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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > General
The book covers Egyptian history from the Predynastic to the late
Roman Period. It also introduces early contemporary literary
references to ancient Egypt and uses a number of theoretical
approaches to interrogate the archaeological and textual data.
This book demonstrates how the Romans constructed garden boundaries
specifically in order to open up or undermine the division between
a number of oppositions, such as inside/outside, sacred/profane,
art/nature, and real/imagined. Using case studies from across
literature and material and visual culture, Victoria Austen
explores the perception of individual garden sites in response to
their limits, and showcases how the Romans delighted in playing
with concepts of boundedness and separation. Transculturally, the
garden is understood as a marked-off and cultivated space. Distinct
from their surroundings, gardens are material and symbolic spaces
that constitute both universal and culturally specific ways of
accommodating the natural world and expressing human attitudes and
values. Although we define these spaces explicitly through the
notions of separation and division, in many cases we are unable to
make sense of the most basic distinction between 'garden' and
'not-garden'. In response to this ambiguity, Austen interrogates
the notion of the 'boundary' as an essential characteristic of the
Roman garden.
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.
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.
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.
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