Author: Bernardo Urbani
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110880327X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 560
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Book Description
Archaeoprimatology intertwines archaeology and primatology to understand the ancient liminal relationships between humans and nonhuman primates. During the last decade, novel studies have boosted this discipline. This edited volume is the first compendium of archaeoprimatological studies ever produced. Written by a culturally diverse group of scholars, with multiple theoretical views and methodological perspectives, it includes new zooarchaeological examinations and material culture evaluations, as well as innovative uses of oral and written sources. Themes discussed comprise the survey of past primates as pets, symbolic mediators, prey, iconographic references, or living commodities. The book covers different regions of the world, from the Americas to Asia, along with studies from Africa and Europe. Temporally, the chapters explore the human-nonhuman primate interface from deep in time to more recent historical times, covering both extinct and extant primate taxa. This anthology of archaeoprimatological studies will be of interest to archaeologists, primatologists, anthropologists, art historians, paleontologists, conservationists, zoologists, historical ecologists, philologists, and ethnobiologists.
Author: Emily S. K. Anderson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316839508
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
Generations of scholars have grappled with the origins of 'palace' society on Minoan Crete, seeking to explain when and how life on the island altered monumentally. Emily Anderson turns light on the moment just before the palaces, recognizing it as a remarkably vibrant phase of socio-cultural innovation. Exploring the role of craftspersons, travelers and powerful objects, she argues that social change resulted from creative work that forged connections at new scales and in novel ways. This study focuses on an extraordinary corpus of sealstones which have been excavated across Crete. Fashioned of imported ivory and engraved with images of dashing lions, these distinctive objects linked the identities of their distant owners. Anderson argues that it was the repeated but pioneering actions of such diverse figures, people and objects alike, that dramatically changed the shape of social life in the Aegean at the turn of the second millennium BCE.
Author: Kathryn E. Piquette
Publisher: Ubiquity Press
ISBN: 1909188263
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
Writing as Material Practice grapples with the issue of writing as a form of material culture in its ancient and more recent manifestations, and in the contexts of production and consumption. Fifteen case studies explore the artefactual nature of writing — the ways in which materials, techniques, colour, scale, orientation and visibility inform the creation of inscribed objects and spaces, as well as structure subsequent engagement, perception and meaning making. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years, from c.3200 BCE to the present day, and ranging in spatial context from the Americas to the Near East, the chapters in this volume bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific and broader questions of writing materialities. The authors also aim to place past graphical systems in their social contexts so they can be understood in relation to the people who created and attributed meaning to writing and associated symbolic modes through a diverse array of individual and wider social practices.
Author: Amy J. Maitland Gardner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350277002
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
This volume examines the role of gestures in past societies, exploring both how meaning was communicated through bodily actions, and also how archaeologists can trace the symbolism and significance of ancient gestures, ritual practices and bodily techniques through the material remnants of past human groups. Gesture studies is an area of increasing interest within the social sciences, and the individual chapters not only respond to developments in the field, but push it forward by bringing a wide range of perspectives and approaches into dialogue with one another. Each exhibits a critical and reflexive approach to bodily communication and to re-tracing bodies through the archaeological record (in art, the treatment of the body and material culture), and together they demonstrate the diversity of pioneering global research on gestures in archaeology and related disciplines, with contributions from leading researchers in Aegean, Mediterranean, Mesoamerican, Japanese and Near Eastern archaeology. By bringing case studies from each of these different cultures and regions together and drawing on interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, design, art history and the performing arts, this volume reveals the similarities and differences in gestures as expressed in cultures around the world, and offers new and valuable perspectives on the nature of bodily communication across both space and time.
Author: Pearce Paul Creasman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019022908X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
The concept of pharaonic Egypt as a unified, homogeneous, and isolated cultural entity is misleading. Ancient Egypt was a rich tapestry of social, religious, technological, and economic interconnections among numerous cultures from disparate lands. In fifteen chapters divided into five thematic groups, Pharaoh's Land and Beyond uniquely examines Egypt's relationship with its wider world. The first section details the geographical contexts of interconnections by examining ancient Egyptian exploration, maritime routes, and overland passages. In the next section, chapters address the human principals of association: peoples, with the attendant difficulties of differentiating ethnic identities from the record; diplomatic actors, with their complex balances and presentations of power; and the military, with its evolving role in pharaonic expansion. Natural events, from droughts and floods to illness and epidemics, also played significant roles in this ancient world, as examined in the third section. The final two sections explore the physical manifestations of interconnections between pharaonic Egypt and its neighbors, first in the form of material objects and second, in the powerful exchange of ideas. Whether through diffusion and borrowing of knowledge and technology, through the flow of words by script and literature, or through exchanges in the religious sphere, the pharaonic Egypt that we know today was constantly changing--and changing the cultures around it. This illustrious work represents the first synthesis of these cultural relationships, unbounded by time, geography, or mode.
Author: Nicholas Sekunda
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1789693829
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Twenty-one contributions, written by friends and colleagues, reflect the wide interests of Professor Michael Vickers; from the Aegean Bronze Age to the use made of archaeology by dictators in the modern age. Seven contributions relate to Georgia, where the Professor has worked most recently, and made his home.
Author: James Whitley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472522877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Knossos is one of the most important sites in the ancient Mediterranean. It remained amongst the largest settlements on the island of Crete from the Neolithic until the late Roman times, but aside from its size it held a place of particular significance in the mythological imagination of Greece and Rome as the seat of King Minos, the location of the Labyrinth and the home of the Minotaur. Sir Arthur Evans' discovery of 'the Palace of Minos' has indelibly associated Knossos in the modern mind with the 'lost' civilisation of Bronze Age Crete. The allure of this 'lost civilisation', together with the considerable achievements of 'Minoan' artists and craftspeople, remain a major attraction both to scholars and to others outside the academic world as a bastion of a romantic approach to the past. In this volume, James Whitley provides an up-to-date guide to the site and its function from the Neolithic until the present day. This study includes a re-appraisal of Bronze Age palatial society, as well as an exploration of the history of Knossos in the archaeological imagination. In doing so he takes a critical look at the guiding assumptions of Evans and others, reconstructing how and why the received view of this ancient settlement has evolved from the Iron Age up to the modern era.
Author: Paraskevi Christodoulou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443826197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
The Postgraduate Cypriot Archaeology Conference (POCA) was held in Cyprus in 2007. This event brought together a significant number of distinguished young scholars from research institutions all over the world, conducting research on the history and archaeology of the island. The proceedings volume of this conference is a multidisciplinary collection of papers that spans from the prehistoric to the medieval times, a significant contribution to the field of archaeological research that will engage young and older scholars and provide the groundwork for further development of research ideas, methodologies and collaborations.
Author: Evangelia Papadopoulou
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1784913421
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
In Achaios, thirty-five scholars from six different countries have contributed with thirty-one papers, as a small token of appreciation, gratitude and affection to a true scholar, who devoted his life studying and revealing the long journeys of the Mycenaeans and their culture.
Author: Judith Weingarten
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803275340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Robert Koehl has long considered processions to have played an integral role in Aegean Bronze Age societies. Papers concentrate mainly on evidence from Crete, the Cyclades and the Greek mainland, with additional perspectives from abroad, these geographic divisions forming the basic outline of this volume.
