Examines key technological innovations, knowledge transfer, connectivity and social meaning in the ancient and Medieval Sahara.

Places burial traditions at the centre of Saharan migrations and identity debate, with new technical data and methodological analysis.

This ground-breaking volume pushes back conventional dating of the earliest sedentarisation, urbanisation and state formation in the Sahara.

Demonstrates that the pre-Islamic Sahara was a more connected region than previously thought, with trade an essential linking element.

Beyond the Word provides as implicit critique of postmodernism, redefining it as a further, radical stage of modernism. Theall argues that Joyce anticipated many of the insights of semiotics, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Moreover, Joyce and other modern artists differed from their predecessors in exhibiting a greater sense of their place within a dynamic, multifaceted field of communication. Thus, long before the emergence of postmodernism, these radical modernists posed an implicit challenge to the traditional notion of art as a privileged sphere. Beyond the Word situates artistic expression within a broad ecology of communication alongside genres such as comics, games, ads, videos, and slogans of spontaneous protest. Within this context, Theall reconsiders the contributions of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Gregory Bateson, and Kenneth Burke to our contemporary understanding of communication, and looks at artists as disparate as Dusan Makavejev, Stanley Kubrick, Alexander Pope, Rabelais, William Gibson, Gene Roddenberry, and Wyndham Lewis.

In more than 30 essays in two volumes, leading archaeologist Egyptologists examine topics ranging from date stones to insects, from footwear to flour production, relating to sites and finds from all parts of Egypt, in an important collection dedicated to the work and career of a much respected archaeologist.

This volume offers a view of the cultural, interpersonal and family consequences of mobile communication across the globe. The contributors analyse the effects of moble communications on all aspects of life, from the relationship between literacy and the textual features of phones, to the use of ringtones as a form of social exchange.

Beyond the Primary Commodity Trap offers an alternative paradigm for analysing African development from the current "aid and aids" narrative. Taking as its point of departure Africa's failure to extricate itself from over dependence on raw materials and its seeming inability to industrialise, it offers an analysis of the political forces that have shaped and continue to shape Africa's political economy. The book focuses particularly on the endemic poverty in the continent and how it interfaces with politics. Written with the general reader in mind, the book also examines some of the internal dynamics in Africa and how these combine with the continent's history and some other extraneous factors to explain the current conditions of economic poverty and the poverty of leadership in many parts of the continent.