List of illustrations Preface 1. The relevance of archaeological history 2. Classical archaeology and antiquarianism 3. The beginnings of scientific archaeology 4. The imperial synthesis 5. Culture-historical archaeology 6. Soviet archaeology 7. Functionalism in Western archaeology 8. Neo-evolutionism and the New Archaeology 9. The explanation of diversity 10. Archaeology and its social context Bibliographical essay References Index.

A History of Archaeological Thought

This study illustrates the potential of small-game data for identifying and dating Paleolithic demographic pulses such as those associated with modern human origins and the later evolution of food-producing economies. Archaeofaunal series from Israel and Italy serve as our examples. Three important implications of this study are that (1) early Middle Paleolithic populations were exceptionally small and highly dispersed, (2) the first major population growth pulse in the eastern Mediterranean probably occurred before the end of the Middle Paleolithic, and (3) subsequent demographic pulses in the Upper and Epi-Paleolithic greatly reshaped the conditions of selection that operated on human subsistence ecology, technology, and society. The findings of this study are consistent with the main premise of Flannery's broad-spectrum-revolution hypothesis. However, ranking small prey in terms of work of capture (in the absence of special harvesting tools) proved far more effective in this investigation of human diet breadth than have the taxonomic-diversity analyses published previously.

The Tortoise and the Hare. Small-Game Use, the Broad-Spectrum Revolution, and Paleolithic Demography.

Societies with low-level food production economies occupy the vast and diverse middle ground between hunting–fishing–foraging and agriculture. Efforts by Ford, Harris, Rindos, Zvelebil, and others to characterize this “in-between” territory are discussed, and a new conceptual framework is proposed. Domestication, the central landmark of this middle ground, is situated well away from the boundaries with hunting–gathering and agriculture, and separates low-level food production economies into two broad categories. Key issues and questions concerning societies with low-level food production, both with and without domesticates, are discussed. Hunter–gatherer and agriculture boundary zones on either side of the middle ground are considered, as are the developmental pathways that traverse them.

http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/davidson/Proseminar/Week%2014%20Subsistance/2001,%20Smith,%20Low%20Level%20food%20production.pdf

Low-Level Food Production

The importance of commensal microbes for human health is increasingly recognized, yet the impacts of evolutionary changes in human diet and culture on commensal microbiota remain almost unknown. Two of the greatest dietary shifts in human evolution involved the adoption of carbohydrate-rich Neolithic (farming) diets (beginning ∼10,000 years before the present) and the more recent advent of industrially processed flour and sugar (in ∼1850). Here, we show that calcified dental plaque (dental calculus) on ancient teeth preserves a detailed genetic record throughout this period. Data from 34 early European skeletons indicate that the transition from hunter-gatherer to farming shifted the oral microbial community to a disease-associated configuration. The composition of oral microbiota remained unexpectedly constant between Neolithic and medieval times, after which (the now ubiquitous) cariogenic bacteria became dominant, apparently during the Industrial Revolution. Modern oral microbiotic ecosystems are markedly less diverse than historic populations, which might be contributing to chronic oral (and other) disease in postindustrial lifestyles.

/pdf/sequencing-ancient-calcified-dental-plaque-shows-changes-in-y9o9brq77u.pdf

Sequencing ancient calcified dental plaque shows changes in oral microbiota with dietary shifts of the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions

Publisher Summary
This chapter focuses on the demographic archaeology. There has been a definite shift for two decades within archaeology from an obsession with material remains to a healthier concern with past peoples and their behavior. Demographic methods in archaeology are not restricted to those undertaken in the course of archaeological surveys or excavations. The sources of demographic information in archaeology are varied, consisting of human skeletal remains, settlements, artifacts, food remains, the ecological potentials of human habitat, and historical and ethnohistoric records. A more sophisticated approach utilizes the life table, which represents the mortality history from birth to death of a cohort. Palaeodemographic data on human populations at various stages of cultural evolution have significant implications for understanding the changes in the mortality and fertility patterns of past human groups as related to changing life conditions and human biology.

5 – Demographic Archaeology

The agricultural revolution.

The volume under review deals with the aims, methods, preliminary results and problems of three campaigns in Iraqi Kurdistan (1948, 1950-51, 1954-55). It does not offer a final excavation or exploration report, since some of the materials have not yet been studied in detail; but it contains a valuable series of essays about special aspects of the project which was undertaken as a first major attempt to identify the earliest village-materials and their immediate predecessors. The archaeological and general chapters to the book are the work of R. J. Braidwood and Bruce Howe. They explain the scene and progress of the field-work; they give a survey of the sites excavated and the materials collected (chapters I-V). The middle part of the book consists of contributions by the scientists who took an essential part in the field research: F. R. Matson writes on ceramic analysis and carbon 14 dating; H. E. Wright Jr. on climate and prehistoric man in the Eastern Mediterranean (a comparative study concerned with the entire Levant); H. Helbaek on the palaeo-ethnobotany of the Near East and Europe (an excellent chapter, most informative for the archaeologist in search of specific statements and analyses of early "agricultural" materials); and Charles A. Reed on animal domestication in the prehistoric Near East (again very instructive, often with an element of reproach directed to field archaeologists who neglected to recognize or salvage zoological evidence in their excavations). The concluding chapters review the results in a more general setting so far as they can be defined in chronological, "environmental" and general cultural terms and periods. [From a review by Machteld J. Mellink in the American Journal of Archaeology 65 (1961) 195-96].

Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan

Excavations in the Plain of Antioch I

Many indications point toward the hill flanks of the Fertile Crescent in southwestern Asia as the scene of the earliest development of effective food production and a village-farming-community way of life, some 10,000 years ago or less. In its 1959-60 field season, with a staff made up of both cultural and natural historians, the Iranian Prehistoric Project reclaimed further evidence of this important transitional step in human history. This is a short interim report, based entirely on an in-the-field assessment of the materials.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/133/3469/2008.full.pdf

Robert J. Braidwood

Papers

The agricultural revolution.

Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan

Excavations in the Plain of Antioch I

The Iranian Prehistoric Project: New problems arise as more is learned of the first attempts at food production and settled village life.

Excavations in the Plain of Antioch, I. The Earlier Assemblages. Phases A-J