Product Description: Humans have always been interested in their origins, but historians have been reluctant to write about the long stretches of time before the invention of writing. In fact, the deep past was left out of most historical writing almost as soon as it was discovered...read more

Product Description: The Bronze Age was a formative period in European history when the organization of landscapes, settlements, and economy reached a new level of complexity. This book presents the first in-depth, comparative study of household, economy, and settlement in three micro-regions: the Mediterranean (Sicily), Central Europe (Hungary), and Northern Europe (South Scandinavia)...read more

Product Description: This integrated collection of new and newly revised essays by archaeologist Timothy Earle represents both a personal journey and a growing synthesis of how political economies emerged in human societies. Drawing in detail on the cases of chiefdoms in Hawaii, the Andes, and Denmark, Bronze Age Economics documents how intensification of economies, surplus mobilization, and controlled distribution of both staple and prestige goods fundamentally drove the political evolutionary processes that prefigured states...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The study of chiefdoms has moved from a preoccupation with their formal characteristics to a concern with their dynamics as political institutions. The contributors are interested in how ruling elites retain power through control over production and exchange, and then legitimize that control through an elaborated ideology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)