Runoko Rashidi is the foremost living scholar in the field of research into Black communities all over the world. He is not the kind of academic who sits in an ivory tower studying manuscripts. In fact, he has met with Black communities in over 100 countries and visited countless museums and historical sites and given thousands of lectures. He has taken beautiful photographs, some of which feature in his other books published by Books of Africa, Black Star, African Star over Asia, Uncovering the African Past and his book for children, Assata-Garvey and Me. This book contains 202 of Runoko's best photographs mainly from museums in Egypt, Europe and America. 118 of the pictures depict the African essence of great Egyptian art from the early dynasties of Kmt down to Roman times. Also included are pictures of Black people in Western Asia and in China; black Buddhas in Vietnam and Thailand; images of Black people in Europe - in Crete and among the Etruscans and Romans; and images of the famous Olmec heads in Mexico. This is a book to treasure, a perfect companion to Runoko's other works.

A companion to The Archaeology of Rock-Art (Cambridge, 1998), this new collection addresses the most important component of the rock-art panel: its landscape. The book draws together the work of many well-known scholars from key regions of the world known for rock-art and rock-art research. It provides insight into the location and structure of rock-art and its role within the landscapes of ancient worlds.

The German ethnologist and explorer Theodor Koch-Grunberg (1872-1924) discusses the origin and significance of rock art in South America in this study, originally published in 1907. In the first part of the book Koch-Grunberg traces the earliest mention of Brazilian rock art to an eighteenth-century German explorer and gives a wide-ranging account of rock paintings found in South America, engaging critically with the interpretations proposed by some of his fellow scholars. In the second part of the work, the author reproduces (either as drawings or photographs) 29 rock paintings that he himself discovered during one of his expeditions to the Yapura River and the Rio Negro (Venezuela) in 1903-1905. He comments on the characteristics and significance of each of the paintings and assesses their impact within the larger ethnological context of the indigenous tribes of that area.

In this volume, contributors show how stylistic and iconographic analyses of Mississippian imagery provide new perspectives on the beliefs, narratives, public ceremonies, ritual regimes, and expressions of power in the communities that created the artwork. Exploring various methodological and theoretical approaches to pre-Columbian visual culture, these essays reconstruct dynamic accounts of Native American history across the U.S. Southeast. These case studies offer innovative examples of how to use style to identify and compare artifacts, how symbols can be interpreted in the absence of writing, and how to situate and historicize Mississippian imagery. They examine designs carved into shell, copper, stone, and wood or incised into ceramic vessels, from spider iconography to owl effigies and depictions of the cosmos. They discuss how these symbols intersect with memory, myths, social hierarchies, religious traditions, and other spheres of Native American life in the past and present. The tools modeled in this volume will open new horizons for learning about the culture and worldviews of past peoples.

A significant number of Holocene societies throughout the world have resorted at one time or another to the making of paints or carvings on different places (tombs, rock-shelters or caves, openair outcrops). The aim of the session A11e. Public images, private readings: multi-perspective approaches to the post-Palaeolithic rock art, which was held within the XVII World UISPP Congress (Burgos, September 1-7 2014), was to put together the experiences of specialists from different areas of the Iberian Peninsula and the World. The approaches ranged from the archaeological definition of the artistic phenomena and their socioeconomic background to those concerning themselves with the symbolic and ritual nature of those practices, including the definition of the audience to which the graphic manifestations were addressed and the potential role of the latter in the making up of social identities and the enforcement of territorial claims. More empirical issues, such as new recording methodologies and data management or even dating were also considered during this session.

This volume presents the proceedings of Session XXVIII-4 of the XVIII UISPP World Congress (4-9 June 2018, Paris, France), Caracterisation, continuites et discontinuites des manifestations graphiques des societes prehistoriques. Papers address the question of exchange and mobility in prehistoric societies in relation to the evolution of their environments through the prism of their graphic productions, on objects or on walls. This volume offers the opportunity to question their symbolic behaviours within very diverse temporal, chrono-cultural or geographic contexts. It also provides the framework for a discussion on cultural identity and how this was asserted in the face of environmental or social changes or constraints.

Named after an archaeological site discovered in 1951 in Zhengzhou, China, the Erligang civilization arose in the Yellow River valley around the middle of the second millennium BCE. Shortly thereafter, its distinctive elite material culture spread to a large part of China's Central Plain, in the south reaching as far as the banks of the Yangzi River. The Erligang culture is best known for the remains of an immense walled city at Zhengzhou, a smaller site at Panlongcheng in Hubei, and a large-scale bronze industry of remarkable artistic and technological sophistication.

This richly illustrated book is the first in a western language devoted to the Erligang culture. It brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines, including art history and archaeology, to explore what is known about the culture and its spectacular bronze industry. The opening chapters introduce the history of the discovery of the culture and its most important archaeological sites. Subsequent essays address a variety of important methodological issues related to the study of Erligang, including how to define the culture, the usefulness of cross-cultural comparative study, and the difficulty of reconciling traditional Chinese historiography with archaeological discoveries. The book closes by examining the role the Erligang civilization played in the emergence of the first bronze-using societies in south China and the importance of bronze studies in the training of Chinese art historians.

The contributors are Robert Bagley, John Baines, Maggie Bickford, Rod Campbell, Li Yung-ti, Robin McNeal, Kyle Steinke, Wang Haicheng, and Zhang Changping.

Die 2011 von der UNESCO anerkannte serielle Welterbestatte vereinigt Fundorte in Deutschland, Frankreich, Italien, OEsterreich, der Schweiz und Slowenien. Die Pfahlbauten dokumentieren die Lebensverhaltnisse jungsteinzeitlicher und metallzeitlicher Siedelgemeinschaften zwischen 5000 und 600 v. Chr. Obertagig nicht sichtbar, liegen sie verborgen in den Ufer- und Flachwasserbereichen der Alpenrandseen oder unter Moorbedeckung. Unter Luftabschluss haben sich organische Materialien wie Holz, Textil und Nahrungsreste in sensationeller Weise erhalten. Doch bedrohen moderne Nutzung und veranderte Umweltbedingungen die empfindlichen Fundstellen. Unter diesen Aspekten nimmt der Sammelband eine Bestandsaufnahme vor und diskutiert Gefahren, Moeglichkeiten und Chancen einer kunftigen Erforschung und Entwicklung.

L'arte rupestre nella penisola e nelle isole italiane presents the proceedings of IFRAO 2018 - Session 2H: Rock Art in the Italian Peninsula and Islands: Issues about the Relation between Engraved and Painted Rocks, Symbols, Mountain Areas and Paths. The various papers present a remarkable synthesis of current knowledge on inscriptions, engraved and painted, on the rock walls of the Italian peninsular. In recent years an increasing amount of data has been collected, characterized by a regional and peculiar iconography with some common elements: anthropomorphic figures, weapons, daggers, halberds and other several symbols, all stylised. A peculiarity of this research is the site's locations within small shelters, inappropriate for habitation or in places suitable for supervising mountain and territory roads; this research demonstrates similarities to that carried out in the Western Mediterranean Sea. A new subject of relates to the possible interpretations of some engravings as solar and stellar symbols related to the measuring of time and to economic, daily and seasonal factors.