John Bintliff

Time, process and catastrophism in the study of Mediterranean alluvial history: A review

This article offers an update on the long-standing debate on the causes and effects of Holocene erosion and alluviation in the Mediterranean lands. The contribution of Vita-Finzi (1969) has continued to be a positive stimulus to research, and its punctuated-equilibrium perspective has survived more detailed regional studies, whereas its chronology has been significantly modified. The climate dominance of Vita-Finzi and the anthropogenic dominance of later researchers such as Van Andel and co-workers must now yield to more complex multi-causal explanations in which local interactions between environmental context, climate fluctuations and human impact are being envisaged as appropriate explanations for landscape change.

The Structure and Dynamics of Dry-Farming States in Upper Mesopotamia [and Comments and Reply]

A model describing the layout of Early Bronze Age Mesopotamian states is synthesized using a range of off-site and on-site data from Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. These allow the description of the basic settlement patterns, land use, and exchange systems of an early state system. The hypothesis is tested that Bronze Age settlements in this zone of rain-fed farming tended not to exceed IOO hectares, an area which was capable of accommodating between io,ooo and 2o,ooo people. Detailed off-site surveys and landscape archaeology suggest that these settlements were provisioned by intensively farmed zones of cultivation that surrounded the central settlement and by tributary secondary or satellite communities. This main production zone was just capable of supporting the population of the prime site, but the constraint of labour and the frictional effect of distance meant that food produced farther away than some io-is km made only a minor contribution to the main settlement. As a result, settlements tended not to expand beyond a certain size. Even then, the maximizing effect of intensive crop production in such areas of highly variable rainfall and episodic major droughts made these communities very vulnerable to collapse.

Mediterranean survey and the city.

The Mediterranean, and especially Greece, provides fine conditions for field-survey – long and intense human occupation, good surface exposure, and distinctive, diagnostic ceramics. Where the Classical authors are conspicuously reticent about the countryside, field-survey can provide a rural picture, as well as the settlement patterns of prehistory. Here, the methods of field-survey return from the countryside to look at the cities, formerly the preserve of the excavator.

Structuralism and myth in Minoan Studies.

Nick Humphrey, of King’s College, Cambridge, in a recent broadcast on Human Evolution, made the following comments (slightly paraphrased from my notes of the radio broadcast): ‘Man, in comparison to the chimp is a forgetful ape. Chimps in experiments have a remarkable visual memory, recalling for example 25 complex patterns. Some humans can do the same, but rarely, and often where there is a brain malfunction as with epilepsy or damage to the parietal lobes. In effect it is characteristically pathological. Why was this facility suppressed? In order to replace this means of storing knowledge with a new way of thought. Not one of counting objects or observations as particular, but instead ordering such data into general models of things and situations, as with the Platonic Ideal forms. This was the birth of symbolic thought.’

Intra-site Artefact Surveys

This chapter will use the Mediterranean region as the basis for discussing the achievements, problems and prospects for the surface survey of complex archaeological sites. I shall focus on the largest category of site, urban settlements with multiple phases of occupation, although the discussion is equally relevant to villages and in many respects to smaller rural sites if they show several phases of use. For reference the challenges of complex minor rural sites are explored using a new rigorous methodology, as detailed in the monograph Testing the Hinterland (2007) edited by Bintliff, Howard and Snodgrass.

Archaeological theory: back to the future?Ian Hodder. Entangled: an archaeology of the relationships between human beings and things. xii+252 pages, 26 illustrations. 2012. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell; 978-0-470-67211-2 hardback £ 55 and

Pierre Lemonnier is a French anthropologist whose fieldwork has focused on the indigenous peoples of New Guinea. This small volume explains some intriguing aspects of material culture which do not fit the now-standard views of how objects reflect and also sustain social life. The examples he chooses, such as fish-traps or garden fences, fall into the mundane except for local differences from community to community, where similar objects can take on far deeper significance in relation to cosmography, gender relations and so on. Lemonnier’s point is that objects can remain in the everyday or, incrementally, and just locally, be subtly altered

66; 978-0-470-67212-9 paperback £ 19.99 and

A lot of what our brains process never enters our consciousness, even if it may be of potential value to us. So just what are we wasting by letting our brains process stimuli we don’t even notice or attend to? This is one of the areas being explored in the 16-partner CEEDs project (ceeds-project.eu). Funded by the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies programme, CEEDs (the Collective Experience of Empathic Data systems) has developed new sensors and technologies to unobtrusively measure people’s implicit reactions to multimodal presentations of very large data sets. The idea is that monitoring these reactions may reveal when you are surprised, satisfied, interested or engaged by a part of the data, even if you’re not aware of being so. Applications of CEEDs technology are relevant to a broad range of disciplines – spanning science, education, design, and archaeology, all the way through to connected retail. This chapter provides a formalisation of the CEEDs approach and its applications and in so doing explains how the CEEDs project has broken new ground in the nascent domain of human computer confluence.

24; 978-1-1182-4193-6 e-book.

This article covers the development of societies in Southern Europe from Late (Roman) Antiquity through the Middle Ages on to Early Modern times. A holistic view is taken in which historical texts and images are linked to architecture, landscape and settlement, and everyday artefacts, representing Christian and Islamic societies over this 1500 year era.