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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > General
Since 2003 the International Association for the History of
Traffic, Transport and Mobility (T2M) has served as a trade-free
zone, fostering a new interdisciplinary vitality in the
now-flourishing study of the History of Mobility. In its Yearbook,
Mobility in History, T2M surveys these developments in the form of
a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of research in the field,
presenting synopses of recent research, international reviews of
research across many countries, thematic reviews, and retrospective
assessments of classic works in the area. Mobility in History
provides an essential and comprehensive overview of the current
situation of Mobility studies. Volume 6 divides its review of
recent literature across polemical, theoretical, and geographical
categories, and concludes with a section on tourism.
In The Lordship of the Isles, twelve specialists offer new insights
on the rise and fall of the MacDonalds of Islay and the greatest
Gaelic lordship of later medieval Scotland. Portrayed most often as
either the independently-minded last great patrons of Scottish
Gaelic culture or as dangerous rivals to the Stewart kings for
mastery of Scotland, this collection navigates through such opposed
perspectives to re-examine the politics, culture, society and
connections of Highland and Hebridean Scotland from the fourteenth
to sixteenth centuries. It delivers a compelling account of a land
and people caught literally and figuratively between two worlds,
those of the Atlantic and mainland Scotland, and of Gaelic and
Anglophone culture. Contributors are David Caldwell, Sonja Cameron,
Alastair Campbell, Alison Cathcart, Colin Martin, Tom McNeill,
Lachlan Nicholson, Richard Oram, Michael Penman, Alasdair Ross,
Geoffrey Stell and Sarah Thomas.
Landscape Biographies explores the long and complex histories of
landscapes from personal and social perspectives. As an essential
part of human life-worlds, landscapes have the potential to absorb
something of people's lives, works, and thoughts. But landscapes
also shape their own life-histories at different timescales,
transcending human life-cycles and generating their own
temporalities and rhythms. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that
the co-scripting of landscapes and people figures prominently in
the (auto-)biographical works of writers and attracts the interest
of geographers, archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists.
This has even resulted in a new genre in landscape research,
rapidly gaining in popularity, under the heading of 'landscape
biography'. In Landscape Biographies, twenty geographers,
archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists investigate the
diverse ways in which landscapes and monuments have been
constructed, transmitted, and transformed from prehistory up to the
present, from Manhattan to Shanghai, from Iceland to Portugal, and
from England to Estonia. Among the authors are distinguished
scholars like Gisli Palsson, Cornelius Holtorf, Joshua Pollard, and
Mark Gillings.
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.
This book meticulously recreates the most important episodes in
Czech-German relations in what is now the Czech Republic. Drawing
on extensive archival research, Stephen M. Thomas depicts the
formation of the Czechoslovak Republic from the ruined
Austro-Hungarian empire and examines political and public life
between world wars via the ethnic rivalry between Germans and
Czechs. He questions the nature, legitimacy and political viability
of the nation state, and especially its relationship to ethnic
minorities, such as the Slovaks. Confrontational nationalism and
the use of ethnicity as a political tool are no less common today
than they were in the 20th century. This book's radical
contribution to studies of nationalism and ethnicity is that it
juxtaposes German and Czech perspectives of power and oppression as
part of the same story. This framework allows us to appreciate new
complexities regarding the creation of Czechoslovakia and ponder
them in 21st century terms.
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.
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.
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