Prehistoric archaeology

Ethnography and Prehistoric Archaeology in Australia

After a review of ethnographic approaches to Australian archaeology, this paper discusses food exchanges as an example of how Aboriginal society organizes production and social reproduction in gender specific terms. This goes well beyond the orthodoxy that men hunt and women gather. Evidence that food and other exchanges are reflected in the contemporary archaeological record is presented toget...

Prehistoric archaeology in a dynamic spatial visualization environment

My paper addresses how the past can be understood as experiential by exploring the interaction between the mobile body and the structures of the built environment. My central argument is that in order for digital cultural heritage to include the social context it needs to consider bodies and patterns of movement in relation to physical architecture. In this paper a model is proposed for articul...

Prehistoric Man in the High Country: The Archaeology of the Northern Tetons

Crafting a new science: defining paleoanthropology and its relationship to prehistoric archaeology, 1860-1890.

Paleoanthropology emerged as a science during the late nineteenth century. The discovery of prehistoric artifacts in Pleistocene deposits soon led to the excavation of fossilized human bones. The archaeologists and geologists who unearthed them were primarily concerned with determining whether the human fossils and the artifacts found with them actually dated from the Pleistocene, thus offering...

The meaning of ceraunia: archaeology, natural history and the interpretation of prehistoric stone artefacts in the eighteenth century

Historians of archaeology have noted that prehistoric stone artefacts were first identified as such during the seventeenth century, and a great deal has been written about the formulation of the idea of a Stone Age in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been devoted to the study of prehistoric artefacts during the eighteenth century. Yet it was during this time that researchers firs...