Recent publications in the general series include:

Ethan Cochrane & Andrew Gardner (eds) (2011) Evolutionary and Interpretive Archaeologies.

This collection of original articles, which arises from a seminar series held at the Institute in 2007, compares key archaeological topics from evolutionary and interpretive perspectives – the two strands representing the major current theoretical poles in the discipline. The book will advance debate and contribute to a better understanding of the goals and research strategies that comprise these distinct research traditions.

Andrew Bevan & David Wengrow (eds) (2010) Cultures of Commodity Branding.

Commodity branding did not emerge with contemporary global capitalism. The authors in this volume show that the cultural history of branding stretches back to the beginnings of urban life and can be found in various permutations in places as diverse as the Bronze Age Mediterranean, Socialist Hungary, and the contemporary kingdoms of Cameroon.

Recent publications in the Critical Cultural Heritage sub-series include:

Mingming Wang (2009) Empire and Local Worlds. A Chinese Model of Long-Term Historical Anthropology.

This book traces almost a millennium of history of the southern Chinese city of Quangzhou, a major international trading entrepot in the 13th century that declined to a peripheral regional centre by the end of the 19th century. Wang offers a Chinese paradigm for the study of civilization that is distinctly different from Eurocentric models.

Layla Renshaw (2011) Exhuming Loss. Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War.

This book examines the contested representations of those murdered during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s in two small rural communities as they undergo the experience of exhumation, identification, and reburial from nearby mass graves. The exposure of graves has opened up a discursive space in Spanish society for multiple representations to be made of the war dead and of Spain's traumatic past.

Further information about all these books and earlier publications can be found both on the Institute website (www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/about/publications) and on the LCP website (www.lcoastpress.com/books).

Many other books have been published by Institute staff between 2009 and 2011 – some of these are featured below:

Joe Flatman (2011) Becoming an Archaeologist: A Guide to Professional Pathways. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Joe Flatman's new handbook on career paths in archaeology outlines in straightforward fashion the entire process of getting a job in archaeology, including the various options; the training that is required; and how to get positions in the academic, commercial and government worlds.

Margarita Gleba & Helle Horsnaes (eds) (2011) Communicating Identity in Italic Iron Age Communities. Oxbow Books: Oxford.

The inhabitants of Iron Age Italy did not possess a single, fixed identity. The papers in this volume discuss these multiple identities, both on a personal level for the individual and at the scale of community identity, using different types of evidence.

Julio Escalona & Andrew Reynolds (eds) (2011) Scale and Scale Change in the Early Middle Ages: Exploring Landscape, Local Society and the World Beyond. Turnhout: Brepols.

This collection of papers is the result of a Spanish-funded international research network which investigated the application of concepts of scale drawn widely from the social sciences to the study of early medieval societies throughout Europe. The volume provides new approaches and new models for studying the comparative development of post-Roman Europe.

Corinna Riva (2010) The Urbanization of Etruria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In this survey of the burial and settlement evidence of late Iron Age Etruria, Corinna Riva offers a reading of the socio-political transformations that led to the formation of urban centres in Tyrrhenian Central Italy. Through a close examination of burial ritual and the material culture associated with it, Riva traces the transformations of seventh-century elite funerary practices and the structuring of political power around these practices in Etruria. Challenging established views that deem contact with eastern Mediterranean regions crucial to these developments, Riva offers an intriguing interpretation of the so-called Orientalising material culture, taking a long-term perspective on local changes and east-west contact across the Mediterranean.

Michael J. O'Brien & Stephen Shennan (eds) (2010) Innovation in Cultural Systems: Contributions from Evolutionary Anthropology. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

This volume came from a workshop at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Austria and is part of their Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology. The contributions offer new perspectives on long-standing questions about the nature of innovation processes, including theoretical analyses and archaeological and anthropological case-studies.

David Wengrow (2010) What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

In What Makes Civilization? David Wengrow relates the 'birth of civilization' in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to other, more recent attempts at reshaping the world order to an ideal image, and obliges us to recognize that civilizations are not formed in isolation, but through the mixing and borrowing of culture between societies.

A. Haour, K. Manning, N. Arazi, O. Gosselain, N.S. Guèye, D. Keita, A. Livingstone Smith, K. MacDonald, A. Major, S. McIntosh & R. Vernet (eds) (2010) African Pottery Roulettes Past and Present: Techniques, Identification and Distribution. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Fibre roulettes have been the primary decorative tools of West African potters since c. 2000 BC. In 1996 Olivier Gosselain and Kevin MacDonald (UCL) organised a symposium on these complex manipulations and their identification. In 2008 Anne Haour and Kat Manning (UCL), funded by the Leverhulme Trust, collaborated with major researchers in the field to bring the present volume to publication. The resultant book was nominated for the Prix International du Livre d'Art Tribal 2010.

Stuart Brookes & Sue Harrington (2010) The Kingdom and People of Kent AD400-1066. Stroud: The History Press.

This book discusses major themes relating to the kingdom and people of Kent in the early middle ages – migration, settlement, the making of kingship, the impact of the Church, warfare and defence. Drawing on written, topynomic and archaeological sources, it outlines issues in the formation of a key kingdom of early medieval England.

Stephen Shennan (ed) (2009) Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

This book came from the conference that marked the end of the first stage of the Institute's AHRC-funded Centre for Cultural Evolution. It takes a 'broad church' view of the application of Darwinian ideas to archaeology and anthropology, demonstrating the key role of any worthwhile theoretical perspective – to produce productive empirical research.

Joe Flatman (2009) Ships and Shipping in Medieval Manuscripts. London and Chicago: British Museum Press and the University of Chicago Press.

Vividly brought to life with 150 diverse images drawn from the collections of the British Library, this volume paints a vibrant picture of maritime life during the High Middle Ages and provides new insights into medieval knowledge of the maritime environment.

Andrew Reynolds (2009) Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This volume is the first combined study of archaeological and written evidence for the emergence of judicial practice in Anglo-Saxon England. The study takes a landscape perspective and investigates a theme that is much neglected, but central to understanding the development of complex societies.