This book combines findings from archaeology and anthropology on the making, use and distribution of hand-made pottery, the rhythms of mobility involved and the transformations triggered by such processes, discussing different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches.

There have been edited books on the archaeology of nomadism in various regions, and there have been individual archaeological and anthropological monographs, but nothing with the kind of coverage provided in this volume. Its strength and importance lies in the fact that it brings together a worldwide collection of studies of the archaeology of mobility. This book provides a ready-made reference to this worldwide phenomenon and is unique in that it tries to redefine pastoralism within a larger context by the term mobility. It presents many new ideas and thoughtful approaches, especially in the Central Asian region.

Daniel Albero Santacreu presents a wide overview of certain aspects of the pottery analysis and summarizes most of the methodological and theoretical information currently applied in archaeology in order to develop wide and deep analysis of ceramic pastes. The book provides an adequate framework for understanding the way pottery production is organised and clarifies the meaning and role of the pottery in archaeological and traditional societies. The goal of this book is to encourage reflection, especially by those researchers who face the analysis of ceramics for the first time, by providing a background for the generation of their own research and to formulate their own questions depending on their concerns and interests. The three-part structure of the book allows readers to move easily from the analysis of the reality and ceramic material culture to the world of the ideas and theories and to develop a dialogue between data and their interpretation. Daniel Albero Santacreu is a Lecturer Assistant in the University of the Balearic Islands, member of the Research Group Arqueo UIB and the Ceramic Petrology Group. He has carried out the analysis of ceramics from several prehistoric societies placed in the Western Mediterranean, as well as the study of handmade pottery from contemporary ethnic groups in Northeast Ghana.

This volume, together with its companion volume Production and the Exploitation of Resources, examines the economic basis of the early Islamic world, looking at the organization of extractive and agricultural operations, manufacturing processes, and labour relations. This volume opens with studies of artisanal production that address the issues of specialization, the division of labour, and the proliferation of manufacturing occupations in early Islamic times, looking in particular at ceramic and textile production. The section on labour expands the enquiry to cover the legal and social status of manual labourers and questions of the organization and mobility of labour, wage labour, and labour partnerships. These studies deal with both the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, and also identify the role of slave labour in commerce, domestic service, agriculture and herding. Taken together, this body of work demonstrates a high degree of commercialization in the early Islamic economy, particularly in Iraq, Egypt and Ifriqiya.

Despite notable explorations of past dynamics, much of the archaeological literature on mobility remains dominated by accounts of earlier prehistoric gatherer-hunters, or the long-distance exchange of materials. Refinements of scientific dating techniques, isotope, trace element and aDNA analyses, in conjunction with phenomenological investigation, computer-aided landscape modeling and GIS-style approaches to large data sets, allow us to follow the movement of people, animals and objects in the past with greater precision and conviction. One route into exploring mobility in the past may be through exploring the movements and biographies of artifacts. Challenges lie not only in tracing the origins and final destinations of objects but in the less tangible ‘in between’ journeys and the hands they passed through. Biographical approaches to artifacts include the recognition that culture contact and hybridity affect material culture in meaningful ways. Furthermore, discrete and bounded ‘sites’ still dominate archaeological inquiry, leaving the spaces and connectivities between features and settlements unmapped. These are linked to an under-explored middle-spectrum of mobility, a range nestled between everyday movements and one-off ambitious voyages. We wish to explore how these travels involved entangled meshworks of people, animals, objects, knowledge sets and identities. By crossing and re-crossing cultural, contextual and tenurial boundaries, such journeys could create diasporic and novel communities, ideas and materialities.

Interaction and mobility have attracted much interest in research within scholarly fields as different as archaeology, history, and more broadly the humanities. Critically assessing some of the most widespread views on interaction and its social impact, this book proposes an innovative perspective which combines radical social theory and currently burgeoning network methodologies. Through an in-depth analysis of a wealth of data often difficult to access, and illustrated by many diagrams and maps, the book highlights connections and their social implications at different scales ranging from the individual settlement to the Mediterranean. The resulting diachronic narrative explores social and economic trajectories over some seven centuries and sheds new light on the broad historical trends affecting the life of people living around the Middle Sea. The Bronze Age is the first period of intense interaction between early state societies of the Eastern Mediterranean and the small-scale communities to the west of Greece, with people and goods moving at a scale previously unprecedented. This encounter is explored from the vantage point of one of its main foci: Apulia, located in the southern Adriatic, at the junction between East and West and the entryway of one of the major routes for the resource-rich European continent.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible represents a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners interested in an emerging multidisciplinary area within psychology and the social sciences: the study of how we engage with and cultivate the possible within self, society and culture. Far from being opposed either to the actual or the real, the possible engages with concrete facts and experiences, with the result of transforming them. This encyclopedia examines the notion of the possible and the concepts associated with it from standpoints within psychology, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience and logic, as well as multidisciplinary fields of research including anticipation studies, future studies, complexity theory and creativity research. Presenting multiple perspectives on the possible, the authors consider the distinct social, cultural and psychological processes - e.g., imagination, counterfactual thinking, wonder, play, inspiration, and many others - that define our engagement with new possibilities in domains as diverse as the arts, design and business.

The present book explores the complexity of the past, by analysing the relationships between place, territory, the material value of objects and landscapes, time and ritual, during archaeological investigations. It presents the archaeology of place as a series of interconnecting and interactive relationships. It is clear that things and places do not emerge without some form of agency, usually through the concept of material manipulation, coupled with elaboration, innovation and time. Depending on the raw material used and the process of manipulation and its relationship with the environment, materiality gains value. How do we as modern humans work within the complexity of place, materiality, time, and ritual? Traditional in archaeological discourse is the need to describe place, albeit in an empiricist and banal way. Discourse is sometimes followed by a more fruitful and interpretive account. However, these accounts tend to ignore human emotion that is bound-up in place, for example the ritualized and symbolic meanings that place holds. This book explores the significance of geography, place and the materiality that place holds, and challenges many of the tradition norms that in the past have trivialized landscape archaeology. The book is divided into 14 thought-provoking and crafted chapters and will be an ideal companion to anyone involved in the social sciences.

This book provides the most complete overview of the Attica region from the Neolithic to the end of the Late Bronze Age. It paves the way for a new understanding of Attica in the Early Iron Age and indirectly throws new light on the origins of what will later become the polis of the Athenians.

This work explores the long-term evolutionary implications of the "Mobility Imperative:" the foundational nature of mobility for human beings and their societies. The author puts forward a parsimonious but comprehensive model based on Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) rationales. The selected case studies range from the emergence and expansion of humans to cattle domestication and beyond.