Archaeology: Books

The most wide-ranging, comprehensive, and up-to-date dictionary of archaeology available. Over 4,000 entries cover the terms encountered in academic and popular archaeological literature, in lectures, and on television.

This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the latest thinking about archaeological theory.

The Handbook of East and Southeast Asian Archaeology focuses on the material culture and lifeways of the peoples of prehistoric and early historic East and Southeast Asia.

Archaeology and Landscape in the Mongolian Altai examines the distribution of ancient surface archaeology within the mountainous landscape of northwestern Mongolia. For thousands of years, this region has been inhabited by hunters and pastoral nomads who erected great stone altars, burial mounds, standing stones and stone images in the valleys through which they moved; they left behind them huge concentrations of rock art in the high valleys-images that effectively recount their lives.

Bronze Age deer stone monuments of Mongolia that intrigued travelers and archaeologists became the target of modern science by a Smithsonian-Mongolian team in 2001-2004. For the first time Mongolia's ancient "stone men" have been dated accurately to 1400-700 BCE and have been shown to be part of the Deer Stone-Khirigsuur culture.

Based on the fieldwork of N.C. Nelson and Alonzo Pond, members of the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History directed by Roy Chapman Andrews.

In this collection of 29 articles, leading researchers and a generation of new scholars join together in questioning the dominant opposing dichotomy in Eurasian archaeology of the 'steppe and sown, ' while forging new approaches which integrate local and global visions of ancient culture and society in the steppe, mountain, desert and maritime coastal regions of Eurasia.

This monograph uses the latest archaeological results from Mongolia and the surrounding areas of Inner Asia to propose a novel understanding of nomadic statehood, political economy, and the nature of interaction with ancient China. In contrast to the common view of the Eurasian steppe as a dependent periphery of Old World centers, this work views Inner Asia as a locus of enormous influence on neighboring civilizations, primarily through the development and transmission of diverse organizational models, technologies, and socio-political traditions.

The history and accomplishments of the Central Asia nomads are described here in ten essays by distinguished Soviet scholars. The book's publication coincides with the opening of the exhibit Nomads: Masters of the Eurasian Steppe at the National History Museum of Los Angeles County, which features over 1,100 artifacts.

This comparative study of pastoral nomadism is now updated, with a revised bibliography, and designed to present the whole phenomenon in historical, ecological, spatial and structural perspective. It covers numerous peoples of Central Asia, Siberia, North and East Africa and the Middle East.

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.

There have been edited books on the archaeology of nomadism in various regions, and there have been individual archaeological and anthropological monographs, but nothing with the kind of coverage provided in this volume. Its strength and importance lies in the fact that it brings together a worldwide collection of studies of the archaeology of mobility. This book provides a ready-made reference to this worldwide phenomenon and is unique in that it tries to redefine pastoralism within a larger context by the term mobility. It presents many new ideas and thoughtful approaches, especially in the Central Asian region.