La mort d'autrui est une épreuve que les communautés humaines ont dû apprendre à surmonter dès les premiers temps de l'Humanité. Ce travail est une exploration des différentes réponses proposées par l'homme face au problème de la perte de l'autre à travers les gestes effectués sur le corps mort, depuis les soins thanatopraxiques jusqu'aux funérailles en plusieurs temps ou la création de reliques.La manipulation post-mortem des corps fournit régulièrement à l'archéologue des ...

Para las poblaciones indígenas la llegada de Colon al Caribe en 1492 significó una transformación y reestructuración de su mundo, incluyendo cambios a niveles culturales, sociales, económicos y políticos. En este trabajo se proponen modelos interpretativos sobre la transformación del paisaje indígena al colonial, a través de la aplicación de una investigación arqueológica regional que integró los conceptos de taskscape y paisajes en conflicto con análisis estadísticos y de Sist...

There is little evidence of the routes connecting Amerindian communities in the Caribbean prior to and just after 1492. Uncovering possible canoe routes between these communities can help to explain the structure, capabilities, and limitations of the physical links in their social and material networks. This book evaluates how routes connecting islands indicate the structure of past inter-island networks, by using computer modeling.Computer modeling and least-cost pathway analysis is a popula...

De bronstijd (2000-800 v.Chr.) is een sleutelperiode in de prehistorie van Nederland en Europa. De opkomst van een nieuw metaal – brons – leidt tot ingrijpende ontwikkelingen in de samenleving die tot de dag van vandaag doorklinken.

Een grootschalige migratie van oost naar west, aan het eind van de steentijd, markeert het begin van een periode van revolutionaire ontwikkeling op maatschappelijk, technologisch en cultureel vlak. Brons, een legering van koper en tin, vormt daarvan de motor. ...

The main goal of this volume is to look at social groups involved in economic activity other than members of the palace-based institutions and “elites” in Late Bronze Age Mycenaean Greek societies. The palaces and elites are the usual subject of studies of ancient economies, often from a top-down approach, but here we consider a fuller range of the members of a society, their organization, their institutions, and their contributions to the economies of those societies from bottom-up appro...

The human past is unimaginable without the horse. From our ancestors hunting and painting horses in the Upper Palaeolithic, to the earliest riders, the rise of equestrian empires, and the critical role of horses in war, settler colonialism, and modern state formation, human history is undeniably equestrian. Because of the deep and varied entanglements between people and horses, the study of horses of the past is inherently, and increasingly, interdisciplinary. However, scholars often do not u...

In the rich archives of the Leiden Museum of Antiquities lies a fascinating manuscript dealing with the autopsy on an Ancient Egyptian mummy. This was performed in 1878 by the Museum’s curator Willem Pleyte. Thanks to Pleyte’s detailed procès-verbal, the mummy (which did not survive the dissection) can be reconstructed at least on paper. The name of the deceased has been inscribed on the mummy’s cartonnage, on some of the linen bandages, and on the Book of the Dead papyrus retrieved by...

St. Eustatius, a small island in the Lesser Antilles, has played an important role in Atlantic World history. Since its first permanent European settlement in 1636, the island changed hands 22 times between the Dutch, French, and English. As a result of the Dutch free trade policy, St. Eustatius became one of the Caribbean’s main transshipment centers in the eighteenth century. During the American War of Independence (1775-1783), large amounts of arms, ammunition, and gunpowder were shipped...

This collection of papers was compiled in celebration of the remarkable academic career of Professor Wil Roebroeks, who has established himself as one of Europe’s leading figures in Palaeolithic archaeology over the past three decades and founded the Human origins research group at Leiden University. The volume features a diverse array of chapters contributed by close colleagues, as well as former and current students, providing a thorough overview of the flourishing field of Palaeolithic a...