Throughout the world, competing interest groups lay claim to the material remains of the past. Archaeologists, developers, indigenous 'first peoples', looters, museum curators, national government officals, New Age worshippers, private collectors, tourists - all want their share. This introduction to contemporary debates surrounding their rival claims deals with defining, owning, protecting, managing, interpreting, and experiencing the archaeological heritage.

Fundamental questions are considered: What is 'archaeological heritage'? Who should own and control the material culture of...

Colin Renfrew argues that what is most precious in archaeology is the information that excavations can shed on our human past. Yet the clandestine and unpublished digging of archaeological sites for gain - looting - is destroying the context in which archaeological findings can be understood, as well as sabotaging the most valuable information. It is the source of most of the antiquities that appear on the art market today - unprovenanced antiquities, the product of illicit traffic financed, knowingly or not by the collectors and museums that buy them on a no-questions-asked basis. This...

A study that makes use of an interdisciplinary approach to challenge traditional theories of state formation in China and promote debate on early Chinese history. Analyzing data from archaeology, geology, cultural geography, ethnohistory and ancient texts, the authors show how the procurement of key external resources - especially metal and salt - drove the dynamics of state formation in early China in the period of 1800-1400BC.

The concept of social evolution in its modern form became widespread 250 years ago as part of the Enlightenment, and yet it still structures the thinking of academics, politicians and the public in a myriad ways. Hunter-gatherers become the repository of the natural or primitive; civilisation and 'our' history is deemed to begin with farming societies; and state societies are seen as the only gateway to social complexity. Through a historical and comparative review, this book challenges the idea that social evolution and the inevitability of progress is self-evident, and examines the...

This series of short volumes, each devoted to a theme which is the subject of contemporary debate in archaeology, ranges from issues in theory and method to aspects of world archaeology. If 'all property is theft', then cultural property is nothing less than the theft of culture. The term 'cultural property' is widespread in the field of heritage management and is a particularly powerful concept in legal approaches. The term and the concept it represents are never discussed, however. The idea that material that comes to us from the past should be considered 'property' accordingly seems to...

This series of short volumes, each devoted to a theme which is the subject of contemporary debate in archaeology, ranges from issues in theory and method to aspects of world archaeology. The archaeology of recent conflict is a fast-moving field of research. It is challenging and provocative. It deals with established historical events for which the material remains are unquestionably 'heritage', but also the more recent, tragic and heavily politicised events, actions and places whose meaning and significance is more ambiguous. But although recent and familiar, it is also a subject that...

Romanesque is the style name given to the art and architecture of Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. First used in the early nineteenth century to express the perceived indebtedness of the visual-artistic and architectural cultures of this period to their Classical antecedents, the term has survived two centuries of increasingly sophisticated readings of the relevant medieval buildings and objet d'art. The study of Romanesque as a stylistic phenomenon is now almost exclusively the preserve of art historians, particularly in the English-speaking world. Here 'the Romanesque' is...

This series of short volumes, each devoted to a theme, which is the subject of contemporary debate in archaeology, ranges from issues in theory and method to aspects of world archaeology. Wetland archaeology has provided some of the most exciting discoveries in world archaeology, from bog bodies in northern Europe, to prehistoric and medieval wetland dwellings in central and western Europe, New Zealand, Japan and the Pacific Northwest. Arguably, however, the amount of evidence from these sites and the need for intense multidisciplinary scientific analysis, allied to a general tendency...

During the Long Classical Millennium (fourth century BC to eighth century AD), Northwest Jordan was part of two worlds, looking west to the Mediterranean as well as east towards the Arabian desert. It was not only a collection of distinctive micro-regions but a 'virtual island', isolated by geography on all sides. Here one finds historical and archaeological data of an intensity and quality probably superior to that of any region in the Near East other than Israel.
This book exploits some of that evidence to explain the character of an unusual region with a dense network of cities and...

After more than a century of neglect, a profound revolution is occurring in the way archaeology addresses and interprets developments in the social history of early Islamic Syria-Palestine. This concise book offers an innovative assessment of social and economic developments in Syria-Palestine shortly before, and in the two centuries after, the Islamic expansion (the later sixth to the early ninth century AD), drawing on a wide range of new evidence from recent archaeological work. Alan Walmsley challenges conventional explanations for social change with the arrival of Islam, arguing for...