Kristian Kristiansen

Johan Ling

Richard Chacon

Trade before Civilization explores the role that long-distance exchange played in the establishment and/or maintenance of social complexity, and its role in the transformation of societies from egalitarian to non-egalitarian. Bringing together research by an international and methodologically diverse team of scholars, it analyses the relationship between long-distance trade and the rise of inequality. The volume illustrates how elites used exotic prestige goods to enhance and maintain their elevated social positions in society. Global in scope, it offers case studies of early societies and sites in Europe, Asia, Oceania, North America, and Mesoamerica. Deploying a range of inter-disciplinary and cutting-edge theoretical approaches from a cross-cultural framework, the volume offers new insights and enhances our understanding of socio-political evolution. It will appeal to archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, conflict theorists, and ethnohistorians, as well as economists seeking to understand the nexus between imported luxury items and cultural evolution.

Long Distance Exchange and the Rise of Social Complexity

Trade before Civilization

Eske Willerslev

Guus Kroonen

The Indo-European dispersal inalterably shaped the Eurasian linguistic landscape. This book offers the newest insights into this dramatic prehistoric event.

Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics

The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited

Thomas Lindkvist

Janken Myrdal

This book provides the first global analysis of the relationship between trade and civilisation from the beginning of civilisation 3000 BC until the modern era 1600 AD. Encompassing the various networks including the Silk Road, the Indian Ocean trade, Near Eastern family traders of the Bronze Age, and the Medieval Hanseatic League, it examines the role of the individual merchant, the products of trade, the role of the state, and the technical conditions for land and sea transport that created diverging systems of trade and in the development of global trade networks. Trade networks, however, were not durable. The the establishment and decline of great trading network systems, and how they related to the expansion of civilisation, and to different forms of social and economic exploitation. Case studies focus on local conditions as well as global networks until the 16th century when the whole globe was connected by trade.

Economic Networks and Cultural Ties, from Prehistory to the Early Modern Era

Trade and Civilisation

Timothy Earle

The Bronze Age was a formative period in European history when the organisation of landscapes, settlements, and economy reached a new level of complexity. This book presents the first in-depth, comparative study of household economy and settlement in three micro-regions: the Mediterranean (Sicily), Central Europe (Hungary), and Northern Europe (South Scandinavia). The results are based on ten years of fieldwork in a similar method of documentation, and scientific analyses were used in each of the regional studies, making controlled comparisons possible. The new evidence demonstrates how differences in settlement organisation and household economies were counterbalanced by similarities in the organised use of the landscape in an economy dominated by the herding of large flocks of sheep and cattle. This book's innovative theoretical and methodological approaches will be of relevance to all researchers of landscape and settlement history.

The Mediterranean, Central Europe, and Scandanavia Compared

Organizing Bronze Age Societies

Thomas B. Larsson

Winner of the 2006 SAA Book Award Beginning with state formation and urbanization in the Near East c. 3000 BC and ending in Central and Northern Europe c. 1000-500 BC, the Bronze Age marks an heroic age of travels and transformations throughout Europe. Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas Larsson reconstruct the travel and transmission of knowledge that took place between the Near East, the Mediterranean and Europe. They explore how religious, political and social conceptions of Bronze Age people were informed by long-distance connections and alliances between local elites.

Travels, Transmissions and Transformations

The Rise of Bronze Age Society

Berit Valentin Eriksen

Jens-Henrik Bech

This two volume monograph about the region of Thy in the early Bronze Age provides a high resolution archaeological and ecological model of the organisation of landscape, settlements and households during the period 1500-1100 BC. Bordering the North Sea to the west, and the calmer waters of the Limfjord to the east, the region of Thy in Denmark experienced four centuries of intense economic and demographic expansion. By combining results from environmental and economic research (pollen and palaeo-botanical analyses) with intensive field surveys and excavations of farmsteads with exceptional preservation, it has been possible to open a window to the changes that transformed Bronze Age society and its environment during a few centuries of exceptional expansion and wealth consumption. The results from this interdisciplinary venture made it possible to link together the histories of local farmsteads with the wider regional and global history of the Bronze Age in North-western Europe during this period. Here is much to feed on for students and researchers of the Bronze Age alike.

Bronze Age Settlement and Land-Use in Thy, Northwest Denmark (Volume 1 & 2)

The societies of the European Bronze Age produced elaborate artifacts and were drawn into a wide trade network extending over the whole of Europe, even though they were economically and politically undiversified. Kristian Kristansen attempts to explain this paradox using a world-systems analysis, and in particular tries to acount for the absence of state formation. He presents his case with a powerful marshalling of the evidence across the whole of Europe and over two millennia. The result is the most coherent overview of this period of European prehistory since the writings of Gordon Childe and Christopher Hawkes. A great strength of this book is the broad European perspective, which allows the author to address some of the larger questions that have been raised in the study of the Bronze Age. It captures the complexity of a prehistorical world at different levels of integration and interaction from local to global.

Europe Before History

Michael J. Rowlands

Mogens Larsen

This collaborative volume is concerned with long-term social change. Envisaging individual societies as interlinked and interdependent parts of a global social system, the aim of the contributors is to determine the extent to which ancient societies were shaped over time by their incorporation in - or resistance to - the larger system. Their particular concern is the dependent relationship between technically and socially more developed societies with a strong state ideology at the centre and the simpler societies that functioned principally as sources of raw materials and manpower on the periphery of the system. The papers in the first part of the book are all concerned with political developments in the Ancient Near East and the notion of a regional system as a framework for analysis. Part 2 examines the problems of conceptualising local societies as discrete centres of development in the context of both the Near East and prehistoric Europe during the second millennium BC. Part 3 then presents a comprehensive analytical study of the Roman Empire as a single system showing how its component parts often relate to each other in uneven, even contradictory, ways.

Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World

Birgit Anette Olsen

Thomas Olander

Recent developments in aDNA has reshaped our understanding of later European prehistory, and at the same time also opened up for more fruitful collaborations between archaeologists and historical linguists. Two revolutionary genetic studies, published independently in Nature, 2015, showed that prehistoric Europe underwent two successive waves of migration, one from Anatolia consistent with the introduction of agriculture, and a later influx from the Pontic-Caspian steppes which without any reasonable doubt pinpoints the archaeological Yamnaya complex as the cradle of (Core-)Indo-European languages. Now, for the first time, when the preliminaries are clear, it is possible for the fields of genetics, archaeology and historical linguistics to cooperate in a constructive fashion to refine our knowledge of the Indo-European homeland, migrations, society and language. For the historical-comparative linguists, this opens up a wealth of exciting perspectives and new working fields in the intersections between linguistics and neighbouring disciplines, for the archaeologists and geneticists, on the other hand, the linguistic contributions help to endow the material findings with a voice from the past. The present selection of papers illustrate the importance of an open interdisciplinary discussion which will gradually help us in our quest of Tracing the Indo-Europeans.

New evidence from archaeology and historical linguistics

Tracing the Indo-Europeans

Provides the first global analysis of the relationship between trade and civilisation from the beginning of civilisation until the modern era.

roman

Jesper Nattmann

Christian Horn

The Bronze Age represents the global emergence of a militarized society with a martial culture that constructed the warrior as a 'Hero' and warfare as 'Heroic'. The book takes a fresh look at warfare and its role in reshaping Bronze Age society from the Mediterranean to northern Europe.

Kristian Kristiansen

About

Books

Join the club