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Books > Humanities > Archaeology
How did small-scale societies in the past experience and respond to
sea-level rise? What happened when their dwellings, hunting grounds
and ancestral lands were lost under an advancing tide? This book
asks these questions in relation to the hunter-gatherer inhabitants
of a lost prehistoric land; a land that became entirely inundated
and now lies beneath the North Sea. It seeks to understand how
these people viewed and responded to their changing environment,
suggesting that people were not struggling against nature, but
simply getting on with life - with all its trials and hardships,
satisfactions and pleasures, and with a multitude of choices
available. At the same time, this loss of land - the loss of places
and familiar locales where myths were created and identities formed
- would have profoundly affected people's sense of being. This book
moves beyond the static approach normally applied to environmental
change in the past to capture its nuances. Through this, a richer
and more complex story of past sea-level rise develops; a story
that may just have resonance for us today.
Many modern cats are descendants of the cats of ancient Egypt.
These beautiful creatures thus represent a living link between the
modern world and the ancient Egyptian civilization. Cats in Egypt
were probably domesticated by around 4,000 BC, from wild ancestors.
Over the following centuries, they became popular household pets;
they are regularly shown in tomb paintings of family life. They
were also seen as manifestations of the goddess Bastet, and Dr
Malek draws on a vast range of artistic and written sources to show
how they became one of the most widely-esteemed and revered animals
in Egypt. In the Late Period, enormous numbers of mummified cats
were buried with honours, and bronze statuettes of cats were
dedicated to temples during religious festivals. Dr Malek ends by
describing how cats fared in Egypt in the post-pharaonic period.
Cats remain popular in Egypt today; the contract between cats and
humans, entered into in Egyptian villages thousands of years ago,
is still very much in action.
'Western-Pontic Culture Ambience and Pattern: In Memory of Eugen
Comsa' is dedicated to the memory of Eugen Comsa, an archaeologist
whose work created the foundation of the Northern Balkan prehistory
and was essential for the contemporary view of the prehistory of
the North-western Pontic region. This edited volume brings together
researchers in the field of Circumpontic archaeology from the
Neolithic to the Iron Age period. The content of the volume is
offered to students and scholars who seek a deeper understanding of
the prehistory of the Western Pontic region, in particular the
Balkans in their Eurasian context and more broadly to enhance the
scholarly collections of academic, educational, public and private
libraries throughout the world.
How do archaeologists think? How do they use the scattered and
often-fragmentary remains from the past-both historical and
excavated-to create meaningful, sensible interpretations of human
history? In Archaeological Thinking, Charles E. Orser Jr., provides
a commonsense guide to applying critical thinking skills to
archaeological questions and evidence. Rather than critiquing and
debunking specific cases of pseudo-archaeology or concentrating on
archaeological theory, Orser considers the basics of scientific
thinking, the use of logic and analogy, the meaning and context of
facts, and the evaluation of source materials. He explains,
concisely and accessibly, how archaeologists use these principles
to create pictures of the past and teaches students to develop the
skills needed to make equally reasoned interpretations.
Multiple Hopewellian monumental earthwork sites displaying timber
features, mortuary deposits, and unique artifacts are found widely
distributed across the North American Eastern Woodlands, from the
lower Mississippi Valley north to the Great Lakes. These sites,
dating from 200 b.c. to a.d. 500, almost define the Middle Woodland
period of the Eastern Woodlands. Joseph Caldwell treated these
sites as defining what he termed the ""Hopewell Interaction
Sphere,"" which he conceptualized as mediating a set of interacting
mortuary-funerary cults linking many different local ethnic
communities. In this new book, A. Martin Byers refines Caldwell's
work, coining the term ""Hopewell Ceremonial Sphere"" to more
precisely characterize this transregional sphere as manifesting
multiple autonomous cult sodalities of local communities affiliated
into escalating levels of autonomous cult sodality heterarchies. It
is these cult sodality heterarchies, regionally and transregionally
interacting - and not their autonomous communities to which the
sodalities also belonged - that were responsible for the
Hopewellian assemblage; and the heterarchies took themselves to be
performing, not funerary, but world-renewal ritual ceremonialism
mediated by the deceased of their many autonomous Middle Woodland
communities. Paired with the cult sodality heterarchy model, Byers
proposes and develops the complementary heterarchical community
model. This model postulates a type of community that made the
formation of the cult sodality heterarchy possible. But Byers
insists it was the sodality heterarchies and not the complementary
heterarchical communities that generated the Hopewellian ceremonial
sphere. Detailed interpretations and explanations of Hopewellian
sites and their contents in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Georgia
empirically anchor his claims. A singular work of unprecedented
scope, Reclaiming the Hopewellian Ceremonial Sphere will encourage
archaeologists to re-examine their interpretations.
Analysis of the scroll fragments of the Qumran Aramaic scrolls has
been plentiful to date. Their shared characteristics of being
written in Aramaic, the common language of the region, not focused
on the Qumran Community, and dating from the 3rd century BCE to the
1st century CE have enabled the creation of a shared identity,
distinguishing them from other fragments found in the same place at
the same time. This classification, however, could yet be too
simplistic as here, for the first time, John Starr applies
sophisticated statistical analyses to newly available electronic
versions of these fragments. In so doing, Starr presents a
potential new classification which comprises six different text
types which bear distinctive textual features, and thus is able to
narrow down the classification both temporally and geographically.
Starr's re-visited classification presents fresh insights into the
Aramaic texts at Qumran, with important implications for our
understanding of the many strands that made up Judaism in the
period leading to the writing of the New Testament.
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