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Artifacts like amphorae, terracottas, inscribed bowls and structural remains garner much attention from archaeologists, who learn much about the history of a particular site and era from these relics. Often overlooked, however, are microartifacts, or pebble-and sand-sized artifactual remains. Microartifacts are a great source of information about building functions, the delineation of activity areas and the processes involved in site formation.

Changes in settlement patterns from the early Neolithic era to the full development of states (ca. 6500-200 B.C.) in the Yiluo region of China are examined by an international collaborative archaeological program. Significant socio-political transformations occurred in the Yiluo basin during the Erlitou period such as the development of the first four-tiered hierarchy and economic integration, to name a few.

A detailed geoarchaeological and environmental study of southeastern Kazakhstan reveals subtle changes of land use and environment during the Iron Age. Major economic changes from pastoralism to agriculture over time may be reinterpreted from these new findings. Key-words: Kazakhstan, Central Asia, geoarchaeology, environmental archaeology, phyoliths, nomads, agriculture, Introduction The acquisition of agricultural goods among Iron Age pastoralists of Central Asia is a topic crucial for understanding the relationship between the nomads and their sedentary neighbours. Many authors [...]

Reviewed by Arlene Miller Rosen, Ben Gurion University. Within these pages, bound together under its seemingly mundane title, are an accumulation of dates that have revised our understanding of the [...]

A biography is presented of geographer, ecologist, and archaeologist Karl W. Butzer. He was born in August 1934 in Germany, emigrated to England and Canada, and studied mathematics, meteorology, and geography at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He served as chaired professor at the Swiss Institute of Science and Technology from 1981-1982, where he researched societies, paleoclimatology, and geoarchaeology. He taught at University of Texas at Austin until his death on May 4, 2016.

The scale and nature of early cultivation are topics that have received relatively limited attention in research on the origins of agriculture. In Southwest Asia, one the earliest centers of origin worldwide, the transition to food production is commonly portrayed as a macroevolutionary process from hunter-gatherer through to cultivator-forager and farming stages. Climate change, resource intensification, sedentism, rising population densities, and increasing social complexity are widely considered by prehistorians as pivotal to the emergence of protoagricultural village life. In this paper we revisit these narratives that have been influenced by culture-history and social evolution, together forming the dominant theoretical paradigms in the prehistory of Southwest Asia. We propose a complementary contextual approach seeking to reconstruct the historical development of Early Holocene plant-food production and its manifold sociocultural environments by intersecting multiple lines of evidence on the biology of plant domestication, resource management strategies, settlement pattern.;, cultivation and harvesting technologies, food storage, processing and consumption, ritual practices and symbolic behaviors. Furthermore, we propose that early plant-food production in Southwest Asia should be dissociated from ethnographically derived notions of sedentary village life. Plants emerge as important components of community interactions and ritual performances involving suprahousehold groups that were mediated through communal focd consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]