LBK massacres – who killed whom?

January 16, 2011

The  Neolithic massacres at Talheim and Schletz-Asparn in northern Europe are usually interpreted in terms of village against village. But could they reflect something more familiar, the killing of a particular section of the community? It’s a story of misery, ethnic tensions and massacres in northern Europe. It would make for unconfortable reading in one of those [...]

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Mesolithic London and Neolithic Europe

January 11, 2011

Could the recent dating of Mesolithic timber posts in London be evidence for contact with Europe? The dating of six ‘hefty timber piles’, which turned out to have been driven into the ground by the Thames River bank in Vauxhall around or a little before 4500BC*, raises some interesting possibilities. 4500BC is a hundred or [...]

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Jane Jacobs, agriculture and a model for ancient civilisations

December 18, 2010

A summary of Jane Jacobs’ economy of cities and a briefly applying some of the book’s ideas to European prehistory. Jane Jacobs is perhaps best known for her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” in the early 1960s. She is less well known for her 1969 book “The Economy of Cities”. However [...]

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Circumscription – Carneiro’s theory of the rise of states

November 17, 2010

Discussing a forty years old theory of the rise of civilisations due to population pressures in restricted areas and why I think it’s half right. In 1970, the 43 year old curator of the American Museum of Natural History, Professor Robert Carneiro, published a paper containing a theory for why states rise in certain areas [...]

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Preseli bluestones – is Milford Haven the wrong place?

November 1, 2010

Why should the Preseli bluestones have gone via Milford Haven to Stonehenge when they might have taken a less perilous route to the east? And does this have anything to do with an end ‘Neolithic’ Irish copper trade? Newport, on the north coast of Pembrokeshire in Wales, is a small and charming little town, blighted only by having [...]

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Mesopotamia, Mormons and the world’s first cities

October 22, 2010

What caused the first cities of Mesopotamia to appear? Was it trade links, was it agricultural surplus, was it exporting high quality goods or was it religion? Maybe it was all of them. This has been a difficult post to write. When I started writing had an idea of what I was trying to say. [...]

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Avoiding the seas south of Turkey

October 8, 2010

Do obsidian distribution patterns, Neolithic Çatalhöyük and the Bronze age Uluburun shipwreck have a connection? On the southern coast of Turkey, particularly between Bodrum in the west and Silifke in the east, there are many sheer cliffs and rocky headlands, the only gentle shore along this length being the bay between Antalya and Alanya. For [...]

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Indo-Europeans on the Silk Road

September 10, 2010

Why are so many Indo-European languages strung out along the Silk Road? Did it have something to do with chariots but not so much to do with the steppe? Turkish, the language of modern Turkey, is part of the Turkic language family, a group of related languages spread extensively across central Asia all the way [...]

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Indo-Europeans and the first slaves

August 29, 2010

Were the ‘Proto Indo-Europeans’ involved in the first slave trade? I think we should be told. Slavery is not something you come across much in prehistoric archaeology books. The fourth edition of Renfrew and Bahns ‘Archaeology’ mentions it in passing just three times, all in the context of the early modern African slave trade. One [...]

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Diyarbakır

August 10, 2010

Fancy a holiday to eastern Turkey? If you want the perfect base to visit two classic locations of Neolithic archaeology, Çayönü and Göbekli Tepe, you could do worse than stay in their ‘modern’ equivalent, the caravanserai of Diyarbakır.* I’ve just been to eastern Turkey with my partner, Steph. Without intending to we ended up in [...]

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