bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Autonomy of the South-East European Copper Age
Authors: Renfrew Colin 
Published: February 2015

Ten years have now elapsed since the death of V. Gordon Childe, whose great achievement it was to relate the many disparate elements of European prehistory into a single coherent whole. These ten years have seen not only the sustained application of radiocarbon dating to the south-east European Neolithic (Quitta, 1967; Kohl and Quitta, 1966), but the publication of important stratigraphic sequences, especially that of the great tell at Karanovo in Bulgaria (Georgiev, 1961). Both these advances put in question one of the essential elements in Childe's structure for the chronology of Europe: the chronological equation between Troy I and the Vinča culture of Jugoslavia (Childe, 1929, 32; 1927; 1939).This is the cornerstone for the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age of much of Europe, and to remove it would cause widespread changes both in chronology and culture history.The crucial importance of this point has been well expressed by Professor Clark (1938): ‘Thanks to the synchronisms established between Troy and Iberia and the western Mediterranean on the one hand, and central and northern Europe on the other, any important alterations in the absolute dating of the successive “cities” is bound to affect the dating of every culture in Europe of the period, much in the same way as fluctuations in the price of certain key commodities are felt in the exchanges of the whole world’. Today, of course, it is not so much the absolute dating of Troy which is in question, but the synchronisms with Europe: the effect, however, is the same.
Preliminary Report on a Petrological Study of Ground-Edge Artefacts from North-Eastern New South Wales, Australia
Authors: Binns R. A. , McBryde I. 
Published: February 2015

Petrological and chemical analyses of stone, bronze and iron implements are playing an increasingly important role in the study of prehistoric economies. Their contributions, long familiar to students of European prehistory, were recently discussed in a paper which also reviewed the evidence from Polynesia, Melanesia and Australia (Clark, 1965). Apart from some studies limited to stone artefacts from individual archaeological sites, these techniques have not previously been applied to material from Australian prehistory (Gutsche in McBryde, 1966; Branagan and Megaw, 1969). In this brief communication we present some of the results of a petrological analysis of ground-edge artefacts from north-eastern New South Wales.The widespread dispersal of stone for axe-making based on organized exploitation of definite quarry sites is well documented in the historical and anthropological literature for eastern Australia at the time of European settlement. Unfortunately few of these historical records are sufficiently detailed, so even for the recent past as well as for prehistory, techniques of petrological analysis may make vital contributions to our knowledge both of quarry sites in eastern Australia and of the distribution of their products. Our preliminary discussion here is based on an investigation of some 200 axes mainly taken from the archaeological collections in the History Department of the University of New England and various local museum and private collections, but also including axes from northern New South Wales in the Australian collections of the British Museum, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Anthropological Museum of Aberdeen University.
An Iron Age Hill-Fort at Grimthorpe, Yorkshire, England
Authors: Stead I. M. , Jarman M. , Fagg Angela , Higgs E. S. , Denston C. B. 
Published: February 2015

The Iron Age hill-fort at Grimthorpe (Grid reference SE.816535) in the parish of Millington, East Riding of Yorkshire, is on the western edge of the Yorkshire Wolds, with a commanding position over the Vale of York. There is an uninterrupted view to the White Horse on the Hambleton Hills, 25 miles to the north-west; beyond York, 13 miles to the west, to the Pennines; and to the south 25 miles to the chimneys of Keadby and Scunthorpe. To the west and south the land slopes away to the Vale of York, and to the north and east there is a sharper fall to Given Dale and Whitekeld Dale. The hill-fort defences follow the 520 feet contour, and enclose an approximately circular area of eight acres (fig. 1).A traditional reference may be preserved in the field-name—Bruffs—perhaps a variation of ‘Brough’, which ‘refers in all cases to ancient camps, usually Roman ones’. But all surface indications have now been obliterated by ploughing, and even a century ago there was little more to be seen. John Phillips in 1853 noticed ‘unmistakable traces of ancient but unascertainable occupation’, and in 1871 an excavation by J. R. Mortimer located ‘the filled up inner ditch of a supposed camp’. But Mortimer was not concerned with the settlement; his interest had been aroused by the discovery, in 1868, of a burial with rich grave-goods, including metalwork with La Tène ornament, in a chalk-pit within the south-west sector of the hill-fort.
Settlement and Economy in Southern Italy in the Neothermal Period
Authors: Whitehouse Ruth D. 
Published: February 2015

The post-Pleistocene archaeology of southern Italy is a rapidly developing study and for this reason, while many facets of it are still little known, others are undergoing fundamental changes as new discoveries are made. Particularly notable contributions have been made in the last 20 years by, among others, L. Cardini, P. Graziosi, A. Palma di Cesnola, E. Borzatti von Löwenstern, O. Cornaggia Castiglioni and F. Zorzi in the palaeolithic and mesolithic field, R. B. K. Stevenson, L. Bernabò Brea, D. Trump and S. Tinè in the Neolithic sphere and D. Trump, S. M. Puglisi, R.Peroni, F. G. Lo Porto and H. Muller-Karpe for the bronze age. As a result of this work it is now possible for us to reconstruct in outline the later prehistory of southern Italy. Most of the work that has been done has been on individual topics, and, while some attempts at synthesis have been made (most notably those of A. M. Radmilli, D. Trump and R. Peroni), these have taken the form of a culture-by-culture description, as it were a commentary upon a vast composite stratigraphy of the area. No attempt, however, has yet been made to produce a history of the human occupation of the land and it is towards this aim that my paper is directed.The emphasis in this paper is on settlement and economy in relation to environment. It is through the techniques of his subsistence economy that man deals with (or in evolutionary terms, adapts to) his environment, and in this sense it can be regarded as the most important factor contributing to the nature and development of society.
A Petrological Study of Certain Iron Age Pottery from Western England
Authors: Peacock D. P. S. 
Published: February 2015

The Early Iron Age pottery of the Herefordshire-Cotswold region is marked by a predominance of the well-known duck-stamped ware associated with a thinner spread of pottery ornamented with tooled lines. It has been customary to equate the former with the presence of an intrusive culture now generally labelled Western Third B, while the linear-tooled pottery has been referred to the Western Second B culture and is held to represent the indigeneous population. However, this is based on the unwritten assumption that the pottery was produced in or near the home and hence can be used as a cultural type-fossil. Petrological examination suggests that this is unwarranted since it appears that the pottery was the object of a well organized trade involving specialist potters based in the Malvern district. The distribution could thus be due to purely commercial factors, and this necessitates a reassessment of the cultural interpretation. The object of this paper is to present the new evidence and to discuss briefly its implications.Although concerned mainly with the stamp ornamented and linear tooled ware of the west Midland and Cotswold regions, this paper deals occasionally with undecorated pieces. The ornamented vessel from Pen Dinas, Aberystwyth has been included because of its obvious resemblance to some of the pots from Bredon Hill, Worcestershire, but other stamped sherds such as that from Methyr Mawr, Glamorgan or the Cornish duck-stamped pottery have been excluded on typological grounds.
The Climate, Environment and Industries of Stone Age Greece: Part III
Authors: Higgs E. S. , Vita-Finzi C. , Harris D. R. , Fagg A. E. , Bottema S. 
Published: February 2015

In the second article of this series, brief mention was made of a cave at Kastritsa, near Lake Ioannina, whose talus had yielded an industry reminiscent of the last phase at the shelter of Asprochaliko. The evidence for an increase in the size of Lake Ioannina during the Last Glaciation was also outlined. The purpose of this paper is to consider the concomitant environmental changes in relation to the evidence for human occupation.Lake Ioannina lies at 469 metres above sea-level. To the north-east stands the Mitsikeli ridge, with a maximum elevation of 1,810 metres and separated from the Pindus range by the gorge of the upper Arakhthos (fig. 1). To the south-west lies the Tomarokhoria plateau, which in places rises to over 1,900 metres. The basin, a typical polje, is cradled by limestones which range in age from the Upper Triassic to the Upper Eocene. The Flysch of the Pindus borders it on the south-east. The lake lies along the axis of the Perama syncline, which runs north-west-south-east parallel to the Mitsikeli anticline and the Stavraki anticline; faulting is common. The basin would seem to owe its existence primarily to structural factors, although solution doubtless contributed to its present form.
Minoan Stone Vases as Evidence for Minoan Foreign Connexions in the Aegean Late Bronze Age
Authors: Warren Peter 
Published: February 2015

This article presents the evidence for the distribution of Late Minoan stone vases outside Crete. This class of evidence has not been discussed previously and as the amount of material involved is substantial, over a hundred vases, it is here set out as a contribution to the discussion of Minoan foreign connexions in the earlier part of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean.The vases were made in Crete in Middle Minoan III/Late Minoan I—Late Minoan III A 1, c. 1600–1400 B.C., as is shown by the contexts of parallel vases from sites in the island (see the Catalogue). Most of the exports occur in Aegean contexts of this period; for those from contexts later than c. 1400 B.C. it is most reasonable to believe that they too were exported from Crete at the time of their floruit, containing in use for a time afterwards. In any case most of them are fragments, which indicates that their time of arrival and period of use were earlier than the late date of their contexts. Moreover after c. 1400 B.C. Cretan influence abroad ceased (Desborough 1964, 166–7; cf. Furumark 1950, 263–4 for the end of Minoan contacts with Trianda and Phylakopi), nor is there evidence that stone vases were then made in the island.
Stock Rearing as a Cultural Factor in Prehistoric Europe
Authors: Higham C. F. W. 
Published: February 2015

Agriculture and stock rearing moulded the life of the English peasant during the Middle Ages. Together, they absorbed the greater part of his energy, time and skill. In good seasons there was plenty, and in times of dearth, the threat of starvation. Tracts were written on the most effective means of stock management and soil utilization, and farming methods varied with regional changes in topography and environment.There is no reason to suppose that the same does not hold for the prehistoric peasant: yet the economic prehistory of England, indeed of Europe as a whole, remains unwritten. This paper will consider the possibility of discovering the basic economic framework of a number of prehistoric societies through the examination of both faunal and floral remains. The sites in question are restricted to the Alpine Foreland, due to the excellent local conditions for the survival of floral, faunal and artefactual material.
The Hallstatt Sword of Bronze: on the Continent and in Britain
Authors: Cowen J. D. 
Published: February 2015

The primary object of the present article is to offer a review of the current state of knowledge of those flange-hilted swords of bronze which characterize the earliest phase of the Hallstatt period, and of some derivative varieties; and to support it by as complete an inventory of the available material as lies within the writer's power. It aspires, accordingly, first and foremost to be a factual survey of a clearly defined group of weapons, which over a significant portion of the area treated were the last of their kind to be made in bronze.More specifically, it is hoped that the topographical, typological, and chronological aspects of this essay may be found acceptable, in and for themselves, and as a basis for further study. But the interpretation of the character of the Hallstatt sword, and the socio-historical situation presented as a background to that, inevitably lie in a more speculative field, and are offered solely as a possible explanation of the genesis of the type. This explanation, if correct, would indeed make good sense of a number of otherwise disconnected factors. It remains, nevertheless, a hypothesis propounded to account for the origins of the material under review; and can be jettisoned, in whole or in part, without at all impairing the validity of the treatment of that material, once it had come into being.Though the contemporary swords of iron are certainly overdue for comprehensive and up-to-date treatment, they fall outside the scope of this study.
The Lanhill Long Barrow, Wiltshire, England: An Essay in Reconstruction
Authors: King D. Grant , Young W. E. V. , Clarke A. J. , Cain A. J. , Dimbleby G. W. 
Published: February 2015

The destruction of barrows and other monuments of antiquity has become an everyday occurrence. In earlier centuries many things survived, as in Ireland in more recent times, by reason of public superstition or veneration, in which the invocation of the fairies and the little people has played a lively part. It is astonishing how much survived the ages of ignorance. There is irony in the situation. For the main onslaught of destruction, it must be confessed, begins in the self-styled age of culture and enlightenment—from the 17th century to the present day—and of this the greatest slaughter is clearly attributable to our own 20th century.The Lanhill Long Barrow, once included among the most important antiquities in Wiltshire, has suffered a typical spoliation. When John Aubrey first described and drew the tomb in the mid-17th century, it must have been nearly complete, save for a certain amount of natural weathering. He wrote that the tenant farmer of his day ‘thought to have digged down this hill for the earth to lay on other land’; but he recorded only three small areas of disturbance marked ‘a’ on his original sketch.
The ‘Lower Perigordian’ in French Archaeology
Authors: Lynch Thomas F. 
Published: February 2015

An evaluation of the concept of ‘Lower Perigordian‘ is attempted in this paper. The conclusion of this work suggests that the Lower Perigordian is a fallacious concept, that it can no longer be accepted as the first stage of the French Upper Palaeolithic, and that the so-called Lower Perigordian stone industries may not even represent a unified stage in the development of stone-tool technology.The terms ‘industry’ and ‘assemblage’ will be used in this paper in the sense defined by Braidwood (1946, 133–6). An industry is a collection of tools of one category of material (here stone or bone only) which appears in archaeological context, or in an untransported geological context. An assemblage is ‘… a variety of categories of artifacts and non-artifactual materials which appears in archaeological context.’ The non-artifactual aspect of an assemblage most notably provides information on geological context and physical relationships. Many of the collections of tools to be dealt with below can in no way be considered assemblages, but we still know something of their archaeological contexts, so they have not yet sunk to the level of Braidwood's ‘aggregations’. ‘Culture’ will be used in its anthropological sense to mean the whole of patterned, learned behaviour shared by a group of human beings, and the effects of this behaviour on material artifacts. If set off by quotation marks, ‘culture’ may refer also to the ‘material culture’ of other writers or be a convenient translation of the French word ‘civilization.’
The Origins of the Flange-hilted Sword of Bronze in Continental Europe
Authors: Cowen J. D. 
Published: February 2015

In the present study it is proposed to set out, in somewhat greater detail than has yet been attempted, the case for an independent and wholly indigenous development of the flange-hilted sword of bronze in extra-Aegean Europe. That these were not the first tanged or even flange-hilted swords to be made goes without saying. At a time which on any view must be earlier by a clear margin the Mycenaeans were enjoying the use of splendid rapiers of which the hilts were furnished with highly developed flanges. And in Anatolia swords with substantial tangs are known from towards the end of the 3rd millennium. The argument, accordingly, is for independent invention of the same device in more than one period and place—a concept which some prehistorians seem to find unpalatable to the point of disbelief, however simple and natural the device.In the circumstances it is not altogether surprising that the subject has been long debated, and our main conclusion warmly contested, not so much in point of detail (on which in the ultimate the verdict must stand or fall) as on the broader ground of general resemblances, or even of preconceived ideas on probability. To analyse the ebb and flow of conflicting views is no part of the present purpose. It will suffice to observe that we have yet to see demonstrated a coherent chain of development by which the swords of central Europe can be derived from those of the Aegean, much less from Anatolia.
The Greek Mainland, c. 1150 — c. 1000 B.C.
Authors: Desborough Vincent 
Published: February 2015

In this article, an attempt will be made to review briefly the relative significance of surviving Mycenaean and intrusive elements on the Greek Mainland south of Macedonia during the late 12th and the 11th centuries B.C. Not all the area has been thoroughly investigated. Indeed there is no district that would not repay further exploration and excavation, but certain regions such as Arcadia, North Elis, the Megarid, Phocis and Locris, much of Boeotia, Phocis and Locris, and even parts of Attica, Corinthia and the Argolid need basic surveys. This irregularity of our knowledge should be borne in mind.The century immediately preceding the period under discussion appears to be characterized by extensive depopulation in many areas, and by the destruction of a number of major Mycenaean sites. Invasion would seem at least in part to have been responsible for the upheaval, though that upheaval was so great that the side effects of some climatic change are perhaps not to be ruled out as a contributory cause. So far as one can tell, an increase of population was registered only in Achaea, and in the relatively secluded Aegean-facing coasts of the Peloponnese and Attica. It would not be incorrect to say that the whole fabric of Mycenaean civilization on the Mainland, with the possible exception of Thessaly, had suffered a fatal blow in the period shortly before 1200 B.C. The course of Mycenaean history faltered and then (at different times in different areas) ceased, a phenomenon observable partly in the further abandonment of sites, but perhaps more in the discontinuation of the characteristic chamber tomb and tholos cemeteries.
Was Native Copper used in Transcaucasia in Eneolithic Times?
Authors: Selimkhanov I. R. 
Published: February 2015

The majority of scientists hold the opinion that mankind first knew metal in the form of native copper. In particular, at this period the malleability of native copper was realized, and its brittleness when cold worked, as well as the need of annealing to cold forge the necessary tools. The melting of copper was discovered later when native copper was met with in association with ores.These opinions are shared by H. H. Coghlan and H. Otto and W. Witter, though the first mentioned also pointed out that in some regions artifacts made from copper alloys existed in early periods while artifacts made of pure copper might be met with in the latest periods.V. I. Vernadski also had some doubt about the unconditional validity of this theory. However, he did not deny that where native copper was distributed it was the first metal replacing (although only partly) stone and bone for making tools. In certain cases such an assertion has been supported by old and unreliable analyses of ancient artifacts, as well as by some mistakes in the determination of their age.
The Characterization of Obsidian and its application to the Mediterranean Region
Authors: Cann J. R. , Renfrew Colin 
Published: February 2015

Evidence of contact between cultural groups is of great importance to the study of prehistory. Although the development of absolute dating methods has decreased our dependence on the discovery of such contacts for chronology, they are essential material when the origin and spread of culture is being studied. In the past, cultural contacts have generally been demonstrated by typological similarities of artifacts, but unfortunately many typological comparisons are open to discussion, and it can be exceedingly difficult to be certain of direct contact by this means alone.The importance in this respect of the study of raw materials used in places far from their place of origin and presumably deliberately imported has long been realized. Recently more attention has been paid to the careful characterization of such materials; the detection, that is, of properties of the specimen under study which are characteristic of material from particular sources. By this means it is often possible to assign a source to a given specimen. The petrological identification of British neolithic stone axes is perhaps the most comprehensive archaeological characterization study yet undertaken. Demonstrations of trading links made by such methods, if based on a sure identification and a comprehensive survey of possible sources, are not open to the criticism and doubt which may be directed at typological similarities. The variety of techniques now available for the analysis and identification of materials makes this field a promising one for the archaeologist.