As an archaeologist with primary research and training experience in North American arid lands, I have always found the European Stone Age remote and impenetrable. My initial introduction, during a survey course on world prehis tory, established that (for me, at least) it consisted of more cultures, dates, and named tool types than any undergraduate ought to have to remember. I did not know much, but I knew there were better things I could be doing on a Saturday night. In any event, after that I never seriously entertained any notion of pur suing research on Stone Age Europe-that course was enough for me. That's a pity, too, because Paleolithic Europe-especially in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene-was the scene of revolutionary human adaptive change. Iron ically, all of it was amenable to investigation using precisely the same models and analytical tools I ended up spending the better part of two decades applying in the Great Basin of western North America. Back then, of course, few were thinking about the late Paleolithic or Me solithic in such terms. Typology, classification, and chronology were the order of the day, as the text for my undergraduate course reflected. Jochim evidently bridled less than I at the task of mastering these chronotaxonomic mysteries, yet he was keenly aware of their limitations-in particular, their silence on how individual assemblages might be connected as part of larger regional subsis tence-settlement systems.

For more than a century, the study of hunting and gathering societies has been central to the development of both archaeology and anthropology as academic disciplines, and has also generated widespread public interest and debate. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies to date, including critical engagements with older debates, new theoretical perspectives, and renewed obligations for greater engagement between researchers and indigenous communities. Chapters provide in-depth archaeological, historical, and anthropological case-studies, and examine far-reaching questions about human social relations, attitudes to technology, ecology, and management of resources and the environment, as well as issues of diet, health, and gender relations - all central topics in hunter-gatherer research, but also themes that have great relevance for modern global society and its future challenges. The Handbook also provides a strategic vision for how the integration of new methods, approaches, and study regions can ensure that future research into the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers will continue to deliver penetrating insights into the factors that underlie all human diversity.

Marking the Land investigates how hunter-gatherers use physical landscape markers and environmental management to impose meaning on the spaces they occupy. The land is full of meaning for hunter-gatherers. Much of that meaning is inherent in natural phenomena, but some of it comes from modifications to the landscape that hunter-gatherers themselves make. Such alterations may be intentional or unintentional, temporary or permanent, and they can carry multiple layers of meaning, ranging from practical signs that provide guidance and information through to less direct indications of identity or abstract, highly symbolic signs of sacred or ceremonial significance. This volume investigates the conditions which determine the investment of time and effort in physical landscape marking by hunter-gatherers, and the factors which determine the extent to which these modifications are symbolically charged. Considering hunter-gatherer groups of varying sociocultural complexity and scale, Marking the Land provides a systematic consideration of this neglected aspect of hunter-gatherer adaptation and the varied environments within which they live.

The definitive publication of the ten year Southern Hebrides Mesolithic Project. The project aimed to document Mesolithic settlement on the islands of Islay and Colonsay and, in intepreting it, to throw light on a number of major issues: the colonisation of Scotland following the last Ice Age; the nature of early postglacial settlement patterns; the transition to Neolithic and farming communities. The report is divided into nine sections describing the development of the project, palaeoenvironmental studies on raw materials, sea level change and vegetation history. Later sections cover the results of archaeological surveys and excavations, the computer modelling of site location and foraging behaviour and the experimental replication of tool use. The monograph concludes with an overall interpretation of the diverse strands of evidence regarding Mesolithic settlement in this region. A core element is the publication of Bolsay Farm on Islay and Staosnaig on Colonsay. The key feature of the project, however, is the application of a landscape approach to hunter-gatherer archaeology through multi-disciplinary research.

This book provides a challenging interpretation of ancient hunter-gatherer societies along the St. Johns River in northeast Florida and reveals that these mounds were not just garbage dumps, but rather intentionally constructed sacred mounds of immense significance to their creators. The book presents a new theoretical framework for investigating shell mounds as places of history-making through daily living, ceremonies, and burial ritual.

"Discussing case studies from the Pleistocene through Late Holocene periods, this volume offers a robust examination of houses as not only places of shelter but also of memory, history, and social cohesion within mobile cultures"--

This 2001 volume is an interdisciplinary text on hunter-gatherer populations world-wide.