Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 407-427). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / xiii, 427 leaves, bound ill., maps 29 cm

Late Iron Age and Early Roman Britain has often been homogenised by models that focus on the resistance/assimilation dichotomy during the period of transition. The main objective of this thesis is to examine the rural settlements of this period through the lens of Cultural Theory in order to tease out the more nuanced and diverse human landscape that the material suggests. This approach begins to develop new ways of thinking about the variability observed in rural settlement from the end of the Middle Iron Age (MIA) to the beginning of the 2nd century AD. The selected study area is the Upper and Middle Thames Valley. The thesis uses the grid/group designations of Mary Douglas' Cultural Theory as a tool to produce a more multifaceted picture of the period, exploring the assemblages of these rural settlements to understand the nature of the socio-political structures of the region, beyond the anonymity of tribal affiliation and the faceless economical dichotomy of high and low status. The structure of the thesis is as follows: Chapter 2 summarises the state of play in the study of Late Iron Age and Early Roman Britain within the study area. The strengths and weakness of Cultural Theory, how it has been used in the past, and what role it has played in this research will be introduced in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 presents the dataset and the patterns observed, as well as why and how the types of artefacts examined are integral to the formation of the worldview of people. Chapter 5 offers interpretation of the data through the lens of the Cultural Theory model whilst Chapters 6, 7, and 8 place six case studies from the Upper and Middle Thames Valley under inspection and show in greater detail the potential of Cultural Theory as a tool for thinking about rural settlement variation. This study re-characterises the rural Upper and Middle Thames Valley as a place where there was a wide variety of worldviews during the period of great cultural and socio-political transition of the centuries straddling the turn of the first millennium. It suggests that the varying success and longevities of these rural settlements may have depended upon the ability of their inhabitants to either change their worldviews or to find similarities in the new organisation of their world.

Despite ecological, anthropological, and archaeological debate surrounding their desirability as habitats for human occupation, tropical rainforests have received relatively little attention in discussions of Homo sapiens' Pleistocene dispersal. Sri Lanka has yielded some of the earliest dated fossil and material culture evidence (c. 38-35,000 cal. years BP) for our species in a modern rainforest context beyond Africa. Nevertheless, assertions in Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, regarding early human rainforest reliance have been largely based on coarse or 'off-site' palaeoenvironmental records, and the overall role of these environments in human subsistence strategies has remained uncertain. This study applies stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis to Sri Lankan human fossil, and associated faunal, tooth enamel dated to between 36-29,000 and 3,000 cal. years BP, in order to directly test human rainforest resource reliance, reconstruct a stable isotope ecology, and develop 'on-site' palaeoenvironmental records for Late Pleistocene-Holocene Sri Lankan rainforest foragers. Stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis of modern Sri Lankan primates, and stable carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen isotope analysis of modern plant samples from the Polonnaruwa Nature Sanctuary, are also performed to investigate the ecology of Sri Lankan primates on which Late Pleistocene-Holocene forager subsistence strategies were focused. The results demonstrate that Homo sapiens relied on rainforest resources in Sri Lanka from c. 36-29,000 cal. years BP until the Iron Age c. 3 cal. years BP, even when open environments, and their corresponding resources, were available. This remains the case through periods of evident environmental change at the Last Glacial Maximum and even upon the arrival of agriculture in the island's tropical forests. The primate stable isotope data prove difficult to interpret as ecological niche separation in the absence of observation data. Nonetheless, humans were evidently able to not only use but also rapidly specialise in the exploitation of South Asia's rainforests.

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Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished