Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology

This 2nd edition of the encyclopedia keeps up with the latest advances in the ever-expanding and rapidly evolving field of geoarchaeology. New subjects have been added and previous ones updated to stay apace with innovations since the 1st edition. It describes terms, introduces concepts and problems, explains and illustrates techniques, and discusses theory and strategy in the use of earth science applications in archaeology. The breadth of the discipline is systematically covered, including environmental archaeology, dating, materials analysis, and paleoecology, as well as syntheses of important archaeological sites where geoarchaeology has played a prominent role in describing, analyzing, and interpreting the record of the human past. The text is clearly written so that technical topics become accessible to a wide spectrum of readers, from the general public and university students to researchers and practitioners. It will not specifically cover general sites, civilizations, and ancient cultures, etc., that are better described in other encyclopedias of world archaeology, but it does include entries on sites and past events that are better known as a result of substantial geoarchaeological contributions.

About the Editor:

Allan S. Gilbert is Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. He holds a B.A. from Rutgers University, and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in anthropology were earned at Columbia University. His areas of research interest include the Near East (late prehistory and early historic periods) as well as the Middle Atlantic region of the U.S. (historical archaeology). His specializations are in archaeozoology and geoarchaeology, especially mineralogy and compositional analysis of pottery and building materials. Publications have covered a range of subjects, including ancient pastoralism, faunal quantification, skeletal microanatomy, brick geochemistry, and two co-edited volumes on the marine geology and geoarchaeology of the Black Sea basin.

About the Associate Editors:

Paul Goldberg is Professor Emeritus at Boston University. He is currently Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong, and Affiliated Professor of Geoarchaeology and Senior Researcher at the Center for Archaeological Science at the University of Tübingen. He obtained his B.A. in geology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in geology from The University of Michigan. His research interests focus on the application of micromorphology to the study of landscapes, soils, archaeological deposits, and generally site formation processes at archaeological sites, especially prehistoric caves. Most of his research is in the Old World, including France, Spain, Israel, Germany, China, Siberia, and Indonesia.

Rolfe D. Mandel is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, Director of the Kansas Geological Survey, and Senior Scientist and Executive Director of the Odyssey Geoarchaeology Research Program at the Kansas Geological Survey in Lawrence, Kansas. He holds a B.A. from the University of Texasat Austin, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. From 1999-2004, he served as Editor-in-Chief of Geoarchaeology: An International Journal. His research spans a wide range of topics including geoarchaeology, paleopedology, late-Quaternary landscape evolution, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction. He has spent most of career working with archaeologists in the midcontinent of North America and the eastern Mediterranean, and during the past 15 years he has focused on the use of geoscientific methods to search for the earliest evidence of humans in the Central Great Plains and Midwest.

Vera Aldeias is an associated researcher and group leader at the Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior (ICArEHB) at the University of Algarve in Portugal. She holds a B.A. in archaeology from University of Lisbon, and a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Pennsylvania. From 2013-2017 she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Human Evolution in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-Eva, Germany). Her research interests focus on Old World archaeology investigating site formation processes and human behavior using microscopic and experimental data on anthropogenic and geogenic deposits. She has conducted fieldwork in contexts ranging from Late Pliocene to Early Holocene in Portugal, France, Bulgaria, Israel, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Mozambique.