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73 results in Archaeology of Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and The Pacific

Page 1 of 4

The Archaeology of Pastoralism, Mobility, and Society
  • Beyond the Grass Paradigm
  • Emily Hammer
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Though mobile pastoralists were long a significant component of many societies in Eurasia and Africa, scholars have long considered them to be materially and documentarily 'invisible.' The archaeological study of pastoralism across these regions has relied on ethnographic analogies and environmentally deterministic models, often with little or no data on historically specific herding communities. This approach has yielded a static picture of pastoralism through time that has only recently been challenged. In this book, Emily Hammer articulates a new framework for investigating variability in past pastoral practices. She proposes ways to develop a more rigorous relationship with pastoralist ethnographies and illustrates new archaeological and scientific methodologies for collecting direct data on herding, mobility, and social complexity in the past. Hammer's approach to the archaeology of pastoralism promotes efforts to dismantle the legacy of evolutionary classifications of human societies, which have drawn sharp distinctions between farmers and herders, and to investigate how diverse non-agricultural and mobile groups have shaped complex society and environment.

The Origins of Agriculture in the Bronze Age Indus Civilization
  • Jennifer Bates
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • The Indus civilization in South Asia (c. 320 – 1500BC) was one of the most important Old World Bronze Age cultures. Located at the cross-roads of Asia, in modern Pakistan and India, it encompassed ca. one million square kilometers, making it one the largest  and most ecologically, culturally, socially, and economically complex among contemporary civilisations.  In this study, Jennifer Bates offers new insights into the Indus civilisation through an archaeobotanical reconstruction of its environment. Exploring the relationship between people and plants, agricultural systems, and the foods that people consumed, she demonstrates how the choices made by the ancient inhabitants were intertwined with several aspects of society, as were their responses to social and climate changes. Bates' book synthesizes the available data on genetics, archaeobotany, and archaeology. It shows how the ancient Indus serves as a case study of a civilization navigating sustainability, resilience and collapse in the face of changing circumstances by adapting its agricultural practices.

The Archaeology of Han China
  • Alice Yao, Wengcheong Lam
  • Published online:
    12 December 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.

Aboriginal Rock Art and the Telling of History
  • Laura Rademaker, Sally K. May, Gabriel Maralngurra, Joakim Goldhahn
  • Published online:
    12 November 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024
  • The rock art of Australia is among the oldest, most complex, and most fascinating manifestations of human creativity and imagination in the world. Aboriginal people used art to record their experiences, ceremonies, and knowledge by embedding their understanding of the world in the landscape over many generations. Indeed, rock art serves as archives and libraries for Australia's Indigenous people. It is, in effect, its repository of memory. This volume explores Indigenous perspectives on rock art. It challenges the limits and assumptions of traditional, academic ways of understanding and knowing the past by showing how history has literally been painted 'on the rocks'. Each chapter features a biography of an artist or family of artists, together with an artwork created by contemporary artist Gabriel Maralngurra. By bringing together history, archaeology, and Indigenous artistic practice, the book offers new insights into the medium of rock art and demonstrates the limits of academic methods and approaches.

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.

Kingship, Ritual, and Royal Ideology in Western Zhou China
  • Paul Nicholas Vogt
  • Published online:
    10 November 2022
    Print publication:
    10 November 2022
  • In accounts of Chinese history, the Western Zhou period has been lionized as a golden age of ritual, when kings created the ceremonies that underlay the traditions of imperial governance. In this book, Paul Nicholas Vogt rediscovers their roots in the vagaries of Western Zhou royal geopolitics through an investigation of inscriptions on bronze vessels, the best contemporary source for this period. He shows how the kings of the Western Zhou adapted ritual to create and retain power, while introducing changes that affected later remembrances of Zhou royal ritual and that shaped the tradition of statecraft throughout Chinese history. Using ritual and social theory to explain Western Zhou history, Vogt traces how the traditions of pre-modern China were born, how a ruling dynasty establishes and holds on to power, how religion and politics can support and restrain each other, and how ancient peoples made, used, and assigned meaning to art and artifacts.

Ghosts and Religious Life in Early China
  • Mu-Chou Poo
  • Published online:
    13 January 2022
    Print publication:
    27 January 2022
  • For modern people, ghost stories are no more than thrilling entertainment. For those living in antiquity, ghosts were far more serious beings, as they could affect the life and death of people and cause endless fear and anxiety. How did ancient societies imagine what ghosts looked like, what they could do, and how people could deal with them? From the vantage point of modernity, what can we learn about an obscure, but no less important aspect of an ancient culture? In this volume, Mu-chou Poo explores the ghosts of ancient China, the ideas that they nurtured, and their role in its culture. His study provides fascinating insights into the interaction between the idea of ghosts and religious activities, literary imagination, and social life devoted to them. Comparing Chinese ghosts with those of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, Poo also offers a wider perspective on the role of ghosts in human history.

Monsoon Rains, Great Rivers and the Development of Farming Civilisations in Asia
  • Peter D. Clift, Jade d'Alpoim Guedes
  • Published online:
    17 December 2020
    Print publication:
    07 January 2021
  • The Asian monsoon and associated river systems supply the water that sustains a large portion of humanity, and has enabled Asia to become home to some of the oldest and most productive farming systems on Earth. This book uses climate data and environmental models to provide a detailed review of variations in the Asian monsoon since the mid-Holocene, and its impacts on farming systems and human settlement. Future changes to the monsoon due to anthropogenically-driven global warming are also discussed. Faced with greater rainfall and more cyclones in South Asia, as well as drying in North China and regional rising sea levels, understanding how humans have developed resilient strategies in the past to climate variations is critical. Containing important implications for the large populations and booming economies in the Indo-Pacific region, this book is an important resource for researchers and graduate students studying the climate, environmental history, agronomy and archaeology of Asia.

Prehistoric Stone Tools of Eastern Africa
  • A Guide
  • John J. Shea
  • Published online:
    27 March 2020
    Print publication:
    16 April 2020
  • Stone tools are the least familiar objects that archaeologists recover from their excavations, and predictably, they struggle to understand them. Eastern Africa alone boasts a 3.4 million-year-long archaeological record but its stone tool evidence still remains disorganized, unsynthesized, and all-but-impenetrable to non-experts, and especially so to students from Eastern African countries. In this book, John J. Shea offers a simple, straightforward, and richly illustrated introduction in how to read stone tools. An experienced stone tool analyst and an expert stoneworker, he synthesizes the Eastern African stone tool evidence for the first time. Shea presents the EAST Typology, a new framework for describing stone tools specifically designed to allow archaeologists to do what they currently cannot: compare stone tool evidence across the full sweep of Eastern African prehistory. He also includes a series of short, fictional, and humorous vignettes set on an Eastern African archaeological excavation, which illustrate the major issues and controversies in research about stone tools.

The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia
  • A Cultural History
  • Marieke Bloembergen, Martijn Eickhoff
  • Published online:
    24 December 2019
    Print publication:
    16 January 2020
  • This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels. Starting at Hindu-Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, colonial, and prehistoric heritage sites in Indonesia, the focus is on people's encounters and the knowledge exchange taking place across colonial and post-colonial regimes. Objects are followed as they move from their site of origin to other locations, such as the Buddhist statues from Borobudur temple, that were gifted to King Chulalongkorn of Siam. The ways in which the meaning of these objects transformed as they moved away to other sites reveal their role in parallel processes of heritage formation outside Indonesia. Calling attention to the power of the material remains of the past, Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff explore questions of knowledge production, the relationship between heritage and violence, and the role of sites and objects in the creation of national histories.

The Worlds of the Indian Ocean
  • A Global History
  • Volume 1, From the Fourth Millennium BCE to the Sixth Century CE
  • Philippe Beaujard
  • Published online:
    04 October 2019
    Print publication:
    24 October 2019
  • Europe's place in history is re-assessed in this first comprehensive history of the ancient world, centering on the Indian Ocean and its role in pre-modern globalization. Philippe Beaujard presents an ambitious and comprehensive global history of the Indian Ocean world, from the earliest state formations to 1500 CE. Supported by a wealth of empirical data, full color maps, plates, and figures, he shows how Asia and Africa dominated the economic and cultural landscape and the flow of ideas in the pre-modern world. This led to a trans-regional division of labor and an Afro-Eurasian world economy. Beaujard questions the origins of capitalism and hints at how this world-system may evolve in the future. The result is a reorienting of world history, taking the Indian Ocean, rather than Europe, as the point of departure. Volume I provides in-depth coverage of the period from the fourth millennium BCE to the sixth century CE.

Image-Makers
  • The Social Context of a Hunter-Gatherer Ritual
  • David Lewis-Williams
  • Published online:
    18 May 2019
    Print publication:
    23 May 2019
  • Rock art images around the world are often difficult for us to decipher as modern viewers. Based on authentic records of the beliefs, rituals and daily life of the nineteenth-century San peoples, and of those who still inhabit the Kalahari Desert, this book adopts a new approach to hunter-gatherer rock art by placing the process of image-making within the social framework of production. Lewis-Williams shows how the San used this imagery not simply to record hunts and the animals that they saw, but rather to sustain the social network and status of those who made them. By drawing on such rich and complex records, the book reveals specific, repeated features of hunter-gatherer imagery and allows us insight into social relations as if through the eyes of the San themselves.

Memory and Agency in Ancient China
  • Shaping the Life History of Objects
  • Edited by Francis Allard, Yan Sun, Kathryn M. Linduff
  • Published online:
    17 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018
  • Memory and Agency in Ancient China offers a novel perspective on China's material culture. The volume explores the complex 'life histories' of selected objects, whose trajectories as ginle objects ('biographies') and object types ('lineages') cut across both temporal and physical space. The essays, written by a team of international scholars, analyse the objects in an effort to understand how they were shaped by the constraints of their social, political and aesthetic contexts, just as they were also guided by individual preference and capricious memory. They also demonstrate how objects were capable of effecting change. Ranging chronologically from the Neolithic to the present, and spatially from northern to southern mainland China and Taiwan, this book highlights the varied approaches that archaeologists and art historians use when attempting to reconstruct object trajectories. It also showcases the challenges they face, particularly with the unearthing of objects from archaeological contexts that, paradoxically, come to represent the earliest known point of their 'post-recovery lives'.

The Nile Basin
  • Quaternary Geology, Geomorphology and Prehistoric Environments
  • Martin Williams
  • Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    03 January 2019
  • The Nile Basin contains a record of human activities spanning the last million years. However, the interactions between prehistoric humans and environmental changes in this area are complex and often poorly understood. This comprehensive book explains in clear, non-technical terms how prehistoric environments can be reconstructed, with examples drawn from every part of the Nile Basin. Adopting a source-to-sink approach, the book integrates events in the Nile headwaters with the record from marine sediment cores in the Nile Delta and offshore. It provides a detailed record of past environmental changes throughout the Nile Basin and concludes with a review of the causes and consequences of plant and animal domestication in this region and of the various prehistoric migrations out of Africa into Eurasia and beyond. A comprehensive overview, this book is ideal for researchers in geomorphology, climatology and archaeology.

Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State
  • The Shang and their World
  • Roderick Campbell
  • Published online:
    25 May 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018
  • Situated between myth and history, the Shang has been hailed both as China's first historical dynasty and as one of the world's primary civilizations. This book is an up-to-date synthesis of the archaeological, palaeographic and transmitted textual evidence for the Shang polity at Anyang (c.1250–1050 BCE). Roderick Campbell argues that violence was not the antithesis of civilization at Shang Anyang, but rather its foundation in war and sacrifice. He explores the social economy of practices and beliefs that produced the ancestral order of the Shang polity. From the authority of posthumously deified kings, to the animalization of human sacrificial victims, the ancestral ritual complex structured the Shang world through its key institutions of war, sacrifice, and burial. Mediated by hierarchical lineages, participation in these practices was basic to being Shang. This volume, which is based on the most up-to-date evidence, offers comprehensive and cutting-edge insight into the Chinese Bronze Age civilization.

Social Memory and State Formation in Early China
  • Min Li
  • Published online:
    14 May 2018
    Print publication:
    24 May 2018
  • In this book, Li Min proposes a new paradigm for the foundation and emergence of the classical tradition in early China, from the late Neolithic through the Zhou period. Using a wide range of historical and archaeological data, he explains the development of ritual authority and particular concepts of kingship over time in relation to social memory. His volume weaves together the major benchmarks in the emergence of the classical tradition, particularly how legacies of prehistoric interregional interactions, state formation, urban florescence and collapse during the late third and the second millenniums BCE laid the critical foundation for the Sandai notion of history among Zhou elite. Moreover, the literary-historical accounts of the legendary Xia Dynasty in early China reveal a cultural construction involving social memories of the past and subsequent political elaborations in various phases of history. This volume enables a new understanding on the long-term processes that enabled a classical civilization in China to take shape.

African Archaeology Without Frontiers
  • Papers from the 2014 PanAfrican Archaeological Association Congress
  • Chapurukha M. Kusimba, Santores Tchandeu, Dirk Seidensticker, Adrianne Daggett, Marilee Wood, Laure Dussubieux, Tim Forssman, Kate Smuts, Nick Wiltshire, Akin Ogundiran, Matthew Davies, Caleb Adebayo Folorunso, Timothy Kipkeu Kipruto, Freda M'Mbogori, Henrietta L. Moore, Emubosa Orijemie, Alex Schoeman, Festo W Gabriel, Elinaza Mjema, Philip de Barros, Gabriella Lucidi, Narcisse
  • Edited by Karim Sadr, Amanda Esterhuysen, Christine Sievers
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    15 March 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016
  • Confronting national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, contributors to African Archaeology Without Frontiers argue against artificial limits and divisions created through the study of ‘ages’ that in reality overlap and cannot and should not be understood in isolation. Papers are drawn from the proceedings of the landmark 14th PanAfrican Archaeological Association Congress, held in Johannesburg in 2014, nearly seven decades after the conference planned for 1951 was re-located to Algiers for ideological reasons following the National Party’s rise to power in South Africa. Contributions by keynote speakers Chapurukha Kusimba and Akin Ogundiran encourage African archaeologists to practise an archaeology that collaborates across many related fields of study to enrich our understanding of the past. The nine papers cover a broad geographical sweep by incorporating material on ongoing projects throughout the continent including South Africa, Botswana, Cameroon, Togo, Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria. Thematically, the papers included in the volume address issues of identity and interaction, and the need to balance cultural heritage management and sustainable development derived from a continent racked by social inequalities and crippling poverty. Edited by three leading archaeologists, the collection covers many aspects of African archaeology, and a range of periods from the earliest hominins to the historical period. It will appeal to specialists and interested amateurs.

Ancient China and its Eurasian Neighbors
  • Artifacts, Identity and Death in the Frontier, 3000–700 BCE
  • Katheryn M. Linduff, Yan Sun, Wei Cao, Yuanqing Liu
  • Published online:
    13 November 2017
    Print publication:
    23 November 2017
  • This volume examines the role of objects in the region north of early dynastic state centers, at the intersection of Ancient China and Eurasia, a large area that stretches from Xinjiang to the China Sea, from c.3000 BCE to the mid-eighth century BCE. This area was a frontier, an ambiguous space that lay at the margins of direct political control by the metropolitan states, where local and colonial ideas and practices were reconstructed transculturally. These identities were often merged and displayed in material culture. Types of objects, styles, and iconography were often hybrids or new to the region, as were the tomb assemblages in which they were deposited and found. Patrons commissioned objects that marked a symbolic vision of place and person and that could mobilize support, legitimize rule, and bind people together. Through close examination of key artifacts, this book untangles the considerable changes in political structure and cultural makeup of ancient Chinese states and their northern neighbors.

Sources and Methods in African History
  • Spoken Written Unearthed
  • Edited by Toyin Falola, Christian Jennings
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2003
  • Spurred in part by the ongoing re-evaluation of sources and methods in research, African historiography in the past two decades has been characterized by the continued branching and increasing sophistication of methodologies and areas of specialization. The rate of incorporation of new sources and methods into African historical research shows no signs of slowing.

    This book is both a snapshot of current academic practice and an attempt to sort through some of the problems scholars face within this unfolding web of sources and methods. The book is divided into five sections, each ofwhich begins with a short introduction by a distinguished Africanist scholar. The first section deals with archaeological contributions to historical research. The second section examines the methodologies involved in deciphering historically accurate African ethnic identities from the records of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The third section mines old documentary sources for new historical perspectives. The fourth section deals with the method most often associated with African historians, that of drawing historical data from oral tradition. The fifth section is devoted to essays that present innovative sources and methods for African historical research.

    Together, the essays in this cutting-edge volume represent the current state of the art in African historical research.

    Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
    Christian Jennings isa doctoral candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Material Culture, Power, and Identity in Ancient China
  • Xiaolong Wu
  • Published online:
    23 March 2017
    Print publication:
    09 February 2017
  • In this book, Xiaolong Wu offers a comprehensive and in-depth study of the Zhongshan state during China's Warring States Period (476–221 BCE). Analyzing artefacts, inscriptions, and grandiose funerary structures within a broad archaeological context, he illuminates the connections between power and identity, and the role of material culture in asserting and communicating both. The author brings an interdisciplinary approach to this study. He combines and cross-examines all available categories of evidence, including archaeological, textual, art historical, and epigraphical, enabling innovative interpretations and conclusions that challenge conventional views regarding Zhongshan and ethnicity in ancient China. Wu reveals the complex relationship between material culture, cultural identity, and statecraft intended by the royal patrons. He demonstrates that the Zhongshan king Cuo constructed a hybrid cultural identity, consolidated his power, and aimed to maintain political order at court after his death through the buildings, sculpture, and inscriptions that he commissioned.

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