Think of a souvenir from a foreign trip, or an heirloom passed down the generations - distinctive individual artefacts allow us to think and act beyond the proximate, across both space and time. While this makes anecdotal sense, what does scholarship have to say about the role of artefacts inhuman thought? Surprisingly, material culture research tends also to focus on individual artefacts. But objects rarely stand independently from one another they are interconnected in complex constellations. This innovative volume asserts that it is such 'networks of objects' that instill objectswith their power, enabling them to evoke distant times and places for both individuals and communities.Using archaeological case studies from the Bronze Age of Greece throughout, Knappett develops a long-term, archaeological angle on the development of object networks in human societies. He explores the benefits such networks create for human interaction across scales, and the challenges faced byancient societies in balancing these benefits against their costs. In objectifying and controlling artefacts in networks, human communities can lose track of the recalcitrant pull that artefacts exercise. Materials do not always do as they are asked. We never fully understand all their aspects. Thiswe grasp in our everyday, unconscious working in the phenomenal world, but overlook in our network thinking. And this failure to attend to things and give them their due can lead to societal "disorientation".

Archaeological Networks and Social Interaction focuses on conceptualisations of human interaction, human-thing entanglement, material affordances and agency. Network concepts in the archaeological discipline are ubiquitous these days. They range from loose concepts, used as metaphors to address a notion of connectivity, to highly formal and mathematically complex predictions of human behaviour. These different networked worlds sometimes clash and rarely converge. Archaeologists interested in network analysis, however, have achieved a much better understanding of the implications of adopting formal methods for studying social interaction and there have been theoretical advancements realising a better synergy between different theoretical perspectives. These nascent concerns are explored further in this volume with regional specialists exploring case studies from Prehistory to the Middle Ages throughout the Ancient and New Worlds, outlining how formal network approaches contribute to studying social interaction archaeologically. This book will be of interest to archaeologists wishing to access the latest research on networks and interconnectivity and how these approaches have been productively modified to archaeological research.

Outgrowth of a session organized for the 75th Anniversary Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology held in St. Louis, Mo., in 2010. Cf. acknowledgments.

People have long been fascinated about times in human history when different cultures and societies first came into contact with each other, how they reacted to that contact, and why it sometimes occurred peacefully and at other times was violent or catastrophic. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick,seeks to define the role of culture contact in human history, to identify issues in the study of culture contact in archaeology, and to provide a critical overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of culture and contact. In this collection of essays, anthropologists and archaeologists working in Europe and the Americas consider three forms of culture contact—colonization, cultural entanglement, and symmetrical exchange. Part I provides a critical overview of theoretical approaches to the study of culture contact, offering assessments of older concepts in anthropology, such as acculturation, as well as more recently formed concepts, including world systems and center-periphery models of contact. Part II contains eleven case studies of specific contact situations and their relationships to the archaeological record, with times and places as varied as pre- and post-Hispanic Mexico, Iron Age France, Jamaican sugar plantations, European provinces in the Roman Empire, and the missions of Spanish Florida. Studies in Culture Contact provides an extensive review of the history of culture contact in anthropological studies and develops a broad framework for studying culture contact’s role, moving beyond a simple formulation of contact and change to a more complex understanding of the amalgam of change and continuity in contact situations.

The impacts of climate change on human societies, and the roles those societies themselves play in altering their environments, appear in headlines more and more as concern over modern global climate change intensifies. Increasingly, archaeologists and paleoenvironmental scientists are looking to evidence from the human past to shed light on the processes which link environmental and cultural change. Establishing clear contemporaneity and correlation, and then moving beyond correlation to causation, remains as much a theoretical task as a methodological one. This book addresses this challenge by exploring new approaches to human-environment dynamics and confronting the key task of constructing arguments that can link the two in concrete and detailed ways. The contributors include researchers working in a wide variety of regions and time periods, including Mesoamerica, Mongolia, East Africa, the Amazon Basin, and the Island Pacific, among others. Using methodological vignettes from their own research, the contributors explore diverse approaches to human-environment dynamics, illustrating the manifold nature of the subject and suggesting a wide variety of strategies for approaching it. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in Archaeology, Paleoenvironmental Science, Ecology, and Geology.

Offering a fresh archaeological interpretation, this work reconceptualizes the Bronze Age prehistory of the vast Eurasian steppe during one of the most formative and innovative periods of human history. Michael D. Frachetti combines an analysis of newly documented archaeological sites in the Koksu River valley of eastern Kazakhstan with detailed paleoecological and ethnohistorical data to illustrate patterns in land use, settlement, burial, and rock art. His investigation illuminates the practical effect of nomadic strategies on the broader geography of social interaction and suggests a new model of local and regional interconnection in the third and second millennia B.C.E. Frachetti further argues that these early nomadic communities played a pivotal role in shaping enduring networks of exchange across Eurasia.

This volume of proceedings from the fourteenth biennial Southwest Symposium explores different kinds of social interaction that occurred prehistorically across the Southwest. The authors use diverse and innovative approaches and a variety of different data sets to examine the economic, social, and ideological implications of the different forms of interaction, presenting new ways to examine how social interaction and connectivity influenced cultural developments in the Southwest. The book observes social interactions’ role in the diffusion of ideas and material culture; the way different social units, especially households, interacted within and between communities; and the importance of interaction and interconnectivity in understanding the archaeology of the Southwest’s northern periphery. Chapters demonstrate a movement away from strictly economic-driven models of social connectivity and interaction and illustrate that members of social groups lived in dynamic situations that did not always have clear-cut and unwavering boundaries. Social connectivity and interaction were often fluid, changing over time. Interaction and Connectivity in the Greater Southwest is an impressive collection of established and up-and-coming Southwestern archaeologists collaborating to strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of the discipline. It will be of interest to professional and academic archaeologists, as well as researchers with interests in diffusion, identity, cultural transmission, borders, large-scale interaction, or social organization. Contributors: Richard V. N. Ahlstrom, James R. Allison, Jean H. Ballagh, Catherine M. Cameron, Richard Ciolek-Torello, John G. Douglass, Suzanne L. Eckert, Hayward H. Franklin, Patricia A. Gilman, Dennis A. Gilpin, William M. Graves, Kelley A. Hays-Gilpin, Lindsay D. Johansson, Eric Eugene Klucas, Phillip O. Leckman, Myles R. Miller, Barbara J. Mills, Matthew A. Peeples, David A. Phillips Jr., Katie Richards, Heidi Roberts, Thomas R. Rocek, Tammy Stone, Richard K. Talbot, Marc Thompson, David T. Unruh, John A. Ware, Kristina C. Wyckoff