Archaeology

03 Oct 1994 12:00

Guillermo Algaze, "The Sumerian Takeoff", Structure and Dynamics 1 (2005): forthcoming [From the abstract: "Economic geographers correctly note that regional variations in economic activity and population agglomeration are always the result of self-reinforcing processes of resource production, accumulation, exchange, and innovation. This article proposes that essentially similar forces account for the emergence of the world's earliest cities in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Souther Mesopotamia), sometime during the second half of the fourth millennium BC."]
Amy Dockser Marcus, The View from Nebo [Popular survey of recent Biblical archaeology]
Nicholas Clapp, The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands ["Weeks later, a courteous yet understandably skeptical American Express agent allowed that losing-one's-checks-while-paying-a-ransom-for-goats-frightened-to-death was surely the most unusual explanation he had ever heard."]
Daniel Glyn and Colin Renfrew, The Idea of Prehistory
Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris, Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence [Review]
E. C. Krupp, Skywatchers, Shamans and Kings: Astronomy and the Archaeology of Power
John Novembre and Matthew Stephens, "Interpreting principal component analyses of spatial population genetic variation", Nature Genetics 40 (2008): 646--649 [Many PCA patterns commonly taken to be signs of ancestral population movements can also be produced as artifacts from null models. This is distressing, since many of the results Cavalli-Sforza et al. have based on PCA maps are things which make sense and I'd like to be true, but Novembre and Stephens's arguments check out.]
William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage [A bunch of archaeologists start excavating modern American garbage dumps, with surprising results. A proper archaeological dissection of modern America would be a fascinating and I suspect frightening and unpublishable thing.]
Colin Renfew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice [Excellent introductory textbook; somebody stole my copy.]
Lynne Sebastian, The Chaco Anasazi: Sociopolitical Evolution in the Prehistoric Southwest

W. Alva and C. B. Donnan, Royal Tombs of Sipan
Matthew A. Chamberlin, "Symbolic Conflict and the Spatiality of Traditions in Small-scale Societies", Cambridge Archaeological Journal 16 (2006): 39--51
V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself
Grahame Clark, Archaeology and Society: Reconstructing the Prehistoric Past
George L. Cowgill, "Origins and Development of Urbanism: Archaeological Perspective", Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004)
Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age
Kenneth L. Feder, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology
Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nicholas (eds.), Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies [Review by Donald C. Haggis in American Scientist]
Chris Gosden, Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present
Charles Higham, The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia
Ian Hodder and Scott Hutson, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology [3rd ed. 2003]
Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, Lords of Sipan: A True Story of Pre-Inca Tombs, Archaeology, and Crime
Kristian Kristiansen, Europe Before History ["Attempts to explain why societies of the European Bronze Age, while producing elaborate artifacts and trading across the whole of Europe, were economically and politically undiversified. Most coherent overview of this period of European prehistory."]
Herbert Donald Graham Maschner (ed.), Darwinian Archaeologies
Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5,000 BC [Review in American Scientist]
Michael J. O'Kelly, Newgrange: Archaeology, Art and Legend
Adrian Praetzellis, Death by Theory: Death by Theory: A Tale of Mystery and Archaelogical Theory
Neil Price (ed.), The Archaeology of Shamanism
Stephen Shennan, Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution
Adam T. Smith, The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities [Blurb]
Michael E. Smith, "The Archaeology of Ancient State Economies", Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004)
Trigger, Artifacts and Ideas
Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations [Review in Science]