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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeological theory
This innovative book takes the concept of translation beyond its traditional boundaries, adding to the growing body of literature which challenges the idea of translation as a primarily linguistic transfer. To gain a fresh perspective on the work of translation in the complex processes of meaning-making across physical, social and cultural domains (conceptualized as translationality), Piotr Blumczynski revisits one of the earliest and most fundamental senses of translation: corporeal transfer. His study of translated religious officials and translated relics reframes our understanding of translation as a process creating a sense of connection with another time, place, object or person. He argues that a promise of translationality animates a broad spectrum of cultural, artistic and commercial endeavours: it is invoked, for example, in museum exhibitions, art galleries, celebrity endorsements, and the manufacturing of musical instruments. Translationality offers a way to reimagine the dynamic entanglements of matter and meaning, space and time, past and present. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies as well as related disciplines such as the history of religion, anthropology of art, and material culture.
Material Culture in Transit: Theory and Practice constellates curators and scholars actively working with material culture within academic and museal institutions through theory and practice. The rich collection of essays critically addresses the multivalent ways in which mobility reshapes the characteristics of artefacts, specifically under prevailing issues of representation and colonial liabilities. The volume attests to material culture as central to understanding the repercussions of problematic histories and proposes novel ways to address them. It offers valuable reading for scholars of anthropology, museum studies, history and others with an interest in material culture.
This book is about the conflict which resolved the Greek–Turkish War of 1919–1922: the Great Offensive. On 26 August 1922, the army of the GNA executed the Great Offensive against the Greek defence line extending from the Bay of Gemlik to the Meander River. The Turkish Forces split the Greek Army into two large groups, annihilated one of the groups in the field at the Battle of Dumlupınar on 30 August and pursued the remaining forces of the Greek Army towards the Aegean and Marmara coasts until 18 September. Within these 24 days, the face of Western Anatolia changed unalterably: numerous towns, villages and cities of Western Anatolia were reduced to ashes. This conflict was a turning point in the histories of Turkey and Greece, as it played a significant role in shaping the present-day demographic and geopolitical landscapes of both nations. It resulted in a population exchange in 1923 that dramatically altered the lives of Muslims in Greece and Greek Orthodox people in Turkey and paved the way to the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. Despite the outcome of this war and the existence of a rich literature on its military and political history, the landscapes, memoryscapes and material culture have not been systematically investigated. This book bridges that gap via an archaeological, historical and oral-historical study of the Great Offensive and its aftermath. With its wide chronological perspective, this book is not a pure analysis of a historical war, it is instead a journey into the foundation myth of the Turkish Republic and the ideological foundations of the Turkish state.
Social Ghosts and the Dead of World History looks at the global phenomena of the dead in world history, examining the phantasms and spirits of classical social science and philosophy. From Hegel’s ‘World-Spirit’ to Max Weber’s ‘Verstehen’ and Marx’s phantasms, there is a recurring obsession with the ‘spirits’ of modernity. This book explores the relationships and interactions between those spirits and materiality in five broad areas: the nature of the dead in modernity, shape-shifting and mobile souls, the spirit in accounts of prehistory and archaeology, the phenomenology of spirits and the relation to statues and stone, and the nature of spirit as it is manifested in wooden artefacts and folklore. It offers a counter-modernity to that of classical social science and philosophy and new ways of thinking about our crises and catastrophes in social theory and the world and the worlds beyond this world. Building on the author’s previous work on the sociology of haunted houses and landscapes, it examines the body and the individual as the locus of haunting. The book will appeal to academics in philosophy, history, social theory, anthropology and cultural studies in its omni-disciplinarity and in its import for rethinking the histories of social thought.
Theoretical Approaches in Bioarchaeology emphasizes how several different theoretical perspectives can be used to reconstruct the biocultural experiences of humans in the past. Over the past few decades, bioarchaeology has been transformed through methodological revisions, technological advances, and the inclusion of external theoretical frameworks from the social and natural sciences. These interdisciplinary perspectives became the backbone of bioarchaeology and strengthened the discipline's ability to address questions about past biological and social dynamics. Consequently, how, why, and when to apply external theory to studies of past populations are central and timely questions tied to future developments of the discipline. This book facilitates ongoing dialogues about theoretical applications within the field and interdisciplinary connections between bioarchaeology, biological anthropology, and other disciplines. Each chapter highlights how a theoretical framework originating from a social or natural science connects to past and future bioarchaeological research. For scholars and archaeologists interested in the theoretical applications of bioarchaeology, this book will be an excellent resource.
Both the work and the life of Leo S. Klejn, Russia's foremost archaeological theorist, remain generally unrecognized by Western scholars. Until now. In this biography and summary of his work, Stephen Leach outlines Klejn's wide-ranging theoretical contributions on the place and nature of archaeology. The book details-Klejn's diverse work on ethnogenesis, migration, Homeric studies, pagan Slavic religion, homosexuality, and the history of archaeology;-his life challenges as a Russian Jewish scholar, jailed for homosexuality by the KGB and for his challenges to Marxist dogma;-his key contributions to theoretical archaeology and, in particular, Klejn's comparisons between archaeologists and forensic scientists.
At the core of this book is a success story of an Eastern European woman who survived both Soviet and Nazi occupations of her homeland, lived as a displaced person in postwar Germany, and built her career and scholarly authority within the androcentric American academia. At the same time, it is also a story of a controversy, which followed Gimbutas' theory of Old Europe - a prehistoric civilization, characterized by peacefulness, egalitarianism, women's leadership, and the worship of the Great Goddess. First introduced in 1974, this theory inspired women's movements worldwide, but was harshly criticized by other archaeologists. This book examines the various intellectual contexts (feminist, nationalist, theoretical) in which Gimbutas' ideas were formed, received, and interpreted, as well as appropriated for different political goals. This timely study will appeal to scholars and students in the following fields: history of archaeology, prehistoric archaeology, gender studies, feminist studies, women's history, Baltic studies, and religion and spirituality.
This book Explores Indo-European fire rituals and sacrifices throughout history and fire in its fundamental role in rites and religious practices. Analyzes fire rituals as the unifying structure in time and space in Indo-European cultures from the Bronze Age onwards. Asks the question how and why was fire the ultimate power in culture and cosmology? Has a broad interdisciplinary audience including archaeology, ethnography, folklore, religious and Indo-European studies.
This book looks at the ways in which archaeological methods have been used in debates concerning the early medieval and medieval periods in South Asia. Despite the incorporation and use of archaeological data to corroborate historical narratives, the theories and methods of archaeology are largely ignored in and excluded from the dominating, institutionalized, and hegemonic disciplinary discourses. The volume offers contesting insights, polemical narratives, and new data from archaeological contexts to initiate a debate on many foundational premises of archaeological and historical narratives. It focuses on the much-neglected region of the Eastern Ganga-Brahmaputra Basin as a spatial frame to do this and studies themes such as spatial and temporal scales of concepts and methods, multi-scaler factors and processes of continuity and changes, the settlement archaeology of the alluvial landscape, changing patterns of agrarian transformation, and material cultures, including coins, inscriptions, pottery, and sculptures, in their contexts in sub-regional, regional, and supra-regional intersections. Dedicated to historian Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, this volume presents a crucial and unprecedented intervention in the study of the early medieval and the medieval periods. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of archaeology, ancient history, medieval history, water history, earth sciences, palaeoecology, historical ecology, epigraphy, art history, material culture studies, Indian history, and South Asian studies in general.
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.
Rather than seeing theory as something worked from the outside in, this book explores theory from the inside out, which means it focuses on specific archaeological practices rather than specific theories. It starts from the kinds of situations that students find themselves in and learn about in other archaeology courses, avoiding the gap between practice and theory from the very beginning. It shows students the theoretical implications of almost everything they engage in as archaeologists, from fieldwork, recording, writing-up and making and assessing an argument, to exploring the very nature of archaeology and justifying its relevance. Essentially, it adopts a structure which attempts to pre-empt one of the most common complaints of student's taking theory courses: how is this applicable? Aimed primarily at undergraduates, this book is the ideal way to engage students with archaeological theory.
An ecological approach holds that life exists in the interactions of people with the environment surrounding them. This theoretical grounding therefore supports research at a local scale and validates the analysis of individual effort. The case studies explore individual perception, action and expression in a startlingly diverse set of objects and features from the past: natural and constructed monuments, ancient and recent rock paintings, petroglyphs, fresco paintings and impressionist landscape art. While traditional cultural approaches render ordinary people as proxies, these individuals, as members of families and communities, do the actual work of society, using their senses, bodies and minds. The analysis here therefore turns away from traditional speculations about the meanings of cultural things to look for evidence of the personal choices of travelers, inhabitants, pilgrims, and artists as they acted, and attempt to gain insights from these decisions about the past as lived. The book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and advanced students in culture and society who may be restless in theatres of discourse dominated by self-affirming narratives, who wish to consider the fields of possibility in an environmental perspective that integrates culture with nature and humans with other beings in a singular, physical world.
There are currently no handbooks on heritage and sustainability. The book fills this gap by providing an overview of the topic with insights from all over the world. It fills a gap in current sustainable heritage literature by offering a strong focus on heritage science. The book covers cutting edge topics such as digital heritage, indigenous heritage, climate change and environmental issues, resilience, and contested heritage. The editors are experts in their field of research and members of a world renowned Institute at UCL. The range of contributors reflects a number of different current strands of heritage theory and practice.
The Rosewood Massacre investigates the 1923 massacre that devastated the predominantly African American community of Rosewood, Florida. The town was burned to the ground by neighboring whites, and its citizens fled for their lives. None of the perpetrators were convicted. Very little documentation of the event and the ensuing court hearings survives today. Edward Gonzalez-Tennant uses archaeology to uncover important elements of the forgotten history of Rosewood. He draws on cutting-edge GIS mapping, geospatial technology, census data, artifacts from excavations at the site, and archaeological theory to explore the local circumstances and broader sociopolitical power structures that led to the massacre. He shows how the event was a microcosm of the oppression and terror suffered by people of African heritage in the United States, and he connects these historic forms of racial violence to present-day social and racial inequality.
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.
An ecological approach holds that life exists in the interactions of people with the environment surrounding them. This theoretical grounding therefore supports research at a local scale and validates the analysis of individual effort. The case studies explore individual perception, action and expression in a startlingly diverse set of objects and features from the past: natural and constructed monuments, ancient and recent rock paintings, petroglyphs, fresco paintings and impressionist landscape art. While traditional cultural approaches render ordinary people as proxies, these individuals, as members of families and communities, do the actual work of society, using their senses, bodies and minds. The analysis here therefore turns away from traditional speculations about the meanings of cultural things to look for evidence of the personal choices of travelers, inhabitants, pilgrims, and artists as they acted, and attempt to gain insights from these decisions about the past as lived. The book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and advanced students in culture and society who may be restless in theatres of discourse dominated by self-affirming narratives, who wish to consider the fields of possibility in an environmental perspective that integrates culture with nature and humans with other beings in a singular, physical world.
The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology is a multi-authored compendium of articles on specific topics of interest to today's historical archaeologists, offering perspectives on the current state of research and collectively outlining future directions for the field. The broad range of topics covered in this volume allows for specificity within individual chapters, while building to a cumulative overview of the field of historical archaeology as it stands, and where it could go next. Archaeological research is discussed in the context of current sociological concerns, different approaches and techniques are assessed, and potential advances are posited. This is a comprehensive treatment of the sub-discipline, engaging key contemporary debates, and providing a series of specially-commissioned geographical overviews to complement the more theoretical explorations. This book is designed to offer a starting point for students who may wish to pursue particular topics in more depth, as well as for non-archaeologists who have an interest in historical archaeology. Archaeologists, historians, preservationists, and all scholars interested in the role historical archaeology plays in illuminating daily life during the past five centuries will find this volume engaging and enlightening.
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.
Working with and for Ancestors examines collaborative partnerships that have developed around the study and care of Indigenous ancestral human remains. In the interest of reconciliation, museums and research institutions around the world have begun to actively seek input and direction from Indigenous descendants in establishing collections care and research policies. However, true collaboration is difficult, time-consuming, and sometimes awkward. By presenting examples of projects involving ancestral remains that are successfully engaged in collaboration, the book provides encouragement for scientists and descendant communities alike to have open and respectful discussions around the research and care of ancestral human remains. Key themes for discussion include new approaches to the care for ancestors; the development of culturally sensitive museum policies; the emergence of mutually beneficial research partnerships; and emerging issues such as those of intellectual property, digital data, and alternatives to destructive analyses. Critical discussions by leading scholars also identify the remaining challenges in the repatriation process and offer a means to continue moving forward. This volume will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience interested in collaborative research and management strategies that are aimed at developing mutually beneficial relationships between researchers and descendant communities. This includes students and researchers in archaeology, anthropology, museums studies, and Indigenous communities.
The book, uniquely, provides archaeologists and heritage professionals with an introduction to the ways in which mental health researchers view and measure wellbeing, helping archaeologists and other heritage professionals to move beyond the anecdotal when evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of such initiatives. Importantly, this book also serves to highlight to mental health researchers the many ways in which archaeology and heritage can be, and are being, harnessed to support non-medical therapeutic interventions to improve wellbeing. Authentic engagement with the historic environment can also provide powerful tools for community health and wellbeing, and this book offers examples of the diverse communities that have benefited from its capacity to promote wellbeing and wellness. Archaeology, Heritage, and Wellbeing is for students and researchers of archaeology and psychology interested in wellbeing, as well as researchers and professionals involved in health and social care, social prescribing, mental health and wellbeing, leisure, tourism, and heritage management.
Revealing the hidden labour of keeping things as they are, the book highlights the ethical commitments and dilemmas involved in trying to care well. In doing so, it reveals how conservation objects are made literally to matter. Taking debates in the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies forward in important new directions, the book engages with themes of broader interest within the arts, humanities and social sciences, shedding new light on time, authenticity, modernity, materiality, expert knowledge and the politics of care.
An Introduction to Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology is the first concise introduction that lays out the epistemological foundations of evolutionary cognitive archaeology in a way that is accessible to students. The volume is divided into three sections. The first section situates cognitive archaeology in the pantheon of archaeological approaches and distinguishes between ideational cognitive archaeology and evolutionary cognitive archaeology. This is followed by a close look at the nature of cognitive archaeological inferences and concludes with brief summaries of the major methods of evolutionary cognitive archaeology. The second section of the book introduces the reader to a variety of cognitive phenomena that are accessible using the methods of cognitive archaeology: memory, technical cognition, spatial cognition, social cognition, art and aesthetics, and symbolism and language. The third section presents a brief outline of hominin cognitive evolution from the perspective of evolutionary cognitive archaeology. The authors divide the archaeological record into three major phases: The Bipedal Apes-3.3 million-1.7 million years ago; The Axe Age-1.7 million-300,000 years ago; and The Emergence of Modern Thinking-300,000-12,000 years ago. An Introduction to Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology is an essential text for undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars across the behavioral and social sciences interested in learning about cognitive archaeology, including psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, and archaeologists.
Psychology and Cognitive Archaeology demonstrates the potential of using cognitive archaeology framing to explore key issues in contemporary psychology and other behavioral sciences. This edited volume features psychologists exploring archaeological data concerning specific themes such as: the use of tools, our child-rearing practices, our expressions of gender and sexuality, our sleep patterns, the nature of warfare, cultural practices, and the origins of religion. Other chapters touch on cognitive archaeological methods, the history of evolutionary approaches in psychology, and relevant philosophical considerations to further illustrate the interdisciplinary potential between archaeology and psychology. As a complementary counterpoint, the book also includes an archaeologist's perspective on these same topical matters, as well as robust introductory and concluding thoughts by the editors. This book will be an illuminating read for students and scholars of psychology (particularly theoretical, social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology), as well as philosophy, archaeology, and anthropology.
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.
Archaeological interpretation is an imaginative act. Stratigraphy and artefacts do not tell us what the past was like; that is the task of the archaeologist. The diverse group of contributors to this volume address the relationship between archaeology and imagination through the medium of historical fiction and fictive techniques, both as consumers and as producers. The fictionalisation of archaeological research is often used to disseminate the results of scholarly or commercial archaeology projects for wider public outreach. Here, instead, the authors focus on the question of what benefits fiction and fictive techniques, as inspiration and method, can bring to the practice of archaeology itself. The contributors, a mix of archaeologists, novelists and other artists, advance a variety of theoretical arguments and examples to advance the case for the value of a reflexive engagement between archaeology and fiction. Themes include the similarities and differences in the motives and methods of archaeologists and novelists, translation, empathy, and the need to humanise the past and diversify archaeological narratives. The authors are sensitive to the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding the influence of fiction on researchers and the incorporation of fictive techniques in their work. Sometimes dismissed as distracting just-so stories, or even as dangerously relativistic narratives, the use of fictive techniques has a long history in archaeological research and examples from the scholarly literature on many varied periods and regions are considered. The volume sets out to bring together examples of these disparate applications and to focus attention on the need for explicit recognition of the problems and possibilities of such approaches, and on the value of further research about them. |
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