Around 15,000 years ago, almost all humans lived in small mobile foraging bands. By about 5,000 years ago, the first city-states had appeared. This radical transformation in human society laid the foundations for the modern world. We use economic logic and archaeological evidence to explain six key elements in this revolution: sedentism, agriculture, inequality, warfare, cities, and states. In our approach the ultimate cause of these events was climate change. We show how shifts in climate interacted with geography to drive technological innovation and population growth. The accumulation of population at especially rich locations led to creation of group property rights over land, stratification into elite and commoner classes, and warfare over land among rival elites. This set the stage for urbanization based on manufacturing or military defense and for elite-controlled states based on taxation. Our closing chapter shows how these developments eventually resulted in contemporary global civilization.

Throughout his career Grahame Clark has pioneered on a world scale the use of the archaeological record to document the economic and social life of prehistoric communities. In Europe he was the first to employ the concept of the ecosystem in archaeology and to underscore the necessarily reciprocal relationship that exists between culture and environment. In Britain he has played a major role in moving archaeology away from its preoccupation with typology and spurring on the newly emergent discipline of bioarchaeology. Economic Prehistory reflects all these concerns. Following a comprehensive bibliography of Professor Clark's writing, the volume opens with a series of classic papers on basic subsistence activities such as seal hunting, whaling, fowling, fishing, forest clearance, farming and stock raising. Subsequent sections then deal with world prehistory and the thorny relationship between archaeology, education and society. The volume closes with a retrospective which looks critically at such figures of the past as Gordon Childe and Mortimer Wheeler and to the author's own renowned excavations at the Mesolithic site of Starr Carr.

This book brings together a classic collection of Andrew Sherratt's work on the economic foundations of prehistoric Europe, which have put forward important new ideas about the development of farming, pastoralism, early technology and trade. In a series of contributions that have included wide-ranging syntheses and detailed local studies, he discusses their implications for the understanding of settlement-patterns, social structures, material culture, and less tangible aspects of prehistoric life such as the spread of languages and the use of narcotics.

Explains how recent scientific advances have revolutionised our understanding of prehistoric diet, economy and society.

Economic behavior is governed by two major sets of boundary conditions: environmental and technological factors on the one hand, and conditions of social organization on the other hand. Indeed, social scientists are often particularly interested in the framework of exchange relationships: exchange of goods, services, personnel, and information. Economic exchanges lend concrete manifestations to social relations that themselves may transcend the economic realm and that otherwise are often difficult to trace. Yet in social science research in Southeast Asia, the area of economic studies has lagged behind, despite the great study potential represented by the tremendous diversity of its physical and human environment. Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia attempts to take advantage of that opportunity. As a number of the contributions to this volume show, many if not most of the systems organized on very different levels of integration interact with each other. Taken as a whole, they provide evidence of the incredible diversity of economic and social systems that may be investigated in Southeast Asia.

Provides the first global analysis of the relationship between trade and civilisation from the beginning of civilisation until the modern era.

A series of case studies which combine an awareness of recent developments in hunter-gatherer theory with a commitment to the analysis and interpretation of prehistoric material.