Aujourd’hui, les traces de la présence amérindienne en Martinique constituent, en dehors des pétroglyphes de la forêt de Montravail et des pièces exposées dans les musées de l’île, un patrimoine invisible. Cependant, avant son invasion par les européens cette île a bien été pendant au moins 1500 ans terre amérindienne.Pendant dix années, entre 1995 et 2005, une équipe pluridisciplinaire internationale a ainsi travaillée à étudier l’occupation précolombienne de la Martinique. Ce programme initialement dirigé par J.-P. Giraud puis par Benoît Bérard a été menée dans le cadre d’un Projet Collectif de Recherche intitulé “Le néolithique martiniquais dans son contexte antillais” agréé par le Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication et financé par la Direction des Affaires Culturelle de la Martinique. La synthèse des résultats de ces travaux a été présentée au public martiniquais dans le cadre d’un séminaire international qui s’est tenu à Fort-de-France en mai 2007 avec le soutient du Conseil Général. Elle constitue le cœur de cet ouvrage. Elle a été complétée par un certain nombre de contributions permettant une mise en perspectives des résultats obtenus.Ce volume se divise en trois parties. La première fait un état des lieux de la connaissance sur les différentes cultures précolombiennes qui se sont succédées dans l’île au travers de la présentation de plusieurs sites de références. Elle se conclue par un regard historique qui grâce au récit de l’incroyable vie de Francisco Congo illustre les contacts entre populations amérindiennes, africaines et européennes au début de la colonisation et nous offre des informations inédites sur l’origine de la communauté des Caraïbes noirs de Saint-Vincent. La seconde partie de l’ouvrage présente un bilan des connaissances sur la relation entre les amérindiens et leur environnement naturel au travers d’études archéo-vulcanologiques, archéo-zoologiques et paléo-ethnobotaniques. Ce recours aux sciences paléo-environnementales offre pour la première fois la possibilité d’une réelle approche historicisée de cette relation. Enfin, parce ce que la division géopolitique coloniale et post-coloniale de l’archipel antillais n’a pas de sens appliquée à l’étude de son peuplement précolombien, il nous est apparu essentiel de conclure cet ouvrage par une ouverture sur les îles voisines en particulier la Dominique et la Guadeloupe. Cela nous fait entrée dans cette perspective archipélique qui guide aujourd’hui le travail des archéologues.Cet ouvrage est le premier volume synthétique sur l’occupation amérindienne de la Martinique publié depuis des décennies. Par son sérieux et son accessibilité il met enfin à la disposition d’un public de spécialistes et de non-spécialistes un bilan des dernières connaissances produites. Il répond en cela tant à un besoin scientifique qu’à une réelle demande sociale.About the editor:Benoît Bérard is currently an associate professor of Caribean Archaeology at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane in Martinique campus where he is head of the history department and Vice-director of the “Archéologie industrielle, histoire et patrimoine de la Caraïbe” EA 929 laboratory.

The case of Deir Alla is a social and economic case study of developing Third World agriculture. The study is based upon historical sources, contemporary public information with statistics, and field work in the Jordanian village of Deir Alla. This fieldwork took place in 1986 and a report was prepared in 1989. For this publication additional field work in 1997 accounted for the rapidly changing social and economic situation.The Ottoman feudal system, with the local harrath (ploughman) economy, changed gradually to private ownership since 1936, affecting the social relations of production. From 1950 onwards this development was strongly influenced by a sudden population increase (Palestinian refugees), the East Ghor irrigation system, the strong promotion of vegetable production and new technologies and institutions. Share cropping became the dominant feature of agrarian relations, but during the last decades international migrant labour expanded the wage labour system.Some types of production organization, such as the small-owner-family-labour system, proved to be more successful than others, but with the current difficult economic situation the debt trap is felt by many of these small owners.The book is important for the understanding of the social and economic history of the region, showing the dynamics of social change, but also because of its thorough analysis of the current situation, assessing theoretical models and predicting developments in a rapidly changing agricultural world.Mohamed Fayez Tarawneh is Associate Professor at Yarmouk University, specialized in the Anthropology of development and particularly interested in rural development and social change. Furthermore, he is the general manager of the Hashemite Fund for the Development of Jordan Badia. Some of his major publications concern a historical and social geographic study of the Jordanian town and countryside of Kerak, the participatory development in Wadi Araba and Poverty in Jordan.

The archaeological past exists for us through intermediaries. Some are written works, descriptions, narratives and field notes, while others are visual: the drawings, paintings, photographs, powerpoints or computer visualizations that allow us to re-present past forms of human existence. This volume brings together nine papers, six of which were presented at a symposium hosted at Brown University. Two papers explore the classical past and medieval visualizations. Three treat the Maya, and one considers the imaging by eighteenth-century antiquarians of British history; yet another ranges broadly in its historical considerations. Several consider the trajectory over time of visualization and self-imaging. Others engage with issues of recording by looking, for example, at the ways in which nineteenth–century excavation photographs can aid in the reconstruction of an inscription or by evaluating the process of mapping a site with ArcGIS and computer animation software. All essays raise key questions about the function of re-presentations of the past in current archaeological practice.

Scenes from the Old Kingdom tombs represent our main sources for the study of daily life of private individuals. Written by a number of specialists with years of research, this monograph deals with various aspects of life in ancient Egypt, presented in an accessible manner to the scholar and lay-person alike. Richly illustrated with an excellent selection of photographs and drawings, the book aims to bring the reader as close as possible to the Egyptian sources, allowing them to delve into the world behind the scenes.

A wide variety of organizations are both creating and retaining digital data from archaeological projects. While current methods for preservation and access to data vary widely, nearly all of these organizations agree that careful management of digital archaeological resources is an important aspect of responsible archaeological stewardship. The Archaeology Data Service and Digital Antiquity have produced this guide to provide information on the best way to create, manage, and document digital data files produced during the course of an archaeological project. This guide aims to improve the practice of depositing and preserving digital information safely within an archive for future use and is structured in three main parts: Digital Archiving - looks at the fundamentals of digital preservation and covers general preservation themes within the context of archaeological investigations, research, and resource management, with an overview of digital archiving practice and guidance. The Project Life cycle - looks at common project life cycle elements such as file naming, meta-data creation, and copyright and covers general, broad themes that should be considered at the outset of a project. Basic Components - looks at selected technique and file type-specific issues together with archive structuring and deposit. This section covers common file types that are frequently present in archaeological archives, irrespective of a project's primary technique or focus. The accompanying online Guides to Good Practice take these elements further and address the preservation of data resulting from common data collection, processing and analysis techniques such as aerial and geophysical survey, laser scanning, GIS and CAD.

This volume presents the findings of a major international project on the application of radiocarbon dating to the Egyptian historical chronology. Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Cranfield in the UK, along with a team from France, Austria and Israel, radiocarbon dated more than 200 Egyptian objects made from plant material from museum collections from all over the world. The results comprise an accurate scientifically based chronology of the kings of ancient Egypt obtained by the radiocarbon analysis of short-lived plant remains. The research sheds light on one of the most important periods of Egyptian history documenting the various rulers of Egypt's Old, Middle and New Kingdoms. Despite Egypt's historical significance, in the past the dating of events has been a contentious undertaking with Egyptologists relying on various chronologies made up from archaeological and historical records. The radiocarbon dates nail down a chronology that is broadly in line with previous estimates. However, they do rule out some chronologies that have been put forward particularly in the Old Kingdom, which is shown to be older than some scholars thought. The research has implications for the whole region because the Egyptian chronology anchors the timing of historical events in neighbouring areas tied to the reign of particular Egyptian kings. The results will allow for more historical comparisons to be made in countries like Libya and Sudan, which have conducted radiocarbon dating techniques on places of archaeological interest in the past.

Europe is dotted with tens of thousands of prehistoric barrows. In spite of their ubiquity, little is known on the role they had in pre- and protohistoric landscapes. In 2010, an international group of archaeologists came together at the conference of the European Association of Archaeologists in The Hague to discuss and review current research on this topic. This book presents the proceedings of that session.The focus is on the prehistory of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, but also includes an excursion to huge prehistoric mounds in the southeast of North America. One contribution presents new evidence on how the immediate environment of Neolithic Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture megaliths was ordered, another one discusses the role of remarkable single and double post alignments around Bronze and Iron Age burial mounds. Zooming out, several chapters deal with the place of barrows in the broader landscape. The significance of humanly-managed heath in relation to barrow groups is discussed, and one contribution emphasizes how barrow orderings not only reflect spatial organization, but are also important as conceptual anchors structuring prehistoric perception. Other authors, dealing with Early Neolithic persistent places and with Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age urnfields, argue that we should also look beyond monumentality in order to understand long-term use of “ritual landscapes”.The book contains an important contribution by the well-known Swedish archaeologist Tore Artelius on how Bronze Age barrows were structurally re-used by pre-Christian Vikings. This is his last article, written briefly before his death. This book is dedicated to his memory.This publication is part of the Ancestral Mounds Research Project of the University of Leiden.

This book discusses the 19th-century historic landscape of Devon though the creation, manipulation and querying of a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) database to examine physical evidence of change and development through field and settlement patterns. Making use of tithe surveys, the relationship between field and settlement morphologies and patterns of landholding is discussed for three case-study areas in Devon, developing the idea of landscape pays and the identification of regional differences in the study of the historic landscape.

Some 2800 years ago, a man died in what is now the municipality of Oss, the Netherlands. His death must have been a significant event in the life of local communities, for he received an extraordinary funeral, which ended with the construction of an impressive barrow. Based on the meticulous excavation and a range of specialist and comprehensive studies of finds, a prehistoric burial ritual now can be brought to life in surprising detail. An Iron Age community used extraordinary objects that find their closest counterpart in the elite graves of the Hallstatt culture in Central Europe. This book will discuss how lavishly decorated items were dismantled and taken apart to be connected with the body of the deceased, all to be destroyed by fire. In what appears to be a meaningful pars pro toto ritual, the remains of his body, the pyre, and the objects were searched through and moved about, with various elements being manipulated, intentionally broken, and interred or removed. In essence, a person and a place were transformed through destruction. The book shows how the mourners carefully, almost lovingly covered the funeral remains with a barrow. Attention is also given to another remarkable monument, long mound 6, located immediately adjacent to mound 7. Excavations show how mound 7 was part of an age-old ritual heath landscape that was entirely restructured during the Early Iron Age, when it became the setting for the building of no less than three huge Hallstatt C barrows. Thousands of years later, during the Late Middle Ages, this landscape underwent a complete transformation of meaning when the prehistoric barrows became the scenery for a macabre display of the cadavers of executed criminals.This publication is part of the Ancestral Mounds Research Project of the University of Leiden.

Excavations carried out by Oxford Archaeology in advance of the building of the Oracle shopping centre revealed a long sequence of development of the Kennet floodplain at Reading. This volume reports on the substantial evidence recovered for medieval and post-medieval water management, milling at the Minster Mill and St Giles Mill, the tanning, leather working and dyeing industries, and an unusual building interpreted as the 12th- to 13th-century cookhouse of Reading Abbey. The stories of two well-known Reading sites, the Oracle Workhouse and the Yield Hall, are followed from the medieval period up to the 19th century. Substantial specialist reports include pottery, glass, leatherworking, dendrochronology and clay pipes.

Anyone who has tried to archive archaeological geophysics data will have wondered what might be the most comprehensive and practical approach. This question is addressed by this Guide’s extensively revised 2nd edition, which systematically explores what should be included in an Archive, illustrated with relevant examples. A conceptual framework is developed that allows assembling data and meta-data so that they can be deposited with an Archiving Body. This framework is also mapped onto typical database structures, including OASIS and the English Heritage Geophysics Database. Examples show step-by step how an Archive can be compiled for deposition so that readers will be able to enhance their own archiving practice. Geophysical data are sometimes the only remaining record of buried archaeological features when these are destroyed during commercial developments (e.g. road schemes). To preserve them in an Archive can therefore be essential. However, it is important that data are made available in formats that can still be read in years to come, accompanied by documentation that gives meaningful archaeological context. This Guide covers the creation of the necessary metadata and data documentation. There is no point preserving data if they cannot be used again; therefore this Guide is essential for anyone using geophysical data.

This volume presents the conclusions of a research assessment funded by English Heritage which drew together the broad community of scholars interested in marine and maritime affairs, with a remit of both quantifying the known record and establishing a clear research agenda for the future. The result is an unrivalled exploration of our maritime heritage and a challenging agenda for the future.Britain is a maritime nation. Thus understanding the changing record of people&supl;s relationships with, and use of the sea is key to interpreting the archaeological record. People and the Sea considers all aspects of our maritime heritage; from the submerged landscapes created by changes in sea- level over the last million years, to the physical development of the modern coastline, through to ports, their hinterlands and associated maritime communities. It investigates the nature of seafaring, its associated material culture as well as people&supl;s changing perceptions and interactions with the sea. Chronological chapters, from the Palaeolithic to the 20th century, all consider a number of key themes, exploring both the current state of knowledge and priorities for future research. While the focus is on England, the themes explored are applicable to any coastal community, both in the UK and the near Continent. Written by leading academics, in consultation with numerous specialists, People and the Sea provides an unrivalled exploration of our maritime heritage and sets a challenging agenda for future research.

During the nineteenth century, antiquarians such as William Gell and George Dennis visited the ancient city of Veii, some 15 km north of Rome, and noted the rapid destruction of its archaeology. The city continued under to be under threat, and in the 1950s was the subject of ground-breaking survey and excavation by John Ward-Perkins. However, the results of his fieldwork were never published fully. Knowledge and understanding of material culture (especially pottery, votive objects and architectural terracottas) has increased dramatically over the past fifty years, so allowing the authors to reveal the full potential of the data. This publication reaffirms many of Ward-Perkins’s original insights, and contextualizes his research within the new discoveries of the past fifty years; whilst an important contribution to our knowledge, it is also a spur to further work.

Where do our images about early hominids come from? In this fascinating in-depth study, David Van Reybrouck demonstrates how input from ethnography and primatology has deeply influenced our visions about the past from the 19th century to this day – often far beyond the available evidence. Victorian scholars were keen to look at contemporary Australian and Tasmanian aboriginals to understand the enigmatic Neanderthal fossils. Likewise, today’s primatologists debate to what extent bonobos, baboons or chimps may be regarded as stand-ins for early human ancestors. The belief that the contemporary world provides ‘living links’ still goes strong. Such primate models, Van Reybrouck argues, continue the highly problematic ‘comparative method’ of the Victorian times. He goes on to show how the field of ethnoarchaeology has succeeded in circumventing the major pitfalls of such analogical reasoning.A truly interdisciplinary study, this work shows how scholars working in different fields can effectively improve their methods for interpreting the deep past by understanding the historical challenges of adjacent disciplines.Overviewing two centuries of intellectual debate in fields as diverse as archaeology, ethnography and primatology, Van Reybrouck’s book is one long plea for trying to understand the past on its own terms, rather than as facile projections from the present.David Van Reybrouck (Bruges, 1971) was trained as an archaeologist at the universities of Leuven, Cambridge and Leiden. Before becoming a highly successful literary author (The Plague, Mission, Congo…), he worked as a historian of ideas. For more than twelve years, he was co-editor of Archaeological Dialogues. In 2011-12, he held the prestigious Cleveringa Chair at the University of Leiden.

Things travel around the globe: they are shipped as mass consumer goods, or transported as souvenirs or gifts. There are infinite ways for things to be mobile, not only in the era of globalisation but since the beginning of time, as the earliest traces of long distance trading show. This book investigates the mobility of things from archaeological and anthropological perspectives. Material Objects are characterised by temporal continuity, embodying a prior existence with lingering effects. Yet the material continuity disguises the transformations they may undergo, which only become evident upon closer examination. Objects are in perpetual flux, leaving visible traces of their age, usage, and previous life. While travelling through time, objects also circulate through space, and their spatial mobility alters their meaning and use with respect to new cultural horizons. As objects transform through time and space, so does the value attributed to them. Mapping out itineraries of value in the realm of the material, allows us to grasp the nature of a given social formation through the shape and meaning taken on by its valued 'stuff'. It also provides insights into the nature of materiality, through the value ascribed to objects at a given point in time and space. This edited volume brings together studies of material culture, materiality and value, with regard to the mobility of objects, with the aim of tracing the ways in which societies constitute their valued objects and how the realm of the material reflects upon society.

There are about 300 archaeological open-air museums in Europe. Their history goes from Romanticism up to modern-day tourism. With the majority dating to the past 30 years, they do more than simply present (re)constructed outdoor sceneries based on archaeology. They have an important role as education facilities and many showcase archaeology in a variety of ways. Compared to other museum categories, archaeological open-air museums boast a wide variety of manifestations.This research assesses the value of archaeological open-air museums, their management and their visitors, and is the first to do so in such breadth and detail. After a literature study and general data collection among 199 of such museums in Europe, eight archaeological open-air museums from different countries were selected as case studies. They included museums in a very varied state with different balances between public versus private funding levels on the one hand, and on the other the proportion of private individuals to educational groups among their visitors.The issue of ‘quality’ was investigated from different perspectives. The quality as assessed by the museum management was recorded in a management survey; the quality as experienced by their visitors was also recorded using a survey. In addition on-site observations were recorded. Management and visitors have different perspectives leading to different priorities and appreciation levels.The studies conclude with recommendations, ideas and strategies which are applicable not just to the eight archaeological open-air museums under study, but to any such museum in general. The recommendations are divided into the six categories of management, staff, collections, marketing, interpretation and the visitors. They are designed to be informative statements of use to managers across the sector.