The papers in this volume focus especially on the relationship between ground stone artefacts and foodways and include archaeological and ethnographic case studies ranging from the Palaeolithic to the current era, and geographically from Africa to Europe and Asia.

Ground Stone Tools and Past Foodways brings together a selection of papers presented at the 3rd meeting of the Association of Ground Stone Tools Research, which was held at the University of Copenhagen in 2019. Ground stone artefacts are one of the most enduring classes of material culture: first used by Palaeolithic gatherer-hunters, they are still used regularly by people in many parts of the world to grind, mash and pulverize plants, meat and minerals. As such, ground stone artefacts provide a well preserved record at the nexus of interaction between humans, plants and animals. The papers in this volume focus especially on the relationship between ground stone artefacts and foodways and include archaeological and ethnographic case studies ranging from the Palaeolithic to the current era, and geographically from Africa to Europe and Asia. They reflect the current state of the art in ground stone tool research and highlight the many ways in which foodways can be studied through holistic examinations of ground stone artefacts.

In the third millennium B.C.E., the Oman Peninsula was the site of an important kingdom known in Akkadian texts as "Magan," which traded extensively with the Indus Civilization, southern Iran, the Persian Gulf states, and southern Mesopotamia. Excavations have been carried out in this region since the 1970s, although the majority of studies have focused on mortuary monuments at the expense of settlement archaeology. While domestic structures of the Bronze Age have been found and are the focus of current research at Bat, most settlements dating from the third millennium B.C.E. in Oman and the U.A.E. are defined by the presence of large, circular monuments made of mudbrick or stone that are traditionally called "towers." Whether these so-called towers are defensive, agricultural, political, or ritual structures has long been debated, but very few comprehensive studies of these monuments have been attempted. Between 2007 and 2012, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology conducted excavations at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat in the Sultanate of Oman under the direction of the late Gregory L. Possehl. The focus of these years was on the monumental stone towers of the third millennium B.C.E., looking at the when, how, and why of their construction through large-scale excavation, GIS-aided survey, and the application of radiocarbon dates. This has been the most comprehensive study of nonmortuary Bronze Age monuments ever conducted on the Oman Peninsula, and the results provide new insight into the formation and function of these impressive structures that surely formed the social and political nexus of Magan's kingdom.

This volume offers a system for the hierarchical classification of British lithic artefacts from the Late Glacial and Holocene periods, and it is hoped that it may find use as a guide book for, for example, archaeology students, museum staff, non-specialist archaeologists, local archaeology groups and lay enthusiasts.

A number of researchers have tried to characterise the anatomy and behavioural systems of early hominid and early modern human populations in an attempt to understand how we became what we are. Can archaeology, palaeo-anthropology and genetics tell us how and when human cultures developed the traits that make our societies different from those of our closest living relatives? In which cases are these differences substantial, and when do they simply reflect our definitions of culture, species, the image we have of their evolution or of ourselves? From Tools to Symbols, a collection of twenty-seven selected papers from a South African-French conference organised in honour of the well-known palaeo-anthropologist Phillip Tobias, provides a multidisciplinary overview of this field of study. It is based on collaborative research conducted in sub-Saharan Africa by South African, French, American and German scholars in the last twenty years, and represents an excellent synthesis of the palaeontological and archaeological evidence of the last five million years of human evolution.

Ever since the discovery of fossil remains of extinct animals associated with flint implements, bones and other animal remains have been providing invaluable information to the archaeologist. In the last 20 years many archaeologists and zoologists have taken to studying such "archaeofaunal" remains, and the science of "zoo-archaeology" has come into being. What was the nature of the environment in which our ancestors lived? In which season were sites occupied? When did our earliest ancestors start to hunt big game, and how efficient were they as hunters? Were early humans responsible for the extinction of so many species of large mammals 10-20,000 years ago? When, where and why were certain animals first domesticated? When did milking and horse-riding begin? Did the Romans influence our eating habits? What were sanitary conditions like in medieval England? And could the terrible pestilence which afflicted the English in the seventh century AD have been plague? These are some of the questions dealt with in this book. The book also describes the nature and development of bones and teeth, and some of the methods used in zoo-archaeology.

This monograph makes a significant contribution to answering some long standing questions in the Later Stone Age prehistory of southern Africa and to archaeological methods in general. The Vredenburg Peninsula Survey project originally set out to confirm that the first herders at the south-western Cape were immigrant Khoekhoe-speakers who had migrated from farther north about two thousand years ago. It failed to find evidence to support this hypothesis and instead ended up making a solid contribution to documenting the regional transition from formal, microlithic technology to the informal stone tool repertoire that marks the immediately Pre-Colonial period. It also throws light on another regional question concerning the rise and fall of stone adze technology. Its contribution to survey methodology is of worldwide importance and this is the first time an archaeologist has gambled on dating surface shell on a large scale and it has paid off handsomely. Coastal archaeologists on all continents should take note of this, and be rightly encouraged.

This collection aims to refocus archaeological and anthropological interest in technology.

This volume describes important sites in the Pleistocene deposits of the Thames terrace system laid down by the Thames and its tributaries. It correlates the Thames sequence with deposits found elsewhere in Britain, on the European continent and on the ocean floor.