Wetland Archaeology and Beyond

Wetland Archaeology and Beyond PDF Author: Francesco Menotti
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199571015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 563

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Book Description
Wetland Archaeology and Beyond offers an appreciative study of the people, and their artefacts, who occupied a large variety of worldwide wetland archaeological sites. The volume also includes a comprehensive explanation of the processes involved in archaeological practice and theory.

Wetland Archaeology and Beyond

Wetland Archaeology and Beyond PDF Author: Francesco Menotti
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199571015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 563

Get Book Here

Book Description
Wetland Archaeology and Beyond offers an appreciative study of the people, and their artefacts, who occupied a large variety of worldwide wetland archaeological sites. The volume also includes a comprehensive explanation of the processes involved in archaeological practice and theory.

The Oxford Handbook of Wetland Archaeology

The Oxford Handbook of Wetland Archaeology PDF Author: Francesco Menotti
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199573492
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 970

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Book Description
This Handbook sets out the key issues and debates in the theory and practice of wetland archaeology which has played a crucial role in studies of our past. Due to the high quantity of preserved organic materials found in humid environments, the study of wetlands has allowed archaeologists to reconstruct people's everyday lives in great detail.

An Introduction to Peatland Archaeology and Palaeoenvironments

An Introduction to Peatland Archaeology and Palaeoenvironments PDF Author: Benjamin R. Gearey
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789257581
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Peatlands are regarded as having exceptional archaeological value, due to the fact the waterlogged conditions of these wetlands can preserve organic remains that are almost entirely lost from the majority of dryland contexts. This is certainly true, although the remarkable preservation of sites and artifacts is just one aspect of their archaeological importance. Peatlands are ‘archives’ of past environmental changes: the palaeoenvironmental or palaeoecological record. The waterlogged conditions preserve pollen, plant remains, insects and other proxies that can be used to reconstruct past patterns and processes of environmental change, critical records of long term ecological processes for wetland and also adjacent dryland areas. The potential to integrate and combine records of cultural and environmental change, represents the distinguishing feature of peatland (and wetland) archaeology, what we might describe collectively as the ‘archaeo-environmental record’. When these records are analyzed in conjunction, exceptional interpretative synergy can be achieved; but this relies on the development and implementation of integrated excavation and analytical strategies and approaches. This new title in our highly successful Studying Scientific Archaeology series provides an accessible introduction to the ecology and formation processes of peatlands, and to the different archaeological and palaeoenvironmental techniques that have been developed and adapted for the study of these environments. It provides an outline of the major themes and methods and as a guide to other more detailed and technical literature concerning peatland archaeology. The case studies have been selected to illustrate, as far as possible, examples of 'best practice'. Processes such as drainage, agriculture, peat-cutting, afforestation, and climate change threaten peatlands and by extension, the survival of archaeological sites and deposits in situ. On the other side of this environmental coin, healthy, functioning peatlands are important for biodiversity, hydrology and as ‘carbon sinks’ with the potential to mitigate global heating. Recent years have thus seen increasing efforts to stop destruction and damage and rehabilitate peatlands with a view to restoring these 'ecosystem services'. The book considers these issues in terms of the past loss and damage of archaeological sites and the future protection of the resource in the Anthropocene.

Material Evidence

Material Evidence PDF Author: Robert Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317576233
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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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.

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge PDF Author: Nancy J. Turner
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773585400
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1137

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Book Description
Volume 1: The History and Practice of Indigenous Plant Knowledge. Volume 2: The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. Nancy Turner has studied Indigenous peoples' knowledge of plants and environments in northwestern North America for over forty years. In Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge, she integrates her research into a two-volume ethnobotanical tour-de-force. Drawing on information shared by Indigenous botanical experts and collaborators, the ethnographic and historical record, and from linguistics, palaeobotany, archaeology, phytogeography, and other fields, Turner weaves together a complex understanding of the traditions of use and management of plant resources in this vast region. She follows Indigenous inhabitants over time and through space, showing how they actively participated in their environments, managed and cultivated valued plant resources, and maintained key habitats that supported their dynamic cultures for thousands of years, as well as how knowledge was passed on from generation to generation and from one community to another. To understand the values and perspectives that have guided Indigenous ethnobotanical knowledge and practices, Turner looks beyond the details of individual plant species and their uses to determine the overall patterns and processes of their development, application, and adaptation. Volume 1 presents a historical overview of ethnobotanical knowledge in the region before and after European contact. The ways in which Indigenous peoples used and interacted with plants - for nutrition, technologies, and medicine - are examined. Drawing connections between similarities across languages, Turner compares the names of over 250 plant species in more than fifty Indigenous languages and dialects to demonstrate the prominence of certain plants in various cultures and the sharing of goods and ideas between peoples. She also examines the effects that introduced species and colonialism had on the region's Indigenous peoples and their ecologies. Volume 2 provides a sweeping account of how Indigenous organizational systems developed to facilitate the harvesting, use, and cultivation of plants, to establish economic connections across linguistic and cultural borders, and to preserve and manage resources and habitats. Turner describes the worldviews and philosophies that emerged from the interactions between peoples and plants, and how these understandings are expressed through cultures’ stories and narratives. Finally, she explores the ways in which botanical and ecological knowledge can be and are being maintained as living, adaptive systems that promote healthy cultures, environments, and indigenous plant populations. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge both challenges and contributes to existing knowledge of Indigenous peoples' land stewardship while preserving information that might otherwise have been lost. Providing new and captivating insights into the anthropogenic systems of northwestern North America, it will stand as an authoritative reference work and contribute to a fuller understanding of the interactions between cultures and ecological systems.

The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox

The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox PDF Author: Tom Bloemers
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9089641556
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 753

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Book Description
The basic problem is to what extent we can know past and mainly invisible landscapes, and how we can use this still hidden knowledge for actual sustainable management of landscape's cultural and historical values. It has also been acknowledged that heritage management is increasingly about 'the management of future change rather than simply protection'. This presents us with a paradox: to preserve our historic environment, we have to collaborate with those who wish to transform it and, in order to apply our expert knowledge, we have to make it suitable for policy and society. The answer presented by the Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape programme (pdl/bbo) is an integrative landscape approach which applies inter- and transdisciplinarity, establishing links between archaeological-historical heritage and planning, and between research and policy.

The Norse Sorceress

The Norse Sorceress PDF Author: Leszek Garde?a
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789259541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1062

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Book Description
Old Norse literature abounds with descriptions of magic acts that allow ritual specialists of various kinds to manipulate the world around them, see into the future or the distant past, change weather conditions, influence the outcomes of battles, and more. While magic practitioners are known under myriad terms, the most iconic of them is the völva. As the central figure of the famous mythological poem Völuspá (The Prophecy of the Völva), the völva commands both respect and fear. In non-mythological texts similar women are portrayed as crucial albeit somewhat peculiar members of society. Always veiled in mystery, the völur and their kind have captured the academic and popular imagination for centuries. Bringing together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, this volume aims to provide new insights into the reality of magic and its agents in the Viking world, beyond the pages of medieval texts. It explores new trajectories for the study of past mentalities, beliefs, and rituals as well as the tools employed in these practices and the individuals who wielded them. In doing so, the volume engages with several topical issues of Viking Age research, including the complex entanglements of mind and materiality, the cultural attitudes to animals and the natural world, and the cultural constructions of gender and sexuality. By addressing these complex themes, it offers a nuanced image of the völva and related magic workers in their cultural context. The volume is intended for a broad, diverse, and international audience, including experts in the field of Viking and Old Norse studies but also various non-professional history enthusiasts. The Norse Sorceress: Mind and Materiality in the Viking World is a key output of the project Tanken bag Tingene (Thoughts behind Things) conducted at the National Museum of Denmark from 2020 to 2023 and funded by the Krogager Foundation.

Ecologies of Bronze Age Rock Art

Ecologies of Bronze Age Rock Art PDF Author: Fredrik Fahlander
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
A consideration of the rock art of the Mälaren bay region exploring the potential efficacy of petroglyphs as physical devices through organization, design, and articulation. The Bronze Age (1700–500 BCE) petroglyphs of southern Scandinavia comprise a unique tradition of rock art in northern Eurasia. Despite a limited repertoire of motifs such as cupmarks, boats, anthropomorphs, zoomorphs, podomorphs and circles, it shows great variability in design, elaboration and articulation. This book is a study of the Mälaren region in southern-central Sweden that includes one of the most prominent rock art clusters of southwest Uppland as well as the hinterland of Södermanland county. The rock art in this region is studied on three scales: regional, local and particular. This allows for comparisons between dense and small sites, an exploration of how the Bronze Age rock art tradition developed over time in the area, and equally how the design and articulation of certain motifs relate to contemporary settlements, waterways and varying environmental settings. Patterns and structures in the distribution and articulation of the petroglyphs show that the different motifs are not only visual expressions but very much material enactments. The motifs often physically relate to each other, the flows of water, and the microtopography and mineral contents of the rocks. The study is therefore not as much about rock art as images and symbols as it is about the ecology of rock art – the web of social and physical relations in which it was enacted and employed. From this perspective, the petroglyphs are seen as petrofacts, that is something akin to tools or devices articulated in various ways to affect humans, other-than-humans and the animacies of the coastal milieus where they were made.

Human Transformations of the Earth

Human Transformations of the Earth PDF Author: Charles French
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789259223
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book charts and explains how human activities have shaped and altered the development of soils in many parts of the world, taking advantage of five decades of soil analytical work in many archaeological landscapes from around the globe. The core of this volume describes and illustrates major transformations of soils and the processes involved in these that have occurred during the Holocene and how these relate to human activities as much as natural causes and trajectories of development, right up to the present day. This is done in two ways: first by examining a number of major processes and impacts on the landscape such as Holocene warming and the development of woodland, clearance and agricultural activities, and second by examining the trajectories of these changes in soil systems in different palaeo-environmental situations in several diverse parts of the world. The transformations identified are relevant to prevalent themes of today such as over-development and soil, land and environmental degradation and resilience. The studies articulated relate to Britain, southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean basin, East Africa, northern India and Peru in South America.

The end of the lake-dwellings in the Circum-Alpine region

The end of the lake-dwellings in the Circum-Alpine region PDF Author: Francesco Menotti
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1782978631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
After more than 3500 years of occupation in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, the many lake-dwellings around the Circum-Alpine region ‘suddenly’ came to an end. Throughout that period alternating phases of occupation and abandonment illustrate how resilient lacustrine populations were against change: cultural/environmental factors might have forced them to relocate temporarily, but they always returned to the lakes. So why were the lake-dwellings finally abandoned and what exactly happened towards the end of the Late Bronze Age that made the lake-dwellers change their way of life so drastically? The new research presented here draws upon the results of a four-year-long project dedicated to shedding light on this intriguing conundrum. Placing a particular emphasis upon the Bronze Age, a multidisciplinary team of researchers has studied the lake-dwelling phenomenon inside out, leaving no stones unturned, enabling identification of all possible interactive socioeconomic and environmental factors that can be subsequently tested against each other to prove (or disprove) their validity. By refitting the various pieces of the jigsaw a plausible, but also rather unexpected, picture emerges.