- Publisher: Thames & Hudson
- Year: 2016
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 432pp
- Illustrated: Yes
- Dimensions: 240x162mm
- Condition: New
- Weight: 0.8kg
- ISBN: 9780500051863
- Product code: 535226
The Tale of the Axe
How the Neolithic Revolution Transformed Britain
David Miles New Hardback Illustrated
Postscript summary
Around 6,000 years ago agriculture reached Britain from the Mediterranean. Focusing on the era’s most representative tool, the polished stone hand axe used to clear the wildwood, this study tells how cultivation of crops and livestock replaced foraging and transformed the landscape.
Product information
Full publisher description
Focusing on the British Isles, the author explores a period of huge societal change - the Neolithic, or 'New Stone Age' - through the most iconic artifact of its time: the polished stone axe, using his own ancient stone axe-head, given to him by a local quarry worker, as a guide to the revolution that changed the world. These formidable creations were not only crucial tools that enabled the first farmers to clear the forests, but also objects of great symbolic importance, signifying status and power, wrapped up in expressions of religion and politics. Mixing anecdote, ethnography and archaeological analysis, the author vividly demonstrates how the archaeology on the ground reveals to us the evolving worldview of a species increasingly altering their own landscape; settling down together, investing in agricultural plots, and collectively erecting massive ceremonial monuments to cement new communal identities.
As a direct result of the invention, and intensification, of agriculture, the planet entered the Anthropocene, or the current 'age of humanity': an era in which we are changing the world around us in significant, accelerating and often unpredictable ways. As the author poignantly concludes, our ancestors set us on the path to the modern world we live in; now seven billion humans must face the challenges that presents.
As a direct result of the invention, and intensification, of agriculture, the planet entered the Anthropocene, or the current 'age of humanity': an era in which we are changing the world around us in significant, accelerating and often unpredictable ways. As the author poignantly concludes, our ancestors set us on the path to the modern world we live in; now seven billion humans must face the challenges that presents.
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535226
The Tale of the Axe
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Around 6,000 years ago agriculture reached Britain from the Mediterranean. Focusing on the era’s most representative tool, the polished stone hand axe used to clear the wildwood, this study tells how cultivation of crops and livestock replaced foraging and transformed the landscape.
Hardback
0
0
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rrp_info:£19.95
productId:154534
bic_code:HBLA, HDD
HBLA, HDD
£19.95
David Miles
General
240x162mm
Thames & Hudson
No
Hardback
Ancient
