Involving contributions from archaeology, geology, ethnography, anthropology and prehistory, The World at 18 000 BP: Low Latitudes (second 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 contain 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.
Involving contributions from archaeology, geology, ethnography, anthropology and prehistory, The World at 18 000 BP: Low Latitudes (second of the two volumes, and originally published in 1990) surveys the world scene 18,000 years ago.
Contents of Volume 1: high latitudes Introduction: Pleistocene
polyphone: the diversity of human adaptations at the Last Glacial Maximum
1.
The distribution of human settlement in the extra-tropical Old World: 24000
15000 BP North Africa and the Middle East
2. North Africa at 18,000 BP
3. The
Last Glacial Maximum in the Mediterranean Levant
4. The Last Glacial Maximum
in the Jordanian Desert
5. Kebaran occupation at the Last Glacial Maximum in
Wadi al-Hammeh, Jordan Valley Sub-Saharan Africa
6. The Glacial Maximum in
tropical Africa: 22 00012 000 BP
7. Changes in the archaeological record in
South Africa at 18000 BP
8. A palaeoecological model for archaeological site
distribution in southern Africa during the Upper Pleniglacial and Late
Glacial
9. Zimbabwe at 18000 BP
10. A view from the south: southern Africa
before, during, and after the Last Glacial Maximum Southern Asia, Sunda and
Australia
11. South Asian climate and environment at c. 18000 BP
12.
Huntergatherers of the terminal Pleistocene in Uttar Pradesh, India
13. From
Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene in Sundaland
14. From Kakadu to Kutikina:
the southern continent at 18000 years ago
15. Environmental history in
southwestern New South Wales during the Late Pleistocene Afterword: Minitime
and megaspace in the Palaeolithic at 18K and otherwise
Clive Gamble is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton, UK. Gambles main research interests are the archaeology of human origins, the social life of the earliest humans and the timing of their global colonisation.
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.
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