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Books > Humanities > Archaeology
This book is an introduction to a new branch of archaeology that
scrutinises landscapes to find evidence of past human activity.
Such evidence can be hard to detect at ground-level, but may be
visible in remote sensing (RS) imagery from aerial platforms and
satellites. Drawing on examples from around the world as well as
from her own research work on archaeological sites in India
(including Nalanda, Agra, Srirangapatna, Talakadu, and
Mahabalipuram), the author presents a systematic process for
integrating this information with historical spatial records such
as old maps, paintings, and field surveys using Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) to gain new insights into our past.
Further, the book highlights several instances where these insights
are actionable -- they have been used to identify, understand,
conserve, and protect the fragile remnants of our past. This book
will be of particular interest not only to researchers in
archaeology, history, art history, and allied fields, but to
governmental and non-governmental professionals working in cultural
heritage protection and conservation.
Building Colonialism draws together the relationship between
archaeology and history in East Africa using techniques of
artefact, building, spatial and historical analyses to highlight
the existence of, and accordingly the need to conserve, the urban
centres of Africa's more recent past. The study does this by
exploring the physical remains of European activity and the way
that the construction of harbour towns directly reflects the
colonial mission of European powers in the nineteenth century in
Tanzania and Kenya. Based on fieldwork which recorded and analysed
the buildings and monuments within these towns it compares the
European creations to earlier Swahili urban design and explores the
way European commercial trade systems came to dominate East Africa.
Based on the kind of Urban Landscape Analyses carried out in the UK
and Ireland, Building Colonialism looks at the social and spatial
implications of the towns on the Indian Ocean coast which contain
centres of derelict and unused buildings dating from East Africa's
nineteenth-century colonial era. The book begins by concentrating
upon towns in Tanzania and Kenya which were the key entry points
into Africa for the nineteenth-century colonial regimes and
compares these to later French and Italian colonies and discusses
contemporary approaches to the conservation of colonial built
heritage and the difficulties faced in ensuring valid participatory
protection of the urban heritage resource.
While household archaeologists view the home as a social unit, few
move their investigations ""beyond the walls"" when contextualizing
a household in its community. Even exterior aspects of a
dwelling-its plant life, yard spaces, and trash heaps-uncover
issues of domination and resistance, gender relations, and the
effects of colonialism. This innovative volume examines historical
homes and their wider landscapes to more fully address social
issues of the past. The contributors, leading archaeologists using
various interpretive frameworks, analyze households across time
periods and diverse cultures in North America. Including case
studies of James Madison's Montpelier, George Washington's Ferry
Farm, Chinese immigrants in a Nevada mining town, Hawaiian ranching
communities, and Southern plantations, Beyond the Walls offers a
new avenue for archaeological study of domestic sites.
Historical and archaeological records show that racism and white
supremacy defined the social fabric of the northeastern states as
much as they did the Deep South. This collection of essays looks at
both new sites and well-known areas to explore race, resistance,
and supremacy in the region. With essays covering farm communities
and cities from the early seventeenth century to the late
nineteenth century, the contributors examine the marginalization of
minorities and use the materialculture to illustrate the
significance of race in understanding daily life. Drawing on
historical resources and critical race theory, they highlight the
context of race at these sites, noting the different experiences of
various groups, such as African American and Native American
communities. This cutting-edge research turns with new focus to the
dynamics of race and racism in early American life and demonstrates
the coming of age of racialization studies.
This book was first published in 2004. There is emerging interest
amongst researchers from various subject areas in understanding the
interplay of earthquake and volcanic occurrences, archaeology and
history. This discipline has become known as archeoseismology.
Ancient earthquakes often leave their mark in the myths, legends,
and literary accounts of ancient peoples, the stratigraphy of their
historical sites, and the structural integrity of their
constructions. Such information leads to a better understanding of
the irregularities in the time-space patterns of earthquake and
volcanic occurrences and whether they could have been a factor
contributing to some of the enigmatic catastrophes in ancient
times. This book focuses on the historical earthquakes of North and
South America, and describes the effects those earthquakes have had
with illustrated examples of recent structural damage at
archaeological sites. It is written at a level that will appeal to
students and researchers in the fields of earth science,
archaeology, and history.
The sequel to the acclaimed Made in Niugini, which explored in
unparalleled depth the material world of the Wola comprising
moveable artefacts, Built in Niugini continues Paul Sillitoe's
project in exemplary fashion, documenting the built environment,
architecture and construction techniques in a tour de force of
ethnography. But this is more than a book about building houses.
Sillitoe also shows how material constructions can serve to further
our understandings of intellectual constructions. Allowing his
ethnography to take the lead, and paying close attention to the
role of tacit understandings and know-how in both skilled work and
everyday dwelling, his close experiential analyses inform a
phenomenologically inflected discussion of profound philosophical
questions - such as what can we know of being-in-the-world - from
startlingly different cultural directions. The book also forms part
of a long-term project to understand a radically different
'economy', which is set in an acephalous order that extends
individual freedom and equality in a manner difficult to imagine
from the perspective of a nation-state - an intriguing way of
being-in-the-world that is entwined with tacit aspects of knowing
via personal and emotional experience. This brings us back to the
explanatory power of a focus on technology, which Sillitoe argues
for in the context of 'materiality' approaches that feature
prominently in current debates about the sociology of knowledge.
Archaeology has long been to the fore in considering technology and
buildings, along with vernacular architecture, and Sillitoe
contributes to a much-needed dialogue between anthropology and
these disciplines, assessing the potential and obstacles for a
fruitful rapprochement. Built in Niugini represents the culmination
of Sillitoe's luminous scholarship as an anthropologist who
dialogues fluidly with the literature and ideas of numerous
disciplines. The arguments throughout engage with key concepts and
theories from anthropology, archaeology, architecture, material
culture studies, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy.
The result is a significant work that contributes to not only our
regional knowledge of the New Guinea Highlands but also to studies
of tacit knowledge and the anthropology of architecture and
building practices. Trevor Marchand, Emeritus Professor of Social
Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies
In this book, Li Min proposes a new paradigm for the foundation and
emergence of the classical tradition in early China, from the late
Neolithic through the Zhou period. Using a wide range of historical
and archaeological data, he explains the development of ritual
authority and particular concepts of kingship over time in relation
to social memory. His volume weaves together the major benchmarks
in the emergence of the classical tradition, particularly how
legacies of prehistoric interregional interactions, state
formation, urban florescence and collapse during the late third and
the second millenniums BCE laid the critical foundation for the
Sandai notion of history among Zhou elite. Moreover, the
literary-historical accounts of the legendary Xia Dynasty in early
China reveal a cultural construction involving social memories of
the past and subsequent political elaborations in various phases of
history. This volume enables a new understanding on the long-term
processes that enabled a classical civilization in China to take
shape.
This volume expands understandings of crafting practices, which in
the past was the major relational interaction between the social
agency of materials, technology, and people, in co-creating an
emergent ever-changing world. The chapters discuss different ways
that crafting in the present is useful in understanding crafting
experiences and methods in the past, including experiments to
reproduce ancient excavated objects, historical accounts of
crafting methods and experiences, craft revivals, and teaching
historical crafts at museums and schools. Crafting in the World is
unique in the diversity of its theoretical and multidisciplinary
approaches to researching crafting, not just as a set of techniques
for producing functional objects, but as social practices and
technical choices embodying cultural ideas, knowledge, and multiple
interwoven social networks. Crafting expresses and constitutes
mental schemas, identities, ideologies, and cultures. The multiple
meanings and significances of crafting are explored from a great
variety of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology,
archaeology, sociology, education, psychology, women's studies, and
ethnic studies. This book provides a deep temporal range and a
global geographical scope, with case studies ranging from Europe,
Africa, and Asia to the Americas and a global internet website for
selling home crafted items.
This book explores ancient efforts to explain the scientific,
philosophical, and spiritual aspects of water. From the ancient
point of view, we investigate many questions including: How does
water help shape the world? What is the nature of the ocean? What
causes watery weather, including superstorms and snow? How does
water affect health, as a vector of disease or of healing? What is
the nature of deep-sea-creatures (including sea monsters)? What
spiritual forces can protect those who must travel on water? This
first complete study of water in the ancient imagination makes a
major contribution to classics, geography, hydrology and the
history of science alike. Water is an essential resource that
affects every aspect of human life, and its metamorphic properties
gave license to the ancient imagination to perceive watery
phenomena as the product of visible and invisible forces. As such,
it was a source of great curiosity for the Greeks and Romans who
sought to control the natural world by understanding it, and who,
despite technological limitations, asked interesting questions
about the origins and characteristics of water and its influences
on land, weather, and living creatures, both real and imagined.
This book outlines the history of man in England and Wales from
earliest times to the Norman Conquest and explains the basic
terminology of archaeology, the methods used by archaeologists and
the ways in which one can take part in excavations.
The race of the Ancient Egyptians has long been a subject of
controversy and debate. Ancient Egyptians have constantly been
shown to be everything but black African, even though Egypt is in
Africa and black people originate from Africa. Some have dared to
challenge this Eurocentric view of a non-black Egypt and put black
people at the centre. But now Segun Magbagbeola aims to leave no
stone unturned and prove once and for all that Black Africans
founded and drove one of the greatest civilisations in Earth's
history. This groundbreaking work explains some of the mysteries of
Ancient Egypt, such as the secrets of the pyramids, their
connection to the stars and their descendants over the world. It
includes genetic research and a magnitude of sources especially
Nuwaupu, a culture based on Egyptology and factual confirmation,
practiced by black Africans worldwide. Now is the time for us to
dispel all uncertainties and claim our rightful throne as Black
Egyptians.
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