The last three decades have witnessed a period of growing archaeological activity in Greece that have enhanced our awareness of the diversity and variability of ancient communities. New sites offer rich datasets from many aspects of material culture that challenge traditional perceptions and suggest complex interpretations of the past. This volume provides a synthetic overview of recent developments in the study of Neolithic Greece and reconsiders the dynamics of human-environment interactions while recording the growing diversity in layers of social organization. It fills an essential lacuna in contemporary literature and enhances our understanding of the Neolithic communities in the Greek Peninsula.

The famous Franchthi Cave excavations in Greece brought to light an exceptionally long sequence of ornaments, spanning from the earliest Upper Paleolithic to the end of the Neolithic. This volume focuses on the Neolithic, whose assemblages are far more diversified than those of earlier times. The introduction during the Neolithic of entirely artificial shapes, geometric and anthropomorphic, creates a marked departure from earlier periods and shows new directions in creativity by the bead makers. It also denotes a conceptual break in the treatment of shell, no longer solely a natural element barely modified by perforation, but now also a raw material rendered anonymous by workmanship. Due to the systematic sieving of the sediments and its location by the sea, the Franchthi cave and its outdoor settlement, the Paralia, yielded one of the richest collection of ornaments for Neolithic Greece.

Effective spatial analysis is an essential element of archaeological research; this book is a unique guide to choosing the appropriate technique, applying it correctly and understanding its implications both theoretically and practically. Focusing upon the key techniques used in archaeological spatial analysis, this book provides the authoritative, yet accessible, methodological guide to the subject which has thus far been missing from the corpus. Each chapter tackles a specific technique or application area and follows a clear and coherent structure. First is a richly referenced introduction to the particular technique, followed by a detailed description of the methodology, then an archaeological case study to illustrate the application of the technique, and conclusions that point to the implications and potential of the technique within archaeology. The book is designed to function as the main textbook for archaeological spatial analysis courses at undergraduate and post-graduate level, while its user-friendly structure makes it also suitable for self-learning by archaeology students as well as researchers and professionals.

This volume aims to show networks of cultural interactions by focusing on the latest lithic studies from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans, bringing to the forefront the connectedness and techno-cultural continuity of knapped and ground stone technologies.

Deeply stratified settlements are a distinctive site type featuring prominently in diverse later prehistoric landscapes of the Old World. Their massive materiality has attracted the curiosity of lay people and archaeologists alike. Nowadays a wide variety of archaeological projects are tracking the lifestyles and social practices that led to the building-up of such superimposed artificial hills. However, prehistoric tell-dwelling communities are too often approached from narrow local perspectives or discussed within strict time- and culture-specific debates. There is a great potential to learn from such ubiquitous archaeological manifestations as the physical outcome of cross-cutting dynamics and comparable underlying forces irrespective of time and space. This volume tackles tells and tell-like sites as a transversal phenomenon whose commonalities and divergences are poorly understood yet may benefit from cross-cultural comparison. Thus, the book intends to assemble a representative range of ongoing theory – and science –based fieldwork projects targeting this kind of sites. With the aim of encompassing a variety of social and material dynamics, the volume’s scope is diachronic – from the Earliest Neolithic up to the Iron Age–, and covers a very large region, from Iberia in Western Europe to Syria in the Middle East. The core of the volume comprises a selection of the most remarkable contributions to the session with a similar title celebrated in the European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting held at Barcelona in 2018. In addition, the book includes invited chapters to round out underrepresented areas and periods in the EAA session with relevant research programmes in the Old World. To accomplish such a cross-cultural course, the book takes a case-based approach, with contributions disparate both in their theoretical foundations – from household archaeology, social agency and formation theory – and their research strategies – including geophysical survey, microarchaeology and high-resolution excavation and dating.

This collection of papers explores whether the Lévi-Straussian notion of the House is a valid concept in aiding the comprehension of the social structure of Bronze Age Aegean societies. The volume succeeds in stressing the advances made in the study of social structure of the Aegean on the basis of material remains.

A guide to the systematic understanding of the geoarchaeological matrix Reconstructing Archaeological Sites offers an important text that puts the focus on basic theoretical and practical aspects of depositional processes in an archaeological site. It contains an in-depth discussion on the role of stratigraphy that helps determine how deposits are organised in time and space. The authors — two experts in the field — include the information needed to help recognise depositional systems, processes and stratigraphic units that aid in the interpreting the stratigraphy and deposits of a site in the field. The book is filled with practical tools, numerous illustrative examples, drawings and photos as well as compelling descriptions that help visualise depositional processes and clarify how these build the stratigraphy of a site. Based on the authors’ years of experience, the book offers a holistic approach to the study of archaeological deposits that spans the broad fundamental aspects to the smallest details. This important guide: Offers information and principles for interpreting natural and anthropogenic sediments and physical processes in sites Provides a framework for reconstructing the history of a deposit and the site Outlines the fundamental principles of site formation processes Explores common misconceptions about what constitutes a deposit Presents a different approach for investigating archaeological stratigraphy based on sedimentary principles Written for archaeologists and geoarchaeologists at all levels of expertise as well as senior level researchers, Reconstructing Archaeological Sites offers a guide to the theory and practice of how stratigraphy is produced and how deposits can be organised in time and space.

This unique book is an exciting global journey into the origins, technologies, and recipes of ancient beer as well as into beer's continued importance today in diet, ritual, and economics.

Archaeology is in crisis. Spatial turns, material turns and the ontological turn have directed the discipline away from its hard-won battle to find humanity in the past. Meanwhile, popularised science, camouflaged as archaeology, produces shock headlines built on ancient DNA that reduce humanity’s most intriguing historical problems to two-dimensional caricatures. Today archaeology finds itself less able than ever to proclaim its relevance to the modern world. This volume foregrounds the relevance of the scholarship of John Barrett to this crisis. Twenty-four writers representing three generations of archaeologists scrutinise the current turmoil in the discipline and highlight the resolutions that may be found through Barrett’s analytical framework. Topics include archaeology and the senses, the continuing problem of the archaeological record, practice, discourse, and agency, reorienting archaeological field practice, the question of different expressions of human diversity, and material ecologies. Understanding archaeology as both a universal and highly specific discipline, case-studies range from the Aegean to Orkney, and encompass Anatolia, Korea, Romania, United Kingdom and the very nature of the Universe itself. This critical examination of John Barrett’s contribution to archaeology is simultaneously a response to his urgent call to arms to reorient archaeology in the service of humanity.

True to its initial aims, the latest volume of the Journal of Greek Archaeology runs the whole chronological range of Greek Archaeology, while including every kind of material culture.