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Books > Humanities > Archaeology
Digital history is commonly argued to be positioned between the
traditionally historical and the computational or digital. By
studying digital history collaborations and the establishment of
the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, Kemman
examines how digital history will impact historical scholarship.
His analysis shows that digital history does not occupy a singular
position between the digital and the historical. Instead,
historians continuously move across this dimension, choosing or
finding themselves in different positions as they construct
different trading zones through cross-disciplinary engagement,
negotiation of research goals and individual interests.
The Rosewood Massacre investigates the 1923 massacre that
devastated the predominantly African American community of
Rosewood, Florida. The town was burned to the ground by neighboring
whites, and its citizens fled for their lives. None of the
perpetrators were convicted. Very little documentation of the event
and the ensuing court hearings survives today. Edward
Gonzalez-Tennant uses archaeology to uncover important elements of
the forgotten history of Rosewood. He draws on cutting-edge GIS
mapping, geospatial technology, census data, artifacts from
excavations at the site, and archaeological theory to explore the
local circumstances and broader sociopolitical power structures
that led to the massacre. He shows how the event was a microcosm of
the oppression and terror suffered by people of African heritage in
the United States, and he connects these historic forms of racial
violence to present-day social and racial inequality.
This exciting book brings the often-overlooked southern Maya region
of Guatemala into the spotlight by closely examining the ""lost
city"" of Chocola. Jonathan Kaplan and Federico Paredes Umana prove
that Chocola was a major Maya polity and reveal exactly why it was
so influential. In their fieldwork at the site, Kaplan and Paredes
Umana discovered an extraordinarily sophisticated underground
water-control system. They also discovered cacao residues in
ceramic vessels. Based on these and other findings, the authors
believe that cacao was consumed and grown intensively at Chocola
and that the city was the center of a large cacao trade. They
contend that the city's wealth and power were built on its abundant
supply of water and its command of cacao, which was significant not
just to cuisine and trade but also to Maya ideology and cosmology.
Moreover, Kaplan and Paredes Umana detail the ancient city's
ceramics and add over thirty stone sculptures to the site's
inventory. Because the southern Maya region was likely the origin
of Maya hieroglyphic writing and the Long Count calendar, scholars
have long suspected the area to be important. This pioneering field
research at Chocola helps explain how and why the region played a
leading role in the rise of the Maya civilization.
Since the days of conquistador Hernan Cortes, rumours have
circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden deep in the
Honduran interior. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled
there to escape the Spanish invaders, and warn the legendary city
is cursed: to enter it is a death sentence. They call it the Lost
City of the Monkey God. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore
Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artefacts and
an electrifying story of having found the City - but then committed
suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century
later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists
on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a
single-engine plane carrying a highly advanced, classified
technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest
canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that
flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis,
tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but a lost
civilization. To confirm the discovery, Preston and the team
battled torrential rains, quickmud, plagues of insects, jaguars,
and deadly snakes. They emerged from the jungle with proof of the
legend... and the curse. They had contracted a horrifying,
incurable and sometimes lethal disease. Suspenseful and shocking,
filled with history, adventure and dramatic twists of fortune, The
Lost City of the Monkey God is the absolutely true, eyewitness
account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first
century.
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.
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