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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region
Dialogos" encompasses Greek language and literature, Greek history and archaeology, Greek culture and thought, present and past: a territory of distinctive richness and unsurpassed influence. It seeks to foster critical awareness and informed debate about the ideas, events and achievements that make up this territory, by redefining their qualities, by exploring their interconnections and by reinterpreting their significance within Western culture and beyond.
Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols. In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens--small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay--represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device. In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.
Did Trajan really deserve his reputation as the embodiment of all imperial virtues? Why did Dante, writing in the Middle Ages, place him in the sixth sphere of Heaven among the Just and Temperate rulers? In this, the only biography of Trajan available in English, Julian Bennett rigorously tests the substance of this glorious reputation. Surprisingly, for a Roman emperor, Trajan comes through the test with his reputation relatively intact.
Since prehistoric times, Andean societies have been organized around the ayllu, a grouping of real or ceremonial kinspeople who share labor, resources, and ritual obligations. Many Andean scholars believe that the ayllu is as ancient as Andean culture itself, possibly dating back as far as 6000 B.C., and that it arose to alleviate the hardships of farming in the mountainous Andean environment. In this boldly revisionist book, however, William Isbell persuasively argues that the ayllu developed during the latter half of the Early Intermediate Period (around A.D. 200) as a means of resistance to the process of state formation. Drawing on archaeological evidence, as well as records of Inca life taken from the chroniclers, Isbell asserts that prehistoric ayllus were organized around the veneration of deceased ancestors, whose mummified bodies were housed in open sepulchers, or challups, where they could be visited by descendants seeking approval and favors. By charting the temporal and spatial distribution of chullpa ruins, Isbell offers a convincing new explanation of where, when, and why the ayllu developed.
The impact of classical Rome on ancient Britain, as perceived by the late Victorian and Edwardian elites, was a resource of immense contemporary political value. The images it produced helped to define the idea and practice of British imperialism, and the very concept of "Englishness". Academics colluded in this process and this created a legacy in Roman archaeology which persists to the present day. Richard Hingley's work explores this relationship. His thorough examination of late Victorian and Edwardian writings on Rome and the ancient Britons illuminates the historical context and development of Roman archaeology, and simultaneously makes a contribution to the debates on English identity and imperialism. This landmark study should be useful reading for scholars and students in Roman archaeology, ancient history, colonial studies and historiography.
The period from 6500 to 2500 BC was one of the most dynamic eras of the prehistory of south-eastern Europe, for it saw many fundamental changes in the ways in which people lived their lives. This up-to-date and authoritative synthesis both describes the best excavated relevant Balkan sites and interprets long-term trends in the central themes of settlement, burial, material culture and economy. Prominence is given to the ways people organized themselves, the houses and landscapes where they lived and the objects, plants and animals that they kept. The key developments are seen as the creation of new social environments through the construction of houses and villages, and a new materiality of life which filled the built environment with a wide variety of objects. Against the prevailing trends in European prehistory, the author argues for a prehistoric past riven with tension and conflict, where hoarding and exclusion of people was just as frequent as sharing and helping. "Balkan Prehistory" provides a much-needed guide to a period which has previously been inaccessible to western scholars.;It should be a useful resource for undergraduates, advanced students and scholars.
Douglass Bailey's volume fills the huge gap that existed for a
comprehensive synthesis, in English, of the archaeology of the
Balkans between 6,500 and 2,000 BC; much research on the prehistory
of Eastern Europe was inaccessible to a western audience before
now, because of linguistic barriers.
This book examines the archaeological implications of Islam as a force which can act upon all areas of life. Islam leaves distinctive material culture remains and distinctive categories of evidence which can be detected and described. The subject and the geographical area of Islam is vast. The author provides an assessment of the means and the methods of uncovering Islamic material records in the context of a wide range of times and places. Separate chapters examine the mosque, the domestic environment, the Islamic city, death and burial, art, manufacturing and trade. The author draws evidence from the perceived heartlands of the Islamic world (Arabia, the Near East), and from those regions traditionally regarded as the periphery (Africa and the Far East). Coverage extends from the origins of Islam in the seventh century AD up until the present.
In the first published synthesis of the subject, Caroline Earwood traces the changing styles and manufacturing techniques of wooden domestic artefacts in Britain and Ireland from the Neolithic age to the time of the Vikings. A surprising number of these items have survived - some as ancient as 6000 years old - in wet and waterlogged places such as wells and bogs. The book atempts to answer questions about who made the many and varied objects, who used them and ow theirstyle and deecoration compare with potery, maetal and stone artefacts from the same period. It also examines the continues use of ancient tehniques as late as the 20th century.
From bioarchaeologist and bestselling author of River Kings, a gripping new history of the making of England as a nation, told through six bone chests, stored for over a thousand years in Winchester Cathedral. In December 1642, during the Civil War, Parliamentarian troops stormed the magnificent Winchester Cathedral, intent on destruction. Reaching the choir, its beating heart, the soldiers searched out ten beautifully decorated wooden chests resting high up on the stone screens. Those chests contained some of England’s most venerated, ancient remains: The bones of eight kings, including William Rufus and Cnut the Great – the only Scandinavian king to rule England and a North Sea Empire; three bishops; and a formidable queen, Emma of Normandy. These were the very people who witnessed and orchestrated the creation of the kingdom of Wessex in the 7th century; who lived through the creation of England as a unified country in response to the Viking threat; and who were part and parcel of the Norman conquest. On that day, the soldiers smashed several chests to the ground, using the bones as missiles to shatter the cathedral’s stained glass windows. Afterwards, the clergy scrambled to collect the scattered remains. In 2014, the six remaining chests were reopened. A team of forensic archaeologists, using the latest scientific methods, attempted to identify the contents: They discovered an elaborate jumble of bones, including the remains of two forgotten princes. In The Bone Chests, Cat Jarman builds on this evidence to untangle the stories of the people within. It is an extraordinary and sometimes tragic tale, and a story of transformation. Why these bones? Why there? Can we ever really identify them? In a palimpsest narrative that runs through more than a millennium of British history, it tells the story of both the seekers and the sought, of those who protected the bones and those who spurned them; and of the methods used to investigate.
The ancient capital of Cahokia and a series of lesser population centers developed in the Mississippi valley in North America between the eighth and fifteenth centuries AD, leaving behind an extraordinarily rich archaeological record. Cahokia's gigantic pyramids, finely crafted artifacts, and dense population mark it as the founding city of the Mississippian civilization, formerly known as the 'mound' builders. As Cahokian ideas and objects were widely sought, a cultural and religious ripple effect spread across the mid-continent and into the South. In its wake, population migrations and social upheavals transformed social life along the ancient Mississippi River. In this important new survey, Timothy Pauketat outlines the development of Mississippian civilization, presenting a wealth of archaeological evidence and advancing our understanding of the American Indians whose influence extended into the founding moments of the United States and lives on today in American archaeology.
This is the first account of the Lapita peoples, the common
ancestor of the Polynesians, Micronesians, and
Austronesian-speaking Melanesians who over the last 4000 years
colonized the islands of the Pacific, including New Zealand and
territories as far afield as Fiji and Hawaii. Its purpose is to
provide answers to some of the most puzzling archaeological and
anthropological questions: who were the Lapita peoples? what was
their history? how were they able to travel such great distances?
and why did they do so? Recent discoveries (several by the author
of this book) have begun at last to yield a coherent picture of
these elusive peoples. Professor Kirch takes the reader back many thousands of years to
the earliest evidence of the Lapita peoples. He describes the
research itself and conveys the excitement of the first discoveries
of Lapita settlements, tools and pottery. He then traces the
remarkable cultural development and spread of the Lapita peoples
across the unoccupied islands of Eastern Melanesia, Micronesia and
Western Polynesia. He shows how they became the progenitors of the
Polynesian and Austronesian-speaking Melanesian peoples. The author describes Lapita sites, communities and landscapes,
the development of their decorated ceramics, and their shell-tool
industry. He reveals the means by which they accomplished such
prodigious voyages and explains why they undertook them. He
illustrates his account with specially drawn maps and with a wide
range of photographs, many published for the first time.
This is an accessible and up-to-date account of the Jews during the millennium following Alexander the Great's conquest of the East. Unusually, it acknowledges the problems involved in constructing a narrative from fragmentary yet complex evidence and is, implicitly, an exploration of how this might be accomplished. Moreover, unlike most other introductions to the subject, it concentrates primarily on the people rather than issues of theology and adopts a resolutely unsentimental approach to the subject. Professor Schwartz particularly demonstrates the importance of studying Jewish history, texts and artefacts to the broader community of ancient historians because of what they can contribute to wider themes such as Roman imperialism. The book serves as an excellent introduction for students and scholars of Jewish history and of ancient history.
Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland is the first volume to be devoted solely to the Irish Neolithic, using an innovative landscape and anthropological perspective to provide significant new insights on the period. Gabriel Cooney argues that the archaeological evidence demonstrates a much more complex picture than the current orthodoxy on Neolithic Europe, with its assumption of mobile lifestyles, suggests. He integrates the study of landscape, settlement, agriculture, material culture and burial practice to offer a rounded, realistic picture of the complexities and the realities of Neolithic lives and societies in Ireland.
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