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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region > European archaeology
History has many voices. In the words of Russian fur merchant Grigorii Shelikhov, who led the conquest of Kodiak Island, Alaska, in 1784 and sought to subjugate its indigenous Qikertarmiut population, "the arrival of the Russians in their land had brought them innumerable advantages, security, and prosperity" (Shelikhov 1981:121). Arsenti Aminak, a Qiker tarmiut elder in 1851, held a different view. He recalled a Russian ship that visited the island several years before Shelikhov as a "strange monster, never seen before, which we feared and whose stench made us sick. " In 1784, the dead of his people lay on the beach at a place called A'wauq meaning "to become numb" -where hundreds had been killed by Skeli khov's cannon and muskets (Holmberg 1985:57-59). The Russian hunters who built the Shelikhov-Golikov Company's first outpost on Kodiak Is land, at a small cove they called Gavan Trekh Svetitelei (as commonly translated, "Three Saints Harbor"), recalled their own miseries and de spair: "We . . . spent the winter in ceaseless labors and . . . suffered great shortages and real famine . . . . Many contracted fever, scurvy, and other ills, and died" (Pierce 1976:75). Eyewitness statements about what happened on Kodiak Island dur ing the Russian conquest and early years of colonial rule are important, but rare. They represent the experiences and views of a few individuals who lived through a time of turbulent change and traumatic contact between disparate cultures."
This volume explores the final phase of the West Roman Empire, particularly the changing interactions between the imperial authority and external 'barbarian' groups in the northwest frontiers of the empire during the fourth and fifth centuries. The contributions present valuable overviews of recent archaeological research combined with innovative theoretical discussions. Key topics include the movement of precious metals, trajectories of imperial power, the archaeology of migration, and material culture in relation to debates about ethnicity.
Despite the fact that the human life of the past cannot be understood without taking into account its ecological relationships, environmental studies are often marginalised in archaeology. This is the first book that, by discussing the meaning and purpose we give to the expression environmental archaeology', investigates the reasons for such a problem. This is achieved through the use of theoretical considerations and the aid of a number of case studies, which, by taking us from Anglo-Saxon England to pre-Columbian Venezuela, and from Classical Greece to late Antique Egypt, emphasise the potential of an integrated approach. The book is written by archaeologists with different backgrounds and is addressed to all researchers who care about the past relationship between people and the rest of Nature. Despite the complexity of some of the issues tackled, the book is written in an accessible manner and should be of interest to all students who want to understand the essence of archaeology beyond the boundary of the individual sub-disciplines.
This book contains papers representing the results of the latest research into the relationship between the 'imperial' culture of the Achaemenids and local traditions. Some of them are devoted to the Southern Caucasus, especially to latest archaeological excavations and to investigations into specific categories of archaeological finds. Other articles concern other regions of the Achaemenid world. The article by L. Summerer represents a publication of a unique work of art: the painting on one of the walls of a wooden tomb in Tatarl? in Western Anatolia, depicting a battle between Persians and warriors of nomadic (Scythian-Saka) appearance. The article by S. Sajjadi presents readers with the results of interesting research, which has been going on in Sistan. Originally published as issue 3-4 of Volume 13 (2007) of Brill's journal "Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia," For more details on this journal, please click here.
This fully-illustrated catalogue publishes 1601 ancient Greek coins issued by cities stretching from the modern Crimea to the area of Aeolis on the west coast of modern Turkey. This is a most welcome addition to the SNG's cataloguing of the Ashmolean Museum's rich holdings, the first since Part IV appeared in 1981. It will be of interest to numismatists, coin collectors, and scholars and students of the archaeology and history of the Greek world.
This volume completes the publication of the ancient Greek and
Etruscan vases in the collection of the Reading Museum Service,
most of which are displayed at the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology,
University of Reading (39 other vases were published in Corpus
Vasorum Antiquorum, Great Britain 12, University of Reading, 1954).
This book examines a number of themes relating to housing in Late Antiquity. Two extensive bibliographic essays provide an overview of published literature relating to housing in this period. A selection of thematic essays focus on episcopia, lighting, privacy vs. public access, and building regulations. These are complemented by regional syntheses covering Spain and Africa and case studies of recently investigated urban houses from across the Mediterranean, from Gaul to Jordan. Whilst being firmly based in Late Antiquity, the volume also looks forward to Middle Byzantine and Early Islamic housing, with papers on rock-cut houses in Cappadocia and a wealthy "dar" from Pella in Jordan, destroyed by earthquake, with its inhabitants inside, in A.D. 749.
The Roman province of Noricum occupied most of Austria as well as parts of Italy, Germany and the Balkans. Noricum, first published in 1974, presents a comprehensive history of Noricum, from 400 BC to the end of Roman rule in AD 600. Professor Alfoeldy's account is predicated on the methodical interpretation of literary, epigraphic and archaeological sources, and emphasises the problems of demography and socio-economic history. The chapters are arranged chronologically, ensuring a sense of the continuity of historical events and illuminating the history and archaeology of Noricum both before it came into contact with the Romans as well as under Roman rule. Noricum includes a review of much recent research on the province, detailed references to the source material, a comprehensive bibliography and valuable appendices. It is a substantial work of ancient history and archaeology and will interest both the specialist and the general reader.
This catalogue completes the publication of the great
eighteenth-century collection of William Hunter in Glasgow
University, an important stage in the British SNG project. It
illustrates the remaining 2581 Roman provincial coins produced in
the East from Cyprus to Egypt, about half of which were produced at
Alexandria.
This is the first truly global survey of the relationship between artifacts and texts from historiographical, methodological, and analytical perspectives. It analyzes the crucial relationship between material culture and writing in ancient societies, employing examples from twelve major disciplines in historical archaeology and summarizing their role in five global methodological approaches. It is valuable reading for advanced (under/post) graduate students, and instructors in any historical archaeological subject.
Roman Egypt is a critical area of interdisciplinary research, which has steadily expanded since the 1970s and continues to grow. Egypt played a pivotal role in the Roman empire, not only in terms of political, economic, and military strategies, but also as part of an intricate cultural discourse involving themes that resonate today - east and west, old world and new, acculturation and shifting identities, patterns of language use and religious belief, and the management of agriculture and trade. Roman Egypt was a literal and figurative crossroads shaped by the movement of people, goods, and ideas, and framed by permeable boundaries of self and space. This handbook is unique in drawing together many different strands of research on Roman Egypt, in order to suggest both the state of knowledge in the field and the possibilities for collaborative, synthetic, and interpretive research. Arranged in seven thematic sections, each of which includes essays from a variety of disciplinary vantage points and multiple sources of information, it offers new perspectives from both established and younger scholars, featuring individual essay topics, themes, and intellectual juxtapositions.
The excavated foundations of a ninth-century sacral building in the northeastern suburb of Pohansko, an important centre of Great Moravia, and especially the find of the nobleman's grave H 153, has focused scholarly attention onto the nature of the Mojmirid state and the reasons behind its sudden disintegration. In this volume, a group of archaeologists, historians and a natural scientist aim to incorporate this remarkable discovery into the wider frameworks of Moravian power, society, and culture, and thereby arrive at some surprising conclusions. Contributors: are Stefan Eichert, David Kalhous, Pavel Kouril, Jiri Machacek, Vladimir Sladek, Ivo Stefan, Martin Wihoda, Roman Zehetmayer.
One of the most visited places in the world, Rome attracts millions of tourists each year to walk its storied streets and see famous sites like the Colosseum, St. Peter's Basilica, and the Trevi Fountain. Yet this ancient city's allure is due as much to its rich, unbroken history as to its extraordinary array of landmarks. Countless incarnations and eras merge in the Roman cityscape. With a history spanning nearly three millennia, no other place can quite match the resilience and reinventions of the aptly nicknamed Eternal City. In this unique and visually engaging book, Jessica Maier considers Rome through the eyes of mapmakers and artists who have managed to capture something of its essence over the centuries. Viewing the city as not one but ten "Romes," she explores how the varying maps and art reflect each era's key themes. Ranging from modest to magnificent, the images comprise singular aesthetic monuments like paintings and grand prints as well as more popular and practical items like mass-produced tourist plans, archaeological surveys, and digitizations. The most iconic and important images of the city appear alongside relatively obscure, unassuming items that have just as much to teach us about Rome's past. Through 140 full-color images and thoughtful overviews of each era, Maier provides an accessible, comprehensive look at Rome's many overlapping layers of history in this landmark volume. The first book ever published in English to tell Rome's rich story through its maps, The Eternal City beautifully captures the past, present, and future of one of the most famous and enduring places on the planet.
Religion in Ephesos Reconsidered provides a detailed overview of the current state of research on the most important Ephesian projects offering evidence for religious activity during the Roman period. Ranging from huge temple complexes to hand-held figurines, this book surveys a broad scope of materials. Careful reading of texts and inscriptions is combined with cutting-edge archaeological and architectural analysis to illustrate how the ancient people of Ephesos worshipped both the traditional deities and the new gods that came into their purview. Overall, the volume questions traditional understandings of material culture in Ephesos, and demonstrates that the views of the city and its inhabitants on religion were more complex and diverse than has been previously assumed.
Roman Archaeology for Historians provides students of Roman history with a guide to the contribution of archaeology to the study of their subject. It discusses the issues with the use of material and textual evidence to explain the Roman past, and the importance of viewing this evidence in context. It also surveys the different approaches to the archaeological material of the period and examines key themes that have shaped Roman archaeology. At the heart of the book lies the question of how archaeological material can be interpreted and its relevance for the study of ancient history. It includes discussion of the study of landscape change, urban topography, the economy, the nature of cities, new approaches to skeletal evidence and artefacts in museums. Along the way, readers gain access to new findings and key sites - many of which have not been discussed in English before and many, for which, access may only be gained from technical reports. Roman Archaeology for Historians provides an accessible guide to the development of archaeology as a discipline and how the use of archaeological evidence of the Roman world can enrich the study of ancient history, while at the same time encouraging the integration of material evidence into the study of the period's history. This work is a key resource for students of ancient history, and for those studying the archaeology of the Roman period.
This work provides a survey of the jewellery of Roman Britain. Fully illustrated and accessible to both the specialist and amateur enthusiast, it surveys the full range of personal ornament worn in Britain during the Roman period, the 1st to 4th centuries AD. It emphasizes the presence of two distinct cultural and artistic traditions, the classical element introduced by the Romans and the indigeneous Celtic background. The interaction of these traditions affected all aspects of Romano-British life and is illustrated in the jewellery.; The meaning and significance of personal ornament in a wide range of cultures is discussed, including such matters as symbolism and the display of wealth and status. The principal types of Romano-British jewellery are classified in detail, drawing attention to those which can be relatively closely dated. The coverage is not restricted to precious-metal objects, but includes jewellery made of base metals and materials such as bone, jet and glass. The final chapter is devoted to the techniques of manufacture, a subject which has become better understood in recent years as a result of scientific advances. The book should appeal to anyone who practices, teaches or studies Roman archaeology, together with all those with a professional or amateur interest in the history of jewellery and design.
James Delle has solved a number of problems in Caribbean archaeology with An Archaeology of Social Space. He deals with most of the problems by using historical archaeology, and clearly implicates Ameri canist prehistorians. Although this book is about coffee plantations in the Blue Mountains area of Jamaica, it is actually about the whole Caribbean. Just as it is about all archaeology, not only historical archaeology, it is also a book about colonialism and national inde pendence and how these two enormous events happened in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth century capitalism. The first issue raised appears to be an academic topic that has come to be known as landscape archaeology. Landscape archaeology considers the planned spaces around living places. The topic is big, comprehensive, and new within historical archaeology. Its fundamen tal insight is that in the early modern and modern worlds everything within view could be made into money. Seeing occurs in space and from 1450, or a little before, everything that could be seen could, potentially, be measured. The measuring-and the accompanying culture of record ing called a scriptural economy-became a way of controlling people in space, for a profit. Dr. Delle thus explores maps, local philosophies of settlement, town dwelling, housing, and the actual condition of plantations and their buildings now, so as to describe coffee-Jamaica from 1790-1860."
Divine Interiors is an investigation into the decoration of Greek and Roman temples with wall paintings. Mighty marble facades, sculptures and paintings played an important role in relation to these monuments. While the official temples, which were connected to the city or state, usually had a simple but solemn appearance, the more popular buildings were true multi-color expressions of religiosity. Scenes from the life of the revered deity, supporters and practitioners of the cult, or of plants and animals could carry visitors of the shrines away to different worlds. It is also striking to find in the vast Greco-Roman world that there are many similarities between often widely separated temples. The wall paintings were characterized by stylistic and taste changes, but they had the same look everywhere. Besides using archeological remains, this book also uses the texts of antiquity, whose descriptions of the monuments provide additional information. Amsterdam Archaeological Studies is a series devoted to the study of past human societies from the prehistory up into modern times, primarily based on the study of archaeological remains. The series will include excavation reports of modern fieldwork; studies of categories of material culture; and synthesising studies with broader images of past societies, thereby contributing to the theoretical and methodological debates in archaeology.
This study explains the Greco - Roman urban form as it relates to the geological basis at selected sites in the Mediterranean basin. Each of the sites - Argos, Delphi, Ephesus, and Syracuse among them - has manifested in its physical form the geology on which it stood and from which it was made.
Thi study presents a systematic analysis of the huge, and in most cases, completely new archaeological evidence for amber from Lithuania and the surrounding regions. A comprehensive synthesis of archaeological evidence and written sources provides an opportunity to develop new viewpoints about the sources of amber, extraction methods and amber-wearing.
Includes 384 illustrations, some in colour. In 1986 and 1987 Oleson and a small team surveyed an area of 250 sq km around the site of al-Humayma (ancient Hawara) in Jordan's southern desert. Hawara was founded sometime in the first century BC by the Nabataean king Aretas. The flourishing settlement was occupied by a unit of Roman soldiers after AD 107, and it became the largest settlement in the Hisma desert during the Byzantine period. The Abbasid family built a manor house and mosque at Humayma in the late seventh century. This is the second volume of a projected four volume series about the research on this important site. This volume reports on a Nabataean campground, which provides unique testimony to the flexible character of Nabataean settlement design, and provides detailed information on the Nabataean necropolis, which shows parallels with those at both Petra and Hegra. The volume also includes the excavation records and analysis of five Byzantine churches, two of which lay above Nabataean structures, and three of which were modified for re-occupation in the Early Islamic period. There are also short reports on the probing of an Early Islamic structure of undetermined character, and on an important hoard of coins and jewellery found in the countryside. A number of subsidiary studies concern the human remains, botanical and faunal remains, fish bones, and molluscs found at the site in the course of the 11 seasons of excavation. The ceramics and small finds associated with the structures are analyzed, along with the many marble chancel screen fragments. The main audience will be archaeologists of the Near and Middle East. The presentation highlights issues such as the projection of culture from Petra outward to peripheral settlements, transitions between nomadic pastoralist and sedentary agricultural ways of life in Arabia Petraea, design eccentricities in rural church architecture, the spread and practice of Christianity in this region, and rural architecture of the Early Islamic period. There is also discussion of the physical evidence for local desert agriculture, stock raising, hunting, the import and export of foodstuffs, and the state of human nutrition at ancient Humayma.
This is the first comprehensive catalogue of the sculpture from this region of Roman Britain, including the first proper record of the sculpture from Wroxeter. The sculptures, all in local sandstone, were carved locally and provide an index of Romanisation in the far north-west of the Roman Empire - at the Fortress of Legio II Adivtrix and then Legio XX Valeria Victrix at Devra (Chester), and at the Fortress and subsequently the civil town of the Cornovii at Viroconium (Wroxeter). The sculpture from Letcetum (Wall, Staffs) is also considered. The works range in quality from highly accomplished and decorative altars and tombstones, to rather ham-fisted efforts which hint that it was not always possible to attract sculptors to these relatively remote places. Such factors are discussed in an extended introduction.
In this magisterial two-volume book, Pier Luigi Tucci offers a comprehensive examination of one of the key complexes of Ancient Rome, the Temple of Peace. Based on archival research and an architectural survey, his research sheds new light on the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque transformations of the basilica, and the later restorations of the complex. Volume 1 focuses on the foundation of the complex under Vespasian until its restoration under Septimius Severus and challenges the accepted views about the ancient building. Volume 2 begins with the remodelling of the library hall and the construction of the rotunda complex, and examines the dedication of the Christian Basilica of SS Cosmas and Damian. Of interest to scholars in a range of topics, The Temple of Peace in Rome crosses the boundaries between classics, archaeology, history of architecture, and art history, through Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period.
A completely new account of the archaeological and historical evidence relating to Delphi - one of the most important places in the ancient world. Each of the three sites at Delphi - the Sanctuary of Apollo, the Sanctuary of Athena and the Gymnasium - are described in detail, along with its architectural development and the Museum, where the works of art on display can be directly related to the place in which they were found. A separate chapter discusses the Pythian festival, the oracular procedure and an interpretation of the Delphic rituals, to explain the arcane phenomena of the oracle and the enduring influence that the sanctuary had throughout ancient Greek history. Written in an accessible style, the book incorporates the results of the latest research into the sanctuary of Delphi and uses photographs to demonstrate the conservation works carried out in recent years.
The Etruscans are one of history's great mysteries -- a sophisticated society that flourished at the heart of the Classical world and then vanished, leaving relatively few archaeological remains and few records of their culture. The Etruscans were adept at magic, and Etruscan books of spells were common among the Romans but they have not survived. While greatly influenced by the Greeks, the Etruscans retained elements of an ancient non-Western culture, and these archaic traits contributed greatly to the civilization once thought of as purely Roman (gladiators, for example, and many kinds of divination). Leland retrieves elements of Etruscan culture from the living popular traditions of remote areas of the Italian countryside where belief in "the old religion" survives to an astonishing degree. Recorded when many of these secret beliefs and practices were fading away, this remarkable volume deals with ancient gods, spirits, witches, incantations, prophecy, medicine, spells, and amulets, giving full descriptions, illustrations, and instructions for practice. |
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