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Books > Humanities > Archaeology
This volume is the first in a planned series of reports on the
investigations of the Lahav Research Project (LRP) at Tell Halif,
located near Kibbutz Lahav in southern Israel. The LRP has focused
widely on stratigraphic, environmental, and ethnographic problems
related to the history of settlement at Tell Halif and in its
immediate surroundings, from prehistoric through modern times. It
is fitting that this LRP series begins by focusing on remains from
Site 101, which was the first location excavated by the team in
1973. This initial effort involved investigation of a warren of
shallow caves that had been exposed by efforts to widen the road
into the kibbutz. In this volume, J. P. Dessel reports on the
excavation undertaken at Site 101 during Phase II and is also
supplemented by his later research. The excavation itself was
guided throughout by Dessel's determination to require the total
retrieval of all ceramic remains. It was his rigorous
follow-through on all details involved in the analysis of materials
that produced the pioneering results herein presented. Readers will
find the book important for the archaeology and history of the
southern Levant in the 4th millennium B.C.E. as well as for
connections between the Levant and surrounding regions in that era.
The Mediterranean Context of Early Greek History reveals the role
of the complex interaction of Mediterranean seafaring and maritime
connections in the development of the ancient Greek city-states. *
Offers fascinating insights into the origins of urbanization in the
ancient Mediterranean, including the Greek city-state * Based on
the most recent research on the ancient Mediterranean * Features a
novel approach to theories of civilization change - foregoing the
traditional isolationists model of development in favor of a
maritime based network * Argues for cultural interactions set in
motion by exchange and trade by sea
This volume is the final report of excavations carried out in the
Hebron hills and the Negev desert in 1967-1980 on behalf of Hebrew
Union College in Jerusalem and the University of Arizona. They were
pioneering, multidisciplinary projects that helped to illuminate
what was then a poorly known "Dark Age" in the cultural history of
ancient Palestine, a nonurban interlude of pastoral nomadic
movements over several centuries (ca. 2400-2000 B.C.E.) between the
great urban civilizations of the early Bronze Ages. Eighteen
appendixes by specialists in many disciplines analyze all aspects
of material culture and human and animal remains. A history of
previous scholarship and a synthesis of the EB IV period in both
Israel and Jordan conclude the volume, which will be a landmark
study for many years.
In this ground-breaking work on the Ottoman town of Manastir
(Bitola), Robert Mihajlovski, provides a detailed account of the
development of Islamic, Christian and Sephardic religious
architecture and culture as it manifested in the town and
precincts. Originally a town on the edge of the Via Egnatia, this
small provincial town gradually developed into a significant
administrative, military, religious, cultural and intellectual
centre for the Balkans; a vibrant place, nurturing progressive
multi-cultural and multi-confessional values with considerable
influence on the formation of modern Balkan identities. The present
work is the culmination of thirty years of research using primary
source material from archives and chronicles and the monuments
themselves for the purpose of both preserving and extending the
boundaries of current knowledge. It offers a comprehensive
biography of a great cultural knot in the Balkans and offers a rich
source for further use by scholars, students and non-technical
readership alike.
Soils, invaluable indicators of the nature and history of the
physical and human landscape, have strongly influenced the cultural
record left to archaeologists. Not only are they primary reservoirs
for artifacts, they often encase entire sites. And soil-forming
processes in themselves are an important component of site
formation, influencing which artifacts, features, and environmental
indicators (floral, faunal, and geological) will be destroyed and
to what extent and which will be preserved and how well. In this
book, Holliday will address each of these issues in terms of
fundamentals as well as in field case histories from all over the
world. The focus will be on principles of soil geomorphology, soil
stratigraphy, and soil chemistry and their applications in
archaeological research.
For a full month in the autumn of 1812 the 2,000-strong garrison of
the fortress the French had constructed to overawe the city of
Burgos defied the Duke of Wellington. In this work a leading
historian of the Peninsular teams up with a leading conflict
archaeologist to examine the reasons for Wellington's failure.
As scholars have by now long contended, global neoliberalism and
the violence associated with state restructuring provide key
frameworks for understanding flows of people across national
boundaries and, eventually, into the treacherous terrains of the
United States borderlands. The proposed volume builds on this
tradition of situating migration and migrant death within broad,
systems-level frameworks of analysis, but contends that there is
another, perhaps somewhat less tidy, but no less important
sociopolitical story to be told here. Through examination of how
forensic scientists define, navigate, and enact their work at the
frontiers of US policy and economics, this book joins a robust body
of literature dedicated to bridging social theory with
bioarchaeological applications to modern day problems. This volume
is based on deeply and critically reflective analyses, submitted by
individual scholars, wherein they navigate and position themselves
as social actors embedded within and, perhaps partially constituted
by, relations of power, cultural ideologies, and the social
structures characterizing this moment in history. Each contribution
addresses a different variation on themes of power relations,
production of knowledge, and reflexivity in practice. In sum,
however, the chapters of this book trace relationships between
institutions, entities, and individuals comprising the landscapes
of migrant death and repatriation and considers their articulation
with sociopolitical dynamics of the neoliberal state.
On a chilly January morning in 1872, a special visitor arrived
by train in North Platte, Nebraska. Grand Duke Alexis of Russia had
already seen the cities and sights of the East--New York,
Washington, and Niagara Falls--and now the young nobleman was about
to enjoy a western adventure: a grand buffalo hunt. His host would
be General Philip Sheridan, and the excursion would include several
of the West's most iconic characters: George Armstrong Custer,
Buffalo Bill Cody, and Spotted Tail of the Brule Sioux.
The Royal Buffalo Hunt, as this event is now called, has become
a staple of western lore. Yet incorrect information and
misconceptions about the excursion have prevented a clear
understanding of what really took place. In this fascinating book,
Douglas D. Scott, Peter Bleed, and Stephen Damm combine
archaeological and historical research to offer an expansive and
accurate portrayal of this singular diplomatic event.
The authors focus their investigation on the Red Willow Creek
encampment site, now named Camp Alexis, the party's only stopping
place along the hunt trail that can be located with certainty. In
addition to physical artifacts, the authors examine a plethora of
primary accounts--such as railroad timetables, invitations to balls
and dinners, even sheet music commemorating the visit--to
supplement the archaeological evidence. They also reference
documents from the Russian State Archives previously unavailable to
researchers, as well as recently discovered photographs that show
the layout and organization of the camp. Weaving all these elements
together, their account constitutes a valuable product of the
interdisciplinary approach known as microhistory.
While books on archaeological and anthropological ethics have
proliferated in recent years, few attempt to move beyond a
conventional discourse on ethics to consider how a discussion of
the social and political implications of archaeological practice
might be conceptualized differently. The conceptual ideas about
ethics posited in this volume make it of interest to readers
outside of the discipline; in fact, to anyone interested in
contemporary debates around the possibilities and limitations of a
discourse on ethics. The authors in this volume set out to do three
things. The first is to track the historical development of a
discussion around ethics, in tandem with the development and
"disciplining" of archaeology. The second is to examine the
meanings, consequences and efficacies of a discourse on ethics in
contemporary worlds of practice in archaeology. The third is to
push beyond the language of ethics to consider other ways of
framing a set of concerns around rights, accountabilities and
meanings in relation to practitioners, descendent and affected
communities, sites, material cultures, the ancestors and so on.
The 1992 publication of Pottery Function brought together the
ethnographic study of the Kalinga and developed a method and theory
for how pottery was actually used. Since then, there have been
considerable advances in understanding how pottery was actually
used, particularly in the area of residue analysis, abrasion, and
sooting/carbonization. At the 20th anniversary of the book, it is
time to assess what has been done and learned. One of the concerns
of those working in pottery analysis is that they are unsure how to
"do" use-alteration analysis on their collection. Another common
concern is understanding intended pottery function-the connections
between technical choices and function. This book is designed to
answer these questions using case studies from the author and his
colleagues for applying use-alteration analysis to infer actual
pottery function. The focus of Understanding Pottery Function is on
how practicing archaeologists can infer function from their ceramic
collection.
In the third millennium B.C.E., the Oman Peninsula was the site of
an important kingdom known in Akkadian texts as "Magan," which
traded extensively with the Indus Civilization, southern Iran, the
Persian Gulf states, and southern Mesopotamia. Excavations have
been carried out in this region since the 1970s, although the
majority of studies have focused on mortuary monuments at the
expense of settlement archaeology. While domestic structures of the
Bronze Age have been found and are the focus of current research at
Bat, most settlements dating from the third millennium B.C.E. in
Oman and the U.A.E. are defined by the presence of large, circular
monuments made of mudbrick or stone that are traditionally called
"towers." Whether these so-called towers are defensive,
agricultural, political, or ritual structures has long been
debated, but very few comprehensive studies of these monuments have
been attempted. Between 2007 and 2012, the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology conducted
excavations at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat in the
Sultanate of Oman under the direction of the late Gregory L.
Possehl. The focus of these years was on the monumental stone
towers of the third millennium B.C.E., looking at the when, how,
and why of their construction through large-scale excavation,
GIS-aided survey, and the application of radiocarbon dates. This
has been the most comprehensive study of nonmortuary Bronze Age
monuments ever conducted on the Oman Peninsula, and the results
provide new insight into the formation and function of these
impressive structures that surely formed the social and political
nexus of Magan's kingdom.
Since the days of V. Gordon Childe, the study of the emergence of
complex societies has been a central question in anthropological
archaeology. However, archaeologists working in the Americanist
tradition have drawn most of their models for the emergence of
social complexity from research in the Middle East and Latin
America. Bernard Wailes was a strong advocate for the importance of
later prehistoric and early medieval Europe as an alternative model
of sociopolitical evolution and trained generations of American
archaeologists now active in European research from the Neolithic
to the Middle Ages. Two centuries of excavation and research in
Europe have produced one of the richest bodies of archaeological
data anywhere in the world. The abundant data show that
technological innovations such as metallurgy appeared very early,
but urbanism and state formation are comparatively late
developments. Key transformative process such as the spread of
agriculture did not happen uniformly but rather at different rates
in different regions. The essays in this volume celebrate the
legacy of Bernard Wailes by highlighting the contribution of the
European archaeological record to our understanding of the
emergence of social complexity. They provide case studies in how
ancient Europe can inform anthropological archaeology. Not only do
they illuminate key research topics, they also invite
archaeologists working in other parts of the world to consider
comparisons to ancient Europe as they construct models for cultural
development for their regions. Although there is a substantial
corpus of literature on European prehistoric and medieval
archaeology, we do not know of a comparable volume that explicitly
focuses on the contribution that the study of ancient Europe can
make to anthropological archaeology.
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