This volume centers on the application of social theory to commingled remains with special focus on the cultural processes that create the assemblages as a way to better understand issues of meaning, social structure and interaction, and lived experience in the past. The importance of the application of theoretical frameworks to bioarchaeology in general has been recognized, but commingled and fragmentary assemblages require an increased theoretical focus. Too often these assemblages are still relegated to appendices; they are analytical puzzles that need the interpretive power offered by social theory. Theoretical Approaches to Analysis and Interpretation of Commingled Human Remains provides case studies that illustrate how an appropriate theoretical model can be used with commingled and fragmentary remains to add to overall site and population level interpretations of past and present peoples. Specifically, the contributions show a blending and melding of different social theories, highlighting the broad interpretive power of social theory. Contributors are drawn from both the Old and New World. Temporally, time periods from the Neolithic to historic periods are present, further widening the audience for the volume.

Archaeological chemistry is a subject of great importance to the study and methodology of archaeology. This comprehensive text covers the subject with a full range of case studies, materials, and research methods. With twenty years of experience teaching the subject, the authors offer straightforward coverage of archaeological chemistry, a subject that can be intimidating for many archaeologists who do not already have a background in the hard sciences. With clear explanations and informative illustrations, the authors have created a highly approachable text, which will help readers overcome that intimidation. Topics covered included: Materials (rock, pottery, bone, charcoal, soils, metals, and others), Instruments (microscopes, NAA, spectrometers, mass spectrometers, GC/MS, XRF & XRD, Case Studies (Provinience, Sediments, Diet Reconstruction, Past Human Movement, Organic Residues). The detailed coverage and clear language will make this useful as an introduction to the study of archaeological chemistry, as well as a useful resource for years after that introduction.

This book offers a critical reading of the Anthropocene that draws on archaeological, ecological, geological, and ethnographic evidence to argue that the concept reproduces the modernist binary between society and nature, and forecloses a more inclusive politics around climate change. The authors challenge the divisions between humans as biological and geophysical agents that constitute the ontological foundations of the period. Building on contemporary critiques of capitalism, they examine different conceptions of human-environment relationships derived from anthropology to engage with the pressing problem of global warming.

This volume presents the most recent archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research that challenges simplistic perceptions of Native smoking and explores a wide variety of questions regarding smoking plants and pipe forms from throughout North America and parts of South America. By broadening research questions, utilizing new analytical methods, and applying interdisciplinary interpretative frameworks, this volume offers new insights into a diverse array of perspectives on smoke plants and pipes.

This book is designed to act as a readily accessible guide to different methods and techniques of use-wear and residue analysis and therefore includes a wide range of different and complementary essential topics: experimental tests, observation and record methods and techniques and the interpretation of a diversity of tool types and worked raw materials.The onset of use-wear studies was marked by the development of theory, method and techniques in order to infer prehistoric tools functionality and, therefore, understand human technological, social and cultural behavior. The last decade of functional studies, use-wear and residue analysis have been aimed at the observation, recording and interpretation of different activities and worked materials found on archaeological tools made on different types of organic and non-organic materials. This international group of contributions will be fundamental for all researchers and students of the discipline."

To Write What one Could Not Tell Anyone You who live in all tranquility So warm and comfortable in your houses, You who come home at night to find The table laid and friendly faces around you, Consider if this is a man, He who toils in the mud, Who knows no rest, Who fights for a crust of bread, Who dies for the slightest reason. Consider if this is a woman, She who has lost her name and her hair, And even the strength to remember, Her gaze blank and her bosom chilled, Like a frog in winter. Do not forget that this happened, No, do not forget it: Engrave these words in your heart. Think of them in your home, in the street, When you sleep, when you rise; Repeat them to your children. Or else your house will crumble, You will be overcome by illness, And your children will turn away from you (Levi 1987:9, the translations is mine). At Auschwitz, Filip Muller was assigned to the Sonderkommando. Every day, with his fellow prisoners, he emptied the gas chambers of their piles of defiled corpses and loaded them into the crematorium furnaces of the extermination camp."

This book presents 18 essays by leading scholars covering mortuary analysis, the archaeology of foraging and agricultural societies, cultural evolution, and archaeological method and theory, which transcend the processual/postprocessual debate in archaeology and provide examples of how archaeologists think about, and go about, studying the past. As archaeology encounters the 21st century, debate over the nature of the discipline dominates professional discourse. Archaeologists are embattled over isms: processualism, postprocessualism, scientism, and humanism are ubiquitous buzzwords in the literature. Yet archaeology is a craft practiced by individuals, learned from and influenced by other individuals. Sometimes a peson, through sheer force of intellectual spirit, rises above the debate to make a mark on the field in ways that cross out schools, paradigms, and factions. It is fitting to look back at the influence one such individual has had on archaeological methods, theory, data collection, and syntheses over the last half century. This volume draws on the experience of students and colleagues who worked with and were strongly influenced by James A. Brown's approach to the past. The volume is divided into five categories, each reflecting one distinctive facet of Brown's affect on archaeology: mortuary analysis, foraging and horticultural societies, complex agriculturalists, proto-historic and historic societies, and method and theory. These diverse categories, with articles by archaeologists of many backgrounds, are drawn together by the threads of Brown's intellectual legacy. Not all authors here are in agreement with Brown's views on their subjects, but all acknolwedge that his work in the area sets a standard that needs to be met if one is to succeed.

The archaeology of war has revealed evidence of bravery, sacrifice, heroism, cowardice, and atrocities. Mostly absent from these narratives of victory and defeat, however, are the experiences of prisoners of war, despite what these can teach us about cruelty, ingenuity, and human adaptability. The international array of case studies in Prisoners of War restores this hidden past through case studies of PoW camps of the Napoleonic era, the American Civil War, and both World Wars. These bring to light wide variations in historical and cultural details, excavation and investigative methods used, items found and their interpretation, and their contributions to archaeology, history and heritage. Illustrated with diagrams, period photographs, and historical quotations, these chapters vividly reveal challenges and opportunities for researchers and heritage managers, and revisit powerful ethical questions that persist to this day. Notorious and lesser-known aspects of PoW experiences that are addressed include: Designing and operating an 18th-century British PoW camp. Life and death at Confederate and Union American Civil War PoW camps. The role of possessions in coping strategies during World War I. The archaeology of the 'Great Escape' Experiencing and negotiating space at civilian internment camps in Germany and Allied PoW camps in Normandy in World War II. The role of archaeology in the memorial process, in America, Norway, Germany and France Graffiti, decorative ponds, illicit sake drinking, and family life at Japanese American camps As one of the first book-length examinations of this fascinating multidisciplinary topic, Prisoners of War merits serious attention from historians, social justice researchers and activists, archaeologists, and anthropologists.

"Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology" addresses a series of questions: how do archaeologists actually work with the forms of data they identify as a record of the cultural past?; how are these data collected and how are they construed as evidence?; what is the impact on archaeological practice of new techniques of data recovery and analysis (especially those that originate in the physical and life sciences)?; how do archaeologists work with old evidence in pursuit of new interpretations, and how do they adjudicate conflicting evidential claims based on the same or overlapping bodies of data?To answer these questions the authors identify key examples of evidential reasoning in archaeology that are widely regarded as successful, as pivotal to the development of the field, or as instructive failures, and build nuanced analyses of the forms of reasoning exemplified by these cases. This case-based approach is predicated on a conviction that archaeological practice is a repository of considerable methodological wisdom, embodied in tacit norms and skilled expertise; it is rarely made explicit, except when contested, and has been largely obscured by the abstractions of high profile crisis debates. "Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology" captures this wisdom in a set of close-to-ground principles of best practice.

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.

This book delineates the contours of molecular and structural archaeology as an emergent interdisciplinary field based on structural analysis at the molecular level and examines novel methodologies to reconstruct the synthesis and long-term transformation of materials used in antiquity. The focus of this volume is on cosmetic and therapeutic materials.

Defining "culture" is an important step in undertaking archaeological research. Any thorough study of a particular culture first has to determine what that culture contains-- what particular time period, geographic region, and group of people make up that culture. The study of archaeology has many accepted definitions of particular cultures, but recently these accepted definitions have come into question. As archaeologists struggle to define cultures, they also seek todefine the components of culture.

This volume brings together 21 international case studies to explore the meaning of "culture" for regions around the globe and periods from the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age and beyond. Taking lessons and overarching themes from these studies, the contributors draw important conclusions about cultural transmission, technology development, and cultural development.

The result is a comprehensive model for approaching the study of culture, broken down into regions (Russia, Continental Europe, North America, Britain, and Africa), materials (Lithics, Ceramics, Metals) and time periods. This work will be valuable to all archaeologists and cultural anthropologists, particularly those studying material culture."

As people move through life, they continually shift affiliation from one position to another, dependent on the wider contexts of their interactions. Different forms of material culture may be employed as affiliations shift, and the connotations of any given set of artifacts may change. In this volume the authors explore these overlapping spheres of social affiliation. Social actors belong to multiple identity groups at any moment in their life. It is possible to deploy one or many potential labels in describing the identities of such an actor. Two main axes exist upon which we can plot experiences of social belonging - the synchronic and the diachronic. Identities can be understood as multiple during one moment (or the extended moment of brief interaction), over the span of a lifetime, or over a specific historical trajectory.

From the Introduction

The international contributions each illuminate how the various identifiers of race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, class, gender, personhood, health, and/or religion are part of both material expressions of social affiliations, and transient experiences of identity. The Archaeology of Plural and Changing Identities: Beyond Identification will be of great interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, curators and other social scientists interested in the mutability of identification through material remains.

Commingled and Disarticulated Human Remains:Working Toward Improved Theory, Method, and Data brings together research that provides innovative methodologies for the analysis of commingled human remains. It has temporal and spatial breadth, with case studies coming from pre-state to historic periods, as well as from both the New and Old World. Highlights of this volume include: standardizes methods and presents best practices in the field using a case study approach demonstrates how data gathered from commingled human remains can be incorporated into the overall interpretation of a site explores best way to formulate population size, using commingled remains Field archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, academic anthropologists, forensic anthropologists, zoo archaeologists, and students of anthropology and archaeology will find this to be an invaluable resource.

The current focus on the theme of authorship in Medieval and Early Modern studies reopens questions of poetic agency and intent. Bringing into conversation several kinds of scholarship on medieval authorship, the essays in Author, Reader, Book examine interrelated questions raised by the relationship between an author and a reader, the relationships between authors and their antecedents, and the ways in which authorship interacts with the physical presentation of texts in books.The broad chronological range within this volume reveals the persistence of literary concerns that remain consistent through different periods, languages, and cultural contexts. Theoretical reflections, case studies from a wide variety of languages, examinations of devotional literature from figures such as Bishop Reginald Pecock, and analyses of works that are more secular in focus, including some by Chaucer and Christine de Pizan, come together in this volume to transcend linguistic and disciplinary boundaries.

The Germania of Tacitus is the most extensive account of the ancient Germans written during the Roman period. This new translation, introduction, and commentary provides an up-to-date guide to the relevant literary and archaeological evidence, and discusses the methodological issues involved in understanding this important historical source.

In many facets of Western culture, including archaeology, there remains a legacy of perceiving gender divisions as natural, innate, and biological in origin. This belief follows that men are naturally pre-disposed to public, intellectual pursuits, while women are innately designed to care for the home and take care of children. In the interpretation of material culture, accepted notions of gender roles are often applied to new findings: the dichotomy between the domestic sphere of women and the public sphere of men can color interpretations of new materials. In this innovative volume, the contributors focus explicitly on analyzing the materiality of historic changes in the domestic sphere around the world. Combining a global scope with great temporal depth, chapters in the volume explore how gender ideologies, identities, relationships, power dynamics, and practices were materially changed in the past, thus showing how they could be changed in the future.

An archaeology of innovation is the first monograph-length investigation of innovation and the innovation process from an archaeological perspective. It interrogates the idea of innovation that permeates our popular media and our political and scientific discourse, setting this against the long-term perspective that only archaeology can offer. Case studies span the entire breadth of human history, from our earliest hominin ancestors to the contemporary world. The book argues that the present narrow focus on pushing the adoption of technical innovations ignores the complex interplay of social, technological and environmental systems that underlies truly innovative societies; the inherent connections between new technologies, technologists and social structure that give them meaning and make them valuable; and the significance and value of conservative social practices that lead to the frequent rejection of innovations. -- .