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Books > Humanities > Archaeology
Why did the Greeks excel in geometry, but lag begin the Mesopotamians in arithmetic? How were the great pyramids of Egypt and the Han tombs in China constructed? What did the complex system of canals and dykes in the Tigris and Euphrates river valley have to do with the deforestation of Lebanon's famed cedar forests? This work presents a cross-cultural comparison of the ways in which the ancients learned about and preserved their knowledge of the natural world, and the ways in which they developed technologies that enabled them to adapt to and shape their surroundings. Covering the major ancient civilizations - those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Greece, the Indus Valley, and Meso-America - Olson explores how language and numbering systems influenced the social structure, how seemingly beneficial construction projects affected a civilization's rise or decline, how religion and magic shaped both medicine and agriculture, and how trade and the resulting cultural interactions transformed the making of both everyday household items and items intended as art. Along the way, Olson delves into how scientific knowledge and its technological applications changed the daily lives of the ancients.
Through the Lens of Anthropology is a concise introduction to anthropology that uses the twin themes of food and sustainability to connect evolution, biology, archaeology, history, language, and culture. The third edition remains a highly readable text that encourages students to think about current events and issues through an anthropological lens. Beautifully illustrated with over 100 full-color images and maps, along with detailed figures and boxes, this is an anthropology book with a fresh perspective and a lively narrative that is filled with popular topics. The new edition has been updated to reflect the most recent developments in anthropology and the contributions of marginalized scholars, while the use of gender-neutral language makes for a more inclusive text. New content offers anthropological insight into contemporary issues such as COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo. Through the Lens of Anthropology continues to be an essential text for those interested in learning more about the relevance and value of anthropology. The third edition is supplemented by a full suite of updated instructor and student resources. For more information visit www.lensofanthropology.com.
It is widely acknowledged that all archaeological research is embedded within cultural, political and economic contexts, and that all archaeological research falls under the heading 'heritage'. Most archaeologists now work in museums and other cultural institutions, government agencies, non-government organisations and private sector companies, and this diversity ensures that debates continue to proliferate about what constitutes appropriate professional ethics within these related and relevant contexts. Discussions about the ethics of cultural heritage in the 20th century focused on standards of professionalism, stewardship, responsibilities to stakeholders and on establishing public trust in the authenticity of the outcomes of the heritage process. This volume builds on recent approaches that move away from treating ethics as responsibilities to external domains and to the discipline, and which seek to ensure ethics are integral to all heritage theory, practice and methods. The chapters in this collection chart a departure from the tradition of external heritage ethics towards a broader approach underpinned by the turn to human rights, issues of social justice and the political economy of heritage, conceptualising ethical responsibilities not as pertaining to the past, but to a future-focused domain of social action.
During the last half of the nineteenth century, a number of social and economic factors converged that resulted in the rural village of Deerfield, Massachusetts becoming almost entirely female. This drastic shift in population presents a unique lens through which to study gender roles and social relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The lessons gleaned from this case study will provide new insight to the study of gender relations throughout other historical periods as well. Through an intensive examination of both historical and archaeological evidence, the author presents a clear picture of the gendered social relations in Deerfield over the span of seventy years. While gender relations in urban settings have been studied extensively, this unique work provides the same level of examination to gender relations in a rural setting. Likewise, where previous studies have often focused only on relations between married men and women, the unique case of Deerfield provides insight into the experiences of single women, particularly widows and spinsters . This work presents a unique contribution that will be essential for anyone studying the historical archaeology of gender, or gender roles in the Victorian era and beyond."
The study of the Neolithic transition constitutes a major theme in prehistoric research. The process of economic change, from foraging to farming, involved one of the main transformations in human behavior patterns. This volume focuses on investigating the neolithization process at the periphery of one of the main routes in the expansion of the Neolithic in Europe: the Western Mediterranean region. Recent advances in radiocarbon dating, mathematical and computational models, archaeometric analysis and biomolecular techniques, together with new archaeological discoveries, provide novel insights into this topic. This volume is organized into five sections: * new discoveries and new ideas about the Mediterranean Neolithic * reconstructing times and modeling processes * landscape interaction: farming and herding * dietary subsistence of early farming communities * human dispersal mechanisms and cultural transmission This volume will also provide new empirical data to help readers assess different theoretical frameworks and narratives which underlie the models proposed to explain the expansion of farming from the Middle East into Europe.
The global community, dependent as always on the cooperation of nation states, is gradually learning to address the serious threats to the cultural heritage of our disparate but shared civilizations. The legacy of conquest, colonialization, and commerce looms large in defining and explaining these threats. The essays contained in this challenging volume are based on papers presented at an international conference on cultural heritage issues that took place at Willamette University . The conference sought to generate fresh ideas about these cultural heritage issues; offer a good sense of their nuances and complexities; and reveal how culture, law, and ethics can interact, complement, diverge, and contradict one another. This book seeks to accomplish these purposes. What it explores is the fact that, allong with an emerging blend of adversarial and collaborative processes to address cultural heritage issues, has come a substantial broadening of the normative framework in recent years. This framework now spans a welter of issues ranging from the creation of cultural safety zones during armed conflict, to the ongoing rectification of genocidal conquest during the European Holocaust and World War II, to the treatment of shipwrecks and their cargo, to the protection of folklore and other intangibles, to the promotion of traditional knowledge in the interest of biological diversity. All of these topics are controversial, as are the legal instruments that incorporate them, but the issues they embrace are vital to us all, whether our viewpoint is in the global arena, a national legislature, a courtroom, a classroom, an archaeological site, or a museum.
Bodzia is one of the most fascinating archaeological discoveries of the post-war period in Poland. It is one of the few cemeteries in Poland from the time of the origins of the Polish state. The unique character of this discovery is mainly due to the fact that a small, elite population was buried there. The burials there included people whose origins were connected with the Slavic, Nomadic-Khazarian and Scandinavian milieus. For the first time the evidence from this area is given prominence. This book is designed mainly for readers outside Poland. The reader is offered a collection of chapters, combining analyses and syntheses of the source material, and a discussion of its etno-cultural and political significance. The authors formulate new hypotheses and ideas, which put the discoveries in a broader European context. Contributors are Wieslaw Bogdanowicz, Mateusz Bogucki, Andrzej Buko, Magdalena M. Bus, Maria Dekowna, Alicja Drozd-Lipinska, Wladyslaw Duczko, Karin Margarita Frei, Tomasz Goslar, Tomasz Grzybowski, Zdzislaw Hensel, Iwona Hildebrandt-Radke, Michal Kara, Joanna Koszalka, Anna B. Kowalska, Tomasz Kozlowski, Marek Krapiec, Roman Michalowski, Michael Muller-Wille, T. Douglas Price, Tomasz Purowski, Tomasz Sawicki, Iwona Sobkowiak-Tabaka, Stanislaw Suchodolski and Kinga Zamelska-Monczak.
Historical archaeologists are in a unique position to analyze both historical documents and archaeological data in order to generate hypotheses and draw conclusions. In this work, the data not only provided the history of the ship "Catharine" but also the economic, social and political environments in which the ship was built and employed.
This book provides readers with the results of recent research from some of the world's leading historians of astronomy on aspects of Arabic, Australian, Chinese, Japanese, and North and South American astronomy and astrophysics. It contains peer-reviewed papers gathered from the International Conferences on Oriental Astronomy 6 (ICO-6) with the chosen theme of "Highlighting the History of Astronomy in the Asia-Pacific Region." Of particular note are the sections on Arabic astronomy, Asian applied astronomy and the history of Australian radio astronomy, and the chapter on Peruvian astronomy. This title is a valuable complement for those with research interests in applied historical astronomy; archaeoastronomy; calendars, manuscripts, and star charts; historical instruments and observatories, and the history of radio astronomy.
Bringing together leading academics and practitioners from across the globe, this unique collection explores the emerging field of heritage crime studies. Moving beyond the traditional focus on illicit antiquities, the volume identifies the diversity of crimes that affect heritage and outlines various approaches to prevention.
"To look out in any direction was like looking down from an airplane," is how French Ambassador Francois Poncet described his impression of the Eagle's Nest, Adolf Hitler's solid granite and marble pavilion built at great expense on the Kehlstein mountain peak, at 6,000 ft altitude. It was in this luxurious appointed pavilion one year before World War II began that Hitler invited an assortment of high placed diplomats to make the impression he was using diplomacy to avert war, but all the while snarling that his empire required more land in the East. As a place, Hitler accepted the Eagle's Nest as a 50th birthday gift from his confidant and Reichs Leader, Martin Bormann. Former Smithsonian Institution museum exhibitionist and U.S. State Department Diplomacy Center Program Officer, Douglas Mossman invites readers into this hidden getaway to witness secret negotiations between Western diplomats and Der Fuhrer. War of Words: Hitler's Diplomatic Blitzkrieg is a unique work that reveals for the first time many photographs of Hitler meeting with world leaders and diplomats in the Eagle's Nest, and it tells their story how they shook up the geo-political map with cataclysmic results.
Restoring the historicity and plurality of archaeological ethics is a task to which this book is devoted; its emphasis on praxis mends the historical condition of ethics. In doing so, it shows that nowadays a multicultural (sometimes also called "public") ethic looms large in the discipline. By engaging communities "differently," archaeology has explicitly adopted an ethical outlook, purportedly striving to overcome its colonial ontology and metaphysics. In this new scenario, respect for other historical systems/worldviews and social accountability appear to be prominent. Being ethical in archaeological terms in the multicultural context has become mandatory, so much that most professional, international and national archaeological associations have ethical principles as guiding forces behind their openness towards social sectors traditionally ignored or marginalized by their practices. This powerful new ethics-its newness is based, to a large extent, in that it is the first time that archaeological ethics is explicitly stated, as if it didn't exist before-emanates from metropolitan centers, only to be adopted elsewhere. In this regard, it is worth probing the very nature of the dominant multicultural ethics in disciplinary practices because (a) it is at least suspicious that at the same time archaeology has tuned up with postmodern capitalist/market needs, and (b) the discipline (along with its ethical principles) is contested worldwide by grass-roots organizations and social movements. Can archaeology have socially committed ethical principles at the same time that it strengthens its relationship with the market and capitalism? Is this coincidence just merely haphazard or does it obey more structural rules? The papers in this book try to answer these two questions by examining praxis-based contexts in which archaeological ethics unfolds.
Focusing on the transitional period of the late Republic to the early Principate, Trees in Ancient Rome offers a sustained examination of the deployment of trees in the ancient city, exploring not only the practicalities of their cultivation, but also their symbolic value. The Ruminal fig tree sheltered the she-wolf as she nursed Romulus and Remus and year’s later Rome was founded between two groves. As the city grew, neighbourhoods bore the names of groves and hills were known by the trees which grew atop them. From the 1st century BCE, triumphs included trees among their spoils and Rome’s green cityscape grew, as did the challenges of finding room for trees within the congested city. This volume begins with an examination of the role of trees as repositories of human memory, lasting for several generations. It goes on to untangle the import of trees, and their role in the triumphal procession, before closing with a discussion of how trees could be grown in Rome’s urban spaces. Drawing on a combination of literary, visual and archaeological sources, it reveals the rich variety of trees in evidence, and explores how they impacted, and were used to impact, life in the ancient city.
The establishment of a consumer society in Australia has not been a particularly well explored area of academic inquiry. My interests lie in the concepts and meanings that underlie the material world; ideas like, in the words of Madonna, "I am a material girl and I live in a material world" (terminology taken to be not gender specific), the classic graffiti paraphrasing of Descartes: I shop therefore I am or perhaps simply in the "world of goods" in the more academically respectable terms of Douglas and Isherwood (1979). This book arises out of my longstanding interest in the early colonial period in Australia. In part it represents an extension of the purely "historical" research conducted for my Master's thesis in the Department of History at the University of Sydney which explored aspects of the diet, health and lived experience of con victs and immigrants during their voyages to the Australian colonies within the timeframe 1837 to 1839 (Staniforth, 1993a). More importantly, it is the culmina tion of more than twenty-five years involvement in the excavation of shipwreck sites in Australia starting with James Matthews (1841) in 1974, through the test excavation of William Salthouse in 1982, continuing with my involvement between 1985 and 1994 in the excavation of Sydney Cove (1797) and most recently with shore-based whaling stations and whaling shipwreck sites. In this respect, this book may be seen as an example of what Ian Hodder (1986, p."
Colour shapes our world in profound, if sometimes subtle, ways. It
helps us to classify, form opinions, and make aesthetic and
emotional judgements. Colour operates in every culture as a symbol,
a metaphor, and as part of an aesthetic system. Yet archaeologists
have traditionally subordinated the study of colour to the form and
material value of the objects they find and thereby overlook its
impact on conceptual systems throughout human history.
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