Archaeology
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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...
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You might like books by Alice Roberts, also check out Richard Bradley, who is more technical but honestly hard to put down. What area of the world are you interested in? Those two are mostly Europe centric. I'd also have to recommend Changes in the Land for ideas, though not set in the palaeolithic. https://archive.org/details/changesinlandind00cron_2
Bradley does a lot on rituals... Also look into the field of "experimental archaeology" for practical descriptions of how things may have been done.
To recap: 1. Roberts for how we came to be, 2. Bradley for how we interpret and act in our landscape and 3. Changes for how we affect the landscape in alternative systems.
Concerning Europe: Neolithic is basically like wild gardening at first (and happened at multiple places at similar and not so similar times around the world). Monoculture is more towards Roman times to support army movement (oversimplified). Field boundaries are a Bronze Age thing, generally.
https://aeon.co/essays/an-archeological-revolution-transforms-our-image-of-human-freedoms
There's lots of old grimoires found, notably from the 17th century which you can adapt.
@fossilesque @ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling
I can recommend Richard Bradley's work, having contributed to it myself. There is quite a bit on ritual meaning in the landscape as expressed by Neolithic monumentalism, derived from the pre-existing perceived meaning over various natural places.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203630228/archaeology-natural-places-richard-bradley
I'm going to stay eurasia-centric for now because I feel whatever attempt I make at native American history is gonna come across as very condescending.
That said, I plan on including early agricultural practices as late-game material, particularly focusing on alcohol production. I will be looking into the dates that grains and animals were domesticated so I don't include something dumb like Neanderthals keeping beehives and eating golden currant
https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300240214/
There's a good read on domestication. Roberts also has a book called Tamed as well.
It's still worth reading Changes in the Land. It's important and relevant as it decided how people manage nature without farming. Hunter gatherers generally died off in western Europe from plague (oversimplified). It was a population replacement. Asian neolithic is a while different ballgame, you may want to stick more towards Europe.
Thanks for the heads up about the difficulty curve. My only knowledge of how paleolithic cultures are different is that the only domesticatable animal west of the Atlantic was the Guinea Pig, and I'm not even 100% on that. I'll stick to european for now.
Lol yeah, that isn't right. Where do you think turkey and llamas are from? ;)
Totally forgot about turkey being native to north America. They are certainly more docile than chickens.
Well, I learned something new today. Gonna be honest, I thought llamas were an offshoot of camels native to the Caucasus mountains. (I suppose they got to the Andes through Georgia's advanced sea trade network /s)
Edit: Did some googling. They are, in fact, camelids. Why I thought this meant they evolved from bactrian camels is beyond me. They split off from their parent group during the last ice age: camels migrated eastward across the Bering land bridge into Eurasia, whereas the llamas went south.