Globalization in Prehistory: Contact, Exchange, and the 'People Without History'

Description

Globalization in Prehistory challenges traditional historical and archaeological discourse about the drivers of social and cultural connectivity in the ancient world. It presents archaeological case studies of emerging globalization from around the word, from the Mesolithic period, through the Bronze and Iron Ages, to more recent historical times. The volume focuses on those societies and communities that history has bypassed - nomads, pastoralists, fishers, foragers, pirates and traders, among others. It aims for a more complex understanding of the webs of connectivity that shaped communities living outside and beyond the urban, agrarian states that are the mainstay of books and courses on ancient civilizations and trade. Written by a team of international experts, the rich and variable case studies demonstrate the important role played by societies that were mobile and dispersed in the making of a more connected world long before the modern era.

Nicole Boivin is Director of the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Her archaeological research incorporates field and laboratory techniques to explore a range of issues, from anthropogenic landscape change to processes of dispersal, migration, and trade in human societies. She is the author of Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Role of Things in Human Thought, Society, and Evolution (Cambridge, 2008) and co-editor of Human Dispersal and Species Movement: From Prehistory to the Present (Cambridge, 2017). Michael D. Frachetti is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Washington University, St Louis. His work addresses how economic and political strategies served to shape inter-regional networks across Asia as early as 2000 BC (the Mid-Bronze Age), and how those networks laid the foundation for the later Silk Roads. He conducts archaeological field research in Eastern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. He is the author of Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia (2009) and a forthcoming book entitled Ancient Inner Asia.