Search

The globalizing connections that defined the European Bronze Age in the second millennium BC either ended or abruptly changed in the decades around 1200 BC. The impact of climate change at 3.2 ka on such social changes has been debated for the eastern Mediterranean. This paper extends this enquiry of shifting human–climate relationships during the later Bronze Age into Europe for the first time. There, climate data indicate that significant shifts occurred in hydroclimate and temperatures in various parts of Europe ca. 3.2 ka. To test potential societal impacts, I review and evaluate archaeological data from Ireland and Britain, the Nordic area, the Carpathian Basin, the Po Valley, and the Aegean region in parallel with paleoclimate data. I argue that 1200 BC was a turning point for many societies in Europe and that climate played an important role in shaping this. Although long-term trajectories of sociopolitical systems were paramount in defining how and when specific societies changed, climate change acted as a force multiplier that undermined societal resilience in the wake of initial social disjunctures. In this way, it shaped, often detrimentally, the reconfiguration of societies. By impacting more directly on social venues of political recovery, realignment, and reorganization, climate forces accentuate societal crises and, in some areas, sustained them to the point of sociopolitical collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work re-approaches the origins of "the Celts" by detailing the character of their society and the nature of social change in Europe across 700–300 BC. A new approach integrates regional burial archaeology with contemporary classical texts to further refine our social understanding of the European Iron Age. Those known to us as "Celts" were matrifocal Early Iron Age groups in central Gaul who engaged in social traditions out of the central European salt trade and became heavily involved in Mediterranean politics. The paper focuses on evidence from the Hallstatt–La Tène transition to solve a 150-year-old problem: how the Early Iron Age "Celts" became the early La Tène "Galatai," who engaged in the Celtic migrations and the sacking of Rome at 387 BC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses and synthesizes the consequences of the archaeogenetic revolution to our understanding of mobility and social change during the Neolithic period in Europe (6500–2000 BC). In spite of major obstacles to a productive integration of archaeological and anthropological knowledge with ancient DNA data, larger changes in the European gene pool are detected and taken as indications for large-scale migrations during two major periods: the Early Neolithic expansion into Europe (6500–4000 BC) and the third millennium BC "steppe migration." Rather than massive migration events, I argue that both major genetic turnovers are better understood in terms of small-scale mobility and human movement in systems of population circulation, social fission and fusion of communities, and translocal interaction, which together add up to a large-scale signal. At the same time, I argue that both upticks in mobility are initiated by the two most consequential social transformations that took place in Eurasia, namely the emergence of farming, animal husbandry, and sedentary village life during the Neolithic revolution and the emergence of systems of centralized political organization during the process of urbanization and early state formation in southwest Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an examination of processes of secondary state formation that occurred during the emergence of the Ryukyu Kingdom, in southwestern Japan, from the tenth to seventeenth centuries A.D. These processes include the influx of new populations, the appearance of new subsistence strategies and political groupings, shifting patterns of long-distance trade, the development of new patterns of foreign relations with China and Japan, the creation of indigenous culture and new ideology, and the transformation of gender hierarchy. I examine these processes from the perspective of political leadership and the nature of political hierarchy, concluding that the Okinawan case is distinctive in its heterarchical organization. The corporate, collective nature of Okinawan communities was overlain by a state-level network system that developed at the time of tributary linkages with China in the fourteenth century A.D. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Late Neolithic and Copper Age were a time of change in most of Europe. Technological innovations including animal traction, the wheel, and plow agriculture transformed the prehistoric economy. The discovery of copper metallurgy expanded the spectrum of socially significant materials and realigned exchange networks away from Neolithic "greenstone," obsidian, and Spondylus shells. New funerary practices also emerged, signifying the growing importance of lineage ancestors, as well as new ideas of personal identity. These phenomena have long attracted researchers' attention in continental Europe and the British Isles, but comparatively little has been done in the Italian peninsula. Building on recent discoveries and interdisciplinary research on settlement patterns, the subsistence economy, the exchange of socially valuable materials, the emergence of metallurgy, funerary practices, and notions of the body, I critically appraise current models of the Neolithic-Bronze Age transition in light of the Italian regional evidence, focusing on central Italy. In contrast to prior interpretations of this period as the cradle of Bronze Age social inequality and the prestige goods economy, I argue that, at this juncture, prehistoric society reconfigured burial practices into powerful new media for cultural communication and employed new materials and objects as novel identity markers. Stratified political elites may not be among the new identities that emerged at this time in the social landscape of prehistoric Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the archaeology of Predynastic Egypt was last appraised in this journal, Savage (2001a, p. 101) expressed optimism that 'a consensus appears to be developing that stresses the gradual development of complex society in Egypt.' The picture today is less clear, with new data and alternative theoretical frameworks challenging received wisdom over the pace, direction, and nature of complex social change. Rather than an inexorable march to the beat of the neo-evolutionary drum, primary state formation in Egypt can be seen as a more syncopated phenomenon, characterized by periods of political experimentation and shifting social boundaries. Notably, field projects in Sudan and the Egyptian Delta together with new dating techniques have set older narratives of development into broader frames of reference. In contrast to syntheses that have sought to measure abstract thresholds of complexity, this review of the period between c. 4500 BC and c. 3000 BC transcends analytical categories by adopting a practice-based examination of multiple dimensions of social inequality and by considering how the early state may have become a lived reality in Egypt around the end of the fourth millennium BC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparative examination of food practices is useful for assessing the nature of diverse forms of social inequality. This article examines three key contexts in which to evaluate the relationship between social differentiation and food practices in the Andes: early complex societies, pre-Columbian states and nonstate complex societies, and colonial societies. A review of these distinct contexts suggests that social and subsistence change may follow different rhythms and that food-related differentiation, just like other forms of social differentiation, is neither consistently augmented in a scalar fashion in relation to 'degrees' of social complexity, nor is it in all cases a direct indicator of economic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many archaeologists have used world-systems analysis in precapitalist settings. Some have criticized it; others have dismissed it out of hand. Critiques include that it was developed for the 'modern' world, that it is overly economistic, that it neglects individual actors, and that it inappropriately uses modern analyses in ancient settings. Although there is some validity to these charges when applied to Wallerstein's original formulation, most are misdirected. The critiques are rooted in inattention to the last three decades of work on world-systems, especially modifications made with the explicit intention to make world-systems analysis useful in precapitalist settings. Newer comparative versions of world-systems analysis were initially developed to better understand the evolution of world-systems that gave rise to the modern world-system. These new advances are useful for the study of interregional interactions and long-term development. Archaeologists are well placed to contribute to the further development of world-systems analysis; they can shed light on ancient world-systemic processes and the origins of the modern world-system, provide empirical backing for hypotheses, and raise new theoretical and empirical questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish colonial archaeology has undergone a fundamental shift since the Columbian Quincentenary due to the adoption of a bottom-up understanding of colonialism that emphasizes the analysis of local phenomena in a global context and the active ways in which people negotiated the processes set in motion by the conquest. This review examines five key research foci: culture change and identity, missionization, bioarchaeology, economics, and investigations of the colonial core. It ends with a consideration of ongoing challenges posed by the archaeology of colonialism, particularly the relationship of the individual to broader social processes and the emerging role of comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]