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An authoritative and magnificently illustrated survey of Mesoamerican architecture from pre-Olmec times to the Spanish conquest. This important book, prepared by leading contemporary archaeologists working under the aegis of Mexico’s prestigious Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia, begins with an overview of the aesthetics, symbolism, and techniques of Mesoamerican architecture. The succeeding chapters survey the historical development of architecture in each of the region’s cultural...

The Great Houses of the prehistoric and early medieval periods were enormous structures whose forms were modelled on those of domestic dwellings. Most were built of wood rather than stone; they were used over comparatively short periods; they were frequently replaced in the same positions; and some were associated with exceptional groups of artefacts. Their construction made considerable demands on human labour and approached the limits of what was possible at the time. They seem to have played...

Benjamin A. Steere’s compelling study explores the evolution of houses and households in the southeastern United States from the Woodland to the Historic Indian period (ca. 200 BC to AD 1800). The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast contributes enormously to the study of household archaeology and domestic architecture in the region. This significant volume combines both previously published and unpublished data on communities from the Southeast and is the first systemat...

As archaeologists peel away the jungle covering that has both obscured and preserved the ancient Maya cities of Mexico and Central America, other scholars have only a limited time to study and understand the sites before the jungle, weather, and human encroachment efface them again, perhaps forever. This urgency underlies Yaxchilan: The Design of a Maya Ceremonial City, Carolyn Tate's comprehensive catalog and analysis of all the city's extant buildings and sculptures. During a year of field wo...

Published to accompany an exhibition at Salisbury Museum and Art Gallery, this volume explores the most significant works of art engaged with prehistoric moments across Britain from the 18th century to the 21st. While some of the works in the earlier period may be familiar to readers – especially Turner and Constable’s famous watercolours of Stonehenge – the varied responses to British Antiquity since 1900 are much less well known and have never been grouped together. The author aims to s...

Stronghold Scotland is your passport (or should that be pastport?) to a land 2,000 or more years ago. Welcome to the Iron Age. In those times, Scotland was even more individual, independent, inimitable and idiosyncratic than it is today. But this was no idyllic Garden of Eden, for it was inhabited by numerous tribes, large and small, that built more than 1,000 strongholds. From brochs, duns and hillforts, to blockhouses, crannogs and wheelhouses, many of these pre-historic strongholds are uniq...

A stonemason's story of the building of Britain: part archaeological history, part deeply personal insight into an ancient craft. In his thirty-year career, stonemason Andrew Ziminski has worked on many of our greatest monuments. From Neolithic monoliths to Roman baths and temples, from the tower of Salisbury Cathedral to the engine houses, mills and aqueducts of the Industrial Revolution and beyond, The Stonemason is his very personal history of how Britain was built - from the inside out. Sto...

Of all Britain's great archaeological monuments the Iron Age hillforts have arguably had the most profound impact on the landscape, if only because there are so many; yet we know very little about them. Were they recognised as being something special by those who created them or is the 'hillfort' purely an archaeologists' 'construct'? How were they constructed, who lived in them and to what uses were they put? This book, which is richly illustrated with photography of sites throughout Eng...

With Wayne Bennett From the silky wax qualities of the surfaces of some quartz menhirs to the wood-grain textures of others, to the golden honeycombed limestones of Malta, to the icy frozen waves of the Cambrian sandstone of south-east Sweden, this book investigates the sensuous material qualities of stone. Tactile sensations, sonorous qualities, colour, and visual impressions are all shown to play a vital part in our understanding of the power and significance of prehistoric monuments in relati...