There have been edited books on the archaeology of nomadism in various regions, and there have been individual archaeological and anthropological monographs, but nothing with the kind of coverage provided in this volume. Its strength and importance lies in the fact that it brings together a worldwide collection of studies of the archaeology of mobility. This book provides a ready-made reference to this worldwide phenomenon and is unique in that it tries to redefine pastoralism within a larger context by the term mobility. It presents many new ideas and thoughtful approaches, especially in the Central Asian region.

Humans are unique in their ability to inhabit an immense range of physical habitats. This capacity partially results from the need to cope with variation in spatial and temporal distributions of critical resources. Yet factors other than the search for food often impacts relocation. Information gathering, raw material collection, social networking, trade, and mate search each present mobility needs that compete with daily food searches. While physical evidence might explain such human behavior, ethnographic information can reveal how these events interrelate, providing the missing link between human activities and the remains preserved in the archaeological record.

The Archaeology of Movement discusses movement in the past, including the relationships between mobility and place, moving bodies and material culture, and the challenges of studying past movement. Drawing on a wide range of examples and different archaeological practices, The Archaeology of Movement provides an introduction for those interested in thinking about past movement beyond the ‘fact of mobility’. Almost since the beginning of the modern discipline of archaeology, movement has played a role in helping to shape our understanding of the past. However, the issue of movement is complicated, and where it sits in relation to other indicators of the past is problematic. Until now it has received less serious scrutiny than it merits. This book seeks to address this lacuna by placing movement at the centre of our investigations into the archaeological record. The Archaeology of Movement is an excellent introduction for archaeologists, anthropologists, cultural geographers, and students interested in the ways movement has shaped our understanding of history and the archaeological record.

Anthropological archaeologists have long attempted to develop models that will let them better understand the evolution of human social organization. In our search to understand how chiefdoms and states evolve, and how those societies differ from egalitarian 'bands', we have neglected to develop models that will aid the understanding of the wide range of variability that exists between them. This volume attempts to fill this gap by exploring social organization in tribal - or 'autonomous village' - societies from several different ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological contexts - from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period in the Near East to the contemporary Jivaro of Amazonia.

For more than a century, the study of hunting and gathering societies has been central to the development of both archaeology and anthropology as academic disciplines, and has also generated widespread public interest and debate. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies to date, including critical engagements with older debates, new theoretical perspectives, and renewed obligations for greater engagement between researchers and indigenous communities. Chapters provide in-depth archaeological, historical, and anthropological case-studies, and examine far-reaching questions about human social relations, attitudes to technology, ecology, and management of resources and the environment, as well as issues of diet, health, and gender relations - all central topics in hunter-gatherer research, but also themes that have great relevance for modern global society and its future challenges. The Handbook also provides a strategic vision for how the integration of new methods, approaches, and study regions can ensure that future research into the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers will continue to deliver penetrating insights into the factors that underlie all human diversity.

A general introduction to archeogaming describing the intersection of archaeology and video games and applying archaeological method and theory into understanding game-spaces. “[T]he author’s clarity of style makes it accessible to all readers, with or without an archaeological background. Moreover, his personal anecdotes and gameplay experiences with different game titles, from which his ideas often develop, make it very enjoyable reading.”—Antiquity Video games exemplify contemporary material objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define their culture. Video games also serve as archaeological sites in the traditional sense as a place, in which evidence of past activity is preserved and has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology, and which represents a part of the archaeological record. From the introduction: Archaeogaming, broadly defined, is the archaeology both in and of digital games... As will be described in the following chapters, digital games are archaeological sites, landscapes, and artifacts, and the game-spaces held within those media can also be understood archaeologically as digital built environments containing their own material culture... Archaeogaming does not limit its study to those video games that are set in the past or that are treated as “historical games,” nor does it focus solely on the exploration and analysis of ruins or of other built environments that appear in the world of the game. Any video game—from Pac-Man to Super Meat Boy—can be studied archaeologically.

From Gustavo Politis, one of the most renowned South American archaeologists, comes the first in-depth study in English of the last “undiscovered” people of the Amazon. His work is groundbreaking and urgent, both because of encroaching guerrilla violence that makes Nukak existence perilously fragile, and because his work with the Nukak represented one of the last opportunities to conduct research with hunter-gatherers using contemporary methodological and the theoretical tools. Through a rich and comprehensive ethno-archaeological portrait of material culture “in the making,” this work makes methodological and conceptual advances in the interpretation of hunter-gather societies. Politis’s conclusions, based on six years of original research and on comparative analysis, are integrative and contribute to the identification of the multiple factors involved in the formation of hunter-gatherer archaeological assemblages.

People with Animals emphasizes the interdependence of people and animals in society, and contributors examine the variety of forms and time-depth that these relations can take. The types of relationship studied include the importance of manure to farming societies, dogs as livestock guardians, seasonality in pastoralist societies, butchery, symbolism and food. Examples are drawn from the Pleistocene to the present day and from the Altai Mountains, Ethiopia, Iraq, Italy, Mongolia and North America. The 11 papers work from the basis that animals are an integral part of society and that past society is the object of most archaeological inquiry. Discussion papers explore this topic and use the case-studies presented in other contributions to suggest the importance of ethnozooarchaeology not just to archaeology but also to anthrozoology. A further contribution to archaeological theory is made by an argument for the validity of ethnozooarchaeology derived models to Neanderthals. The book makes a compelling case for the importance of human-animal relations in the archaeological record and demonstrates why the information contained in this record is of significance to specialists in other disciplines.

Stressing the interdisciplinary, public-policy oriented character of Cultural Resource Management (CRM), which is not merely “applied archaeology,” this short, relatively uncomplicated introduction is aimed at emerging archaeologists. Drawing on fifty-plus years’ experience, and augmented by the advice of fourteen collaborators, Cultural Resource Management explains what “CRM archaeologists” do, and explores the public policy, ethical, and pragmatic implications of doing it for a living.

Catastrophes are on the rise due to climate change, as is their toll in terms of lives and livelihoods as world populations rise and people settle into hazardous places. While disaster response and management are traditionally seen as the domain of the natural and technical sciences, awareness of the importance and role of cultural adaptation is essential. This book catalogues a wide and diverse range of case studies of such disasters and human responses. This serves as inspiration for building culturally sensitive adaptations to present and future calamities, to mitigate their impact, and facilitate recoveries.