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Cambridge World Archaeology aspires to define the state of the field by providing definitive regional archaeological syntheses, thematic accounts of core issues, and comparative analyses that put world areas into conversation. The books are intended for a global audience of professional archaeologists, scholars, students, and anyone else wanting an up-to-date account of the discipline. Regional syntheses have long been a defining focus of CWA books. We seek books on regions both well-known and neglected. Some region’s covered by earlier publications in CWA’s list are ready for re-study that can bring them up to date with new data and emerging interpretive priorities. Thematic studies in areas such as colonization and decolonization, heritage, gender, sovereignty, liberation, climate, and ecology provide an opportunity to develop a global vision of world archaeology. We are looking for themes that will resonate widely across world areas and set the agenda for archaeology in the years that follow. Comparative analyses enhance CWA’s regional focus by bringing two (or more) world areas into conversation, illuminating a general theoretical problem and deepening understanding of all areas under discussion. We seek books that can revive traditional areas of comparison but also open new pathways for multi-regional analysis.

  • General Editors: Adam T. Smith, Cornell University, New York, Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Emeritus
  • Editorial Boards: Tom Dillehay, Vanderbilt University , Tennessee, Corisande Fenwick, University College London, Lindsay Montgomery, University of Toronto, Dmitri Nakassis, University of Colorado, Boulder, François Richard, University of Chicago, Liv Nilsson Stutz, Linnaeus University, Sweden, Miriam Stark, University of Hawai’i, David Wengrow, University College London, Astrid Van Oyen, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Alice Yao, University of Chicago

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31 results in Cambridge World Archaeology

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The Archaeology of Han China
  • Alice Yao, Wengcheong Lam
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • The Han Dynasty, which ruled from 202 BCE to 212 CE, is often taken as a reference point and model for Chinese identity and tradition. Covering a geographical expanse comparable to that of the People's Republic of China, it is foundational to understanding Chinese culture and politics, past and present. This volume offers an up-to-date overview of the archaeology of the Han Empire. Alice Yao and Wengcheong Lam study the period via an interdisciplinary approach that combines textual and archaeological evidence. Exploring the dynamics of empire building in East Asia, Yao and Lam draw on recent archaeological discoveries to recast Western Han imperialism as a series of contingent material projects, including the organization of spatial orders, foodways, and the expansion of communication and ritual activities. They also demonstrate how the archaeology of everyday life offers insights into the impact of social change, and how people negotiated their identities and cultural affiliations as individuals and imperial subordinates.

The Archaeology of Southern Africa
  • 2nd edition
  • Peter Mitchell
  • Published online:
    15 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • Some of humanity's earliest ancestors lived in southern Africa and evidence from sites there has inspired key debates on human origins and the emergence of complex cognition. Building on its rich rock art heritage, archaeologists have developed theoretical work that continues to influence rock art studies worldwide, with the relationship between archaeological and anthropological data central to understanding past hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and farmer communities alike. New work on pre-colonial states contests models that previously explained their emergence via external trade, while the transformations wrought by European colonialism are being rewritten to emphasise Indigenous agency, feeding into efforts to decolonise the discipline itself. Inhabited by humans longer than almost anywhere else and with an unusually varied, complex past, southern Africa thus has much to contribute to archaeology worldwide. In this revised and updated edition, Peter Mitchell provides a comprehensive and extensively illustrated synthesis of its archaeology over more than three million years.

The Archaeology of the Pampas and Patagonia
  • Gustavo G. Politis, Luis A. Borrero
  • Published online:
    14 February 2024
    Print publication:
    29 February 2024
  • In this book, Gustavo G. Politis and Luis A. Borrero explore the archaeology and ethnography of the indigenous people who inhabited Argentina's Pampas and the Patagonia region from the end of the Pleistocene until the 20th century. Offering a history of the nomadic foragers living in the harsh habitats of the South America's Southern Cone, they provide detailed account of human adaptations to a range of environmental and social conditions. The authors show how the region's earliest inhabitants interacted with now-extinct animals as they explored and settled the vast open prairies and steppes of the region until they occupied most of its available habitats. They also trace technological advances, including the development of pottery, the use of bows and arrows, and horticulture. Making new research and data available for the first time, Politis and Borrero's volume demonstrates how geographical variation in the Southern Cone generated diverse adaptation strategies.

The Archaeology of Pharaonic Egypt
  • Society and Culture, 2700–1700 BC
  • Richard Bussmann
  • Published online:
    06 February 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023
  • In this book, Richard Bussmann presents a fresh overview of ancient Egyptian society and culture in the age of the pyramids. He addresses key themes in the comparative research of early complex societies, including urbanism, funerary culture, temple ritual, kingship, and the state, and explores how ideas and practices were exchanged between ruling elites and local communities in provincial Egypt. Unlike other studies of ancient Egypt, this book adopts an anthropological approach that places people at the centre of the analysis. Bussmann covers a range of important themes in cross-cultural debates, such as materiality, gender, non-elite culture, and the body. He also offers new perspectives on social diversity and cultural cohesion, based on recent discoveries. His study vividly illustrates how our understanding of ancient Egyptian society benefits from the application of theoretical concepts in archaeology and anthropology to the interpretation of the evidence.

Palaeolithic Europe
  • A Demographic and Social Prehistory
  • Jennifer C. French
  • Published online:
    27 October 2021
    Print publication:
    09 December 2021
  • In this book, Jennifer French presents a new synthesis of the archaeological, palaeoanthropological, and palaeogenetic records of the European Palaeolithic, adopting a unique demographic perspective on these first two-million years of European prehistory. Unlike prevailing narratives of demographic stasis, she emphasises the dynamism of Palaeolithic populations of both our evolutionary ancestors and members of our own species across four demographic stages, within a context of substantial Pleistocene climatic changes. Integrating evolutionary theory with a socially oriented approach to the Palaeolithic, French bridges biological and cultural factors, with a focus on women and children as the drivers of population change. She shows how, within the physiological constraints on fertility and mortality, social relationships provide the key to enduring demographic success. Through its demographic focus, French combines a 'big picture' perspective on human evolution with careful analysis of the day-to-day realities of European Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities—their families, their children, and their lives.

The Archaeology of the North American Great Plains
  • Douglas B. Bamforth
  • Published online:
    19 November 2021
    Print publication:
    23 September 2021
  • In this volume, Douglas B. Bamforth offers an archaeological overview of the Great Plains, the vast, open grassland bordered by forests and mountain ranges situated in the heart of North America. Synthesizing a century of scholarship and new archaeological evidence, he focuses on changes in resource use, continental trade connections, social formations, and warfare over a period of 15,000 years. Bamforth investigates how foragers harvested the grasslands more intensively over time, ultimately turning to maize farming, and examines the persistence of industrial mobile bison hunters in much of the region as farmers lived in communities ranging from hamlets to towns with thousands of occupants. He also explores how social groups formed and changed, migrations of peoples in and out of the Plains, and the conflicts that occurred over time and space. Significantly, Bamforth's volume demonstrates how archaeology can be used as the basis for telling long-term, problem-oriented human history.

The Archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula
  • From the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age
  • Katina T. Lillios
  • Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    05 December 2019
  • In this book, Katina Lillios provides an up-to-date synthesis of the rich histories of the peoples who lived on the Iberian Peninsula between 1,400,000 (the Paleolithic) and 3,500 years ago (the Bronze Age) as revealed in their art, burials, tools, and monuments. She highlights the exciting new discoveries on the Peninsula, including the evidence for some of the earliest hominins in Europe, Neanderthal art, interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans, and relationships to peoples living in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Western Europe. This is the first book to relate the ancient history of the Peninsula to broader debates in anthropology and archaeology. Amply illustrated and written in an accessible style, it will be of interest to archaeologists and students of prehistoric Spain and Portugal.

The Archaeology of the Bronze Age Levant
  • From Urban Origins to the Demise of City-States, 3700–1000 BCE
  • Raphael Greenberg
  • Published online:
    21 October 2019
    Print publication:
    07 November 2019
  • The Levant - modern Lebanon, southern Syria, Jordan, Israel and Palestine - is one of the most intensively excavated regions of the world. This richly documented and illustrated survey offers a state-of-the-art description of the formative phase of Levantine societies, as they perfected the Mediterranean village economy and began to interact with neighboring civilizations in Egypt and Syria, on the way to establishing their first towns and city-state polities. Citing numerous finds and interpretive approaches, Greenberg offers a new narrative of social and cultural development, emulation, resistance and change, illustrating how Levantine communities translated broader movements of the Near Eastern and Mediterranean Bronze Age - the emergence of states, international trade, elite networks and imperial ambitions - into a uniquely Levantine idiom.

The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland
  • 2nd edition
  • Richard Bradley
  • Published online:
    06 May 2019
    Print publication:
    16 May 2019
  • Sited at the furthest limits of the Neolithic revolution and standing at the confluence of the two great sea routes of prehistory, Britain and Ireland are distinct from continental Europe for much of the prehistoric sequence. In this landmark study, Richard Bradley offers an interpretation of the unique archaeological record of these islands. Highlighting the achievements of its inhabitants, Bradley surveys the entire archaeological sequence over a 5,000 year period, from the last hunter-gatherers and the adoption of agriculture in the Neolithic period, to the discovery of Britain and Ireland by travellers from the Mediterranean during the later pre-Roman Iron Age. His study places special emphasis on landscapes, settlements, monuments, and ritual practices. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated. The text takes account of recent developments in archaeological science, such as isotopic analyses of human and animal bone, recovery of ancient DNA, and more subtle and precise methods of radiocarbon dating.

The First Farmers of Europe
  • An Evolutionary Perspective
  • Stephen Shennan
  • Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018
  • Knowledge of the origin and spread of farming has been revolutionised in recent years by the application of new scientific techniques, especially the analysis of ancient DNA from human genomes. In this book, Stephen Shennan presents the latest research on the spread of farming by archaeologists, geneticists and other archaeological scientists. He shows that it resulted from a population expansion from present-day Turkey. Using ideas from the disciplines of human behavioural ecology and cultural evolution, he explains how this process took place. The expansion was not the result of 'population pressure' but of the opportunities for increased fertility by colonising new regions that farming offered. The knowledge and resources for the farming 'niche' were passed on from parents to their children. However, Shennan demonstrates that the demographic patterns associated with the spread of farming resulted in population booms and busts, not continuous expansion.

The Archaeology of the Caucasus
  • From Earliest Settlements to the Iron Age
  • Antonio Sagona
  • Published online:
    17 November 2017
    Print publication:
    30 November 2017
  • In The Archaeology of the Caucasus, Antonio Sagona provides the first comprehensive survey of a key area in the Eurasian land mass, from the earliest settlement to the end of the early Iron Age. Examining the bewildering array of cultural complexes found in the region, he draws on both Soviet and post-Soviet investigations and synthesises the vast quantity of diverse and often fragmented evidence across the region's frontiers. Written in an engaging manner that balances material culture and theory, the volume focuses on the most significant sites and cultural traditions. Sagona also highlights the accomplishments of the Caucasian communities and situates them within the broader setting of their neighbours in Anatolia, Iran, and Russia. Sprinkled with new data, much of it published here for the first time, The Archaeology of the Caucasus contains many new photographs, drawings and plans, many of which have not been accessible to Western researchers.

The Archaeology of Elam
  • Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian State
  • 2nd edition
  • D. T. Potts
  • Published online:
    18 December 2015
    Print publication:
    12 November 2015
  • Elam was an important state in southwestern Iran from the third millennium BC to the appearance of the Persian Empire and beyond. Less well-known than its neighbors in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Levant or Egypt, it was nonetheless a region of extraordinary cultural vitality. This book examines the formation and transformation of Elam's many identities through both archaeological and written evidence, and brings to life one of the most important regions of Western Asia, re-evaluates its significance, and places it in the context of the most recent archaeological and historical scholarship. The new edition includes material from over 800 additional sources, reflecting the enormous amount of fieldwork and scholarship on Iran since 1999. Every chapter contains new insights and material that have been seamlessly integrated into the text in order to give the reader an up-to-date understanding of ancient Elam.

The Archaeology of South Asia
  • From the Indus to Asoka, c.6500 BCE–200 CE
  • Robin Coningham, Ruth Young
  • Published online:
    05 September 2015
    Print publication:
    31 August 2015
  • This book offers a critical synthesis of the archaeology of South Asia from the Neolithic period (c.6500 BCE), when domestication began, to the spread of Buddhism accompanying the Mauryan Emperor Asoka's reign (third century BCE). The authors examine the growth and character of the Indus civilisation, with its town planning, sophisticated drainage systems, vast cities and international trade. They also consider the strong cultural links between the Indus civilisation and the second, later period of South Asian urbanism which began in the first millennium BCE and developed through the early first millennium CE. In addition to examining the evidence for emerging urban complexity, this book gives equal weight to interactions between rural and urban communities across South Asia and considers the critical roles played by rural areas in social and economic development. The authors explore how narratives of continuity and transformation have been formulated in analyses of South Asia's Prehistoric and Early Historic archaeological record.

The Archaeology of Malta
  • From the Neolithic through the Roman Period
  • Claudia Sagona
  • Published online:
    05 September 2015
    Print publication:
    25 August 2015
  • The Maltese archipelago is a unique barometer for understanding cultural change in the central Mediterranean. Prehistoric people helped reshape the islands' economy and when Mediterranean maritime highways were being established, the islands became a significant lure to Phoenician colonists venturing from their Levantine homeland. Punic Malta also sat at the front line of regional hostilities until it fell to Rome. Preserved in this island setting are signs of people's endurance and adaptation to each new challenge. This book is the first systematic and up-to-date survey of the islands' archaeological evidence from the initial settlers to the archipelago's inclusion into the Roman world (c.5000 BC–400 AD). Claudia Sagona draws upon old and new discoveries and her analysis covers well-known sites such as the megalithic structures, as well as less familiar locations and discoveries. She interprets the archaeological record to explain changing social and political structures, intriguing ritual practices and cultural contact through several millennia.

The Archaeology of Prehistoric Arabia
  • Adaptation and Social Formation from the Neolithic to the Iron Age
  • Peter Magee
  • Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    19 May 2014
  • Encompassing a landmass greater than the rest of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean combined, the Arabian peninsula remains one of the last great unexplored regions of the ancient world. This book provides the first extensive coverage of the archaeology of this region from c.9000 to 800 BC. Peter Magee argues that a unique social system, which relied on social cohesion and actively resisted the hierarchical structures of adjacent states, emerged during the Neolithic and continued to contour society for millennia later. The book also focuses on how the historical context in which Near Eastern archaeology was codified has led to a skewed understanding of the multiplicity of lifeways pursued by ancient peoples living throughout the Middle East.

Aztec Archaeology and Ethnohistory
  • Frances F. Berdan
  • Published online:
    05 July 2014
    Print publication:
    21 April 2014
  • This book provides an up-to-date synthesis of Aztec culture, applying interdisciplinary approaches (archaeology, ethnohistory and ethnography) to reconstructing the complex and enigmatic civilization. Frances F. Berdan offers a balanced assessment of complementary and sometimes contradictory sources in unravelling the ancient way of life. The book provides a cohesive view of the Aztecs and their empire, emphasizing the diversity and complexity of social, economic, political and religious roles played by the many kinds of people we call 'Aztecs'. Concluding with three integrative case studies, the book examines the stresses, dynamics and anchors of Aztec culture and society.

The Archaeology of Japan
  • From the Earliest Rice Farming Villages to the Rise of the State
  • Koji Mizoguchi
  • Published online:
    05 November 2013
    Print publication:
    25 November 2013
  • This is the first book-length study of the Yayoi and Kofun periods of Japan (c.600 BC–AD 700), in which the introduction of rice paddy-field farming from the Korean peninsula ignited the rapid development of social complexity and hierarchy that culminated with the formation of the ancient Japanese state. The author traces the historical trajectory of the Yayoi and Kofun periods by employing cutting-edge sociological, anthropological and archaeological theories and methods. The book reveals a fascinating process through which sophisticated hunter-gatherer communities in an archipelago on the eastern fringe of the Eurasian continent were transformed materially and symbolically into a state.

The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts
  • Mike Smith
  • Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 February 2013
  • This is the first book-length study of the archaeology of Australia's deserts, one of the world's major habitats and the largest block of drylands in the southern hemisphere. Over the last few decades, a wealth of new environmental and archaeological data about this fascinating region has become available. Drawing on a wide range of sources, The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts explores the late Pleistocene settlement of Australia's deserts, the formation of distinctive desert societies, and the origins and development of the hunter-gatherer societies documented in the classic nineteenth-century ethnographies of Spencer and Gillen. Written by one of Australia's leading desert archaeologists, the book interweaves a lively history of research with archaeological data in a masterly survey of the field and a profoundly interdisciplinary study that forces archaeology into conversations with history and anthropology, economy and ecology, and geography and Earth sciences.

The Archaeology of China
  • From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age
  • Li Liu, Xingcan Chen
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    30 April 2012
  • This book explores the roles of agricultural development and advancing social complexity in the processes of state formation in China. Over a period of about 10,000 years, it follows evolutionary trajectories of society from the last Palaeolithic hunting-gathering groups, through Neolithic farming villages and on to the Bronze Age Shang dynasty in the latter half of the second millennium BC. Li Liu and Xingcan Chen demonstrate that sociopolitical evolution was multicentric and shaped by inter-polity factionalism and competition, as well as by the many material technologies introduced from other parts of the world. The book illustrates how ancient Chinese societies were transformed during this period from simple to complex, tribal to urban, and preliterate to literate.

The Palaeolithic Settlement of Asia
  • Robin Dennell
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    15 December 2008
  • This book provides the first analysis and synthesis of the evidence of the earliest inhabitants of Asia before the appearance of modern humans 100,000 years ago. Asia has received far less attention than Africa and Europe in the search for human origins, but is no longer considered of marginal importance. Indeed, a global understanding of human origins cannot be properly understood without a detailed consideration of the largest continent. In this study, Robin Dennell examines a variety of sources, including the archaeological evidence, the fossil hominin record, and the environmental and climatic background from Southwest, Central, South, and Southeast Asia, as well as China. He presents an authoritative and comprehensive framework for investigations of Asia's oldest societies, challenges many long-standing assumptions about its earliest inhabitants, and places Asia centrally in the discussions of human evolution in the past two million years.

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