This volume of original chapters written by experts in the field offers a snapshot of how historical built spaces, past cultural landscapes, and archaeological distributions are currently being explored through computational social science. It focuses on the continuing importance of spatial and spatio-temporal pattern recognition in the archaeological record, considers more wholly model-based approaches that fix ideas and build theory, and addresses those applications where situated human ...

Mediterranean landscape ecology, island cultures and long-term human history have all emerged as major research agendas over the past half-century, engaging large swathes of the social and natural sciences. This book brings these traditions together in considering Antikythera, a tiny island perched on the edge of the Aegean and Ionian seas, over the full course of its human history. Small islands are particularly interesting because their human, plant and animal populations often experienc...

Commodity branding did not emerge with contemporary global capitalism. In fact, the authors of this volume show that the cultural history of branding stretches back to the beginnings of urban life in the ancient Near East and Egypt, and can be found in various permutations in places as diverse as the Bronze Age Mediterranean and Early Modern Europe. What the contributions in this volume also vividly document, both in past social contexts and recent ones as diverse as the kingdoms of Camero...

Over the past three decades, “landscape” has become an umbrella term to describe many different strands of archaeology. From the processualist study of settlement patterns to the phenomenologist’s experience of the natural world, from human impact on past environments to the environment’s impact on human thought, action, and interaction, the term has been used. In this volume, for the first time, over 80 archaeologists from three continents attempt a comprehensive definition of the ideas a...

There is broad acceptance across the Humanities and Social Sciences that our deliberations on the social need to take place through attention to practice, to object-mediated relations, to non-human agency and to the affective dimensions of human sociality. This Companion focuses on the objects and materials found at centre stage, and asks: what matters about objects?Objects and Materials explores the field, providing succinct summary accounts of contemporary scholarship, a...

‘Archaeology is for people’ is the theme of this book. Split between the academic and commercial sectors, archaeological investigation is also deeply embedded in the needs of local communities, making it simultaneously an art, science and social science. Such a multi-disciplinary discipline needs special methods and creative freedom, not repetitive responses. Carver argues that commercial procedures and academic theory are both suffocating creativity in fieldwork. He’d like to see us bring...

Twenty years ago, John Cherry looked forward to the day when archaeological survey projects working around the Mediterranean region (the 'Frogs round the pond') would begin to compare and synthesize the information they had collected. He anticipated researchers tackling big questions of interregional scope in new and interesting ways, working at a geographical scale considerably larger than that of the individual survey. Was his optimism misplaced? Despite the extraordinary growth of inter...

The importance of complexity is well-captured by Hawking's comment: "Complexity is the science of the 21st century". From the movement of flocks of birds to the Internet, environmental sustainability, and market regulation, the study and understanding of complex non-linear systems has become highly influential over the last 30 years. In this Very Short Introduction, one of the leading figures in the field, John Holland, introduces the key elements and conceptual framework of compl...

This entertaining Very Short Introduction reflects the enduring popularity of archaeology - a subject which appeals as a pastime, career, and academic discipline, encompasses the whole globe, and surveys 2.5 million years. From deserts to jungles, from deep caves to mountain tops, from pebble tools to satellite photographs, from excavation to abstract theory, archaeology interacts with nearly every other discipline in its attempts to reconstruct the past.In this new edition, Paul Bahn brin...

John Heskett wants to transform the way we think about design by showing how integral it is to our daily lives, from the spoon we use to eat our breakfast cereal, and the car we drive to work in, to the medical equipment used to save lives. Design combines 'need' and 'desire' in the form of a practical object that can also reflect the user's identity and aspirations through its form and decoration. This concise guide to contemporary design goes beyond style and taste to look at how differe...

From ecosystems to Facebook, from the Internet to the global financial market, some of the most important and familiar natural systems and social phenomena are based on a networked structure. It is impossible to understand the spread of an epidemic, a computer virus, large-scale blackouts, or massive extinctions without taking into account the network structure that underlies all these phenomena. In this Very Short Introduction, Guido Caldarelli and Michele Catanzaro discuss the nature and...

What accounts for the persistence and spread of "commoning," the irrepressible desire of people to collaborate and share to meet everyday needs? How are the more successful projects governed? And why are so many people embracing the commons as a powerful strategy for building a fair, humane and Earth-respecting social order? In more than fifty original essays, Patterns of Commoning addresses these questions and probes the inner complexities of this timeless social paradigm. The b...