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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > General
Calculating the diversity of biological or cultural classes is a
fundamental way of describing, analyzing, and understanding the
world around us. Understanding archaeological diversity is key to
understanding human culture in the past. Archaeologists have long
experienced a tenuous relationship with statistics; however, the
regular integration of diversity measures and concepts into
archaeological practice is becoming increasingly important. This
volume includes chapters that cover a wide range of archaeological
applications of diversity measures. Featuring studies of
archaeological diversity ranging from the data-driven to the
theoretical, from the Paleolithic to the Historic periods, authors
illustrate the range of data sets to which diversity measures can
be applied, as well as offer new methods to examine archaeological
diversity.
This volume brings together work by authors who draw upon
sociological and criminological methods, theory, and frameworks, to
produce research that pushes boundaries, considers new questions,
and reshape the existing understanding of "art crimes", with a
strong emphasis on methodological innovation and novel theory
application. Criminologists and sociologists are poorly represented
in academic discourse on art and culture related crimes. However,
to understand topics like theft, security, trafficking, forgery,
vandalism, offender motivation, the efficacy of and results of
policy interventions, and the effects art crimes have on
communities, we must develop the theoretical and methodological
models we use for analyses. The readership of this book is expected
to include academics, researchers, and practitioners in the fields
of criminology, sociology, law, and heritage studies who have an
interest in art and heritage crime.
An in-depth and wide-ranging approach to the study of older adults
in society Taking a holistic approach to the study of aging, this
volume uses biological, archaeological, medical, and cultural
perspectives to explore how older adults have functioned in
societies around the globe and throughout human history. As the
world's population over 65 years of age continues to increase, this
wide-ranging approach fills a growing need for both academics and
service professionals in gerontology, geriatrics, and related
fields. Case studies from the United States, Tibet, Turkey, China,
Nigeria, and Mexico provide examples of the ways age-related
changes are influenced by environmental, genetic, sociocultural,
and political-economic variables. Taken together, they help explain
how the experience of aging varies across time and space. These
contributions from noted anthropological scholars examine
evolutionary and biological understandings of human aging, the
roles of elders in various societies, issues of gender and ageism,
and the role of chronic illness and "successful aging" among older
adults. This volume highlights how an anthropology of aging can
illustrate how older adults adapt to shifting life circumstances
and environments, including changes to the ways in which
individuals and families care for them. The research in
Anthropological Perspectives on Aging can also help researchers,
students, and practitioners reach across disciplines to address age
discrimination and help improve health outcomes throughout the life
course.
This April 1920 Edition of "Art and Archaeology" (published by the
Archaeological Institute of America) includes four illustrated
articles on Hellenistic Cities of Asia Minor, including: Pergamum
and Ephesus, by David M. Robinson; Miletus, Pirene, Sardis, by
Howard Crosby Butler; Didyma, by E. Baldwin Smith; and Cnidus, by
T. Leslie Shear.
This book examines treasure law and practice from the rise of the
new science of archaeology in the early Victorian period to the
present day. Drawing on largely-unexamined state records and other
archives, the book covers several legal jurisdictions: England and
Wales, Scotland, Ireland pre- and post-independence, and
post-partition Northern Ireland. From the Mold gold cape (1833) to
the Broighter hoard (1896), from Sutton Hoo (1939) to the Galloway
hoard (2014), the law of treasure trove, and the Treasure Act 1996,
are considered through the prism of notable archaeological
discoveries, and from the perspectives of finders, landowners,
archaeologists, museum professionals, collectors, the state, and
the public. Literally and metaphorically, treasure law is revealed
as a ground-breaking chapter in the history of the legal protection
of cultural property and cultural heritage in Britain and Ireland.
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.
Reindeer have been an integral part of the lives of people in
Northern Fennoscandia in prehistoric and historic times. Today,
reindeer herding practices are changing fast due to climate change,
land use pressures and new technologies. This book outlines recent
advances in the archaeology of reindeer domestication and
development of reindeer herding among the Sami of Northern
Fennoscandia, focusing especially on the identification and
understanding of various reindeer herding tasks and practices
through archaeological evidence and traditional knowledge of
reindeer herders. Covering more than a thousand years of history of
reindeer herding, the book explores how reindeer herding practices
have always been dynamic and adapted to the changing social,
economic and environmental pressures. While reindeer herding
practices have changed, they have also retained memory and
tradition. The continuity and adaptation of reindeer herding
testifies of the resilience of reindeer herders and their animals,
and the importance of their relationship in the changing Arctic.
This book will be of interest to scholars interested in
archaeology, anthropology, and history of the Arctic, as well as
local communities and reindeer herders.
Life in an Indigenous town during an understudied era of Haitian
history This book details the Indigenous Taino occupation at En Bas
Saline in Hispaniola between AD 1250 and 1520, showing how the
community coped with the dramatic changes imposed by Spanish
contact. En Bas Saline is the largest late precontact Taino town
recorded in what is now Haiti; the only one that has been
extensively excavated and analyzed; and one of few with
archaeologically documented occupation both before and after the
arrival of Columbus in 1492. It is thought to be the site of La
Navidad, Columbus's first settlement, where the cacique Guacanagari
offered refuge and shelter after the sinking of the Santa Maria.
Kathleen Deagan provides an intrasite and spatial analysis of En
Bas Saline by focusing on households, foodways, ceramics, and
crafts and offers insights into social organization and chiefly
power in this political center through domestic and ornamental
material culture. Postcontact changes are seen in patterns of
gendered behavior, as well as in the power base of the caciques,
challenging the traditional assumption that Taino society was
devastatingly disrupted almost immediately after contact. En Bas
Saline is the only archaeological account of the consequences of
contact from the perspective of the Taino peoples' lived
experience. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History:
Ripley P. Bullen Series
Examples of a research approach that sheds light on coastal
societies in the past In this volume, contributors apply human
behavioral ecology theoretical models to coastal environments
around the globe and to the use of coastal resources by past human
societies. Evidence demonstrates that coastlines and islands are
dynamic environments that were important in early human migrations,
and this volume shows how researchers can gain insights about human
behavior in these settings through its critical regional reviews
and detailed local case studies. The volume begins by introducing
the importance of theory in the reconstruction of human behavior
and provides examples of traditional foraging models. Contributors
then offer perspectives from North, Central, and South America, the
Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Polynesia. They discuss
unique challenges faced by coastal societies, including extreme
seasonality, patchy resource distribution, natural hazards,
balancing coastal and terrestrial resource needs, aquatic
technological innovation, and multiscale environmental change.
Human Behavioral Ecology and Coastal Environments demonstrates that
exploring decision-making and cultural behaviors is key to
understanding how humans have lived in and related to these
environments. Through its application of human behavioral ecology
models, this volume sheds light on the evolving adaptations of
societies in a variety of coastal contexts through time and across
space. A volume in the series Society and Ecology in Island and
Coastal Archaeology, edited by Victor D. Thompson and Scott M.
Fitzpatrick.
This book presents general problems in geoarchaeology, and
discusses geophysical solutions, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry
applications, X-ray and isotope analyses and GIS technologies. It
also examines practical reconstructions of technological processes
used in ancient time, and investigates the use of minerals and
rocks by ancient societies in the territories of modern Russia,
Ukraine, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, as well as the
characteristics of ores, metallurgical slags and data on the
composition and impurities of archaeological metals. Intended for
archaeologists, historians, museum workers and geologists studying
noble metals and copper, the book is also a useful resource for
students, graduate students, experts and anyone interested in the
use of various minerals at different stages of humanity's
development.
In the past two decades, conflict archaeology has become firmly
established as a promising field of research, as reflected in
publications, symposia, conference sessions and fieldwork projects.
It has its origins in the study of battlefields and other
conflict-related phenomena in the modern Era, but numerous studies
show that this theme, and at least some of its methods, techniques
and theories, are also relevant for older historical and even
prehistoric periods. This book presents a series of case-studies on
conflict archaeology in ancient Europe, based on the results of
both recent fieldwork and a reassessment of older excavations. The
chronological framework spans from the Neolithic to Late Antiquity,
and the geographical scope from Iberia to Scandinavia. Along key
battlefields such as the Tollense Valley, Baecula, Alesia,
Kalkriese and Harzhorn, the volume also incorporates many other
sources of evidence that can be directly related to past conflict
scenarios, including defensive works, military camps,
battle-related ritual deposits, and symbolic representations of
violence in iconography and grave goods. The aim is to explore the
material evidence for the study of warfare, and to provide new
theoretical and methodological insights into the archaeology of
mass violence in ancient Europe and beyond.
In 1628 the Dutch East India Company loaded the Batavia, the flagship of its fleet, with a king’s ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java; the ship itself was a tangible symbol of the world’s richest and most powerful monopoly.
The company also sent along a new employee to guard its treasure. He was Jeronimus Corneliszoon, a disgraced and bankrupt man with great charisma and dangerously heretical ideas. With the help of a few disgruntled sailors, he hatched a plot to seize the ship and her riches. The mutiny might have succeeded, but in the dark morning hours of June 3, 1629, the Batavia smashed through a coral reef and ran aground on a small chain of islands near Australia. The captain and skipper escaped the wreck, and in a tiny lifeboat they set sail for Java—some 1,500 miles north—to summon help. More than 250 frightened survivors waded ashore, thankful to be alive. Unfortunately, Jeronimus and the mutineers had survived too, and the nightmare was only beginning.
Going beyond strictly legal and property-oriented aspects of the
restitution debate, restitution is considered as part of a larger
set of processes of return that affect museums and collections, as
well as notions of heritage and object status. Covering a range of
case studies and a global geography, the authors aim to historicize
and bring depth to contemporary debates in relation to both the
return of material culture and human remains. Defined as contested
holdings, differing museum collections ranging from fine arts to
physical anthropology provide connections between the treatment and
conceptualization of collections that generally occupy separate
realms in the museum world.
Through an unprecedented multidisciplinary and global approach,
this book documents the dramatic several-thousand-year history of
leprosy using bioarchaeological, clinical, and historical
information from a wide variety of contexts, dispelling many
long-standing myths about the disease. Drawing on her 30 years of
research on the infection, Charlotte Roberts begins by outlining
its bacterial causes, how it spreads, and how it affects the body.
She then considers its diagnosis and treatment, both historically
and in the present. She also looks at the methods and tools used by
paleopathologists to identify signs of leprosy in skeletons.
Examining evidence in human remains from many countries,
particularly in Europe and including Britain, Hungary, and Sweden,
Roberts demonstrates that those affected were usually buried in the
same cemeteries as their communities, contrary to the popular
belief that they were all ostracized or isolated from society into
leprosy hospitals. Other myths addressed by Roberts include the
assumptions that leprosy can't be cured, that leprosy is no longer
a problem today, and that what is called "leprosy" in the Bible is
the same illness as the disease with that name now. Roberts
concludes by projecting the future of leprosy, arguing that
researchers need to study the disease through an ethically grounded
evolutionary perspective. Importantly, she advises against use of
the word "leper" to avoid perpetuating stigma today surrounding
people with the infection and resulting disabilities. Leprosy will
stand as the authoritative source on the subject for years to come.
A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the
Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by
Clark Spencer Larsen.
This volume explores various themes at the intersection of
archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary
connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical
issues. Showcasing this heterogeneity, its scope ranges from the
method of analogical inference to the evolution of the human mind;
from conceptual issues in assessing the health of past populations
to the ethics of cultural heritage tourism. It probes the
archaeological record for evidence of numeracy, curiosity and
creativity, and social complexity. Its contributors comprise an
interdisciplinary cluster of philosophers, archaeologists,
anthropologists, and psychologists, from a variety of career
stages, of whom many are leading experts in their fields. Chapter 3
is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License via link.springer.com.
This book highlights new and innovative approaches to
archaeological research using computational modeling while focusing
on the Neolithic transition around the world. The transformative
effect of the spread and adoption of agriculture in prehistory
cannot be overstated. Consequently, archaeologists have often
focused their research on this transition, hoping to understand
both the ecological causes and impacts of this shift, as well as
the social motivations and constraints involved. Given the complex
interplay of socio-ecological factors, the answers to these types
of questions cannot be found using traditional archaeological
methods alone. Computational modeling techniques have emerged as an
effective approach for better understanding prehistoric data sets
and the linkages between social and ecological factors at play
during periods of subsistence change. Such techniques include
agent-based modeling, Bayesian modeling, GIS modeling of the
prehistoric environment, and the modeling of small-scale
agriculture. As more archaeological data sets aggregate regarding
the transition to agriculture, researchers are often left with few
ways to relate these sets to one another. Computational modeling
techniques such as those described above represent a critical next
step in providing archaeological analyses that are important for
understanding human prehistory around the world. Given its scope,
this book will appeal to the many interdisciplinary scientists and
researchers whose work involves archaeology and computational
social science. Chapter "The Spread of Agriculture: Quantitative
Laws in Prehistory?" is available open access under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via springer.com.
Countering dominant narratives of conflict through attention to
memory and traumaThis volume presents approaches to the archaeology
of war that move beyond the forensic analysis of battlefields,
fortifications, and other sites of conflict to consider the
historical memory, commemoration, and social experience of war.
Leading scholars offer critical insights that challenge the
dominant narratives about landscapes of war from throughout the
history of North American settler colonialism. Grounded in the
empirical study of fields of conflict, these essays extend their
scope to include a commitment to engaging local Indigenous and
other descendant communities and to illustrating how public
memories of war are actively and politically constructed.
Contributors examine conflicts including the battle of Chikasha,
King Philip's War, the 1694 battle at Guadalupe Mesa, the Rogue
River War, the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862, and a World War II battle
on the island of Saipan. Studies also investigate the site of the
Schenectady Massacre of 1690 and colonial posts staffed by Black
soldiers. Chapters discuss how prevailing narratives often
minimized the complexity of these conflicts, smoothed over the
contradictions and genocidal violence of colonialism, and erased
the diversity of the participants. This volume demonstrates that
the collaborative practice of conflict archaeology has the
potential to reveal the larger meanings, erased voices, and
lingering traumas of war. A volume in the series Cultural Heritage
Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel.
Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People amplifies the voices of
marginalized or powerless individuals. Following previous work done
by physical anthropologists on the biology of poverty, this volume
focuses on the voices of past actors who would normally be subsumed
within a cohort or whose stories represent those of the minority.
The physical effects of marginalization - manifest as skeletal
markers of stress and disease - are read in their historical
contexts to better understand vulnerability and the social
determinants of health in the past. Bioarchaeological,
archaeological, and historical datasets are integrated to explore
the varied ways in which individuals may be marginalized both
during and after their lifespan. By focusing on previously excluded
voices this volume enriches our understanding of the lived
experience of individuals in the past. This volume queries the
diverse meanings of marginalization, from physical or social
peripheralization, to identity loss within a majority population,
to a collective forgetting that excludes specific groups.
Contributors to the volume highlight the histories of individuals
who did not record their own stories, including two disparate
Ancient Egyptian women and individuals from a high-status
Indigenous cemetery in British Columbia. Additional chapters
examine the marginalized individuals whose bodies comprise the
Robert J. Terry anatomical collection and investigate inequalities
in health status in individuals from Canada, the United States, and
the United Kingdom. Modern clinical population health research is
examined through a historical lens, bringing a new perspective to
the critical public health interventions occurring today. Together,
these papers highlight the role that biological anthropologists
play both in contributing to and challenging the marginalization of
past populations.
The Colonial Caribbean is an archaeological analysis of the
Jamaican plantation system at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Focused specifically on coffee plantation landscapes and framed by
Marxist theory, the analysis considers plantation landscapes using
a multiscalar approach to landscape archaeology. James A. Delle
considers spatial phenomena ranging from the diachronic settlement
pattern of the island as a whole to the organization of individual
house and yard areas located within the villages of enslaved
workers. Delle argues that a Marxist approach to landscape
archaeology provides a powerful theoretical framework to understand
how the built environment played a direct role in the negotiation
of social relations in the colonial Caribbean.
Many years ago 'henge monuments' were identified as a distinctive
kind of prehistoric monument but their interpretation still poses
problems. When were they first built and how long did they remain
important? How were they used and did their roles change during the
course of their history? The results of excavations at Broomend of
Crichie in Aberdeenshire, Pullyhour in Caithness and Migdale and
Lairg in Sutherland are brought together in a new account of the
henge monuments of Northern Britain, which places a special
emphasis on their distinctive character and their extended history.
We are both immensely pleased to have played supporting roles in
the archaeological research that led to this volume. As a faculty
member at the Universidad del Centro (Huancayo) in the 1960s and
later at the Universidad Nacional de San Marcos (Lima), Matos
Mendieta developed a special interest in the Upper Mantaro and
adjacent Tarma drainages, and during the 1960s and 1970s, he
carried out general reconnaissance and several excavations in the
area between Lake Junin and Huancayo. Matos Mendieta began his
field research in the Sierra Central as part of the "Proyecto
Andino de Estudios Arqueologicos" sponsored by the Smithsonian
Institution. As a fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in the
mid-1960s, Matos Mendieta began to interact more closely with North
American scholars; during this period, he began to encourage and
facilitate the interests of several US. -based archaeologists in
the Peruvian Sierra Central, including Craig Morris, John Murra,
and Donald Thompson, who were beginning fieldwork at and around the
Inka provincial center of Huanuco Pampa north of Lake Junin, and
David Browman, who in 1969 carried out one of the very first
systematic archaeological surveys in highland Peru over parts of
the main Mantaro Valley between Huancayo and Jauja."
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