The Neolithic, or the “Missing Copper” Age

March 18, 2010

Is the Copper Age (the Chalolithic) really the start of the copper age? Are we perhaps missing something? Imagine that copper was really rare. By that I mean that people would kill for a small bead of the shining orange metal, that they would sell their mothers for a copper bracelet. White diamonds are an […]

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Ertebølle and Lepenski Vir at the Neolithic frontier

March 11, 2010

What Mesolithic Europe’s settlement sites like Ertebølle and Lepenski Vir say about the way we wrongly divide up prehistory into ages of foragers and farmers. Wedged between the Palaeolithic (or Old Stone Age) and the Neolithic (New Stone Age) is the Mesolithic. It represents a period of time in human prehistory after the last glacial […]

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The Nile Valley’s first farmers and bottlenecks

February 25, 2010

Why did the inhabitants of the ancient Nile valley take so long to start farming and what does it say about Demic Diffusion? The Nile valley is a fine thing. A narrow corridor straddling the great Sahara desert, it is, strangely, a perfect place to farm. Until the construction of the Aswan Dam the annual […]

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The beginnings of farming and the Silk Road (wrong)

January 21, 2010

22 June 2012 – This is one of my earliest posts and it shows. What I’ve said here seems to conflate about 4000 years worth of history, which I now think is silly. I suspect Middle Eastern and Chinese developments were unlikely to be so easily connected. The development of turquoise mining in central Asia […]

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Avebury, Windmill Hill and market forces

January 7, 2010

Making the case for Neolithic Avebury and Windmill Hill, Wiltshire as part of a long-term trading centre but one that changed through time. Eighteen miles north of Stonehenge there lies the village of Avebury, less well known but spectacular in its own way. Avebury sits beside a tiny stream in a relatively flat landscape, nestled […]

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The Avebury Sanctuary – a Neolithic bodge?

December 21, 2009

A discussion of whether the Sanctuary, Avebury, was the site of a roofed building or of free-standing timber posts (as archaeologist Mike Pitts and others now say). In 532 AD, after the second Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople was severely fire damaged by rioters, Emperor Justinian commissioned a startling replacement. In just over […]

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Of white horses and wet weather

December 19, 2009

Is the Uffington White Horse a natural feature? (if you want more – perhaps too – detailed info on this from me, go here) SCENE – Somewhere in southern England, one wet autumn day in the Bronze Age. Bran: “gar, that were bad rain yesterday. I ain’t seed nothin’ like it.” Flake: “gar, it were […]

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