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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > Pre-history
In Breaking the Surface, Doug Bailey offers a radical alternative
for understanding Neolithic houses, providing much-needed insight
not just into prehistoric practice, but into another way of doing
archaeology. Using his years of fieldwork experience excavating the
early Neolithic pit-houses of southeastern Europe, Bailey exposes
and elucidates a previously under-theorized aspect of prehistoric
pit construction: the actions and consequences of digging defined
as breaking the surface of the ground. Breaking the Surface works
through the consequences of this redefinition in order to redirect
scholarship on the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in
Neolithic Europe, offering detailed critiques of current
interpretations of these earliest European architectural
constructions. The work of the book is performed by juxtaposing
richly detailed discussions of archaeological sites (Etton and The
Wilsford Shaft in the UK, and Magura in Romania), with the work of
three artists-who-cut (Ron Athey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio
Fontana), with deep and detailed examinations of the philosophy of
holes, the perceptual psychology of shapes, and the linguistic
anthropology of cutting and breaking words, as well as with
cultural diversity in framing spatial reference and through an
examination of pre-modern ungrounded ways of living. Breaking the
Surface is as much a creative act on its own - in its mixture of
work from disparate periods and regions, its use of radical text
interruption, and its juxtaposition of text and imagery - as it is
an interpretive statement about prehistoric architecture.
Unflinching and exhilarating, it is a major development in the
growing subdiscipline of art/archaeology.
Many undergraduates struggle to fully understand the size of the
earth and the diverse environments to which human beings have
successfully adapted. An Atlas of Human Prehistory gives students
an appreciation for the sheer size of the earth and the diverse
geographies through which humanity and our ancestors have migrated
and settled over millions of years. The book's unique formatting
allows students to read a stand-alone topical essay on the
left-hand page, which refers to the accompanying detailed maps and
diagrams on the right-hand page. The maps and diagrams provide
additional details and enable students to "see" human adaptation
across time and space. This fresh, engaging approach covers hominin
evolution, important fossil sites, early dispersal around the
world, biocultural and subsistence adaptations, and the
establishment of ancient civilizations. An outstanding blend of
words and visuals, An Atlas of Human Prehistory gives readers
excellent graphical representations of the chief lessons of our
shared past and a greater understanding of the pace of movement
across time. It is an excellent supplement for courses in
archaeology, ancient history, human geography, and physical
anthropology.
This book is an analysis of a collection of artefacts from the
Neolithic period of the southern Levant. Although they have
traditionally been identified as human images, the relationship of
some of them to naturalistic human anatomy is tenuous, and, drawing
on comparative examples from other periods and locations, Estelle
Orrelle interprets them as images of Gods. Situating the artefacts
in the context of the Neolithic transition, she shows how a
Darwinian symbolic origins theory can explain the emergence of this
iconography; that it lies in ancient sexual selection strategies,
as power relations changed from an original social contract
underpinned by female ritual power, to a new social contract driven
by competing male elites."
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