The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines

The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines PDF Author: Timothy Insoll
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199675619
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 961

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines is the first text to offer a comparative survey of figurines from across the globe, bringing together myriad contemporary research approaches to provide invaluable insights into their function, context, meaning, and use, as well as past thinking on the human body, gender, and identity.

The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines

The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines PDF Author: Timothy Insoll
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199675619
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 961

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines is the first text to offer a comparative survey of figurines from across the globe, bringing together myriad contemporary research approaches to provide invaluable insights into their function, context, meaning, and use, as well as past thinking on the human body, gender, and identity.

Interpreting Ancient Figurines

Interpreting Ancient Figurines PDF Author: Richard G. Lesure
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139496158
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This book examines ancient figurines from several world areas to address recurring challenges in the interpretation of prehistoric art. Sometimes figurines from one context are perceived to resemble those from another. Richard G. Lesure asks whether such resemblances play a role in our interpretations. Early interpreters seized on the idea that figurines were recurringly female and constructed the fanciful myth of a primordial Neolithic Goddess. Contemporary practice instead rejects interpretive leaps across contexts. Dr Lesure offers a middle path: a new framework for assessing the relevance of particular comparisons. He develops the argument in case studies that consider figurines from Paleolithic Europe, the Neolithic Near East and Formative Mesoamerica.

Figurines

Figurines PDF Author: Jaś Elsner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192605291
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Figurines are objects of handling. As touchable objects, they engage the viewer in different ways from flat art, whether relief sculpture or painting. Unlike the voyeuristic relationship of viewing a neatly framed pictorial narrative as if from the outside, the viewer as handler is always potentially and without protection within the narrative of figurines. As such, they have potential for a potent, even animated, agency in relation to those who use them. This volume concerns figurines as archaeologically-attested materials from literate cultures with surviving documents that have no direct links of contiguity, appropriation, or influence in relation to each other. It is an attempt to put the category of the figurine on the table as a key conceptual and material problematic in the art history of antiquity. It does so through comparative juxtaposition of close-focused chapters drawn from deep art-historical engagement with specific ancient cultures - Chinese, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican, and Greco-Roman. It encourages comparative conversation across the disciplines that constitute the art history of the ancient world through finding categories and models of discourse that may offer fertile ground for comparison and antithesis. It extends the rich and astute literature on prehistoric figurines into understanding the figurine in historical contexts, where literary texts and documents, inscriptions, or surviving terminologies can be adduced alongside material culture. At stake are issues of figuration and anthropomorphism, miniaturization and portability, one-off production and replication, and substitution and scale at the interface of archaeology and art history.

In Search of God the Mother

In Search of God the Mother PDF Author: Lynn E. Roller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520919686
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
This book examines one of the most intriguing figures in the religious life of the ancient Mediterranean world, the Phrygian Mother Goddess, known to the Greeks and Romans as Cybele or Magna Mater, the Great Mother. Her cult was particularly prominent in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), and spread from there through the Greek and Roman world. She was an enormously popular figure, attracting devotion from common people and potentates alike. This book is the first comprehensive assembly and discussion of the entire extant evidence concerning the worship of the Phrygian Mother Goddess, from her earliest appearance in the prehistoric record to the early centuries of the Roman Empire. Lynn E. Roller presents and analyzes literary, historiographic, and archaeological data with equal acuity and flair. While previous studies have tended to emphasize the more outrageous aspects of the Mother Goddess's cult, such as her orgiastic rituals and the eunuch priests who attended her, this book places a special focus on Cybele's position in Anatolia and the ways in which the identity of the goddess changed as her cult was transmitted to Greece and Rome. Roller gives a detailed account of the growth, spread, and evolution of her cult, her ceremonies, and her meaning for her adherents. This book will introduce students of Classical antiquity to many aspects of the Great Mother which have been previously unexamined, and will interest anyone who has ever been piqued by curiosity about the Mother Goddess of the ancient Western world.

Iron Age Terracotta Figurines from the Southern Levant in Context

Iron Age Terracotta Figurines from the Southern Levant in Context PDF Author: Erin D. Darby
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004436774
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume is a ‘one-stop location’ for the most up-to-date scholarship on Southern Levantine figurines in the Iron Age. The essays address terracotta figurines attested in the Southern Levant from the Iron Age through the Persian Period (1200–333 BCE). The volume deals with the iconography, typology, and find context of female, male, animal, and furniture figurines and discusses their production, appearance, and provenance, including their identification and religious functions. While giving priority to figurines originating from Phoenicia, Philistia, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine, the volume explores the influences of Egyptian, Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Mediterranean (particularly Cypriot) iconography on Levantine pictorial material.

Sculpture and Touch

Sculpture and Touch PDF Author: Peter Dent
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351549464
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Since the Renaissance, at least, the medium of sculpture has been associated explicitly with the sense of touch. Sculptors, philosophers and art historians have all linked the two, often in strikingly different ways. In spite of this long running interest in touch and tactility, it is vision and visuality which have tended to dominate art historical research in recent decades. This book introduces a new impetus to the discussion of the relationship between touch and sculpture by setting up a dialogue between art historians and individuals with fresh insights who are working in disciplines beyond art history. The collection brings together a rich and diverse set of approaches, with essays tackling subjects from prehistoric figurines to the work of contemporary artists, from pre-modern ideas about the physiology of touch to tactile interaction in the museum environment, and from the phenomenology of touch in recent philosophy to the experimental findings of scientific study. It is the first volume on this subject to take such a broad approach and, as such, seeks to set the agenda for future research and collaboration in this area.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Library of Congress Subject Headings PDF Author: Library of Congress. Cataloging Policy and Support Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Subject headings, Library of Congress
Languages : en
Pages : 1596

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Book Description


Library of Congress Subject Headings

Library of Congress Subject Headings PDF Author: Library of Congress
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Subject headings, Library of Congress
Languages : en
Pages : 1512

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Book Description


Breaking Images

Breaking Images PDF Author: Gianluca Miniaci
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789259150
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
Archaeological remains are ‘fragmented by definition’: apart from exceptional cases, the study of the human past takes into account mainly traces, ruins, discards, and debris of past civilizations. It is rare that things have been preserved as they were originally made and conceived in the past. However, not all the ancient fragmentary objects were the ‘leftovers’ from the past. A noticeable portion of them was part and parcel of the ancient materiality already in the form of a fragment or damaged item. In 2000, John Chapman, with his volume Fragmentation in Archaeology, attracted the attention of scholars on the need to reconsider broken artifacts as the result of the deliberate anthropic process of physical fragmentation. The phenomenon of fragmentation can be thus explored with more outcomes for a category of objects that played an important role inside the society: the figurines. Due to their portability and size, figurines are particularly entangled and engaged in social, spatial, temporal, and material relations, and – more than other artifacts – can easily accommodate acts of embodiment and dismemberment. The act of creation symmetrically also involves the act of destruction, which in turn is another act of creation, since from the fragmentation comes a new entity with a different ontology. Breaking contains the paradigms of life: creation and reparation, destruction and regeneration. The scope of this volume is to search for traces of any voluntary and intentional fragmentation of ancient artifacts, creating, improving, and sharpening the methods and principles for a scientific investigation that goes beyond single author impression or sensitivity. The comparative lens adopted in this volume can allow the reader to explore different fields taken from ancient societies of how we can address, assess, detect, and even discuss the action of breaking and mutilation of ancient figurines.

The Lost World of Old Europe

The Lost World of Old Europe PDF Author: David W. Anthony
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691143880
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In the prehistoric Copper Age, long before cities, writing, or the invention of the wheel, Old Europe was among the most culturally rich regions in the world. Its inhabitants lived in prosperous agricultural towns. The ubiquitous goddess figurines found in their houses and shrines have triggered intense debates about women's roles. The Lost World of Old Europe is the accompanying catalog for an exhibition at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. This superb volume features essays by leading archaeologists as well as breathtaking color photographs cataloguing the objects, some illustrated here for the first time. The heart of Old Europe was in the lower Danube valley, in contemporary Bulgaria and Romania. Old European coppersmiths were the most advanced metal artisans in the world. Their intense interest in acquiring copper, Aegean shells, and other rare valuables gave rise to far-reaching trading networks. In their graves, the bodies of Old European chieftains were adorned with pounds of gold and copper ornaments. Their funerals were without parallel in the Near East or Egypt. The exhibition represents the first time these rare objects have appeared in the United States. An unparalleled introduction to Old Europe's cultural, technological, and artistic legacy, The Lost World of Old Europe includes essays by Douglass Bailey, John Chapman, Cornelia-Magda Lazarovici, Ioan Opris and Catalin Bem, Ernst Pernicka, Dragomir Nicolae Popovici, Michel Séfériadès, and Vladimir Slavchev.