Results by title

375 books match the query 'Excavations (Archaeology)' and 16 start with e

cover of Early Farming and Warfare in Northwest Mexico

Early Farming and Warfare in Northwest Mexico

Robert J. Hard and John R. Roney

University of Utah Press, 2019

This volume presents the multiyear archaeological investigations of Cerro Juanaqueña and related sites in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. These remarkable terraced hilltop settlements represent a series of watershed developments, including substantial dependence on agriculture and early experiments with village living, fortified settlements, collective labor, and communal architecture. Part of a larger, regional development, they parallel changes in northern Sonora and southern Arizona. The emergence of large fortified agricultural villages at 1300 BC—before the use of ceramics—was an unexpected discovery that changed how archaeologists view early agriculture in this region.
 
The authors place their work in a regional and theoretical context, providing detailed analyses of radiocarbon dates, structures, features, and artifacts. Authors Hard and Roney, and their contributors, present innovative analyses of plant and animal remains, ground stone, chipped stone, and landscape evolution. Through comparisons with a global cross-cultural probe of hilltop sites and a detailed examination of the features and artifacts of Cerro Juanaqueña, Hard and Roney argue that these cerros de trincheras sites are the earliest fortified defensive sites in the region. Readers with interests in ancient agriculture, warfare, village formation, and material culture will find this to be a foundational volume.
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cover of Early Neolithic Settlement and Society at Olszanica

Early Neolithic Settlement and Society at Olszanica

Sarunas Milisauskas

University of Michigan Press, 1986

The site of Olszanica, in southeastern Poland, contains remains of a large Early Neolithic settlement of the Linear Pottery culture. This monograph presents the results of the archaeological excavations conducted from 1967 to 1973.
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cover of Early Pottery: Technology, Function, Style, and Interaction in the Lower Southeast

Early Pottery

Technology, Function, Style, and Interaction in the Lower Southeast

Edited by Rebecca Saunders and Christopher T. Hays

University of Alabama Press, 2004

A synthesis of research on earthenware technologies of the Late Archaic Period in the southeastern U.S.

Information on social groups and boundaries, and on interaction between groups, burgeons when pottery appears on the social landscape of the Southeast in the Late Archaic period (ca. 5000-3000 years ago). This volume provides a broad, comparative review of current data from "first potteries" of the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and in the lower Mississippi River Valley, and it presents research that expands our understanding of how pottery functioned in its earliest manifestations in this region.

Included are discussions of Orange pottery in peninsular Florida, Stallings pottery in Georgia, Elliot's Point fiber-tempered pottery in the Florida panhandle, and the various pottery types found in excavations over the years at the Poverty Point site in northeastern Louisiana. The data and discussions demonstrate that there was much more interaction, and at an earlier date, than is often credited to Late Archaic societies. Indeed, extensive trade in pottery throughout the region occurs as early as 1500 B.C.

These and other findings make this book indispensable to those involved in research into the origin and development of pottery in general and its unique history in the Southeast in particular.

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cover of Early Stages in the Evolution of Mesopotamian Civilization: Soviet Excavations in Northern Iraq

Early Stages in the Evolution of Mesopotamian Civilization

Soviet Excavations in Northern Iraq

Edited by Norman Yoffee and Jeffery J. Clark

University of Arizona Press, 1993

Between 1969 and 1980, Soviet archaeologists conducted excavations of Mesopotamian villages occupied from pre-agricultural times through the beginnings of early civilization. This volume brings together translations of Russian articles along with new work.
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cover of Early Village Life at Beidha, Jordan: Neolithic spatial organization and vernacular architecture

Early Village Life at Beidha, Jordan

Neolithic spatial organization and vernacular architecture

Brian Byrd

Council for British Research in the Levant, 2005

This book explores the spatial organization and vernacular architecture of the Early Neolithic village of Beidha in southern Jordan. This is a case study rigorously investigating changes in community organization associated with early sedentism and food production in Southwest Asia. Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk's extensive fieldwork at Beidha yielded a considerable occupation span, extensive horizontal exposure, numerous excavated buildings with well preserved architecture and features, and a relative abundance of in situ artefacts. These broad horizontal excavations revealed a moderately sized early farming community dating to the middle of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, primarily after 7000 BC. The first three chapters of the book place the early village of Beidha within the context of the origins of sedentism and food production; provide an overview of the site and the excavations; and present the analytical approach and the methods used in this study, as well as the final phasing model for the history of the settlement. The subsequent two chapters detail the stratigraphy and chronology of the early Neolithic village, and examine the built environment and architecture, focusing on the construction, remodeling, and use life of individual buildings. The next two chapters explore, by phase, architectural patterning, continuity and change, and then community organization and the utilization of space. The book concludes with a broader consideration of emerging organizational trends expressed in the remarkable built environment of early Neolithic settlements in Southwest Asia. The results reveal that the successful establishment of sedentary food-producing villages was marked by novel social and economic developments, and the autonomization of households and formalization of corporate bodies represented important trends during this transition. These two organizational trends then formed the foundation upon which later, more complex social constructions were built.
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cover of Earthquakes and Gardens: Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus

Earthquakes and Gardens

Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus

Virginia Burrus

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Essays about ruination, resilience, reading, and religion generated by a reflection on a fourth-century hagiography.
 
In Jerome’s Life of Saint Hilarion, a fourth-century saint briefly encounters the ruins of an earthquake-toppled city and a haunted garden in Cyprus. From these two fragmentary passages, Virginia Burrus delivers a series of sweeping meditations on our experience of place and the more-than-human worlds—the earth and its gods—that surround us. Moving between the personal and geological, Earthquakes and Gardens ruminates on destruction and resilience, ruination and resurgence, grief and consolation in times of disaster and loss. Ultimately, Burrus’s close readings reimagine religion as a practice that unsettles certainty and develops mutual flourishing.
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cover of Elamite and Achaemenid Settlement on the Deh Luran Plain: Towns and Villages of the Early Empires in Southwestern Iran

Elamite and Achaemenid Settlement on the Deh Luran Plain

Towns and Villages of the Early Empires in Southwestern Iran

Edited by Henry T. Wright and James A. Neely

University of Michigan Press, 2010

The Deh Luran Plain, nestled in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains close to the modern border between Iraq and Iran, had a long and rich prehistory, beginning with the local development of villages dependent upon rainfall farming and herding in the 8th millennium BC. This volume continues the account of the plain from the later 3rd millennium BC to the middle of the 1st millennium BC. It contains detailed site maps and descriptions, aerial and satellite images of major sites, statistics and drawings of ceramics, and discussions of the historical sources.
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cover of Enduring Monuments: Formative Period Transformations at Pukara, Peru

Enduring Monuments

Formative Period Transformations at Pukara, Peru

Elizabeth A. Klarich

University Press of Colorado, 2025

Enduring Monuments traces the architectural histories of monumental complexes and public spaces of the Pukara site in the Lake Titicaca Basin. Using data from three distinct areas—the Qalasaya, the Central Pampa, and the Northern Platform—Elizabeth A. Klarich provides a powerful diachronic and comparative perspective for understanding social and political transformations during the Late Formative period in Peru.
 
In the early twentieth century, Peruvian scholars Luis E. Valcárcel and Julio C. Tello visited Pukara and shared images of its multicolored pottery and unique stone sculptures with colleagues across the world. A number of both small-scale and multiyear field projects have followed, with goals of refining Lake Titicaca Basin cultural chronologies, tracking Pukara-style material culture in the south-central Andes, restoring the structural integrity of the Qalasaya, and documenting the reoccupations of Pukara by Colla, Inca, and early Spanish colonial populations. Enduring Monuments synthesizes the findings of these diverse projects and shares the results of fieldwork and artifact analysis by the Pukara Archaeological Project since 2000.
 
Using a “building biography” approach that tracks initial construction, major remodeling, and subsequent expansion efforts during the Middle and Late Formative periods (400 BC–AD 200), Klarich highlights transformations in material culture, settlement patterns, social hierarchy, and daily practices at Pukara and contemporaneous sites across the Titicaca Basin and situates Formative period Pukara within the vast anthropological and archaeological literature addressing monumentality, ritual practice, and incipient urbanism in complex societies in South America and beyond.
 
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cover of Engendering Households in the Prehistoric Southwest

Engendering Households in the Prehistoric Southwest

Edited by Barbara J. Roth

University of Arizona Press, 2010

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once described a village as “deserted” when all the adult males had vanished. While his statement is from the first half of the twentieth century, it nonetheless illustrates an oversight that has persisted during most of the intervening decades.

Now Southwestern archaeologists have begun to delve into the task of “engendering” their sites. Using a “close to the ground” approach, the contributors to this book seek to engender the prehistoric Southwest by examining evidence at the household level.

Focusing on gendered activities in household contexts throughout the southwestern United States, this book represents groundbreaking work in this area. The contributors view households as a crucial link to past activities and behavior, and by engendering these households, we can gain a better understanding of their role in prehistoric society. Gender-structured household activities, in turn, can offer insight into broader-scale social and economic factors. The chapters offer a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to engendering households and examine topics such as the division of labor, gender relations, household ritual, ceramic and ground stone production and exchange, and migration.

Engendering Households in the Prehistoric Southwest ultimately addresses broader issues of interest to many archaeologists today, including households and their various forms, identity and social boundary formation, technological style, and human agency. Focusing on gendered activities in household contexts throughout the southwestern United States, this book represents groundbreaking work in this area. The contributors view households as a crucial link to past activities and behavior, and by engendering these households, we can gain a better understanding of their role in prehistoric society. Gender-structured household activities, in turn, can offer insight into broader-scale social and economic factors.
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cover of Euphrates River Valley Settlement: The Carchemish Sector in the Third Millennium BC

Euphrates River Valley Settlement

The Carchemish Sector in the Third Millennium BC

E. Peltenburg

Council for British Research in the Levant, 2007

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cover of Excavation Of The Donner Reed

Excavation Of The Donner Reed

Bruce Hawkins

University of Utah Press, 1990

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cover of Excavation at San José Mogote 1: The Household Archaeology

Excavation at San José Mogote 1

The Household Archaeology

Kent V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus with a multidimensional scaling of houses by Robert G. Reynolds

University of Michigan Press, 2005

San José Mogote, an early village and chiefly center in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley, was excavated over a fifteen-year period. This volume reports in detail on every Early and Middle Formative house recovered, including a complete inventory of artifacts, features, plants, animal bones, and craft raw materials by house, with extensive piece-plotting of items on house floors and dooryards.
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cover of Excavations at Cerro Tilcajete: A Monte Albán II Administrative Center in the Valley of Oaxaca

Excavations at Cerro Tilcajete

A Monte Albán II Administrative Center in the Valley of Oaxaca

Christina Elson

University of Michigan Press, 2007

This volume, part of a series on the prehistory and human ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, focuses on Cerro Tilcajete, a secondary administrative center below Monte Albán, the capital of the prehispanic Zapotec state.
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cover of Excavations at San José Mogote 2: The Cognitive Archaeology

Excavations at San José Mogote 2

The Cognitive Archaeology

Kent V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus with contributions by Chris L. Moser, Ronald Spores, Dudley M. Varner, Judith Francis Zeitlin, and Robert N. Zeitlin

University of Michigan Press, 2005

San José Mogote is a 60-70 ha Formative site in the northern Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, which was occupied for a thousand years before the city of Monte Albán was founded. Filling 432 pages and utilizing more than 400 photographs and line drawings, this book describes in detail more than 35 public buildings, including men’s houses, one-room temples, a performance platform, two-room state temples, a ballcourt, and two types of palaces.
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cover of Excavations at Tel Nebi Mend, Syria Volume I

Excavations at Tel Nebi Mend, Syria Volume I

Peter J. Parr

Council for British Research in the Levant, 2015

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cover of Excavations at Wickliffe Mounds

Excavations at Wickliffe Mounds

Kit W. Wesler, with a foreword by Victoria G. Fortner

University of Alabama Press, 2001

Wesler provides an impressive and definitive compilation of more than 70 years of archaeological excavations at one of the most important
archaeological sites in Kentucky.

The Wickliffe Mounds site is located on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in Ballard County, Kentucky, about three miles south of the mouth of the Ohio River. Around A.D. 1100, Mississippian people--farmers and traders with a culture closely related to the historic cultures of the Southeast (Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and others)—created a settlement there on which they lived for approximately 250 years before moving on.

In 1930 road construction cut a channel through the site, revealing archaeological deposits and bringing the area to the attention of Fain King, a local lumberman and entrepreneur. King bought the site in hopes of turning it into an attraction for the education and entertainment of the public, and not incidentally for his own profit. For more than 50 years the area was subjected to excavations ranging from looting to professional research efforts. In 1983, the site was finally turned over to Murray State University to be developed into an academic facility dedicated to research, student training, public education, and preservation of the site and its collections. Fortunately, the Wickliffe collections include all the early excavation records as well as more than 85,000 artifacts, 90% of which had been catalogued. Between 1984 and 1996 excavations were conducted specifically to affirm questionable data and/or fill in gaps in the Wickliffe archaeological record.

In this volume, Wesler and his colleagues have compiled data from almost seven decades of excavations at Wickliffe Mounds, providing the first comprehensive study of this important site. The paperback version of the book is accompanied by a CD-ROM that contains contributions from a wide range of archaeological specialists and includes archaeological data, site maps, database files, plats of excavations, artifact descriptions, and photographs, compiling in one place the entire archaeological record for this very important eastern North American site.

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