Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins

History

Colin Renfrew

World

Penguin

The best-selling textbook on what archaeologists do and how they do itcompletely revised and redesigned. For the Fourth Edition, new theoretical approaches, such as agency, materiality, and engagement theory, are added and earlier approaches analyzed afresh. Field methods and scientific techniques have been updated throughout, and new emphasis is placed on climate change and its impact on human affairs. The latest information on topics as varied as the Iceman, Pleistocene extinctions, and llama domestication is included, along with the most up-to-date material on GIS and surveying technology. New topics will be introduced to emphasize the ever-changing face of modern archaeology, and additional special box features will be included, as well as discussion of the archaeological techniques needed to study the material culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A key component of the new edition will be the introduction of a dedicated Web site and study guide to accompany the textbook itself. Over 600 illustrations.

Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice (Portuguese Edition)

Politics & Social Sciences

PAUL BAHN

Archaeology

Thames&Hudson

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?These questions were posed by Paul Gauguin in a famous canvas painted in Tahiti that heralded the beginning of the modernist era. But they are also the questions asked by modern prehistorians in their quest to reconstruct the human story. In Figuring It Out, Colin Renfrew investigates the profound convergence between the two disciplines, drawing illuminating parallels between the way the modern artist seeks to understand the world by acting upon it, and the way the archaeologist seeks to understand the world through the material traces of such actions.  What does the "sapient paradox"—the fact that 30,000 years passed before anatomically modern humans began to change their world—have to tell us about the unfolding of the history of our species? Why do we now find Cycladic sculpture beautiful when, merely a century ago, such work would not have been thought suitable for display in an art museum? And how is it that, in the light of Marcel Duchamp's revolutionary gallery-based gestures, the prehistoric footsteps at Laetoli have been admitted as art too, albeit of an involuntary kind? Professor Renfrew uses these questions as a springboard for his examination of the history of the human condition, a subject that can only be properly understood, he argues, through the idea of process, of Homo sapiens' active material engagement with their world. Central to his exploration is a group of leading contemporary artists, including Richard Long, Mark Dion, Antony Gormley, Eduardo Paolozzi, and David Mach, whose works are notable for just such an engagement with their physical surroundings. Figuring It Out takes sculpture off the plinth and archaeology out of the trench, and situates the contemporary artist and archaeologist together at the center of an active endeavor to re-evaluate what it is to be human. 175 illustrations, 55 in color

Figuring It Out: What Are We? Where Do We Come From?

Thames & Hudson Ltd, London

The refinement of radiocarbon dating using the information form tree-ring counts has raised serious doubts about the accepted theoretical frameowkr of European prehistory. Monuments in Central and Western Europe have proved to be considerably older than their supposed Near-Eastern forerunners, and the record must be almost completely rewritten in the light of these new dates. Before Civilsation is a preliminary attempt to do this with the help of analogies from more recent and well-documented primitive societies. The more glaring inconsistencies in the old theory are re-examined and Professor Renfrew shows convincingly how the baffling monuments of prehistoric Europe, like Stonehenge, could have been built without recourse to help from the 'more civilized' Near East.

Before Civilization

Europe

Pimlico

Calling for a synthesis between modern historical linguistics and the New Archaeology of cultural process, Professor Renfrew boldly claims that it is time to reconsider questions of language origins and what they imply about ethnic affiliation-issues seriously discredited by the racial theorists of the 1920s and 1930s. Specifically, he re-examines the intriguing problem of the Indo-European languages and how their ancestors came to spread from Anatolia and ancient Persia across Europe and much of the Indian subcontinent, with evidence for related languages found as far away as sinkiang in China. The solution he proposes is powerfully persuasive and deeply surpri-sing. Professor Renfrew argues that ealy forms of Indo-European language were spoken across Europe some thousands of years earlier thanhas long been assumed. There was, for instance, no `coming of the celts' but a parallel development of Celtic-speaking peoples in much the same areas in which they found today. These lands have been our lands, then for very much longer than is widely thought, and the British ness, or Irishness, or Spanishness of our origins goes much deeper than we have long believed.

Archaeology & Language

he authors of this text, originally published in England in 1991, are young scholars who present no less than a "chronological revolution." After tracing the development of Old World chronology, James and his colleagues review archaeological evidence and the lack of it from the Dark Age, the centuries-long period at the end of the Late Bronze Age c.1200 B.C. They include a wide geographical area--as far east as Iran and south to Nubia. Challenging the accepted Egyptian chronology, they argue for lower dates, which would instead put the end of the Late Bronze Age around 950 B.C., thus essentially eliminating the so-called Dark Age. The authors have done a masterful job of drawing together an enormous range of evidence; their conclusion is persuasive. Their challenge to Egyptian chronology cannot be ignored, and Egyptologists will have to address the flaws that they demonstrate. For students of ancient history and archaeology.

Centuries Of Darkness

Nikos Kokkinos

Robert Morkot

John Frankish

I. J. Thorpe

peter-james

Ancient Civilizations

Rutgers University Press

The Cambridge World Prehistory

PAUL G. BAHN

Cambridge University Press

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Books by Colin Renfrew