Entanglement theory posits that the interrelationship of humans and objects is a delimiting characteristic of human history and culture. This edited volume of original studies by leading archaeological theorists applies this concept to a broad range of topics, including archaeological science, heritage, and theory itself. In the theoretical explications and ten case studies, the editors and contributing authors: * build on the intersections between science, humanities and ecology to provide a more fine-grained, multi-scalar treatment emanating from the long-term perspective that characterizes archaeological research; * bring to light the subtle and unacknowledged paths that configure historical circumstances and bind human intentionality; * examine the constructions of personhood, the rigidity of path dependencies, the unpredictable connections between humans and objects and the intricate paths of past events in varied geographic and historical contexts that channel future actions. This broad focus is inclusive of early complex developments in Asia and Europe, imperial and state strategies in the Andes and Mesoamerica, continuities of postcolonialism in North America, and the unforeseen and complex consequences that derive from archaeological practices. This volume will appeal to archaeologists and their advanced students.

Old Lands takes readers on an epic journey through the legion spaces and times of the Eastern Peloponnese, trailing in the footsteps of a Roman periegete, an Ottoman traveler, antiquarians, and anonymous agrarians. Following waters in search of rest through the lens of Lucretian poetics, Christopher Witmore reconstitutes an untimely mode of ambulatory writing, chorography, mindful of the challenges we all face in these precarious times. Turning on pressing concerns that arise out of object-oriented encounters, Old Lands ponders the disappearance of an agrarian world rooted in the Neolithic, the transition to urban-styles of living, and changes in communication, movement, and metabolism, while opening fresh perspectives on long-term inhabitation, changing mobilities, and appropriation through pollution. Carefully composed with those objects encountered along its varied paths, this book offers an original and wonderous account of a region in twenty-seven segments, and fulfills a longstanding ambition within archaeology to generate a polychronic narrative that stands as a complement and alternative to diachronic history. Old Lands will be of interest to historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and scholars of the Eastern Peloponnese. Those interested in the long-term changes in society, technology, and culture in this region will find this book captivating.

The impacts of climate change on human societies, and the roles those societies themselves play in altering their environments, appear in headlines more and more as concern over modern global climate change intensifies. Increasingly, archaeologists and paleoenvironmental scientists are looking to evidence from the human past to shed light on the processes which link environmental and cultural change. Establishing clear contemporaneity and correlation, and then moving beyond correlation to causation, remains as much a theoretical task as a methodological one. This book addresses this challenge by exploring new approaches to human-environment dynamics and confronting the key task of constructing arguments that can link the two in concrete and detailed ways. The contributors include researchers working in a wide variety of regions and time periods, including Mesoamerica, Mongolia, East Africa, the Amazon Basin, and the Island Pacific, among others. Using methodological vignettes from their own research, the contributors explore diverse approaches to human-environment dynamics, illustrating the manifold nature of the subject and suggesting a wide variety of strategies for approaching it. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in Archaeology, Paleoenvironmental Science, Ecology, and Geology.

Incorporating Nonbinary Gender into Inuit Archaeology: Oral Testimony and Material Inroads explores gender diversity in precontact Inuit history. By combining evidence from interviews with re-examinations of previously excavated archaeological collections, the book challenges binary narratives and creates an allowance for diverse narratives around gender to emerge. This work approaches a wide range of ethnographic and archaeological sources with a critical eye, opening up a dialogue between queer Indigenous studies; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Two Spirit, Plus (LGBTQ2S+) Inuit; and archaeology in order to question normative colonial narratives about Indigenous pasts while providing concrete examples of how researchers can begin to let go of rigid assumptions. In this way, the reader is encouraged to explore novel perspectives and think beyond boxes to understand gender complexity in precontact Inuit culture. This book has been written for a wide academic audience, particularly those interested in queer archaeologies, archaeologies of gender, decolonial archaeologies, and indigenous archaeologies and oral history.

Romantic Anti-capitalism and Nature examines the deep connections between the romantic rebellion against modernity and ecological concern with modern threats to nature. The chapters deal with expressions of romantic culture from a wide variety of different areas: travel writing, painting, utopian vision, cultural studies, political philosophy, and activist socio-political writing. The authors discuss a highly diverse group of figures - William Bartram, Thomas Cole, William Morris, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, and Naomi Klein - from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. They are rooted individually in English, American, and German cultures, but share a common perspective: the romantic protest against modern bourgeois civilisation and its destruction of the natural environment. Although a rich ecocritical literature has developed since the 1990s, particularly in the United States and Britain, that addresses many aspects of ecology and its intersection with romanticism, they almost exclusively focus on literature, and define romanticism as a limited literary period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This study is one of the first to suggest a much broader view of the romantic relation to ecological discourse and representation, covering a range of cultural creations and viewing romanticism as a cultural critique, or protest against capitalist-industrialist modernity in the name of past, pre-modern, or pre-capitalist values. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecology, romanticism, and the history of capitalism.

Originally published in 1991, The New Evolutionary Paradigm provides an innovative and cross disciplinary look at evolution. While Darwin's theory of evolution was originally restricted to the life sciences, in recent years the same principles have been applied successfully to historical, social and natural sciences. The papers included in The New Evolutionary Paradigm analyse the facts, observations, and accumulated data from the significance of a general evolution theory cannot be overemphasised; a new understanding of the cosmos and man's relationship to it could lead to the systemization of the irreversible change that takes place in society and nature. This book will appeal to scientists, sociologists and those interested in transdisciplinary evolution theories.

This book traces the archaeological trajectory of the expansion of Buddhism and its regional variations in South Asia. Focusing on the multireligious context of the subcontinent in the first millennium BCE, the volume breaks from conventional studies that pose Buddhism as a counter to the Vedic tradition to understanding the religion more integrally in terms of dhamma (teachings of the Buddha), dana (practice of cultivating generosity) and the engagement with the written word. The work underlines that relic and image worship were important features in the spread of Buddhism in the region and were instrumental in bringing the monastics and the laity together. Further, the author examines the significance of the histories of monastic complexes (viharas, stupas, caityas) and also religious travel and pilgrimage that provided connections across the subcontinent and the seas. An interdisciplinary study, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in South Asian studies, religion, especially Buddhist studies, history and archaeology.

Atlantic Europe is the zone par excellence of megalithic monuments, which encompass a wide range of earthen and stone constructions from inpressive stone circles to modest chambered tombs. A single basic concept lies behind this volume - that the intrinsic qualities encountered within the diverse landscapes pf Atlantic Europe both informed the settings chosen for the monuments and played a role in determining their form and visual appearance. Monuments and Landscape in Atlantic Europe goes significantly beyond the limits of existing debate by inviting archaeologists from different countries within the Atlantic zone (including Britain, France, Ireland, Spain and Sweden) to examine the relationship between landscape features and prehistoric monuments in their specialist regions. By placing the issue within a broader regional and intellectual context, the authors illustrate the diversity of current archaeological ideas and approaches converging around this central theme. The regions represented include Britain, France, Ireland, Spain and Sweden.

How do children cope when their world is transformed by war? This book draws on memory narratives to construct an historical anthropology of childhood in Second World Britain, focusing on objects and spaces such as gas masks, air raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In their struggles to cope with the fears and upheavals of wartime, with families divided and familiar landscapes lost or transformed, children reimagined and reshaped these material traces of conflict into toys, treasures and playgrounds. This study of the material worlds of wartime childhood offers a unique viewpoint into an extraordinary period in history with powerful resonances across global conflicts into the present day.

Focusing on the geographies between the Mekong and the Indus, this book brings objects to the centre of enquiry in the understanding of modern Asian frontiers. It explores how a range of objects have historically been significant bearers and agents of frontier making. For instance, how are objects connected to aspects of state making, social change, everyday life, diplomacy, political and ecological worlds, capital, forms of violence, resistances, circulations, and aesthetic expressions? This book seeks to interrogate and understand the dynamism of frontiers from the vantage point of objects such as salt, rubber, tea, guns, silk scarves, horses, and opium. It attempts to explore objects as sites of encounter, mediation, or dislocation between the social and the spatial. The book not only locates objects in the specificities of frontier spaces, but it also looks at how they are produced, circulated, and come to be intricately linked to a wide range of people, institutions, networks, and geographies. In the process, it explores how objects traverse and come to inhabit multiple historical, cultural, and geographical scales. This book will be of interest to researchers and academics working in areas of history, social and cultural anthropology, Asian studies, frontiers and borderland studies, cultural studies, political and economic studies, and museum studies.

Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing - industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be "matter out of place," challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the "civilizing process." Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, the study adds a new perspective to scholarship on both the Victorian sanitation movement and Victorian fiction. The chapters focus on Victorian commodity culture as a backdrop to narratives about refuse and rubbish; on the impact of waste and ordure on life stories; on the production and circulation of affective responses to filth in realist novels and slum travelogues; and on the function of dirt for both colonial discourse and its deconstruction in postcolonial writing. They address questions as to how texts about dirt create the effect of materiality, how dirt constructs or deconstructs meaning, and how the project of writing dirt attempts to contain its excessive materiality. Schulting discusses representations of dirt in a variety of texts by Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, James Greenwood, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Henry Mayhew, George Moore, Arthur Morrison, and others. In addition, she offers a sustained analysis of the impact of dirt on writing strategies and genre conventions, and pays particular attention to those moments when dirt is recycled and becomes the source of literary creation.

Near Eastern archaeology is generally represented as a succession of empires with little attention paid to the individuals, labelled as terrorists at the time, that brought them down. Their stories, when viewed against the backdrop of current violent extremism in the Middle East, can provide a unique long-term perspective. Extremism, Ancient and Modern brings long-forgotten pasts to bear on the narratives of radical groups today, recognizing the historical bases and specific cultural contexts for their highly charged ideologies. The author, with expertise in Middle Eastern archaeology and counter-terrorism work, provides a unique viewpoint on a relatively under-researched subject. This timely volume will interest a wide readership, from undergraduate and graduate students of archaeology, history and politics, to a general audience with an interest in the deep historical narratives of extremism and their impact on today's political climate.

Through meticulously researched case studies, this book explores the materiality of terracotta sculpture in early modern Europe. Chapters present a broad geographical perspective showcasing examples of modelling, firing, painting, and gilding of clay in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. The volume considers known artworks by celebrated artists, such as Luca della Robbia, Andrea del Verrocchio, Filipe Hodart, or Hans Reichle, in parallel with several lesser-studied terracotta sculptures and tin-glazed earthenware made by anonymous artisans. This book challenges arbitrary distinctions into the fine art and the applied arts, that obscured the image of artistic production in the early modern world. The centrality of clay in the creative processes of artists working with two- and three-dimensional artefacts comes to the fore. The role of terracotta figures in religious practices, as well as processes of material substitutions or mimesis, confirm the medium’s significance for European visual and material culture in general. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, and material culture.

New approaches to both cultural landscapes and historic urban landscapes increasingly recognize the need to guide future change, rather than simply protecting the fabric of the past. Challenging traditional notions of historic preservation, Conserving Cultural Landscapes takes a dynamic multifaceted approach to conservation. It builds on the premise that a successful approach to urban and cultural landscape conservation recognizes cultural as well as natural values, sustains traditional connections to place, and engages people in stewardship where they live and work. It brings together academics within the humanities and humanistic social sciences, conservation and preservation professionals, practitioners, and stakeholders to rethink the meaning and practice of cultural heritage conservation, encourage international cooperation, and stimulate collaborative research and scholarship.

Every large nation in the world was directly or indirectly affected by the impact of war during the course of the twentieth century, and while the historical narratives of war of these nations are well known, far less is understood about how small islands coped. These islands - often not nations in their own right but small outposts of other kingdoms, countries, and nations - have been relegated to mere footnotes in history and heritage studies as interesting case studies or unimportant curiosities. Yet for many of these small islands, war had an enduring impact on their history, memory, intangible heritage and future cultural practices, leaving a legacy that demanded some form of local response. This is the first comprehensive volume dedicated to what the memories, legacies and heritage of war in small islands can teach those who live outside them, through closely related historical and contemporary case studies covering 20th and 21st century conflict across the globe. The volume investigates a number of important questions: Why and how is war memory so enduring in small islands? Do factors such as population size, island size, isolation or geography have any impact? Do close ties of kinship and group identity enable collective memories to shape identity and its resulting war-related heritage? This book contributes to heritage and memory studies and to conflict and historical archaeology by providing a globally wide-ranging comparative assessment of small islands and their experiences of war. Heritage of War in Small Island Territories is of relevance to students, researchers, heritage and tourism professionals, local governments, and NGOs.

This volume adopts a practice-based approach to examine the different ways in which classification is communicated and negotiated in different environments within archaeology. The book looks specifically at the archaeological classification of ceramics as a lens through which to examine the discursive and social practices inherent in the classification and categorization process, with perspectives from such areas as corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology forming the foundation of the book's theoretical framework. The volume then looks at the process of classification in practice in a variety of settings, including a university course on ceramics classification, an archaeological field school, an intensive petrography course, and archaeometry laboratory at a nuclear research reactor, and highlights participant observation and audiovisual data taken from fieldwork practice completed in these environments. This volume offers a valuable contribution to the growing literature on language and material culture, making this a key resource for students and scholars in sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistics, archaeology, discourse analysis, and anthropology.

Recent efforts to engage more explicitly with the interpretation of emotions in archaeology have sought new approaches and terminology to encourage archaeologists to take emotions seriously. This is part of a growing awareness of the importance of senses-what we see, smell, hear, and feel-in the constitution and reconstitution of past social and cultural lives. Yet research on emotion in archaeology remains limited, despite the fact that such states underpin many studies of socio-cultural transformation. The Archaeology of Anxiety draws together papers that examine the local complexities of anxiety as well as the variable stimuli-class or factional struggle, warfare, community construction and maintenance, personal turmoil, and responsibilities to (and relationships with) the dead-that may generate emotional responses of fear, anxiousness, worry, and concern. The goal of this timely volume is to present fresh research that addresses the material dimension of rites and performances related to the mitigation and negotiation of anxiety as well as the role of material culture and landscapes in constituting and even creating periods or episodes of anxiety.

Sources are the raw material of History, but whereas the written word has traditionally been seen as the principal source, historians now recognize the value of sources beyond text. In this new edition of History and Material Culture, contributors consider a range of objects - from an eighteenth-century bed curtain to a twenty-first-century shopping trolley - which can help historians develop new interpretations and new knowledge about the past. Containing two new chapters on healing objects in East Africa and the shopping trolley in the social world, this book examines a variety of material sources from around the globe and across centuries to assess how such sources can be used to study the distant and the recent past. In a revised introduction, Karen Harvey discusses some of the principal issues raised when historians use material culture, particularly in the context of 'the material turn', and suggests some initial steps for those unfamiliar with these kinds of sources. While the sources are discussed from interdisciplinary perspectives, the emphasis of the book is on what historians stand to gain from using material culture, as well as what historians have to offer the broader study of material culture. Clearly written and accessible, this book is the ideal introduction to the opportunities and challenges of researching material culture, and is essential reading for all students of historical theory and method.

The first cultural history of early modern cryptography, this collection brings together scholars in history, literature, music, the arts, mathematics, and computer science who study ciphering and deciphering from new materialist, media studies, cognitive studies, disability studies, and other theoretical perspectives. Essays analyze the material forms of ciphering as windows into the cultures of orality, manuscript, print, and publishing, revealing that early modern ciphering, and the complex history that preceded it in the medieval period, not only influenced political and military history but also played a central role in the emergence of the capitalist media state in the West, in religious reformation, and in the scientific revolution. Ciphered communication, whether in etched stone and bone, in musical notae, runic symbols, polyalphabetic substitution, algebraic equations, graphic typographies, or literary metaphors, took place in contested social spaces and offered a means of expression during times of political, economic, and personal upheaval. Ciphering shaped the early history of linguistics as a discipline, and it bridged theological and scientific rhetoric before and during the Reformation. Ciphering was an occult art, a mathematic language, and an aesthetic that influenced music, sculpture, painting, drama, poetry, and the early novel. This collection addresses gaps in cryptographic history, but more significantly, through cultural analyses of the rhetorical situations of ciphering and actual solved and unsolved medieval and early modern ciphers, it traces the influences of cryptographic writing and reading on literacy broadly defined as well as the cultures that generate, resist, and require that literacy. This volume offers a significant contribution to the history of the book, highlighting the broader cultural significance of textual materialities.

Drawing on love studies and research in material cultures, this book seeks to re-examine love through materiality studies, especially their recent incarnations, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy, to spark a debate on the relationship between love, objects and forms of materializing affection. It focuses on love as a material form and traces connections between feelings and materiality, especially in relation to the changing notion of the material as marked by digital culture, as well as the developments in understanding the nature of non-human affect. It provides insight into how materiality, in its broadest sense, impacts the understanding of the meanings and practices of love today and reversely, how love contributes to the production and transformation of the material world.

Sentient Conceptualisations is about how scientists studying the past understand time in relation to space. Simonetti argues that the feelings for depths and surfaces, arising from the bodily movements and gestures of scientific practice, strongly influence conceptualisations of space and time. With an anthropological eye, Simonetti explores the ways archaeologists and those from related disciplines develop expert knowledge in varied environments. The book draws on ethnographic work carried out with Chilean and Scottish archaeologists, working both on land and underwater, to analyse in depth the visual language of science and what it reveals about the relation between thinking and feeling.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial reviews the current state of mortuary archaeology and its practice, highlighting its often contentious place in the modern socio-politics of archaeology. It contains forty-four chapters which focus on the history of the discipline and its current scientific techniques and methods. Written by leading, international scholars in the field, it derives its examples and case studies from a wide range of time periods, such as the middle palaeolithic to the twentieth century, and geographical areas which include Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. Combining up-to-date knowledge of relevant archaeological research with critical assessments of the theme and an evaluation of future research trajectories, it draws attention to the social, symbolic, and theoretical aspects of interpreting mortuary archaeology. The volume is well-illustrated with maps, plans, photographs, and illustrations and is ideally suited for students and researchers.

The importance of cultural contacts in the East Mediterranean has long been recognized and is the focus of ongoing international research. Fieldwork in the Aegean, Egypt, Cyprus, and the Levant continues to add to our understanding of the nature of this contact and its social and economic significance, particularly to the cultures of the Aegean. Despite sophisticated discussion of the archaeological evidence, in particular on the part of Aegean and Mediterranean archaeologists, there has been little systematic attempt to incorporate anthropological perspectives on materiality and exchange into archaeological narratives of this material. This book addresses that gap and integrates anthropological discourse on contact, examining exchange systems, the gift, notions of geographical distance and power, colonization, and hybridization. Furthermore, it develops a social narrative of culture contact in the Mediterranean context, illustrating the reasons communities chose to engage in international exchange, and how this impacted the construction of identities throughout the region. While traditional archaeologies in the East Mediterranean have tended to be reductive in their approach to material culture and how it was produced, used, and exchanged, this book reviews current research on material culture, focusing on issues such as the biography of objects, inalienable possessions, and hybridization - exploring how these issues can further illuminate the material world of the communities of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

• Combines material culture, environmental history and history of science for the first time to look at living things rather than non-living and human-made things/objects enabling students and museum professionals alike to see the importance of including living things within the history of material culture and the early modern world to understand the full scope. • Provides a deeper understand of global exchange and the history of commodities/collecting for early modern students and museum professionals to understand the development of trade in the early modern period and the creation of a system of trade based on moving things from their geography of origin to another area that valued them more highly. • Enables students and scientist to see the theoretical and empirical interventions with the living objects which reveal connected histories that link Europe to other regions of the globe, by way of naturalists, natural philosophers, collectors, merchants, apothecaries, physicians, agriculturalists, and professional scientists, to inform their own studies and research.

Material Worlds examines consumption from an archaeological perspective, broadly exploring the intersection of social relations and objects through the processes of production, distribution, use, reuse, and discard. Interrogating individual objects as well as considering the contexts in which acts of consumption take place, a range of case studies present the intertwined issues of power, inequality, identity, and community as mediated through choice, access, and use of the diversity of mass-produced goods. Key themes of this innovative volume include the relationship between colonial, political and economic structures and the practices of consumption, the use of consumer goods in the construction and negotiation of identity, and the dialectic between strategies of consumption and individual or community choices. Situating studies of consumerism within the field of historical archaeology, this exciting collection reflects on the interrelationship between the material and ideological aspects of culture. With a focus on North America from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries, Material Worlds is an important examination of consumption which will appeal to scholars with interests in colonialism, gender and race, as well as those engaged with the material culture of the emergent modern world.