![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region
‘Beautifully written, sumptuously illustrated, constantly fascinating‘ The Times On 26 November 1922 Howard Carter first peered into the newly opened tomb of an ancient Egyptian boy-king. When asked if he could see anything, he replied: ‘Yes, yes, wonderful things.’ In Tutankhamun’s Trumpet, acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes a unique approach to that tomb and its contents. Instead of concentrating on the oft-told story of the discovery, or speculating on the brief life and politically fractious reign of the boy king, Wilkinson takes the objects buried with him as the source material for a wide-ranging, detailed portrait of ancient Egypt – its geography, history, culture and legacy. One hundred artefacts from the tomb, arranged in ten thematic groups, are allowed to speak again – not only for themselves, but as witnesses of the civilization that created them. Never before have the treasures of Tutankhamun been analysed and presented for what they can tell us about ancient Egyptian culture, its development, its remarkable flourishing, and its lasting impact. Filled with surprising insights, unusual details, vivid descriptions and, above all, remarkable objects, Tutankhamun’s Trumpet will appeal to all lovers of history, archaeology, art and culture, as well as all those fascinated by the Egypt of the pharaohs. ‘I’ve read many books on ancient Egypt, but I’ve never felt closer to its people‘ The Sunday Times
The study of Roman sculpture has been an essential part of the disciplines of Art History and Classics since the eighteenth century. From formal concerns such as Kopienkritic (copy criticism) to social readings of plebeian and patrician art and beyond, scholars have returned to Roman sculpture to answer a variety of questions about Roman art, society, and history. Indeed, the field of Roman sculptural studies encompasses not only the full chronological range of the Roman world but also its expansive geography, and a variety of artistic media, formats, sizes, and functions. Exciting new theories, methods, and approaches have transformed the specialized literature on the subject in recent decades. Rather than creating another chronological ARCH15OXH of representative examples of various periods, genres, and settings, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture synthesizes current best practices for studying this central medium of Roman art, situating it within the larger fields of art history, classical archaeology, and Roman studies. This volume fills the gap between introductory textbooks-which hide the critical apparatus from the reader-and the highly focused professional literature. The handbook conveniently presents new technical, scientific, literary, and theoretical approaches to the study of Roman sculpture in one reference volume and complements textbooks and other publications that present well-known works in the corpus. Chronologically, the volume addresses material from the Early Republican period through Late Antiquity. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture not only contributes to the field of classical art and archaeology but also provides a useful reference for classicists and historians of the ancient world.
Pilgrimage to ritually significant places is a part of daily life in the Maya world. These journeys involve important social and practical concerns, such as the maintenance of food sources and world order. Frequent pilgrimages to ceremonial hills to pay offerings to spiritual forces for good harvests, for instance, are just as necessary for farming as planting fields. Why has Maya pilgrimage to ritual landscapes prevailed from the distant past and why are journeys to ritual landscapes important in Maya religion? How can archaeologists recognize Maya pilgrimage, and how does it compare to similar behavior at ritual landscapes around the world? The author addresses these questions and others through cross-cultural comparisons, archaeological data, and ethnographic insights.
This is an authoritative guide to the complete range of medieval scholarship undertaken in twentieth-century Britain: history, archaeology, language, culture. Some of the twenty-nine essays focus on changes in research methods or on the achievements of individual scholars, while others are the personal account of a lifetime's work in a discipline. Many outline the ways in which subjects may develop in the twenty-first century.
The pre-Hispanic pueblo settlements of the Pajarito Plateau, whose ruins can be seen today at Bandelier National Monument, date to the late 1100s and were already dying out when the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century. Until recently, little modern scientific data on these sites was available. The essays in this volume summarize the results of new excavation and survey research in Bandelier, with special attention to determining why larger sites appear when and where they do, and how life in these later villages and towns differed from life in the earlier small hamlets that first dotted the Pajarito in the mid-1100s. Drawing on sources from archaeology, paleoethnobotany, geology, climate history, rock art, and oral history, the authors weave together the history of archaeology on the Plateau and the natural and cultural history of its Puebloan peoples for the four centuries of its pre-Hispanic occupation. Contributors include Craig Allen (U. S. Geological Survey, Los Alamos, New Mexico), Sarah Herr (Desert Archaeology, Inc., Tucson, Arizona), F. Joan Mathien (National Park Service), Matthew J. Root (Rain Shadow Research and Department of Anthropology, Washington Sate University), Nancy H. Olsen (Anthropology Department and Intercultural Studies Division, De Anza College, Cupertino, California), Janet D. Orcutt (National Park Service), and Robert P. Powers (National Park Service).
These lectures investigate the numerous miniature baked clay images from Canaan, Israel and Judah (c. 1600-600 BC). They constitute vital evidence for the imagery and domestic rituals of ordinary people, but significantly are not explicitly mentioned in the Old Testament. These terracottas are treated as a distinctive phenomenon with roots deep in prehistory and recurrent characteristics across millennia. Attention is focused on whether or not the female representations are worshippers of unknown deities or images of known goddesses, particularly in Early Israelite religion.
Numismatic Archaeology of North America is the first book to provide an archaeological overview of the coins and tokens found in a wide range of North American archaeological sites. It begins with a comprehensive and well-illustrated review of the various coins and tokens that circulated in North America with descriptions of the uses for, and human behavior associated with, each type. The book contains practical sections on standardized nomenclature, photographing, cleaning, and curating coins, and discusses the impacts of looting and of working with collectors. This is an important tool for archaeologists working with coins. For numismatists and collectors, it explains the importance of archaeological context for complete analysis.
The Greek Bronze Age, roughly 3000 to 1000 BCE, witnessed the
flourishing of the Minoan and Mycenean civilizations, the earliest
expansion of trade in the Aegean and wider Mediterranean Sea, the
development of artistic techniques in a variety of media, and the
evolution of early Greek religious practices and mythology. The
period also witnessed a violent conflict in Asia Minor between
warring peoples in the region, a conflict commonly believed to be
the historical basis for Homer's Trojan War. The Oxford Handbook of
the Bronze Age Aegean provides a detailed survey of these
fascinating aspects of the period, and many others, in sixty-six
newly commissioned articles.
Although the literature of Ancient Egypt is comparatively poorly known compared to its art and architectural achievements, it has been the subject of intense study for almost 200 years, and constitutes one of the earliest literary traditions produced anywhere in the world. This book brings together work from many of the main researchers in the field of Ancient Egyptian literature, and reviews the numerous developments in the theoretical framework of interpretation more recently. The field of literary studies has witnessed a rapid development. The application of more theoretically informed approaches to the ancient literary corpus, and a more detailed analysis of context, form, and reception, have fundamentally challenged the interpretative paradigms that formerly held sway. These papers enable many of the foremost researchers in the field to examine the overall state of work on the subject. Beginning with contributions from scholars working in the literatures of other ancient cultures (Mesopotamian, Old Testament, Classical), the book covers a wide range of Ancient Egyptian uses of written culture, with contributions covering the Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, and Demotic language stages. There are also contributions touching on genre, performance, intertextuality, biography, monumental context, and reception. The papers demonstrate the broad range of approaches currently used in interpreting Ancient Egyptian texts, and attest to the ongoing vitality of this field of study.
This is the first comprehensive and fully illustrated study of silver vessels from ancient Macedonia from the 4th to the 2nd centuries BC. These precious vessels formed part of dining sets owned by the royal family and the elite and have been discovered in the tombs of their owners. Eleni Zimi presents 171 artifacts in a full-length study of form, decoration, inscriptions and manufacturing techniques, set against contemporary comparanda in other media (clay, bronze, glass). She adopts an art historical and sociological approach to the archaeological evidence and demonstrates that the use of silver vessels as an expression of wealth and a status symbol is not only connected with the wealth spread in the empire after Alexander's the Great expedition to the East, but constitutes a practice reflecting the opulence and appreciation for luxury at least in the Macedonian court from the reign of Philip II onwards.
A Field Guide to Stone Artifacts of Texas Indians identifies and describes more than 200 dart and arrow projectile points and stone tools used by prehistoric Native Americans in Texas.
The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia is a unique blend of comprehensive overviews on archaeological, philological, linguistic, and historical issues at the forefront of Anatolian scholarship in the 21st century. Anatolia is home to early complex societies and great empires, and was the destination of many migrants, visitors, and invaders. The offerings in this volume bring this reality to life as the chapters unfold nearly ten thousand years (ca. 10,000-323 B.C.E.) of peoples, languages, and diverse cultures who lived in or traversed Anatolia over these millennia. The contributors combine descriptions of current scholarship on important discussion and debates in Anatolian studies with new and cutting edge research for future directions of study. The fifty-four chapters are presented in five separate sections that range in topic from chronological and geographical overviews to anthropologically based issues of culture contact and imperial structures, and from historical settings of entire millennia to crucial data from key sites across the region. The contributors to the volume represent the best scholars in the field from North America, Europe, Turkey, and Asia. The appearance of this volume offers the very latest collection of studies on the fascinating peninsula known as Anatolia.
Since the early 20th century the scholarly study of Anglo-Saxon texts has been augmented by systematic excavation and analysis of physical evidence - settlements, cemeteries, artefacts, environmental data, and standing buildings. This evidence has confirmed some readings of the Anglo-Saxon literary and documentary sources and challenged others. More recently, large-scale excavations both in towns and in the countryside, the application of computer methods to large bodies of data, new techniques for site identification such as remote sensing, and new dating methods have put archaeology at the forefront of Anglo-Saxon studies. The Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, written by a team of experts and presenting the results of the most up-to-date research, will both stimulate and support further investigation into those aspects of Anglo-Saxon life and culture which archaeology has fundamentally illuminated. It will prove an essential resourse for our understanding of a society poised at the interface between prehistory and history.
This book contains catalogues, analyses, photographs and drawings of some 2,000 archaeological artefacts excavated from the Insula of the Menander in Pompeii. The catalogues, and analyses are organized by provenance - buildings, rooms, and location within rooms - so that the reader can understand the artefacts as household assemblages. The functions of artefacts and groups of artefacts are discussed, as are the Latin names which are often given to these artefacts, and the relationships of these assemblages to the state of occupancy of the buildings in the Insula during the last years of Pompeii. This study, therefore, provides a wealth of information, not only on the range and use of artefacts in Pompeian houses but also on Roman artefacts, and Roman society, more generally.
This study presents the first comprehensive reconstruction of the 'New Jerusalem' Scroll from the Dead Sea, through integration of all the known fragments into a single entity. Secret ceremonies in the temple are discussed; an architectural reconstruction of the elements described in the scroll is presented, accompanied by computerized plans; a consideration of the tradition of planning the ideal city leads to an examination of the use of metrology, mathematics; and a number mysticism in the plan of the 'New Jerusalem'. A comparison is also made with the traditions of building orthogonal cities in Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Holy Land, as manifested in archaeological findings.>
By far the largest single source of new information about the ancient Greek and Roman world is provided by the flow of newly discovered inscriptions, which presents both a challenge and an opportunity. In order to interpret any inscription we need to be able to apply the knowledge that we already have. On the other hand, inscriptions present the opportunity to gain new knowledge about virtually every aspect of the mix of cultures and societies which we call Graeco-Roman antiquity. This book therefore emphasises the importance of the two-way connections and contributions which link epigraphic studies with the historical sciences as a whole. Epigraphic information is helping to reshape and extend our knowledge of the religious life, the languages, the populations, the governmental systems, and the economies of the Graeco-Roman world. New techniques and technologies are helping to make epigraphically based information more accessible, whether in terms of public display or in terms of the ever-widening possibilities of information technology. The act of looking at the Graeco-Roman world through the window provided by the epigraphic record offers a distinctive gaze of unique and exceptional value.
In June, 1973, a group of eleven teachers, students and pupils from Glasgow boarded a new school minibus and began a trip - across Europe, Turkey, Syria and Iraq - to Persepolis, in Iran, the ceremonial capital of the great king Darius of Persia and his son and successor Xerxes. This is the story, based on the diary and photographs of one of the teachers. A fascinating mix of archaeology and culture, the practicalities of travel on a tight budget, bureaucracy, political disruption, and food and drink. Liberally illustrated with maps of the route and photographs of ancient sites, cities and landscapes, and of the minibus and its inhabitants.
In June, 1973, a group of eleven teachers, students and pupils from Glasgow boarded a new school minibus and began a trip - across Europe, Turkey, Syria and Iraq - to Persepolis, in Iran, the ceremonial capital of the great king Darius of Persia and his son and successor Xerxes. This is the story, based on the diary and photographs of one of the teachers. A fascinating mix of archaeology and culture, the practicalities of travel on a tight budget, bureaucracy, political disruption, and food and drink. Liberally illustrated with maps of the route and photographs of ancient sites, cities and landscapes, and of the minibus and its inhabitants.
The Roman Remains of Brittany, Normandy and the Loire Valley is the third in a series of companion guides. The only specialist guidebook to the region, it provides context to many sites that deserve to be better known, some only recently conserved for the public. There are plenty of places to chose from: fifty-four treated at length plus fourteen shorter entries. There is an extended chapter dealing with the historical background and two feature sections. The book is easy to use as there are a large number of maps, plans and colour photographs. To ensure accuracy, the author personally followed aqueduct routes, visited hidden temples, admired ramparts, and visited all the museums. Through his writing a visit is transformed into an experience.
What does archaeology tell us about Jesus and the world in which he lived? How accurate are the Gospel accounts of first-century Galilee and Judea? Has the tomb of Jesus really been found? Informed by the latest archaeological research, and illustrated throughout with photographs of key findings, this fascinating book opens up the subject for people of all religious backgrounds. It will help readers gain a much clearer and more accurate picture of life in the Roman world during first century, and enable them to understand and critique the latest theories - both sober and sensational - about who Jesus was and what he stood for.
In the early 1800's, on a Hebridean beach in Scotland, the sea exposed an ancient treasure cache: 93 chessmen carved from walrus ivory. Norse netsuke, each face individual, each full of quirks, the Lewis Chessmen are probably the most famous chess pieces in the world. Harry played Wizard's Chess with them in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Housed at the British Museum, they are among its most visited and beloved objects. Questions abounded: Who carved them? Where? Ivory Vikings explores these mysteries by connecting medieval Icelandic sagas with modern archaeology, art history, forensics, and the history of board games. In the process, Ivory Vikings presents a vivid history of the 400 years when the Vikings ruled the North Atlantic, and the sea-road connected countries and islands we think of as far apart and culturally distinct: Norway and Scotland, Ireland and Iceland, and Greenland and North America. The story of the Lewis chessmen explains the economic lure behind the Viking voyages to the west in the 800s and 900s. And finally, it brings from the shadows an extraordinarily talented woman artist of the twelfth century: Margret the Adroit of Iceland.
This is a short, illustrated introduction to the ever-fascinating topic of Egyptian mummies, by an international expert. It is a readable, short, but authoritative overview of Egyptian mummification. It deals with perennially popular topic. It is illustrated throughout in colour. The author, a world expert on Egyptian mummification, addresses the most frequently asked questions about Egyptian mummies: how and why they were made, the religious beliefs which underpinned mummification, the preservation of animals, and how the mummies have been treated from ancient times until the present day. He provides an up to date summary of the ancient evidence, and also considers modern attitudes to Egyptian mummies, emphasising their role as a major source of knowledge and understanding about past societies. The text and illustrations draw heavily on the rich collection of mummies and funerary objects in the British Museum, and the findings of a wide range of recent scientific investigations of this collection. The book will therefore reflect the important advances which have been made in the understanding of Egyptian mummies over the last few years. The Author John H. Taylor is a curator of Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Encyclopedia of Entomology: Volume I
Christopher Fleming
Hardcover
Non-Destructive Techniques for the…
Belen Riveiro, Mercedes Solla
Hardcover
R5,115
Discovery Miles 51 150
|