Joy McCorriston is Professor of Anthropology at The Ohio State University. She researches food production,
landscape and paleoenvironments in the ancient Near East and co-directs field research in Arabia.

1. Archaeology and the Anthropocene What Is the Anthropocene? . The Perspective of Archaeology . Polynesia and the North Atlantic: Islands as Laboratories . Methods: Survey and Excavation . How Have Humans Made Their World?

2. Discovering Diversity: Modern Human Origins Diversity of Humans: Homo sapiens and Neanderthals . Modern Humans . Lascaux Cave and the Human Experience of the Ice Age . Additional Human Experiences in the Ice Age . Human Culture Begins to Shape the Anthropocene . Protecting Cultural Diversity

Global Timeline 1: Human Origins and Migrations

3. Technology Makes the Human: Stone, Metal, and Organic Material Culture Stone Tools and the Discovery of Time . The Mechanics of Flintknapping . Stone Tools as Evidence of Human Adaptation . Metalworking, a New Technology for Communities . Perishable Technologies: Revelations from the Iceman . Technology, the Environment, and the Anthropocene

4. Peopling the World: Human Dispersals to Australia, the Americas, and the Pacific Inhabiting Australia . Human Dispersals in the Americas . Inhabiting the Pacific . Methods: Archaeological Survey . Peopling and the Anthropocene

Global Timeline 2: People and Societies

5. Digging In: Responding to Climate Change in the American Southwest The American Southwest . Methods: Excavation . The Colorado Plateau and the Chaco Phenomenon . Understanding Ancient Pueblo Society: Broken K Pueblo . Other People of the Southwest . The Southwest and the Changing Environment

6. Extinctions in the Past Big Game Hunters: The Clovis People . Radiocarbon Dating . The Spread of Clovis . Hunting Megafauna . Mastodons and the Role of a Changing Environment . South America: The Giant Ground Sloth . The Role of Humans in Extinction Events

7. Understanding Human Decisions: Evolutionary and Social Theory Bison Hunters of the American Great Plains . Zooarchaeology . Bison Hunting and Butchering in Context . South Pacific: Conflict and Fortification in Fiji . Europe: Deciding With or Against a Community in St. Kilda . The Amazon: Decision-Making Today

8. Producing Food: Domestication and Its Consequences in Southwest and East Asia Southwest Asia: The First Settlements . What Led to the Development of Farming? . Archaebotany and the Evidence for Food Production . Domestication: A Two-Way Process . China: Independent Domestication and Rice . The Consequences of Farming . The Critical Role of the Community in Food Production

Global Timeline 3: Domestication

9. Individuals and Identity: Agency in History Studying Identity . Mesoamerica: The Aztecs . Cortés and La Malinché . Textiles, Identity, and Gender . Bioarchaeology . Inequality and Structural Violence in Prehistory . Agency, Identity, and the Anthropocene

10. Feeding Cities: Urbanism and Agriculture Mesoamerica: Discovering the Maya . Maize and the Maya . The Maya City . Southeast Asia: Irrigation and Agriculture at Angkor . The State . The Environmental Perils of Intensification . Cities, Surplus, and the Elite

11. Building Monuments, Building Society: Collective Labor as Social Identity Monuments and Landscapes . Ancient Egypt: Building the Egyptian State . Monuments Among Mobile Communities . Stonehenge and the Pastoralist Landscape of Neolithic Britain . North America: The Hopewell Earthworks

12. Conspicuous Consumption: Feasts, Burials, and Sacrifice Chiefs and Hoards . Feasting . Residue Analysis . Reciprocity . The Ultimate Sacrifice: Human . Europe: The Burial of Viking and Anglo-Saxon Ships . Is Conspicuous Consumption Inevitable?

13. Writing: A History of Access to Information Writing in Many Contexts . Writings of the Maya . Writings of the Sumerians . Ancient Chinese Writing . Alphabetic Writing . Preservation of Writing Systems . Without Writing: Systems of Notation . North Africa and Arabia: Literacy without Settlement . Writing and the Anthropocene

14. Extracting the Modern World: Fishing, Mining, and Slavery Extractivism, Markets, and the Environment . Fishing and Maritime Extractivism . Underwater Archaeology . Extracted Minerals in the New World . Extracting People: The Slave Trade . Extractivism and the Anthropocene

15. The Future of the Anthropocene The Challenges Ahead . Extinctions and Increasing Diversity . Population Growth . Fossil-Fuel Consumption and Innovation . Understand Your Agency

Glossary Sources of Quotations

Sources of Illustrations

Index