Colin Renfrew

View Larger
Image

Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind

Colin Renfrew

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice

Colin Renfrew

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Archaeology: The Key Concepts

Colin Renfrew

An invaluable resource, providing an up-to-date and comprehensive survey of the key terms used in this discipline today.

More About this Book

Other editions: Hardcover - 2005

View Larger
Image

Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice

Colin Renfrew

The best-selling textbook on what archaeologists do and how they do it—completely revised and redesigned.
For the Fourth Edition, new theoretical approaches, such as agency, materiality, and engagement theory, are added and earlier approaches analyzed afresh. Field methods and scientific techniques have been updated throughout, and new emphasis is placed on climate change and its impact on human affairs. The latest information on topics as varied as the Iceman, Pleistocene extinctions, and llama domestication is included, along with the most up-to-date material on GIS and surveying technology.
New topics will be introduced to emphasize the ever-changing face of modern archaeology, and additional special box features will be included, as well as discussion of the archaeological techniques needed to study the material culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A key component of the new edition will be the introduction of a dedicated Web site and study guide to accompany the textbook itself. Over 600 illustrations.

More About this Book

Other editions: Softcover - 2000, Hardcover - 1996, Softcover - 1996, Softcover - 1991

Kao Gu Xue: Li Lun, Fang Fa Yu Shi Jian

Colin Renfrew; Paul G. Bahn; Zhongguo she hui ke xue yuan

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Figuring It Out: What Are We? Where Do We Come From? the Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists

Colin Renfrew

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? These questions were posed by Paul Gauguin in a famous canvas painted in Tahiti that heralded the beginning of the modernist era. But they are also the questions asked by modern prehistorians in their quest to reconstruct the human story. In Figuring It Out, Colin Renfrew investigates the profound convergence between the two disciplines, drawing illuminating parallels between the way the modern artist seeks to understand the world by acting upon it, and the way the archaeologist seeks to understand the world through the material traces of such actions.
What does the "sapient paradox"—the fact that 30,000 years passed before anatomically modern humans began to change their world—have to tell us about the unfolding of the history of our species? Why do we now find Cycladic sculpture beautiful when, merely a century ago, such work would not have been thought suitable for display in an art museum? And how is it that, in the light of Marcel Duchamp's revolutionary gallery-based gestures, the prehistoric footsteps at Laetoli have been admitted as art too, albeit of an involuntary kind?
Professor Renfrew uses these questions as a springboard for his examination of the history of the human condition, a subject that can only be properly understood, he argues, through the idea of process, of Homo sapiens' active material engagement with their world. Central to his exploration is a group of leading contemporary artists, including Richard Long, Mark Dion, Antony Gormley, Eduardo Paolozzi, and David Mach, whose works are notable for just such an engagement with their physical surroundings.
Figuring It Out takes sculpture off the plinth and archaeology out of the trench, and situates the contemporary artist and archaeologist together at the center of an active endeavor to reevaluate what it is to be human. 175 illustrations, 55 in color.

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Prehistoric Sitagroi: Excavations In Northeast Greece 1968-1970, The Final Report

Colin Renfrew; Ernestine Elster

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Ancient Interactions: East and West in Eurasia

Colin Renfrew; Katie Boyle; Marsha Levine

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology

Colin Renfrew

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

The Nostratic Macrofamily & Linguistic Paleontology

Colin Renfrew; Aharon Dolgopolsky; A. Dolgopolskii

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

The Bronze Age & Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia: Chung Ya Tung Pu Ching Tung Ho Tsao Chi Tieh Chi Shih Tai TI Chu Min

Colin Renfrew; Victor H. Mair; J. P. Mallory; Asko Parpola; Fredrik T. Hiebert; A. N. Zhimin; Elena E. Kuzmina; David Anthony; H. E. Dexiu; International Conference on the bro

More About this Book

Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology

Colin Renfrew; Christopher Scarre

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology

Colin Renfrew

One of the most troubling problems in archaeology is to determine the manner and content of prehistoric thought. A fundamental challenge is to develop the theory, methodology and tools to understand human cognition. Cognitive archaeology as a subject is still in its infancy, and archaeologists are adopting a variety of approaches--literary, linguistic, and scientific. The contributors to The Ancient Mind develop a new direction in prehistoric cognitive research that is rooted in the scientific tradition and in an empirical methodology. Together, they begin to develop a science of cognitive archaeology.

More About this Book

The Cycladic Spirit: Masterpieces from the Nicholas P. Goulandris Collection

Colin Renfrew; John Bigelow Taylor; Hidryma Nikolaou P. Goulandre; Mouseio Kykladikes Technes

Between 2700 and 2400 B.C., ancient craftsman in the Cycladic Islands of Greece made marble figures of a level of abstraction and simplicity of form not to be seen again in art until the works of Brancusi and Modigliani in the 20th century. Author Colin Renfrew, the world's leading scholar on Cycladic culture, approaches his subject both as archaeologist and art historian, and seeks to explain what these people achieved and what their intentions were. As a work of archaeology, The Cycladic Spirit reveals the culture and aesthetics of a vanished civilization; as a work of art history, it develops a provocative argument about the persistence of a tendency towards abstraction in Western art.

More About this Book

Other editions: 1991

View Larger
Image

Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-european Origins

Colin Renfrew

In this book Colin Renfrew directs remarkable new light on the links between archaeology and language, looking specifically at the puzzling similarities that are apparent across the Indo-European family of ancient languages, from Anatolia and Ancient Persia, across Europe and the Indian subcontinent, to regions as remote as Sinkiang in China. Professor Renfrew initiates an original synthesis between modern historical linguistics and the new archaeology of cultural process, boldly proclaiming that it is time to reconsider questions of language origins and what they imply about ethnic affiliation--issues seriously discredited by the racial theorists of the 1920s and 1930s and, as a result, largely neglected since. Challenging many familiar beliefs, he comes to a new and persuasive conclusion: that primitive forms of the Indo-European language were spoken across Europe some thousands of years earlier than has previously been assumed. There was, in particular, no coming of the Celts, but rather a parallel development of Celtic-speaking peoples in much the same areas in which they are found today.

More About this Book

Other editions: Hardcover - 1987, 1987

The Idea of Prehistory

Colin Renfrew; Glyn Daniel

More About this Book

Other editions: Softcover - 1988

The Prehistory Of Orkney, 4000 Bc - 1000 Ad

Colin Renfrew

More About this Book

Excavations at Sitagroi: A Prehistoric Village in Northeast Greece

Colin Renfrew; Marija Gimbutas

More About this Book

Peer Polity Interaction and Socio-Political Change

Colin Renfrew; John F. Cherry

More About this Book

The Archaeology of Cult: The Sanctuary at Phylakopi

Colin Renfrew; Penelope A. Mountjoy; Callum Macfarlane

More About this Book

Approaches to Social Archaeology

Colin Renfrew

More About this Book

Theory and Explanation in Archaeology: The Southampton Conference

Colin Renfrew; Theoretical Archaeology Group (England); University of Southampton; University of Sheffield; M. J. Rowlands; Barbara Abbott Segraves

More About this Book

Towards an Archaeology of Mind

Colin Renfrew

More About this Book

Antiquity and Man: Essays in Honour of Glyn Daniel

Colin Renfrew; Glyn Edmund Daniel; Barry W. Cunliffe; John Davies Evans

More About this Book

Transformations: Mathematical Approaches to Culture Change

Colin Renfrew

More About this Book