Quick Search

 
All Fields Title Author Description ISBN
or
Browse by Subject

Find Us on Facebook!

Sale Bargains &
Special Offers

Distributed Titles

Current Catalogs and Leaflets
Take advantage of our latest offers

Information on Shipping Charges

Damaged Books

Conference Timetable

Request Catalogues

Landscapes in Transition

edited by Bill Finlayson and Graeme Warren

This volume presents a collection of papers focusing on archaeological approaches to landscape in the context of the adoption of agriculture in Southwest Asia and Northwest Europe. Case studies are presented from these contrasting regions, one where the transition to farming is indigenous, and the other where the transformation is initiated externally. This allows us to consider to what extent hunter-gatherer and farmer landscapes may be different, or the degree to which apparent differences have been constructed by our expectations and traditions of interpretation.

While the concept 'landscape' enjoys considerable popularity in archaeological interpretation, it is somewhat ill-defined and inconsistently used. Some have suggested that this fluidity allows landscape to be a 'usefully ambiguous concept' but at times there is a danger that this very ambiguity affords imprecision in our narratives. This is particularly important where differing traditions of archaeological interpretation meet, as, for example, in the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. The transition has been understood as a major division in archaeological practice and attitudes to 'landscape' across the transition reflect this dichotomy. The results of these debates are illuminating, and raise questions beyond the immediate geographical scope of the volume. The contrast between the two regions provides valuable comparisons between traditions of archaeological theory and interpretation and the bodies of evidence.

Bill Finlayson is the Director of the Council for British Research in the Levant. Graeme Warren is a College Lecturer in the School of Archaeology, UCD, Ireland. 239p (Published jointly by the Council for British Research in the Levant and Oxbow Books 2010)

Review Quotes

Landscapes in Transition provides a good overview of the state of the study of the Neolithic transition in both Britain/Ireland and in the Levant... For any scholar interested in the Neolithic transition in Eurasia, this book will be a welcome contribution."

Bleda S. Düring
The Holocene (June 2011)

"The papers as a group typify the tensions and challenges in trying to explain major transformations in the archaeological record - shifts at a global scale in terms of the beginnings of farming - without falling back on simplistic linear models of causality (‘this cause usually resulted in this effect’), whilst also acknowledging the importance of the local, of individual actors, of historically contingent decisionmaking. The collection does not provide the answers, but it underscores the importance of different scales of analysis."

Graeme Barker
Landscape History, vol 32, No. 1 (2011)

Browse other Near East books