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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region > General
This book outlines the latest research in Fanshan by the archaeologist, a man-made hathpace cemetery, on which is located the inner city of Liangzhu historical site at northwest area. There are 11 tomb locations discovered in Fanshan as built based on mutual dependency while and after excavation and were found continuously more than 1200 pieces (assemblages) of burial accessories, while at least 1100 pieces of jades were among the unearthed items. In view of the above-mentioned background, Fanshan as royal cemetery is well known for the largest number and variety of exquisite highly polished jades. In addition to prehistoric art, the work also explores the traces of Fanshan royal cemetery in conjunction with a substantial number of photos taken by expert of the historical site, restores the crucial burial objects and funeral rite as well as interprets burial accessories in different ways to discover the identity of the tomb's occupants such as social class and status and moreover the interlocking system of an organization.
"The Earliest China" is the first archaeological book in China to translate in the dominant language of the world on the origin of Chinese ancient civilization in the Central Plains and the study of Xia dynastic culture. It shows readers all over the world the outstanding achievements in the study of the formation of early state in China and is the first English translation monograph on the birth history of the first dynasty of Hua-Xia nation from the perspective of archaeology. With the specific archaeological data on the basis of excavations and investigation conducted in recent years, this book focuses on the interpretation of the rise and development of the ancient civilization having initially appeared in the Central Plain of China and even in the Eastern Asia. The book contents include abundant manifestations of the first flourishing civilization especially at the Erlitou site along the Yi and Luo Rivers, characteristic of ultra-large capital city, palace buildings, elaborate bronze vessels, and stratified social organization. With the combination of previously literature, the original author attempts to further explain how the earliest China, a royal-powered, and large-scaled state, emerged four thousand years ago. In this book, the analysis on a comprehensive landscape of the ancient civilization prior to the Shang Dynasty leads the point of views, distinctively from the traditional historical perspectives. With a global perspective, he further compares with other significant civilizations in the world and also points out cultural communications between the early China and other external cultures in the Bronze Age. Therefore, this book, the Earliest China of English translated version, is so appropriate to be recommended to foreign scholars and sinologists, as well as everyone who has been attracted by China's charm overseas. With book contents, ideas, and thoughts that it contains, one can easily acknowledge the goals, methods, and reconstruction process of China's prehistory, so English readers will acknowledge so well about the Chinese Archaeology in the Bronze Age, which does vary in many aspects from that of European and American.
"Shovel Ready" provides a comprehensive lens through which to view
the New Deal period, a fascinating and prolific time in American
archaeology. In this collection of diverse essays united by a
common theme, Bernard K. Means and his contributors deliver a
valuable research tool for practicing archaeologists and historians
of archaeology, as well as New Deal scholars in general.
A history of women prophets from medieval saints to radical Protestants. Diane Watt sets aside the conventional hiatus between the medieval and early modern periods in her study of women's prophecy, following the female experience from medieval sainthood to radical Protestantism. The English women prophets and visionaries whose voices are recovered here all lived between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries and claimed, through the medium of trances and eucharistic piety, to speak for God. They include Margery Kempe and the medieval visionaries, Elizabeth Barton (the Holy Maid of Kent), the Reformation martyr Anne Askew and other godly women described in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and Lady Eleanor Davies as an example of a woman prophetof the Civil War. The strategies women devised to be heard and read are exposed, showing that through prophecy they were often able to intervene in the religious and political discourse of the their times: the role of God's secretary gave them the opportunity to act and speak autonomously and publicly. Winner of Foster Watson Memorial Gift for 1998. Professor Diane Watt is Head of the School of English and Languages, University of Surrey.
For over half a millennium, the megalithic ruins of Tiwanaku in the highlands of the Andes mountains have stood as proxy for the desires and ambitions of various empires and political agendas; in the last hundred years, scholars have attempted to answer the question "What was Tiwanaku?" by examining these shattered remains from a distant preliterate past.This volume contains twelve papers from senior scholars, whose contributions discuss subjects from the farthest points of the southern Andes, where the iconic artifacts of Tiwanaku appear as offerings to the departed, to the heralded ruins weathered by time and burdened by centuries of interpretation and speculation. Visions of Tiwanaku stays true to its name by providing a platform for each scholar to present an informed view on the nature of this enigmatic place that seems so familiar, yet continues to elude understanding by falling outside our established models for early cities and states.
This study explores the evidence for Chinese writing in the late Neolithic (3500-2000 BCE) and early Bronze Age (2000-1250 BCE) periods. Chinese writing is often said to have begun with little incubation during the late Shang period (c. 1300-1045 BCE) in the middle-lower Yellow River Valley area as a sudden independent invention. This explanation runs counter to evidence from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Mesoamerica that shows that independent developments of writing generally undergo a protracted evolution. It also ignores archaeological data from the Chinese Neolithic and early Bronze Age that reveals the existence of signs comparable to Shang characters. Paola Dematte takes this data into account to address the issue of what writing is, and when, why, and how it develops, by employing a theory of writing that does not privilege language as a prime mover. It focuses instead on visual systems of communication as well as ideological and socio-economic developments as key elements that promote the eventual development of writing. To understand the processes that led to primary developments of writing, The Origins of Chinese Writing draws from the latest research on the early writing systems of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Mesoamerica, and other forms of protowriting. The result is a novel and inclusive theoretical approach to the archaeological evidence, grammatological data, and textual sources, an approach that demonstrates that Chinese writing emerged out of a long process that began in the Late Neolithic and continued during the Early Bronze Age.
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 As a source of colonial wealth and a crucible for global culture, Jamaica has had a profound impact on the formation of the modern world system. From the island's economic and military importance to the colonial empires it has hosted and the multitude of ways in which diverse people from varied parts of the world have coexisted in and reacted against systems of inequality, Jamaica has long been a major focus of archaeological studies of the colonial period. This volume assembles for the first time the results of nearly three decades of historical archaeology in Jamaica. Scholars present research on maritime and terrestrial archaeological sites, addressing issues such as: the early Spanish period at Seville la Nueva; the development of the first major British settlement at Port Royal; the complexities of the sugar and coffee plantation system, and the conditions prior to, and following, the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. The everyday life of African Jamaican people is examined by focusing on the development of Jamaica's internal marketing system, consumer behavior among enslaved people, iron-working and ceramic-making traditions, and the development of a sovereign Maroon society at Nanny Town. "Out of Many, One People" paints a complex and fascinating picture of life in colonial Jamaica, and demonstrates how archaeology has contributed to heritage preservation on the island.
This seventh volume of final reports of the Lahav Research Project’s efforts at Tell Halif in Southern Israel focuses on the team’s excavations and related regional ethnographic research at adjacent Khirbet Khuweilifeh, an early twentieth-century settlement of Bedouin and Arab fellahin clients. These efforts illustrate the symbiosis between the itinerant Bedouin and their seasonal sharecropper neighbors along the northern flanks of the Negev desert during and following the First World War in southern Palestine. The stratigraphic excavation and recovery of material culture from Cave Complex A revealed a pattern of occupation dating from the late nineteenth century C.E. up to the mid-1940s and produced hundreds of artifacts and samples, giving testimony to the lifeways of the fellahin who had inhabited the complex. The associated ethnographic research with Bedouin sheikhs and Hebron-area merchant informants established that the Complex’s most recent occupants were the family of a plow maker named Khalil al-Kaayke. The studies elucidated in this volume articulate in more detail the family’s patterns of subsistence, showing the interdependence of the Bedouin and fellahin partners. Examination of the pottery remains provides a profile of the site’s Stratum I, early twentieth-century ceramic forms and also reveals earlier Islamic-period and pre-Islamic traces. Over the past century the lifeways of these early twentieth-century Bedouin and their fellahin village neighbors in southern Palestine have been rapidly disappearing. This volume serves to chronicle and preserve data on their waning history and culture.
Studies of the customs and beliefs of barbarian peoples who migrated westwards and settled in Western Europe from the close of the Roman empire to the ninth century. The decline of the Roman Empire was compounded by the spread westwards of tribes from Eastern Europe, settling areas from which the indigenous populations had been cleared by the spread of the power of Rome; those populations themselves, notably the Celts, were pushed to the fringes of the former empire. These migrations of barbarian peoples between the fourth and ninth centuries left no historical record in the accepted sense, but it is the recovery of the customs and beliefs of these populations that forms the common purpose of the studies in this book, for during these centuries the traits and attitudes developed which are at the root of present-day Europe: feudalism, the statuslevel achieved by the merchant class, the beginnings of an ideology that led to the separation of church and state, the demise of slavery as an inefficient mode of production, the origin of national identities. The late GIORGIO AUSENDA taught at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress, San Marino. Contributors: GIORGIO AUSENDA, JULIAN D. RICHARDS, JOHN HINES, DAVID TURTON, ROSS BALZARETTI, DENNIS H. GREEN, SVEN SCHUETTE, DAVID N. DUMVILLE, MORTEM AXBOE, IAN N. WOOD
Over two thousand years ago, Oaxaca, Mexico, was the site of one of the New World's earliest episodes of primary state formation and urbanism, and today it is one of the world's archaeologically best-studied regions. This volume, which thoroughly revises and updates the first edition, provides a highly readable yet comprehensive path to acquaint readers with one of the earliest and best-known examples of Native American state formation and its consequences as seen from the perspectives of urbanism, technology, demography, commerce, households, and religion and ritual. Written by prominent archaeological researchers who have devoted decades to Oaxacan research and to the development of suitable social theory, the book places ancient Oaxaca within the context of the history of ideas that have addressed the causes and consequences of social evolutionary change. It also critically evaluates the potential applicability of more recent thinking about state building grounded in collective action and related theories.
This book provides a comprehensive research on Ancient Indian glass. The contributors include experienced archaeologists of South Asian glass and archaeological chemists with expertise in the chemical analysis of glass, besides, established ethnohistorians and ethnoarchaeologists. It is comprised of five sections, and each section discusses different aspects of glass study: the origin of glass and its evolution, its scientific study and its care, ancient glass in literature and glass ethnography, glass in South Asia and the diffusion of glass in different parts of the world. The topic covered by the different chapters ranges from the development of faience, to the techniques developed for the manufacture of glass beads, glass bangles or glass mirrors at different times in south Asia, a major glass producing region and the regional distribution of key artefacts both within India and outside the region, in Africa, Europe or Southeast Asia. Some chapters also include extended examples of the archaeometry of ancient glasses. It makes an important contribution to archaeological, anthropological and analytical aspects of glass in South Asia. As such, it represents an invaluable resource for students through academic and industry researchers working in archaeological sciences, ancient knowledge system, pyrotechnology, historical archaeology, social archaeology and student of anthropology and history with an interest in glass and the archaeology of South Asia.
New edition with a new Prologue by the author An Archaeology of Elmina examines a complex African settlement on the coast of present-day Ghana from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries using the archaeological record, European narratives and indigenous oral histories. Placing the site in broader context as the first European trading post in sub-Saharan Africa, Christopher DeCorse explores the developments there in light of Portuguese, Dutch, and British expansion and illustrates remarkable cultural continuity in the midst of technological change. Originally published by Smithsonian Institution Press in 2001.
This work book contributes to the knowledge about human settlements in the Isla Grande of Tierra Del Fuego by the hunter-gatherer societies that inhabited the area until the early twentieth century. The central theme is the study of technological organization as an approach to the management strategies of biotic and abiotic resources, as well as the occupation of space, considering the different environments represented in the area and the differential supply of resources. As a general framework, the book proposes instrumental methodologies that allow us to look at the characterization of the social and economic organization of hunter-gatherer societies from the point of view of the analysis of natural resources management, the resources introduced by Europeans and the spatial organization of technical activities.
This is the first full history of the ancient Georgia ever to be written outside Georgia itself. It is also an introduction to the substantial archaeological work that has been carried out in Georgia in recent decades. The principal purpose of this book is to open up ancient Georgia for the world of scholarship at large. It is not only the history of a neglected region, but also a sustained attempt to inform topics and issues that are more familiar to the historians of antiquity: myths of the periphery, Caucasian mountains and their passes, Greek colonization, the Persian, Athenian, and Selecuid empires, Pompey's conquest of Mithridates' empire, the development of the Roman frontier in the eastern Black Sea region, Roman diplomancy in Iberia, the Christianization of Iberia, Sassanian ambitions in Transcaucasia and Byzantine warfare there. The author has lived in Georgia for substantial periods during the last decade: he has made extensive use of scholarship in Georgian and Russian, and has first-hand knowledge of most of the sites which he discusses.
This compilation, by an international grouping of scholars, focuses on the nature of Caribbean rock art or rock graphics and makes clear the region's substantial and distinctive rock art tradition. Thorough and comparative, it includes data on the history of rock graphic research, the nature of the assemblages (image numbers, types, locations), and the legal, conservation, and research status of the image sites. Chapters on these topics cover research on the islands of Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guadeloupe, Aruba, and Bonaire.The prehispanic rock art and other ceremonial structures and artifacts, along with enthnohistorical accounts of the region at Contact, projected backward in time, all point to an active ritual and ceremonial life involving commoners, religious specialists, and elites in differing and interconnected roles and for diverse purposes. The selective use of common rock graphic design and physical elements can be seen in the distribution and execution of the carved and painted images. Pecked, ground, abraded, and scratched petroglyphs, along with pictographs done frequently in red, black, white, and orange hues are found on a range of rock surfaces including limestones, granites, diorites, and andesites.Caves/rock shelters and rock formations associated with water sources (water ways, pools, ocean) account for the two most common locations, followed by ball court sites, inland rock outcroppings and beach rock. In addition to specific area presentations, the work includes a review of recent advances in Caribbean rock graphic studies including dating and interpretative models; the application of a new documentation method and resulting computer manipulation advantages; a conservation project in Jamaica that has implications for the preservation and interpretation of the site; and, a proposed dating sequence for the Lesser Antillean Windward Islands.
This volume provides a substantive introduction to Babylonian ceremonial script, along with a history of its modern study, and several case studies of how the script was actually used. Since the advent of Assyriology in the early nineteenth century it has been known that two distinct scripts were used in ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions and documents. One, usefully characterized as cursive, was used for the ephemeral documents of daily life as well as on most library and archival texts. The other was a deliberately archaizing script reserved for ceremonial use. This ceremonial script, of Babylonian origin, contained both archaic and archaizing signs, and was in productive use for over two millennia, not only in Babylonia but occasionally also in Assyria and beyond. Yet to date there has been no systematic study devoted specifically to this ceremonial script, nor any published syllabary of the archaic and archaizing signs it employs. This volume attempts to rectify this deficiency. The book's introduction is supplemented by an edition of the palaeographic lists of the second and first millennia BCE, which contain pedagogical inventories of the archaic and archaizing cuneiform signs, illustrating how the ceremonial script was taught, learned and transmitted in scholarly contexts.
This volume is part of the Changing Perspectives sub-series, which is constituted by anthologies of articles by world-renowned biblical scholars and historians that have made an impact on the field and changed its course during the last decades. This volume offers a collection of seminal essays by Keith Whitelam on the early history of ancient Palestine and the origins and emergence of Israel. Collected together in one volume for the first time, and featuring one unpublished article, this volume will be of interest to biblical and ancient Near Eastern scholars interested in the politics of historical representation but also on critical ways of constructing the history of ancient Palestine.
Over two thousand years ago, Oaxaca, Mexico, was the site of one of the New World's earliest episodes of primary state formation and urbanism, and today it is one of the world's archaeologically best-studied regions. This volume, which thoroughly revises and updates the first edition, provides a highly readable yet comprehensive path to acquaint readers with one of the earliest and best-known examples of Native American state formation and its consequences as seen from the perspectives of urbanism, technology, demography, commerce, households, and religion and ritual. Written by prominent archaeological researchers who have devoted decades to Oaxacan research and to the development of suitable social theory, the book places ancient Oaxaca within the context of the history of ideas that have addressed the causes and consequences of social evolutionary change. It also critically evaluates the potential applicability of more recent thinking about state building grounded in collective action and related theories.
This volume provides new insights into the distinctive contributions that community archaeology and heritage make to the decolonization of archaeological practice. Using innovative approaches, the contributors explore important initiatives which have protected and revitalized local heritage, initiatives that involved archaeologists as co-producers rather than leaders. These case studies underline the need completely reshape archaeological practice, engaging local and indigenous communities in regular dialogue and recognizing their distinctive needs, in order to break away from the top-down power relationships that have previously characterized archaeology in Africa. Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa reflects a determined effort to change how archaeology is taught to future generations. Through community-based participatory approaches, archaeologists and heritage professionals can benefit from shared resources and local knowledge; and by sharing decision-making with members of local communities, archaeological inquiry can enhance their way of life, ameliorate their human rights concerns, and meet their daily needs to build better futures. Exchanging traditional power structures for research design and implementation, the examples outlined in this volume demonstrate the discipline's exciting capacity to move forward to achieve its potential as a broader, more accessible, and more inclusive field.
The definition of the regional limits of chiefly influence during the Mississippian period in the southeastern United States remains unresolved. In the Gulf Coastal Plain between the Mississippi and Black Warrior rivers, some studies have explored the role that interpolity interactions played in influencing a polity's social and political complexity through time. It has been argued that the larger, more complex polities were able to preempt the development of more complex political structures among the smaller polities. Using research at the Pevey (22Lw510) and Lowe-Steen (22Lw511) mound sites on the Pearl River in Lawrence County, Mississippi, this book explores the social and political mechanisms by which these polities may have interacted with each other and the geographic limit to the effects of inter-polity competition. The Pevey site is a nine-mound Mississippian site and Lowe-Steen is a two-mound site located 18 kilometers to the north of Pevey. These sites provide a "missing link" of sorts to explore questions about inter-polity interactions because of their centrality to the study region and their unusual size. By filling a void in the regional dataset, this study allows us to better understand the capacity of the largest polities to negatively effect the political development of their smaller neighbors.
Urbanization is a phenomenon that brings into focus a range of topics of broad interest to scholars. It is one of the central, enduring interests of anthropological archaeology. Because urbanization is a transformational process, it changes the relationships between social and cultural variables such as demography, economy, politics, and ideology. As one of a handful of cases in the ancient world where cities developed independently, Mesoamerica should play a major role in the global, comparative analysis of first-generation cities and urbanism in general. Yet most research focuses on later manifestations of urbanism in Mesoamerica, thereby perpetuating the fallacy that Mesoamerican cities developed relatively late in comparison to urban centers in the rest of the world. This volume presents new data, case studies, and models for approaching the subject of early Mesoamerican cities. It demonstrates how the study of urbanism in Mesoamerica, and all ancient civilizations, is entering a new and dynamic phase of scholarship.
First Published in 1994. This research guide was written as a comprehensive, though by no means exhaustive, survey of the literature pertinent to studying the indigenous complex societies of south central Africa. Although the paramount focus of the compilation was the archaeology of Great Zimbabwe, the author has drawn from a broad geographical area and a wider period of time than that usually associated with Zimbabwean culture in order to demonstrate the cultural background for the growth of monumental trading towns in south central Africa.
Black Hawks Rising - the title of this book - acknowledges the formation and deployment of the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) in March 2007. Initially confined to peacekeeping within the Mogadishu enclave, it transformed into a peace-making mission. Many - including the author, who predicted the mission was DOA (Dead on Arrival) - gave the mission little chance of success. As a fighting force, however, AMISOM took on the Somali insurgents in 2010; expelled them from Central Mogadishu on Saturday, 6 August 2011; and expanded control of territory under the Somali Government in the succeeding years to most of Somalia. The opening chapters of the book take the reader be hind the scenes to highlight the inconsistent - and sometimes disastrous - US policy in the Horn of Africa generally, and in Somalia (specifically dating back to the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s). Under President George Bush, the US strongly and vigorously opposed deployment of regional African troops in Somalia - instead sponsoring Somali factions to fight against each other and, when that flopped, egged on Ethiopia to invade Somalia in December 2006, which caused the rise of violent insurgency that spilled across borders. Young jihadists streamed from the heart of USA to fight the invaders. To clean up the mess, the Bush administration finally supported the deployment of regional troops. Black Hawks Rising captures intimately the stories of the men and women who made up AMISOM: their triumphs, setbacks and victories. The spotlight focuses on the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF), whose Herculean efforts supported by Burundi National Defence Forces (BNDF) - and later the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF), Forces Armees Djiboutiennes (FAD) , Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF) and Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF) - were pivotal to the success of the mission. Their dedication, professionalism, ideological commitment, hard work and humanity turned Somalia from a wasted nation to one with hope for peace, stability and a better future for the Somali people. Like Heru - the Hawk-God of Ancient Egypt - AMISOM's new breed of African peace-warriors have demonstrated the capacity to work across borders regionally, continent-wide and globally to help resolve conflicts whenever and wherever they arise - protecting lives and property, and preventing genocides before they happen.
This book, edited by Nancy L. Lapp and with contributions by Michael S. Zimmerman, Daniel Ulvoczky, Nicholas Hudson and Adam Hartman, is the second volume of reports from Paul Lapp's excavations at 'Iraq al-Amir in 1961 and 1962. The first appeared as the Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research Vol. 47, in 1983. The presentation by Michael S. Zimmerman of the stratified corpus of the Hellenistic and Roman pottery in the Village excavations, from approximately 200 BCE to 200 CE, is a major portion of the volume. Along with the smaller pottery collections of the Iron Age, Early Bronze, and Byzantine periods, a major contribution is made to the growing quantity of characteristic pottery of Transjordan and its relation to the ceramic assemblages of ancient Palestine to the west and Syria to the north. Although early Iron Age pottery is present in the collection, the main Iron Age occupation was later in the period, even into early Persian times, and it is doubtful that there was an Iron I fortress there as Paul Lapp suggested. The pottery studies are introduced by a review of the history of the excavations at the site from the time of the early explorers and, further, by an introduction describing camp and excavation life in an area not yet touched by modern conveniences in the middle of the twentieth century.
When originally published in German in 1924, this volume was hailed as the first modern, comprehensive archaeological overview of an emerging area of the world. Yes, the Caribbean islands had long been known and owned, occupied, or traded among by the economically advanced nations of the world. However, the original inhabitants--as well as their artifacts, languages, and culture--had been treated by explorers and entrepreneurs alike as either slaves or hindrances to progress, and were used or eliminated. There was no publication that treated seriously the region and the peoples until this work. In the following ten years, additional pertinent publications emerged, along with a request to translate the original into Spanish. Based on those recent publications, Loven decided to update and reissue the work in English, which he thought to be the future international language of scholarship. This work is a classic, with enduring interpretations, broad geographic range, and an eager audience. |
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