A Critique of Archaeological Reason

A Critique of Archaeological Reason PDF Author: Giorgio Buccellati
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108165761
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
In A Critique of Archaeological Reason, Giorgio Buccellati presents a theory of excavation that aims at clarifying the nature of archaeology and its impact on contemporary thought. Integrating epistemological issues with methods of data collection and the role and impact of digital technology on archaeological work, the book explores digital data in order to comprehend its role in shaping meaning and understanding in archaeological excavation. The ability of archaeologists to record in the field, rather than offsite, has fundamentally changed the methods of observation, conceptualization, and interpretation of deposits. Focusing on the role of stratigraphy as the center of archaeological field work, Giorgio Buccellati examines the challenges of interpreting a 'broken tradition'; a civilization for which there are no living carriers today. He uses the site of Urkesh in Syria, where he has worked for decades, as a case study to demonstrate his theory.

A Critique of Archaeological Reason

A Critique of Archaeological Reason PDF Author: Giorgio Buccellati
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108165761
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book

Book Description
In A Critique of Archaeological Reason, Giorgio Buccellati presents a theory of excavation that aims at clarifying the nature of archaeology and its impact on contemporary thought. Integrating epistemological issues with methods of data collection and the role and impact of digital technology on archaeological work, the book explores digital data in order to comprehend its role in shaping meaning and understanding in archaeological excavation. The ability of archaeologists to record in the field, rather than offsite, has fundamentally changed the methods of observation, conceptualization, and interpretation of deposits. Focusing on the role of stratigraphy as the center of archaeological field work, Giorgio Buccellati examines the challenges of interpreting a 'broken tradition'; a civilization for which there are no living carriers today. He uses the site of Urkesh in Syria, where he has worked for decades, as a case study to demonstrate his theory.

A Critique of Archaeological Reason

A Critique of Archaeological Reason PDF Author: Giorgio Buccellati
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110704653X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
This book defines the concept of 'archaeological reason', and provides a new approach to archaeological excavations, philosophical hermeneutics, and digital theory.

America Before

America Before PDF Author: Graham Hancock
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250153743
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
The Instant New York Times Bestseller! Was an advanced civilization lost to history in the global cataclysm that ended the last Ice Age? Graham Hancock, the internationally bestselling author, has made it his life's work to find out--and in America Before, he draws on the latest archaeological and DNA evidence to bring his quest to a stunning conclusion. We’ve been taught that North and South America were empty of humans until around 13,000 years ago – amongst the last great landmasses on earth to have been settled by our ancestors. But new discoveries have radically reshaped this long-established picture and we know now that the Americas were first peopled more than 130,000 years ago – many tens of thousands of years before human settlements became established elsewhere. Hancock's research takes us on a series of journeys and encounters with the scientists responsible for the recent extraordinary breakthroughs. In the process, from the Mississippi Valley to the Amazon rainforest, he reveals that ancient "New World" cultures share a legacy of advanced scientific knowledge and sophisticated spiritual beliefs with supposedly unconnected "Old World" cultures. Have archaeologists focused for too long only on the "Old World" in their search for the origins of civilization while failing to consider the revolutionary possibility that those origins might in fact be found in the "New World"? America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization is the culmination of everything that millions of readers have loved in Hancock's body of work over the past decades, namely a mind-dilating exploration of the mysteries of the past, amazing archaeological discoveries and profound implications for how we lead our lives today.

Bridging Times and Spaces: Papers in Ancient Near Eastern, Mediterranean and Armenian Studies

Bridging Times and Spaces: Papers in Ancient Near Eastern, Mediterranean and Armenian Studies PDF Author: Pavel S. Avetisyan
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1784917001
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
This book presents papers written by colleagues of Professor Gregory E. Areshian on the occasion his 65th birthday. The range of topics includes Near Eastern, Mediterranean and Armenian archaeology, theory of interpretation in archaeology and art history, interdisciplinary history, historical linguistics, art history, and comparative mythology.

Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons

Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons PDF Author: Tuomo Tiisala
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040048471
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
This book argues that the received view of the distinction between freedom and power must be rejected because it rests on an untenable account of the discursive cognition that endows individuals with the capacity for autonomy and self-governed rationality. In liberal and Kantian approaches alike, the autonomous subject is a self-standing starting point whose freedom is constrained by relations of power only contingently because they are external to the subject’s constitution. Thus, the received view defines the distinction between freedom and power as a dichotomy. Michel Foucault is arguably the most important critic of that dichotomy. However, it is widely agreed that Foucault falls short of justifying the alternative view he develops, where power and freedom are essentially entangled instead. The book fills out the gap by investigating the social preconditions of discursive cognition. Drawing on pragmatist-inferentialist resources from the philosophy of language (Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), it presents a new interpretation of Foucault’s philosophy that is unified by his overlooked idea of “the archaeology of knowledge.” As a result, the book not only explains why and how power and freedom must be entangled but also what it means ethically to pursue and gain autonomy with respect to one’s own understanding. Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, critical theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.

Material Evidence

Material Evidence PDF Author: Robert Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317576225
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence takes a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring instances of exemplary practice, key challenges, instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence. Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with cultural significance to the detritus of everyday life and the inadvertent transformation of landscapes over the long term. Each contributor to Material Evidence identifies a particular type of evidence with which they grapple and considers, with reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past. Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars are increasingly interested in working with material things as objects of inquiry and as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer archaeologists and those in related fields.

Archaeology and its Discontents

Archaeology and its Discontents PDF Author: John C. Barrett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000347575
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Archaeology and its Discontents examines the state of archaeology today and its development throughout the twentieth century, making a powerful case for new approaches. Surveying the themes of twentieth-century archaeological theory, Barrett looks at their successes, limitations, and failures. Seeing more failures and limitations than successes, he argues that archaeology has over-focused on explaining the human construction of material variability and should instead be more concerned with understanding how human diversity has been constructed. Archaeology matters, he argues, precisely because of the insights it can offer into the development of human diversity. The analysis and argument are illustrated throughout by reference to the development of the European Neolithic. Arguing both for new approaches and for the importance of archaeology as a discipline, Archaeology and its Discontents is for archaeologists at all levels, from student to professor and trainee to experienced practitioner.

Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason

Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason PDF Author: Gary Gutting
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521366984
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
An introduction to the critical interpretation of the work of Michael Foucault.

Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique

Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique PDF Author: Matthew Liebmann
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 0759112355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In recent years, postcolonial theories have emerged as one of the significant paradigms of contemporary academia, affecting disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences. These theories address the complex processes if colonialism on culture and society—with repect to both the colonizers and the colonized—to help us understand the colonial experience in its entirety. The contributors to Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique present critical syntheses of archaeological and postcolonial studies by examining both Old and New World case studies, and they ask what the ultimate effect of postcolonial theorizing will be on the practice of archaeology in the twenty-first century.

A Companion to Medieval Pisa

A Companion to Medieval Pisa PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004512713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 639

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Book Description
This volume comprises a multidisciplinary study of Pisa’s socio-economic, cultural, and political history, art history, and archaeology at the time of the city’s greatest fame and prosperity during the transformative period of the Middle Ages.