Graeme Barker and Monica Janowski

Does it make sense to understand the prehistory, history and present-day patterns of life in Southeast Asia in terms of a distinction between two ways of life: ‘farming’ and ‘foraging’? This is the central question addressed by the anthropologists and archaeologists contributing to this volume. Inherent within the question ‘Why Cultivate?’ are people’s relationships with the physical world: are they primarily to do with subsistence and economics or with social and/or cultural forces? The answers given by the contributors are complex. On a practical level they argue that there is a continuum rather than a sharp break between different levels of management of the environment, but rice-growing usually represents a profound break in people’s relations to their cultural and symbolic landscapes. An associated point made by the archaeologists is that the ‘deep histories’ of foraging-farming lifeways that are emerging in this region sit uncomfortably with the theory that foraging was replaced by farming in the mid Holocene as a result of a migration of Austronesian-speaking Neolithic farmers from southern China and Taiwan.

Editors:
Graeme Barker is Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. His research focuses on the relationships between past human societies and their environments and how they have transformed each other. He has worked in many different ecologies and with societies at different levels of complexity from the emergence of our species to Roman farmers and, currently in Borneo, present-day rainforest farmers and foragers.

Monica Janowski is Senior Teaching Fellow and Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her research interests lie in the way people conceptualize and operationalize their relationship between themselves and the rest of the cosmos.

142p, 34 col & 11 b/w illus, 8 tables (McDonald Institute Monograph, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2011)
Table of Contents (.pdf)
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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