Books published by McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

In the early 1990s the University of Cambridge reopened excavations at the Neolithic site of Catalhoeyuek in central Turkey, abandoned since the 1960s.

This volume of essays examines the claim that a linguistic macrofamily can be identified which includes not only the Indo-European and Afroasiatic language families but also the Kartvelian, Uralic,Altaic and Dravidian families.

Tell Brak, ancient Nagar, was one of the most important cities in northern Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC and a focus of long-distance trade. It was also, for about a century, a provincial capital of the Akkadian Empire founded by Sargon of Agade. This is the second of four volumes on the 1976-93 excavations at Tell Brak.

The cathedral-like Niah Caves of Sarawak (Borneo) have iconic status in the archaeology of Southeast Asia, because the excavations by Tom and Barbara Harrisson in the 1950s and 1960s revealed the longest sequence of human occupation in the region, from (we now know) 50,000 years ago to the recent past.

Does it make sense to understand the prehistory, history and present-day patterns of life in Southeast Asia in terms of a distinction between two ways of life: "farming" and "foraging"? This is the central question addressed by the anthropologists and archaeologists contributing to this volume.

These two volumes report on five season's excavation and four millennia of occupation at Kilise Tepe, from the Early Bronze Age through the rise and fall of the Hittite Empire and into the Byzantine era when the mound was crowned by a substantial church.

Drawing on the experience of the Temper project ( Training, Education, Management and Prehistory in the Mediterranean ) and wider examples from the Mediterranean, this volume explores the issues inherent in managing, interpreting and presenting prehistoric archaeological sites.

Data from molecular genetics have changed our views on the origin, spread and timescale of our species across this planet.

Set in the context of this project's innovative landscape surveys, four extraordinary sites excavated at Haddenham, north of Cambridge chart the transformation of Neolithic woodland to Romano-British marshland, providing unrivalled insights into death and ritual in a changing prehistoric environment.

The subject matter of archaeology is the engagement of human beings, now and in the past, with both the natural world and the material world they have created.

What is the relationship between mind and ideas on the one hand, and the material things of the world on the other? In recent years, researchers have rejected the old debate about the primacy of the mind or material, and have sought to establish more nuanced understandings of the ways humans interact with their material worlds.

The nomadic peoples of the great grasslands of the former USSR have left little in the way of settlement evidence, and archaeologists studying their history have had to rely on environmental remains to reconstruct their pasts.