SEAA News Blog: New Books

From the 1790s until World War I, Western museums filled their shelves with art and antiquities from around the world. These objects are now widely regarded as stolen from their countries of origin and demands for their repatriation grow louder by the day. In The Compensations of Plunder, Justin M. Jacobs brings to light the historical context of the exodus of cultural treasures from northwestern China.

Archaeology of East Asia

New specialist sub series

Series Editors:  Anke Hein (Oxford)

In recent years, the archaeology of East Asia has been receiving increasing interest among scholars world-wide, leading to an upsurge in publications in western languages as well as an increase of presentations and panels on that topic at international archaeological conferences. This series offers a venue to publish archaeological material and in-depth analyses that can provide a greater audience access to evidence previously unpublished or only accessible through articles in not-easily-accessible venues or languages. The series provides a platform for data-rich studies on a variety of topics and materials from all over East Asia as well as conference proceedings reflecting the newest research insights and trends. We encourage projects that cross-national borders even into adjoining regions and/or cover areas usually overlooked in main-stream research. This includes all parts of China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, the Russian Far East, the Tibetan Plateau as a whole, and the northern reaches of Southeast Asia. Especially encouraged are submissions proposing and conducting new approaches and methods in all aspects of archaeology including scientific techniques, spatial analysis, various digital methods, but also theory and model-based or traditional chronology-focused studies.

Cattle (Bos taurus), domesticated from the extinct aurochs (Bos primigenius), has been an important animal to many human societies since prehistoric times. Cattle provides not only meat for subsistence, but also hide, blood, dung, milk and traction that contribute to the organization of human beliefs, cultural attitudes and social complexity. This book provides the widest range of cattle bone biometrical information from the Early Neolithic period to the Early Bronze Age (10000 to 3600 years ago) and investigates the morphological variation of this animal from a biological point of view: the main indicator for tracing domestication. The results suggest that cattle in ancient China was imported from the Near East around 4,300 years ago and made their first appearance in the Yellow River Valley. Once they had arrived in central China, these small-sized domesticated cattle soon spread and was exploited intensively from then on.

Archaeology of East Asia, a BAR sub-series

Series Editor: Dr Anke Hein (University of Oxford, UK).

In recent years, the archaeology of East Asia has been receiving increasing interest among scholars world-wide, leading to an upsurge in publications in western languages as well as an increase of presentations and panels on that topic at international archaeological conferences. Within this trend, most publishing houses tend to favour textbook-type overviews or big-picture stories; what has been missing so far is a venue to publish archaeological material and in-depth analyses that can provide a greater audience access to evidence previously unpublished or only accessible through articles in not-easily-accessible venues or languages. Likewise lacking are publication venues for conference proceedings that summarize the most recent findings and insights in a timely manner.