Andy Needham
Biographic Data
| ID | 146376 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andy Needham |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andy |
| FAMILY NAME | Needham |
| SIGNATURE | NEEDHAM A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4302-1568 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Craftwell: A feasibility and acceptability study of outdoor heritage crafting for wellbeing and mental health
Background: There has been increasing interest in creativity, heritage and nature to improve health-related outcomes. However, limited research has examined the intersection of heritage crafting in the context of natural spaces. This study aims to explore the feasibility and acceptability of an archaeologically informed outdoor heritage crafting intervention. Methods: A mixed-methods single group before and after feasibility study was conducted. …
First stage in technological production of Stone Age animal teeth pendants: Evidence from Zvejnieki (Latvia) and wider social implications
Animal teeth were amongst the most common materials utilised for personal ornament production during the Stone Age, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. The hunter-gatherer cemetery site of Zvejnieki (Latvia) (7500-2500 cal. BC) is a clear example of this, with more than 2000 animal teeth excavated from grave contexts. Animal tooth pendants from the site have received significant scholarly attention, largely focusing on their faunal identificat…
The Water Knife
Illuminating palaeolithic art using virtual reality: A new method for integrating dynamic firelight into interpretations of art production and use
Approaches to Palaeolithic art have increasingly shifted beyond the traditional focus on engraved or depicted forms in isolation, to appreciating the sensorial experience of art making as integral to shaping the form of depictions and the meaning imbued within them. This kind of research appreciates an array of factors pertinent to how the art may have been understood or experienced by people during the Palaeolithic, including placement, lighting…
Material and Sensory Experiences of Mesolithic Resinous Substances
Mesolithic resinous adhesives are well known for their role as hafting mastic within composite technologies, yet it is increasingly clear that their usage was more diverse than this. Birch-bark tar has been recovered from Mesolithic contexts as chewed lumps linked to medicinal treatment of toothache and oral diseases, and as a decorative element on ornaments and art objects; and an amorphous resinous substance possibly derived from pine or spruce…
An experimental study of wet-cooking in organic vessels: Implications for Understanding the Evolution of Cooking Technologies
The ability to control and direct fire is a major evolutionary step in the human story. The development of aceramic cooking technologies is less well understood as they rarely survive in the archaeological record. However, inferential evidence such as fire-cracked rocks, earthen pits and heated bones suggest a variety of cooking methods were used prior to the invention of ceramics. Yet there is a paucity of experimental evidence testing the effic…
Flint awls at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr: Understanding tool use through integrated methods
The form and macroscopic wear of Mesolithic awls has been used to infer function, which has become an aspect of established typologies. However, verification of form/function relationships are needed to ensure typologies are robust. This paper presents the results of GIS and microwear analysis of 54 flint awls excavated from the Early Mesolithic site of Star Carr, UK, in conjunction with results from experimental research on awl use. Results expa…
Calculated or caring? Neanderthal healthcare in social context
Explanations for patterns of healed trauma in Neanderthals have been a matter of debate for several decades. Despite widespread evidence for recovery from injuries or survival despite impairments, apparent evidence for healthcare is given limited attention. Moreover, interpretations of Neanderthals' approach to injury and suffering sometimes assume a calculated or indifferent attitude to others. Here the authors review evidence for Neanderthal he…
Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism by Robert Lifset
Reviewed by: Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism by Robert Lifset Andrew Needham (bio) Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism. By Robert Lifset. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. Pp. 328. $25.95. On 26 September 1962, Consolidated Edison of New York approached the city of Cornwall, New York with a proposal to build a …
The application of micro-Raman for the analysis of ochre artefacts from Mesolithic palaeo-lake Flixton
As Precious as Blood: The Western Slope in Colorado's Water Wars, 1900–1970
The scholarship on the politics of the Colorado River forms an edifice that collectively rivals the river's hydroelectric dams in size and scale. Steven C. Schulte's new book is still able to tell a surprisingly original story of water politics on Colorado's western slope during the twentieth century. Schulte demonstrates that water politics, often portrayed through interstate battles, also created enduring political divisions within Colorado. Th…
A Unique Engraved Shale Pendant from the Site of Star Carr: The oldest Mesolithic art in Britain
In 2015 an engraved shale pendant was found during excavations at the Early Mesolithic site of Star Carr, UK. Engraved motifs on Mesolithic pendants are extremely rare, with the exception of amber pendants from southern Scandinavia. The artwork on the pendant is the earliest known Mesolithic art in Britain; the 'barbed line' motif is comparable to styles on the Continent, particularly in Denmark. When it was first uncovered the lines were barely …
Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland
Journal Article Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland Get access By David Stradling and Richard Stradling. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. xviii, 245 pp. $29.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 1, June 2016, Pages 270–271, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw148 Published: 01 June 2016
A Piece of the Action
This chapter focuses on how Navajo nationalism attempted to alter the spatial dynamics that subordinated Navajo claims to control their land to metropolitan demands for inexpensive power. Metropolitan demand produced the notion that Navajos possessed massive mineral wealth, and this allowed young activists to imagine the Nation as space colonized by the greedy cities of the Southwest. It allowed Navajo leader Peter MacDonald to imagine the format…
Turquoise and Turboprops
This chapter examines how manufacturing passed agriculture as the Phoenix's largest economic sector. By 1960, manufacturing employed thirty thousand people and generated income of $435 million in Phoenix, compared to fewer than one thousand employees and income of $5 million twenty years earlier. It also remade the landscape. In Phoenix's industrial boom, the “clean” factories of companies located operations outside of Phoenix's traditional indus…
The Living River
This chapter addresses how The New York Times challenged the long-held claims of Arizona officials that their state was entitled to a portion of the Colorado River by rights, a claim recently upheld by the Supreme Court. The paper also argued that Arizona's attempt to realize those claims endangered the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon itself. Transforming the flowing energy of water into flowing electricity, the Times suggested, was not in th…
Beyond the Crabgrass Frontier
This introductory chapter provides an overview of postwar metropolitan development. The search for the natural resources required for metropolitan growth, and for spaces to discard the waste produced by metropolitan consumption, led federal, state, and local actors to create new infrastructures. These power lines, aqueducts, and landfills reorganized economies, ecologies, and societies in distant landscapes. Once constructed, they shaped possibil…
The Valley of the Sun
This chapter focuses on the Valley of the Sun. “The Valley of the Sun” was not only an idealized place. It was also a political project, the result of two of the most powerful forces in the postwar American political economy. The first was the ongoing legacy of New Deal policies that sought to fuel the national economy through debt-driven personal consumption. Part of the general postwar economic philosophy historians have labeled “growth liberal…
A Region of Fragments
This chapter looks at the construction of Boulder Dam. Franklin Roosevelt explained the dam as a manifestation of the transformations the New Deal had set in motion. “The largest generators and turbines yet installed in this country, machinery that can continuously supply nearly two million horsepower of electric energy,” Roosevelt explained, would soon “power factory motors, street and household lights and irrigation pumps.” In so doing, the dam…
Integrating Geographies
This chapter discusses how changes in geography remade space in the Southwest, rendering the Colorado Plateau in many ways the center of the region's economic development. With the construction of Mojave Generating Station, and the expansion of Four Corners Power Plant from 230 megawatts to over 1,000 megawatts in the late 1960s, the landscape of the Colorado Plateau—and specifically the landscape of the Navajo and Hopi Nations—became the broad o…
“Good Bye, Big Sky”: Coal and Postwar America
This concluding chapter presents a reading of “Good Bye, Big Sky” and “The Giant Revived,” two articles on coal's rise as the fuel of postwar America and the cost of that transition. “The Giant Revived” explained how American electrical utilities found coal to be an inexpensive alternative to natural gas and nuclear power that could meet the nation's burgeoning demand for electricity. This demand drove a revival of the coal industry. By 1970, dem…
Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest
Modernizing the Navajo
This chapter explores how a new infrastructure of coal mines and power plants on the Navajo Reservation, and of power lines that stretched across the Southwest, changed the landscape of the Navajo Reservation. The political terms in which this infrastructure took place—terms set largely by the belief held by businessmen from Phoenix and elsewhere that the state should facilitate capital location—shaped this infrastructure's meaning and future. Th…
Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest
In 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a metropolis of 1.5 million people and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power plants surrounded the reservation, generating electricity for export to Phoenix, Los Angeles, and oth…
The Cradle of Thought: Growth, Learning, Play and Attachment in Neanderthal Children
Childhood is a core stage in development, essential in the acquisition of social, practical and cultural skills. However, this area receives limited attention in archaeological debate, especially in early prehistory. We here consider N eanderthal childhood, exploring the experience of N eanderthal children using biological, cultural and social evidence. We conclude that N eanderthal childhood experience was subtly different from that of their mod…
The Cradle of Thought: Growth, Learning, Play and Attachment in Neanderthal Children
Childhood is a core stage in development, essential in the acquisition of social, practical and cultural skills. However, this area receives limited attention in archaeological debate, especially in early prehistory. We here consider N eanderthal childhood, exploring the experience of N eanderthal children using biological, cultural and social evidence. We conclude that N eanderthal childhood experience was subtly different from that of their mod…
Calculated or caring? Neanderthal healthcare in social context
Explanations for patterns of healed trauma in Neanderthals have been a matter of debate for several decades. Despite widespread evidence for recovery from injuries or survival despite impairments, apparent evidence for healthcare is given limited attention. Moreover, interpretations of Neanderthals' approach to injury and suffering sometimes assume a calculated or indifferent attitude to others. Here the authors review evidence for Neanderthal he…
Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest
In 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a metropolis of 1.5 million people and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power plants surrounded the reservation, generating electricity for export to Phoenix, Los Angeles, and oth…
Geochemical indicators of preservation status and site deterioration at Star Carr
A Unique Engraved Shale Pendant from the Site of Star Carr: The oldest Mesolithic art in Britain
In 2015 an engraved shale pendant was found during excavations at the Early Mesolithic site of Star Carr, UK. Engraved motifs on Mesolithic pendants are extremely rare, with the exception of amber pendants from southern Scandinavia. The artwork on the pendant is the earliest known Mesolithic art in Britain; the 'barbed line' motif is comparable to styles on the Continent, particularly in Denmark. When it was first uncovered the lines were barely …
Material and Sensory Experiences of Mesolithic Resinous Substances
Mesolithic resinous adhesives are well known for their role as hafting mastic within composite technologies, yet it is increasingly clear that their usage was more diverse than this. Birch-bark tar has been recovered from Mesolithic contexts as chewed lumps linked to medicinal treatment of toothache and oral diseases, and as a decorative element on ornaments and art objects; and an amorphous resinous substance possibly derived from pine or spruce…
An experimental study of wet-cooking in organic vessels: Implications for Understanding the Evolution of Cooking Technologies
The ability to control and direct fire is a major evolutionary step in the human story. The development of aceramic cooking technologies is less well understood as they rarely survive in the archaeological record. However, inferential evidence such as fire-cracked rocks, earthen pits and heated bones suggest a variety of cooking methods were used prior to the invention of ceramics. Yet there is a paucity of experimental evidence testing the effic…
The application of micro-Raman for the analysis of ochre artefacts from Mesolithic palaeo-lake Flixton
Illuminating palaeolithic art using virtual reality: A new method for integrating dynamic firelight into interpretations of art production and use
Approaches to Palaeolithic art have increasingly shifted beyond the traditional focus on engraved or depicted forms in isolation, to appreciating the sensorial experience of art making as integral to shaping the form of depictions and the meaning imbued within them. This kind of research appreciates an array of factors pertinent to how the art may have been understood or experienced by people during the Palaeolithic, including placement, lighting…
To Block Lift or Not to Block Lift? An Experiment at the Early Mesolithic Site of Star Carr, North-East Yorkshire, UK
As part of the excavations at Star Carr in the summer of 2007, a 'block' sample of peat from the archaeologically rich lake-edge deposits was removed for micro-excavation in the laboratory. The main aim was to compare on-site excavation and excavation in the laboratory. The techniques employed for the block were intended to maximise the chances of recovering fragile organic remains and provide an understanding of the spatial relationships between…
Flint awls at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr: Understanding tool use through integrated methods
The form and macroscopic wear of Mesolithic awls has been used to infer function, which has become an aspect of established typologies. However, verification of form/function relationships are needed to ensure typologies are robust. This paper presents the results of GIS and microwear analysis of 54 flint awls excavated from the Early Mesolithic site of Star Carr, UK, in conjunction with results from experimental research on awl use. Results expa…
Durable Residues: Addressing the use of microwear, a case study from March Hill
Different cultural and research traditions have led to distinctively different approaches to lithics analysis. An integration of different approaches can often give new 'ways of seeing' artefact assemblages and distribution patterns and provide valuable insights into past activities. Here we present the preliminary results of a project integrating detailed analytical techniques, focused on processes of production and consumption and social dynami…
Durable Residues: Addressing the use of microwear, a case study from March Hill
Different cultural and research traditions have led to distinctively different approaches to lithics analysis. An integration of different approaches can often give new 'ways of seeing' artefact assemblages and distribution patterns and provide valuable insights into past activities. Here we present the preliminary results of a project integrating detailed analytical techniques, focused on processes of production and consumption and social dynami…
Beyond the Metropolis: Metropolitan Growth and Regional Transformation in Postwar America
The new suburban scholarship has succeeded in incorporating suburbs into urban historiography, but it has also implicitly reinforced an artificial boundary that obscures far-reaching effects of metropolitan growth. With their singular emphasis on decentralization, such analyses that stop at the political boundaries of the last “exurb” provide incomplete narratives of postwar community development.This article explores recent historiographical tre…
From Homininity to Humanity: Compassion from the Earliest Archaics to Modern Humans
We are increasingly aware of the role of emotions and emotional construction in social relationships. However, despite their significance, there are few constructs or theoretical approaches to the evolution of emotions that can be related to the prehistoric archaeological record. Whilst we frequently discuss how archaic humans might have thought, how they felt might seem to be beyond the realm of academic inquiry. In this paper we aim to open up …
To Block Lift or Not to Block Lift? An Experiment at the Early Mesolithic Site of Star Carr, North-East Yorkshire, UK
As part of the excavations at Star Carr in the summer of 2007, a 'block' sample of peat from the archaeologically rich lake-edge deposits was removed for micro-excavation in the laboratory. The main aim was to compare on-site excavation and excavation in the laboratory. The techniques employed for the block were intended to maximise the chances of recovering fragile organic remains and provide an understanding of the spatial relationships between…
Geochemical indicators of preservation status and site deterioration at Star Carr
A Piece of the Action
This chapter focuses on how Navajo nationalism attempted to alter the spatial dynamics that subordinated Navajo claims to control their land to metropolitan demands for inexpensive power. Metropolitan demand produced the notion that Navajos possessed massive mineral wealth, and this allowed young activists to imagine the Nation as space colonized by the greedy cities of the Southwest. It allowed Navajo leader Peter MacDonald to imagine the format…
Turquoise and Turboprops
This chapter examines how manufacturing passed agriculture as the Phoenix's largest economic sector. By 1960, manufacturing employed thirty thousand people and generated income of $435 million in Phoenix, compared to fewer than one thousand employees and income of $5 million twenty years earlier. It also remade the landscape. In Phoenix's industrial boom, the “clean” factories of companies located operations outside of Phoenix's traditional indus…
The Living River
This chapter addresses how The New York Times challenged the long-held claims of Arizona officials that their state was entitled to a portion of the Colorado River by rights, a claim recently upheld by the Supreme Court. The paper also argued that Arizona's attempt to realize those claims endangered the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon itself. Transforming the flowing energy of water into flowing electricity, the Times suggested, was not in th…
Beyond the Crabgrass Frontier
This introductory chapter provides an overview of postwar metropolitan development. The search for the natural resources required for metropolitan growth, and for spaces to discard the waste produced by metropolitan consumption, led federal, state, and local actors to create new infrastructures. These power lines, aqueducts, and landfills reorganized economies, ecologies, and societies in distant landscapes. Once constructed, they shaped possibil…
The Valley of the Sun
This chapter focuses on the Valley of the Sun. “The Valley of the Sun” was not only an idealized place. It was also a political project, the result of two of the most powerful forces in the postwar American political economy. The first was the ongoing legacy of New Deal policies that sought to fuel the national economy through debt-driven personal consumption. Part of the general postwar economic philosophy historians have labeled “growth liberal…
A Region of Fragments
This chapter looks at the construction of Boulder Dam. Franklin Roosevelt explained the dam as a manifestation of the transformations the New Deal had set in motion. “The largest generators and turbines yet installed in this country, machinery that can continuously supply nearly two million horsepower of electric energy,” Roosevelt explained, would soon “power factory motors, street and household lights and irrigation pumps.” In so doing, the dam…
Integrating Geographies
This chapter discusses how changes in geography remade space in the Southwest, rendering the Colorado Plateau in many ways the center of the region's economic development. With the construction of Mojave Generating Station, and the expansion of Four Corners Power Plant from 230 megawatts to over 1,000 megawatts in the late 1960s, the landscape of the Colorado Plateau—and specifically the landscape of the Navajo and Hopi Nations—became the broad o…
“Good Bye, Big Sky”: Coal and Postwar America
This concluding chapter presents a reading of “Good Bye, Big Sky” and “The Giant Revived,” two articles on coal's rise as the fuel of postwar America and the cost of that transition. “The Giant Revived” explained how American electrical utilities found coal to be an inexpensive alternative to natural gas and nuclear power that could meet the nation's burgeoning demand for electricity. This demand drove a revival of the coal industry. By 1970, dem…
Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest
Modernizing the Navajo
This chapter explores how a new infrastructure of coal mines and power plants on the Navajo Reservation, and of power lines that stretched across the Southwest, changed the landscape of the Navajo Reservation. The political terms in which this infrastructure took place—terms set largely by the belief held by businessmen from Phoenix and elsewhere that the state should facilitate capital location—shaped this infrastructure's meaning and future. Th…
Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest
In 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a metropolis of 1.5 million people and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power plants surrounded the reservation, generating electricity for export to Phoenix, Los Angeles, and oth…
The Cradle of Thought: Growth, Learning, Play and Attachment in Neanderthal Children
Childhood is a core stage in development, essential in the acquisition of social, practical and cultural skills. However, this area receives limited attention in archaeological debate, especially in early prehistory. We here consider N eanderthal childhood, exploring the experience of N eanderthal children using biological, cultural and social evidence. We conclude that N eanderthal childhood experience was subtly different from that of their mod…
A Unique Engraved Shale Pendant from the Site of Star Carr: The oldest Mesolithic art in Britain
In 2015 an engraved shale pendant was found during excavations at the Early Mesolithic site of Star Carr, UK. Engraved motifs on Mesolithic pendants are extremely rare, with the exception of amber pendants from southern Scandinavia. The artwork on the pendant is the earliest known Mesolithic art in Britain; the 'barbed line' motif is comparable to styles on the Continent, particularly in Denmark. When it was first uncovered the lines were barely …
Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland
Journal Article Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland Get access By David Stradling and Richard Stradling. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. xviii, 245 pp. $29.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 1, June 2016, Pages 270–271, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw148 Published: 01 June 2016
The application of micro-Raman for the analysis of ochre artefacts from Mesolithic palaeo-lake Flixton
As Precious as Blood: The Western Slope in Colorado's Water Wars, 1900–1970
The scholarship on the politics of the Colorado River forms an edifice that collectively rivals the river's hydroelectric dams in size and scale. Steven C. Schulte's new book is still able to tell a surprisingly original story of water politics on Colorado's western slope during the twentieth century. Schulte demonstrates that water politics, often portrayed through interstate battles, also created enduring political divisions within Colorado. Th…
Calculated or caring? Neanderthal healthcare in social context
Explanations for patterns of healed trauma in Neanderthals have been a matter of debate for several decades. Despite widespread evidence for recovery from injuries or survival despite impairments, apparent evidence for healthcare is given limited attention. Moreover, interpretations of Neanderthals' approach to injury and suffering sometimes assume a calculated or indifferent attitude to others. Here the authors review evidence for Neanderthal he…
Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism by Robert Lifset
Reviewed by: Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism by Robert Lifset Andrew Needham (bio) Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism. By Robert Lifset. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. Pp. 328. $25.95. On 26 September 1962, Consolidated Edison of New York approached the city of Cornwall, New York with a proposal to build a …
Flint awls at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr: Understanding tool use through integrated methods
The form and macroscopic wear of Mesolithic awls has been used to infer function, which has become an aspect of established typologies. However, verification of form/function relationships are needed to ensure typologies are robust. This paper presents the results of GIS and microwear analysis of 54 flint awls excavated from the Early Mesolithic site of Star Carr, UK, in conjunction with results from experimental research on awl use. Results expa…
Illuminating palaeolithic art using virtual reality: A new method for integrating dynamic firelight into interpretations of art production and use
Approaches to Palaeolithic art have increasingly shifted beyond the traditional focus on engraved or depicted forms in isolation, to appreciating the sensorial experience of art making as integral to shaping the form of depictions and the meaning imbued within them. This kind of research appreciates an array of factors pertinent to how the art may have been understood or experienced by people during the Palaeolithic, including placement, lighting…
Archaeology (25 works) · Geography (22 works) · American Environmental and Regional History (14 works) · Political science (12 works) · History (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Economy (7 works)