In commemoration of Lothar von Falkenhausen’s 60th birthday, this volume assembles eighteen scholarly essays that explore the intersection between art, economy, and ritual in ancient East Asia.
“offer[s] a rich context, with a social historical rigour that provides an insightful backdrop to contemporary political events, as well as being a welcome addition to the growing literature on the histories of imperial and colonial archaeology practiced worldwide”
— Uzma Z. Rizvi, Antiquity, 2019
The Late Bronze Age (ca. 1000-250 BC) was a crucial period during which the Chinese Classics came into being and famous thinkers such as Confucius (ca. 551-479 BC) laid the intellectual foundations of traditional Chinese civilization.
The Classic Maya of the Central Lowlands crafted one of the ancient world’s great civilizations in what is today Belize, northern Guatemala, and Yucatan, Mexico. Although the Maya have long been known for their artistic and architectural achievements, the economic and agricultural base of this society has received far less attention. Over the past couple of decades, archaeologists have begun to understand how Maya householders reliably farmed this harsh, fragile, and yet highly productive environment for two thousand years.
Information and Its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands explores the question of how information, broadly conceived, is acquired, stored, circulated, and utilized in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, or bands. Given the nature of this question, the volume brings together a group of scholars from multiple disciplines, including archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and evolutionary ecology. Each of these specialties deals with the question of information in different ways and with different sets of data given different primacy.
This volume brings together the work of some of the most prominent archaeologists to document the impact of Jeffrey R. Parsons on contemporary archaeological method and theory. Parsons is a central figure in the development of settlement pattern archaeology, in which the goal is the study of whole social systems at the scale of regions.
This volume of essays dedicated to Robert McCormick Adams reflects both the breadth of his research and the select themes upon which he focused his attention. These essays written by his students and disciples
Warfare, ritual human sacrifice, and the rubber ballgame are the traditional practices through which scholars have most often examined organized violence in the artistic and material records of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America.
For more than four thousand years, empires have been geographically the largest polities on Earth, shaping in many respects the human past and present in different epochsand on different continents.
