Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Archaeology

In this iconoclastic and provocative work, leading scholars Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman draw on recent archaeological research to present a dramatically revised portrait of ancient Israel and its neighbors. They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in...

This pioneering work revises our notions of the origins and early development of textiles in Europe and the Near East. Using innovative linguistic techniques, along with methods from palaeobiology and other fields, it shows that spinning and pattern weaving began far earlier than has been supposed.

Prehistoric Textiles made an unsurpassed leap in the social and cultural understanding of textiles in humankind's early history. Cloth making was an industry that consumed more time and effort, and was more culturally significant to prehistoric cultures, than anyone...

The Sherpas were dead, two more victims of an attempt to scale Mt. Everest. Members of a French climbing expedition, sensitive perhaps about leaving the bodies where they could not be recovered, rolled them off a steep mountain face. One body, however, crashed to a stop near Sherpas on a separate expedition far below. They stared at the frozen corpse, stunned. They said nothing, but an American climber observing the scene interpreted their thoughts: Nobody would throw the body of a white climber off Mt. Everest.

For more than a century, climbers from around the world have...

This volume is the first attempt to synthesize current knowledge on the cultural history of the Great Plains since Wedel's Prehistoric Man on the Great Plains became the standard reference on the subject almost...

"Villa to Village" challenges the historical view that hilltop villages in Italy were first founded in the tenth century. Drawing upon recent excavations, the authors show that the makings of the medieval village lie in the demise of the Roman villa in late antiquity. The book describes the lively debate between archaeologists and historians on this issue. It also examines the evidence for the first manorial villages of the Carolingian era and describes how these were transformed into the familiar feudal villages that are characteristic of much of Italy.

The energy devoted by the ancient Egyptians to their tombs is legendary. The pyramids of Gizeh and the tomb of Tutankhamun are just two very spectacular examples, but no previous book has sought to use the tens of thousands of tombs excavated in Egypt, dating from 5000 BC to AD 200, across all classes of society, to build up a broad picture of burial as practised across the millennia. In this fascinating treatment, Wolfram Grajetzki sets out to remove some widespread misconceptions. Many imagine that few tombs survived undisturbed into modern times, but this is simply not true. In addition...

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.