Autorentext

Olga Soffer is Professor Emerita at the Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her primary areas of research interest combine anthropology, archaeology, and palaeontology.

Clive Gamble is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton, UK. Gamble's main research interests are the archaeology of human origins, the social life of the earliest humans and the timing of their global colonisation.

Klappentext

Involving contributions from archaeology, geology, ethnography, anthropology and prehistory, The World at 18 000 BP: High Latitudes (first of the two volumes, and originally published in 1990) surveys the world scene 18,000 years ago. Following an introduction (common to the two volumes) on the diversity of human adaptations at the last glacial maximum, Volume 1 covers high latitudes: Europe, Asia and the New World. Volume 2 covers low latitudes: Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia and Australasia.

The volumes conation contributions from leading specialists on regional records. Each discusses the pertinent environmental settings, archaeological data, and cultural adaptations. This sampler of the way we were 18,000 years ago affords Pleistocene specialists a multidisciplinary conspectus revealing the diversity of past cultural practices as well as the innate universality of human nature. By stressing both the diversity and the similarity in human cultural practices, the authors contribute invaluable data for both theoretical constructs and a sound empirical basis for global culture history. the global nature of the work also reveals the covert biases hitherto present in reconstructions of the past and perceptions of past cultural change.

This is a fully international and thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of a key topic for the wide range of disciplines concerned with human prehistory and Quaternary environmental reconstruction.

Inhalt

Contents of Volume 2: low latitudes Introduction: Pleistocene polyphony: the diversity of human adaptations at the Last Glacial Maximum 1. Living in the last high glacial - an interdisciplinary challenge Northwestern Europe 2. The last Pleniglacial in the Paris Basin (22500-17000 BP) 3. The northwestern European Plain around 18000 BP 4. The last Pleniglacial in the south of France (24000-14000 years ago) Southern Europe 5. The Last Glacial Maximum in Cantabrian Spain: the Solutrean 6. The Portuguese Estremadura at 18000 BP: the Solutrean 7. Community and change in Italy at the Last Glacial Maximum 8. The Balkans at 18000 BP: the view from Epirus Central and Eastern Europe 9. Germany at 18000 BP 10. Moravia during the Upper Pleniglacial 11. Northern Central Europe c. 18000 BP 12. The Russian Plain at the Last Glacial Maximum Eastern Eurasia and the New World 13. Environmental conditions and human occupation of northern Eurasia during the Late Valdai 14. Central Asian hunter-gatherers at the Last Glacial Maximum 15. China at the Last Glacial Maximum 16. Japan and Korea at 18000 BP 17. New World palaeoecology at the Last Glacial Maximum and the implications for New World prehistory Afterword: Minitime and megaspace in the Palaeolithic at 18 K and otherwise