MCDONALD INSTITUTE MONOGRAPHS

The site of Dhaskalio Kavos, on the remote Cycladic island of Keros, was extensively looted in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Investigations starting in 1963 then revealed large quantities of fractured marble bowls, broken marble figures and smashed pottery of the Early Cycladic period from around 2500 BC.

"The Boeotia Survey in Greece is widely recognized as a milestone in Mediterranean landscape archaeology in the sophistication and rigour of its methodologies, and in the scale of the 25-Year investigation. This first volume of the project's publication deals with the landscape that formed part of the territory of the ancient city of Thespiai. This landscape acted as the laboratory in which the project refined its methodology: the entire territory was traversed systematically by survey teams, and artefacts were collected not only from every archaeological site located but also as 'off-site' material indicative of land-use practices such as manuring. The methodology made possible the construction of detailed period and density maps of rural activity, throwing unprecedented light on the interaction of the city with its hinterland particularly in its period of maximum size between the fifth century B.C. and the sixth century A.D., as well as providing an exemplar for Mediterranean landscape archaeology more generally."--Jacket.

"Things have a social life. They also lead cognitive lives, working subtly in our minds. But just how is it that human thought has become so deeply involved in and expressed through material things? There is today a wide recognition that material culture regulates and shapes the ways in which people perceive, think and act. But just how does that work? This is one of the most challenging research topics for the archaeology and anthropology of human cognition. The understanding of the working of past and present material culture - its cognitive efficacy - is becoming a key issue in the cognitive and social sciences more widely. This volume, with innovative case studies ranging from prehistory to the present, seeks to establish a cross-disciplinary framework and to set out future directions for research. Its aim is to redress the balance of the cognitive equation by at last bringing materiality firmly into the cognitive fold. But how can we integrate artefacts - material culture - into existing theories of human cognition? How do we understand the significant role of the human use of the things we have ourselves created in the development of human intelligence? The distinguished contributors here argue that the boundaries of the mind must now be understood as extending beyond the individual and to include the world of the artefact if we are fully to grasp how interactions among people, things, space and time have come, over thousands of years, to shape the transformations in human cognition that have made us what we are."--Publisher's description.