The Social Organization of Early Copper Age Tribes on the Great Hungarian Plain
The Social Organization of Early Copper Age Tribes on the Great Hungarian Plain

Author: William A. Parkinson

Publisher: BAR International Series

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13:

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The research presented in this study focuses upon a 2,000 sq km area in the Körös River Valley, in northern Békés County, eastern Hungary. Within this region, the author analyzes two separate lines of evidence that relate to the changing patterns of social interaction and integration during the Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age periods. Chapter 1 details the scope of the project Chapter 2 develops the theoretical framework. Chapter Three discusses the methodological correlates of this theoretical framework, and addresses the archaeological problem of inferring dynamic social systems from static material remains. The middle range theory and bridging arguments are presented and the problems of measuring social interaction and integration in prehistoric contexts are discussed. Chapter Four presents the archaeological background necessary for understanding the radical social changes that occurred on the Great Hungarian Plain, ca. 4,500 BC. Chapter Five presents the specific research design. Chapter Six provides an overview of the study area and presents the sites and assemblage included in the subsequent analyses. Chapter Seven details the analysis of integration throughout the study area, based upon the spatial data and Chapter Eight lays out the analyses of Early Copper Age interaction, based upon the stylistic data from the Early Copper Age ceramic assemblages. Chapter Nine integrates the analyses presented in Chapters Seven and Eight into a coherent model and attempts to place the study area into the wider temporal and geographic context of the Great Hungarian Plain, and into the wider context of anthropological archaeology.

The Social Organization of Early Copper Age Tribes on the Great Hungarian Plain
The Social Organization of Early Copper Age Tribes on the Great Hungarian Plain

Author: William A. Parkinson

Publisher: British Archaeological Reports Oxford Limited

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13:

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The research presented in this study focuses upon a 2,000 sq km area in the Körös River Valley, in northern Békés County, eastern Hungary. Within this region, the author analyzes two separate lines of evidence that relate to the changing patterns of social interaction and integration during the Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age periods. Chapter 1 details the scope of the project Chapter 2 develops the theoretical framework. Chapter Three discusses the methodological correlates of this theoretical framework, and addresses the archaeological problem of inferring dynamic social systems from static material remains. The middle range theory and bridging arguments are presented and the problems of measuring social interaction and integration in prehistoric contexts are discussed. Chapter Four presents the archaeological background necessary for understanding the radical social changes that occurred on the Great Hungarian Plain, ca. 4,500 BC. Chapter Five presents the specific research design. Chapter Six provides an overview of the study area and presents the sites and assemblage included in the subsequent analyses. Chapter Seven details the analysis of integration throughout the study area, based upon the spatial data and Chapter Eight lays out the analyses of Early Copper Age interaction, based upon the stylistic data from the Early Copper Age ceramic assemblages. Chapter Nine integrates the analyses presented in Chapters Seven and Eight into a coherent model and attempts to place the study area into the wider temporal and geographic context of the Great Hungarian Plain, and into the wider context of anthropological archaeology.

The Archaeology of Inequality
The Archaeology of Inequality

Author: Orlando Cerasuolo

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-09-01

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 143848514X

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The Archaeology of Inequality explores the different aspects of social boundaries and articulation by comparing several interdisciplinary approaches for the analysis of the archaeological data, as well as actual case studies from the Prehistory to the Classical world. The book explores slavery, gender, ethnicity and economy as intersecting areas of study within the larger framework of inequality and exemplifies to what degree archaeologists can identify and analyze different patterns of inequality.

Coming Together
Coming Together

Author: Attila Gyucha

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1438472773

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Archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how urbanization first emerged in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The pursuit for universally applicable definitions of the terms “urban” and “city” has frequently distracted scholars from scrutinizing processes of how ancient nucleated settlements evolved and developed. Based on the premise that similar social dynamics to a great extent governed nucleation trajectories throughout human history, Coming Together focuses on both prehistoric aggregated and early urban settlements. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how nucleation unfolded in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The major themes of the volume are nucleation’s origins, pathways to sustainability, and the transformative role of these sites in sociopolitical and cultural change.

From Prehistoric Villages to Cities
From Prehistoric Villages to Cities

Author: Jennifer Birch

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-11

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1135045119

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Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the evolution of village societies and the transition to a ‘Neolithic’ way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities. Between these two landmarks in human cultural development lies a critical stage in social and political evolution. Throughout world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities have come together into larger and more complex social formations. These community aggregates were, essentially, middle-range; situated between the earliest villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. This volume explores the social processes involved in the creation and maintenance of aggregated communities and how they brought about revolutionary transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture. While there have been a number of studies that address coalescence from a regional perspective, less is understood about how aggregated communities functioned internally. The key premise explored in this volume is that large-scale, long-term cultural transformations were ultimately enacted in the context of daily practices, interactions, and what might be otherwise considered the mundane aspects of everyday life. How did these processes play out "on the ground" in diverse and historically contingent settings? What are the strategies and mechanisms that people adopt in order to facilitate living in larger social formations? What changes in social relations occur when people come together? This volume employs a broadly cross-cultural approach to interrogating these questions, employing case studies which span four continents and more than 10,000 years of human history.

The Archaeology of Tribal Societies
The Archaeology of Tribal Societies

Author: William A. Parkinson

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2002-03-01

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 1789201713

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Anthropological archaeologists have long attempted to develop models that will let them better understand the evolution of human social organization. In our search to understand how chiefdoms and states evolve, and how those societies differ from egalitarian 'bands', we have neglected to develop models that will aid the understanding of the wide range of variability that exists between them. This volume attempts to fill this gap by exploring social organization in tribal - or 'autonomous village' - societies from several different ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological contexts - from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period in the Near East to the contemporary Jivaro of Amazonia.

CAA2014: 21st Century Archaeology
CAA2014: 21st Century Archaeology

Author: F. Giligny

Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd

Published: 2015-03-31

Total Pages: 664

ISBN-13: 1784911011

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This volume brings together a selection of papers proposed for the Proceedings of the 42nd Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference (CAA), hosted at Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University from 22nd to 25th April 2014.

Current Approaches to Tells in the Prehistoric Old World
Current Approaches to Tells in the Prehistoric Old World

Author: Antonio Blanco-González

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2020-11-30

Total Pages: 596

ISBN-13: 1789254876

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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.

Reimagining Regional Analyses
Reimagining Regional Analyses

Author: Tina L. Thurston

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-10-02

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1443815373

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Reimagining Regional Analysis explores the interplay between different methodological and theoretical approaches to regional analysis in archaeology. The past decades have seen significant advances in methods and instrumental techniques, including geographic information systems, the new availability of aerial and satellite images, and greater emphasis on non-traditional data, such as pollen, soil chemistry and botanical remains. At the same time, there are new insights into human impacts on ancient environments and increased recognition of the importance of micro-scale changes in human society. These factors combine to compel a reimagining of regional archaeology. The authors in this volume focus on understanding individual trajectories and the historically contingent relationships between the social, the economic, the political and the sacred as reflected regionally. Among topics considered are the social construction of landscape; use of spatial patterning to interpret social variability; paleoenvironmental reconstruction and human impacts; and social memory and social practice. This book opens a discourse around the spatial patterning of the contingent, recursive relationships between people, their social activities and the environment.

The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe
The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

Author: Chris Fowler

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-03-26

Total Pages: 1303

ISBN-13: 0191666890

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The Neolithic --a period in which the first sedentary agrarian communities were established across much of Europe--has been a key topic of archaeological research for over a century. However, the variety of evidence across Europe, the range of languages in which research is carried out, and the way research traditions in different countries have developed makes it very difficult for both students and specialists to gain an overview of continent-wide trends. The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe provides the first comprehensive, geographically extensive, thematic overview of the European Neolithic --from Iberia to Russia and from Norway to Malta --offering both a general introduction and a clear exploration of key issues and current debates surrounding evidence and interpretation. Chapters written by leading experts in the field examine topics such as the movement of plants, animals, ideas, and people (including recent trends in the application of genetics and isotope analyses); cultural change (from the first appearance of farming to the first metal artefacts); domestic architecture; subsistence; material culture; monuments; and burial and other treatments of the dead. In doing so, the volume also considers the history of research and sets out agendas and themes for future work in the field.