In
the Beginning
The combined impact of orbital change
and amplifying mechanisms has been the see-sawing of climate from glacial
to interglacial and back every 100,000 years, often with an extraordinarily
rapid switch from one state to another. The global warming that brought
the ice age to its close created localities of abundant resource which
people claimed as their own and were prepared to fight for, such as in
the Nile valley at 14,000 Bc, northern Australia at 6000 Bc and southern
Scandinavia at 5000 BC. Click to enter:
  
Twenty thousand years B.C.,
from left to right excavations at: Nile valley (1980), Kenia (1993) Sea
of Galilee (1999)
Genes
or Behavior?
If we have reached
a point at which we can live within Earth's carrying capacity, we can eliminate
warfare in the same way we can eliminate infectious disease: not perfectly,
not immediately, but slowly and surely. Climatic desiccation centered around
5000 years BP played a major role in the emergence of civilizations.
The rise of Dynastic civilization in Egypt coincided with the onset of
widespread Saharan desiccation, and the northward expansion. And
while Mesopotamia was experiencing fragmentation at a time of unity in
early Dynastic Egypt, complex urban societies emerge in other parts of
the world in the early fifth millennium, for example in the Indus Valley
region and the Supe Valley of Peru. But there is more. The
Archeology of Worldwide War and Peace.
They Built
the First Temples:
|
The Earliest
States
The following section
grew out of the observation that neo-evolutionists erroneously restricted
comparisons to finding representative of stages of organizations (e.g.
of chiefdoms), and archaeologists justified their choice of comparisons
by linking these explicitly to the analysis of data within a structure
of archaeological theory. And although it is important to include comparisons
of developmental sequences, such investigations must include appraisals
of what social changes occurred, and most importantly understand the past
on its own terms, insofar as this can be imagined:
Truth
In History: Inventing Archeology
Archaeology has
often been used in different parts of the world to support nationalist,
colonialist, and imperialist claims, with horrifying results. There does
not seem to be a way to exclude religion and politics from archaeology,
which is after all a social science and hence political and partial. We
will start with a particularly example, the Middle East and
the Holy Land, where Archaeology has been used to serve modern political
goals, including laying claims to the land and denying the claims and narratives
of the other side.
Case
Study: Archeology of the Middle East Today
Levantine Neandertals and the Skhul/Qafzeh
humans, Figurines in the Middle East, Mesopotamia, and the Bible as narrative.
Imperial Ideas, Critical Evaluation of Hypotheses, Concepts of Time, Mounts,
Texts and Representations. |
