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Books > Humanities > Archaeology
This book, a guide and companion to the prehistoric archaeology of
Greece, is designed for students, travelers, and all general
readers interested in archaeology. Greece has perhaps the longest
and richest archaeological record in Europe, and this book reviews
what is known of Greece from the earliest inhabitants in the Stone
Age to the end of the Bronze Age and the collapse of the Minoan and
Mycenaean civilizations.
The book describes the prehistoric cultures of Greece in
chronological order, and illustrates with 98 detailed drawings each
culture's typical artifacts, architecture, burial customs, and art.
Written in an informal and accessible style free of scientific
jargon, the book can be used in the classroom or as a guide for the
traveler, or read simply for pleasure by anyone with a curiosity
about the earliest ages of this fascinating region.
Although intended for a wide audience, the book has a solid
scientific foundation. The authors are professional archaeologists
with more than 25 years of experience in the field and with a
first-hand knowledge of the methods and results of contemporary
research. There is no other book today that covers the same range
of periods and subjects, making it essential reading for anyone
interested in the early civilizations that shaped the Greek
landscape, laid the foundations for Classical Greek civilization,
and contributed in many ways to the formation of the modern Greek
world.
The authors have been careful to address the many questions
concerning prehistoric Greece that have been asked them by students
and visitors to Greece through the years. The illustrations were
created especially for this book, showing familiar artifacts and
sites from a new perspective, and selecting others for illustration
that rarely, if ever, appear in popular publications.
Writing as Material Practice grapples with the issue of writing as
a form of material culture in its ancient and more recent
manifestations, and in the contexts of production and consumption.
Fifteen case studies explore the artefactual nature of writing -
the ways in which materials, techniques, colour, scale, orientation
and visibility inform the creation of inscribed objects, spaces and
landscapes, as well as structure subsequent engagement, perception
and meaning making. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years,
from c.3200 BCE to the present day, and ranging in spatial context
from the Americas to the Near East, the chapters in this volume
bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific
and broader questions of writing materialities. Authors also aim to
place past graphical systems in their social contexts so they can
be understood in relation to the people who created and attributed
meaning to writing and associated symbolic modes through a diverse
array of individual and wider social practices.
Dedicated to Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Art and Material Culture in the
Byzantine and Islamic Worlds offers new perspectives on the
Christian and Muslim communities of the east Mediterranean from
medieval to contemporary times. The contributors examine how people
from diverse religious backgrounds adapted to their changing
political landscapes and show that artistic patronage, consumption,
and practices are interwoven with constructed narratives. The
essays consider material and textual evidence for painted media,
architecture, and the creative process in Byzantium, Crusader-era
polities, the Ottoman empire, and the modern Middle East, thus
demonstrating the importance of the past in understanding the
present. Contributors: Evanthia Baboula, Lesley Jessop, Anthony
Cutler, Jaroslav Folda, John Osborne, Glenn Peers, Annemarie Weyl
Carr, Mat Immerzeel, Bas Snelders, Angela Andersen, May Farhat,
Marcus Milwright, Rico Franses.
Furniture, armour, jewellery, musical instruments, bronze, silver,
and gold vases, and other priceless offerings all accumulated in
the Parthenon and Erechtheion on the Athenian Acropolis during the
classical period. Annual inventories of these precious objects were
inscribed by the Athenians on marble tablets from 434 to 300 BC.
The two hundred fragments of these stelai which have survived are
the only evidence for these cult objects, gifts to Athena, and
treasures of the city, since the items themselves have long since
vanished - either stolen, melted down, or disintegrated. This
volume presents the evidence for these ancient treasures for the
first time, and provides data with important implications for the
history of Athens and Greek religion. Chapters include a history of
the treasures on the Acropolis, catalogues of each object kept in
the Opisthodomus, Proneos, Parthenon, Hekatompedos Neos, and
Erechtheion, and an analysis of the individual worshippers and
allied-city states who gave gifts and offerings to their goddess,
Athena. The most significant and startling conclusion from the
author's findings is that the gifts were used again and again, and
that the temples operated as repositories from which the treasures
might be deposited, withdrawn, or even borrowed.
An anthropologist and an anatomist have combined their skills in
this book to provide students and research workers with the
essentials of anatomy and the means to apply these to
investigations into hominid form and function. Using basic
principles and relevant bones, conclusions can be reached regarding
the probable musculature, stance, brain size, age, weight, and sex
of a particular fossil specimen. The sort of deductions which are
possible are illustrated by reference back to contemporary apes and
humans, and a coherent picture of the history of hominid evolution
appears. Written in a clear and concise style and beautifully
illustrated, An Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy is a
basic reference for all concerned with human evolution as well as a
valuable companion to both laboratory practical sessions and new
research using fossil skeletons.
This volume deals with the pressing issue of uncertainty in
archaeological modeling. Detecting where and when uncertainty is
introduced to the modeling process is critical, as are strategies
for minimizing, reconciling, or accommodating such uncertainty.
Included chapters provide unique perspectives on uncertainty in
archaeological modeling, ranging in both theoretical and
methodological orientation. The strengths and weaknesses of various
identification and mitigation techniques are discussed, in
particular sensitivity analysis. The chapters demonstrate that for
archaeological modeling purposes, there is no quick fix for
uncertainty; indeed, each archaeological model requires intensive
consideration of uncertainty and specific applications for
calibration and validation. As very few such techniques have been
problematized in a systematic manner or published in the
archaeological literature, this volume aims to provide guidance and
direction to other modelers in the field by distilling some basic
principles for model testing derived from insight gathered in the
case studies presented. Additionally, model applications and their
attendant uncertainties are presented from distinct spatio-temporal
contexts and will appeal to a broad range of archaeological
modelers. This volume will also be of interest to non-modeling
archaeologists, as consideration of uncertainty when interpreting
the archaeological record is also a vital concern for the
development of non-formal (or implicit) models of human behavior in
the past.
Destruction of temples and their transformation into churches are
central symbols of late antique change in religious environment,
socio-political system, and public perception. Contemporaries were
aware of these events' far-reaching symbolic significance and of
their immediate impact as demonstrations of political power and
religious conviction. Joined in any "temple-destruction" are the
meaning of the monument, actions taken, and subsequent literary
discourse. Paradigms of perception, specific interests, and forms
of expression of quite various protagonists clashed.
Archaeologists, historians, and historians of religion illuminate
"temple-destruction" from different perspectives, analysing local
configurations within larger contexts, both regional and imperial,
in order to find an appropriate larger perspective on this
phenomenon within the late antique movement "from temple to
church".
This is the first full biography of James Rendel Harris
(1852-1941), Bible and patristic scholar, manuscript collector,
Quaker theologian, devotional writer, traveller, folklorist, and
relief worker. Drawing on published and unpublished sources
gathered in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, many of
which were previously unknown, Alessandro Falcetta tells the story
of Harris's life and works set against the background of the
cultural and political life of contemporary Britain. Falcetta
traces the development of Harris's career from Cambridge to
Birmingham, the story of his seven journeys to the Middle East, and
of his many campaigns, from religious freedom to conscientious
objection. The book focuses upon Harris's innovative contributions
in the field of textual and literary criticism, his acquisitions of
hundreds of manuscripts from the Middle East, his discoveries of
early Christian works - in particular the Odes of Solomon - his
Quaker beliefs and his studies in the cult of twins. His enormous
output and extensive correspondence reveal an indefatigable genius
in close contact with the most famous scholars of his time, from
Hort to Harnack, Nestle, the 'Sisters of Sinai', and Frazer.
This archaeological report provides a comprehensive study of the
excavations carried out at Amheida House B2 in Egypt's Dakhleh
Oasis between 2005 and 2007, followed by three study seasons
between 2008 and 2010. The excavations at Amheida in Egypt's
western desert, begun in 2001 under the aegis of Columbia
University and sponsored by NYU since 2008, are investigating all
aspects of social life and material culture at the administrative
center of ancient Trimithis. The excavations so far have focused on
three areas of this very large site: a centrally located
upper-class fourth-century AD house with wall paintings, an
adjoining school, and underlying remains of a Roman bath complex; a
more modest house of the third century; and the temple hill, with
remains of the Temple of Thoth built in the first century AD and of
earlier structures. Architectural conservation has protected and
partly restored two standing funerary monuments, a mud-brick
pyramid and a tower tomb, both of the Roman period. This volume
presents and discusses the architecture, artifacts and ecofacts
recovered from B2 in a holistic manner, which has rarely before
been attempted in a full report on the excavation of a
Romano-Egyptian house. The primary aim of this volume is to combine
an architectural and material-based study with an explicitly
contextual and theoretical analysis. In so doing, it develops a
methodology and presents a case study of how the rich material
remains of Romano-Egyptian houses may be used to investigate the
relationship between domestic remains and social identity.
Alfred Edersheim's well-researched account of everyday Jewish life
at the time the New Testament Gospels took place remains one of the
best texts on the subject ever authored. This edition includes the
author's appendixes. The reader is taken back to Israel and the
surrounding areas more than 2,000 years ago. How the society would
appear to the casual traveler, what customs the people practiced,
how everyday life proceeded in the Jewish homestead and towns, and
how women were treated are topics which Edersheim examines. The
author goes into much detail, presenting an evocative picture of a
sophisticated ancient society. We also hear of the political
landscape of the era, particularly concerning the Pharisees - the
leading social and political movement of the time - and its
interactions with rival movements such as the Sadducees and
Essenes. Religious rites, the layout and ceremonies of ancient
Jewish synagogues and temples, and the creation of the ancient
religious Talmudic literature, are related.
Managing Heritage in Africa provides a wide-ranging, up-to-date synthesis of heritage management practice in Africa, covering a broad spectrum of heritage issues such as archaeology, living traditions, sacred sites, heritage of pain (slavery), international conventions cultural landscapes, heritage in conflict areas and heritage versus development. Dealing with both intangible and tangible heritage, Managing Heritage in Africa gives an informative insight into some of the major issues and approaches to contemporary heritage management in Africa and situates the challenges facing heritage practitioners.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Figures and Table
Contributors
Series General Co-Editors’ Foreword
1. Approaches and trends in African heritage management and conservation.Shadreck Chirikure, Webber Ndoro & Janette Deacon
2. The challenges of the preservation of archaeological heritage in West Africa.Adebayo Folorunso
3. The African response to the concept and implementation of the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting Illicit Import and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Dawson Munjeri
4. Reorienting heritage management in southern Africa: lessons from traditional custodianship of rock art sites in central Mozambique. Albino Jopela
5. Traditional methods of conservation: a case study of Bafut. Raymond Neba’ane Asombang
6. Sites of Pain and Shame as heritage discourses: Case of Shimoni Slave caves in south-eastern KenyaHerman Kiriama
7. The evolution of cultural and natural management systems with the waterlogged villages in BeninHermione Nonhome Koudakossi Boko
8. Managing Sacred Sites as Heritage in West Africa Victoria Ndidi Osuagwu
9. The sacred groves in the Bight of Benin: a misunderstood heritage.Souayibou Varissou
10. Investigating incorporation of community cultural values in archaeological impact assessment processes: case studies from Botswana.Nonofho Ndobochani & Gilbert Pwiti
11. Heritage management at cross-roads: the role of contract archaeology in South Africa Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu
12. Dammed if you do, damned if you don't: archaeology and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project Peter Mitchell
13. Managing the built environment and the urban landscape in South AfricaStephen Townsend
14. Heritage and energy development issues, a controversial compl
Questions of public and private morality, values and choices have
become important areas of collective discussion. A key feature of
this book is that it takes an ethnographic rather than a
philosophical or speculative approach to moral debates. This study
examines the contemporary explosion of ethical discourse in the
public domain and the growing importance of moral rhetoric as an
aspect of social relations.
This comprehensive text is intended for the junior-senior level
course in North American Archaeology. Written by accomplished
scholar Dean Snow, this new text approaches native North America
from the perspective of evolutionary ecology. Succinct, streamlined
chapters present an extensive groundwork for supplementary
material, or serve as a core text.The narrative covers all of
Mesoamerica, and explicates the links between the part of North
America covered by the United States and Canada and the portions
covered by Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the Greater Antilles.
Additionally, book is extensively illustrated with the author's own
research and findings.
Profusely illustrated with full color and black and white maps,
photographs, illustrations. Center of Miliatry history publication
CMH 30-22. Issued with a laminated hard cover that has an
illustration of soldiers standing in front of American flags.
Presents American military history from 1917 to the present.
Includes expanded sections to include an analysis of the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.
Modern human origins and the fate of the Neanderthals are
arguably the most compelling and contentious arenas in
paleoanthropology. The much-discussed split between advocates of a
single, early emergence of anatomically modern humans in
sub-Saharan Africa and supporters of various regional continuity
positions is only part of the picture. Equally if not more
important are questions surrounding the origins of modern behavior,
and the relationships between anatomical and behavioral changes
that occurred during the past 200,000 years. Although modern humans
as a species may be defined in terms of their skeletal anatomy, it
is their behavior, and the social and cognitive structures that
support that behavior, which most clearly distinguish Homo sapiens
from earlier forms of humans.
This book assembles researchers working in Eurasia and Africa to
discuss the archaeological record of the Middle Paleolithic and the
Middle Stone Age. This is a time period when Homo sapiens last
shared the world with other species, and during which patterns of
behavior characteristic of modern humans developed and coalesced.
Contributions to this volume query and challenge some current
notions about the tempo and mode of cultural evolution, and about
the processes that underlie the emergence of modern behavior. The
papers focus on several fundamental questions. Do typical elements
of "modern human behavior" appear suddenly, or are there earlier
archaeological precursors of them? Are the archaeological records
of the Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age unchanging and
monotonous, or are there detectable evolutionary trends within
these periods? Coming to diverse conclusions, the papers in this
volume open up new avenues to thinking about this crucial interval
in human evolutionary history.
Americanist Culture History reprints thirty-nine classic works of
Americanist archaeological literature published between 1907 and
1971. The articles, in which the key concepts and analytical
techniques of culture history were first defined and discussed, are
reprinted, with original pagination and references, to enhance the
use of this collection as a research and teaching resource. The
editors also include an introduction that summarizes the rise and
fall of the culture history paradigm, making this volume an
excellent introduction to the field's primary literature.
This book argues that the Indo-Europeanizing of Europe essentially
began shortly before 1600 BC, when lands rich in natural resources
were taken over by military forces from the Eurasian steppe and
from southern Caucasia. First were the copper and silver mines
(along with good harbors) in Greece, and the copper and gold mines
of the Carpathian basin. By ca. 1500 BC other military men had
taken over the amber coasts of Scandinavia and the metalworking
district of the southern Alps. These military takeovers offer the
most likely explanations for the origins of the Greek, Keltic,
Germanic and Italic subgroups of the Indo-European language family.
Battlefield warfare and militarism, Robert Drews contends, were
novelties ca. 1600 BC and were a consequence of the military
employment of chariots. Current opinion is that militarism and
battlefield warfare are as old as formal states, going back before
3000 BC. Another current opinion is that the Indo-Europeanizing of
Europe happened long before 1600 BC. The "Kurgan theory" of Marija
Gimbutas and David Anthony dates it from late in the fifth to early
in the third millennium BC and explains it as the result of
horse-riding conquerors or raiders coming to Europe from the
steppe. Colin Renfrew's Archaeology and Language dates the
Indo-Europeanizing of Europe to the seventh and sixth millennia BC,
and explains it as a consequence of the spread of agriculture in a
"wave of advance" from Anatolia through Europe. Pairing linguistic
with archaeological evidence Drews concludes that in Greece and
Italy, at least, no Indo-European language could have arrived
before the second millennium BC.
Research on early medieval Cyprus has focused on the late antique
"golden age" (late fourth/early fifth to seventh century) and the
so-called Byzantine "Reconquista" (post-AD 965) while overlooking
the intervening period. This phase was characterized, supposedly,
by the division of the political sovereignty between the Umayyads
and the Byzantines, bringing about the social and demographic
dislocation of the population of the island. This book proposes a
different story of continuities and slow transformations in the
fate of Cyprus between the late sixth and the early ninth
centuries. Analysis of new archaeological evidence shows signs of a
continuing link to Constantinople. Moreover, together with a
reassessment of the literary evidence, archaeology and material
culture help us to reappraise the impact of Arab naval raids and
contextualize the confrontational episodes throughout the ebb and
flow of Eastern Mediterranean history: the political influence of
the Caliphate looked stronger in the second half of the seventh
century, the administrative and ecclesiastical influence of the
Byzantine empire was held sway from the beginning of the eighth to
the twelfth century. Whereas the island retained sound commercial
ties with the Umayyad Levant in the seventh and eighth centuries,
at the same time politically and economically it remained part of
the Byzantine sphere. This belies the idea of Cyprus as an
independent province only loosely tied to Constantinople and allows
us to draw a different picture of the cultural identities,
political practices and hierarchy of wealth and power in Cyprus
during the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages.
Humans at the End of the Ice Age chronicles and explores the
significance of the variety of cultural responses to the global
environmental changes at the last glacial-interglacial boundary.
Contributions address the nature and consequences of the global
climate changes accompanying the end of the Pleistocene
epoch-detailing the nature, speed, and magnitude of the human
adaptations that culminated in the development of food production
in many parts of the world. The text is aided by vital maps,
chronological tables, and charts.
This is the first academic book which concentrates on the
discoveries of medieval date (6th- 13th centuries) from the
territory of modern Poland. The book covers the principal research
questions, such as the origins of the Slavs, societies of the
proto-state period and the origins of the Polish state. The volume
also includes a discussion of the most interesting, sometimes
controversial, archaeological discoveries or issues. These include
pagan Slavonic holy places, the monumental mounds of Little Poland,
the first traces of medieval writing, exceptional strongholds, the
origins of Polish towns, rural landscapes, archaeology of the
oldest monastic complexes, and the question of locals and aliens
viewed through archaeological evidence and many other topics. The
book is meant mainly for students, archaeologists and historians.
It can also be useful for a wider audience interested in the
history and archaeology of central Europe. In November 2006 "The
Archaeology of Early Medieval Poland" received the KLIO Award from
the Association of Polish History Publishers.
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