Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean

Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean PDF Author: Louise Steel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415537347
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The importance of cultural contacts in the East Mediterranean has long been recognized and is the focus of ongoing international research. Fieldwork in the Aegean, Egypt, Cyprus, and the Levant continues to add to our understanding of the nature of this contact and its social and economic significance, particularly to the cultures of the Aegean. Despite sophisticated discussion of the archaeological evidence, in particular on the part of Aegean and Mediterranean archaeologists, there has been little systematic attempt to incorporate anthropological perspectives on materiality and exchange into archaeological narratives of this material. This book addresses that gap and integrates anthropological discourse on contact, examining exchange systems, the gift, notions of geographical distance and power, colonization, and hybridization. Furthermore, it develops a social narrative of culture contact in the Mediterranean context, illustrating the reasons communities chose to engage in international exchange, and how this impacted the construction of identities throughout the region. While traditional archaeologies in the East Mediterranean have tended to be reductive in their approach to material culture and how it was produced, used, and exchanged, this book reviews current research on material culture, focusing on issues such as the biography of objects, inalienable possessions, and hybridization - exploring how these issues can further illuminate the material world of the communities of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean

Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean PDF Author: Louise Steel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415537347
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The importance of cultural contacts in the East Mediterranean has long been recognized and is the focus of ongoing international research. Fieldwork in the Aegean, Egypt, Cyprus, and the Levant continues to add to our understanding of the nature of this contact and its social and economic significance, particularly to the cultures of the Aegean. Despite sophisticated discussion of the archaeological evidence, in particular on the part of Aegean and Mediterranean archaeologists, there has been little systematic attempt to incorporate anthropological perspectives on materiality and exchange into archaeological narratives of this material. This book addresses that gap and integrates anthropological discourse on contact, examining exchange systems, the gift, notions of geographical distance and power, colonization, and hybridization. Furthermore, it develops a social narrative of culture contact in the Mediterranean context, illustrating the reasons communities chose to engage in international exchange, and how this impacted the construction of identities throughout the region. While traditional archaeologies in the East Mediterranean have tended to be reductive in their approach to material culture and how it was produced, used, and exchanged, this book reviews current research on material culture, focusing on issues such as the biography of objects, inalienable possessions, and hybridization - exploring how these issues can further illuminate the material world of the communities of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

Exploring the Materiality of Food 'Stuffs'

Exploring the Materiality of Food 'Stuffs' PDF Author: Louise Steel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317377400
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
From remote antiquity to contemporary contexts, food and the ‘stuff’ of food remains central to people’s daily experiences as well as their sense and expression of identity. This volume explores the materiality of foodstuffs past and present, examining humanity’s intriguingly complex relationships with, and experiences of, food. The book also makes a fresh contribution to our understanding of materiality through a novel focus on material culture, analysing objects used to prepare, wrap, serve and consume food and the tactile experiences involved in its production and consumption. Considering a wide range of cultures, spanning from ancient China to modern-day Kenya, this broad collection of interdisciplinary chapters reveal the multiple interplays between foods, bodies, material worlds, rituals and embodied knowledge that emerge from these encounters and which, in turn, shape the material culture of food. Exploring the Materiality of Food 'Stuffs' makes an important contribution to this burgeoning field and will be of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists working in the key area of food research.

The Materiality of Text – Placement, Perception, and Presence of Inscribed Texts in Classical Antiquity

The Materiality of Text – Placement, Perception, and Presence of Inscribed Texts in Classical Antiquity PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004379436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Written by an international cast of experts, The Materiality of Text showcases a wide range of innovative methodologies from ancient history, literary studies, epigraphy, and art history and provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on the physicality of writing in antiquity. The contributions focus on epigraphic texts in order to gauge questions of their placement, presence, and perception: starting with an analysis of the forms of writing and its perception as an act of physical and cultural intervention, the volume moves on to consider the texts’ ubiquity and strategic positioning within epigraphic, literary, and architectural spaces. The contributors rethink modern assumptions about the processes of writing and reading and establish novel ways of thinking about the physical forms of ancient texts.

The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean

The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean PDF Author: A. Bernard Knapp
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131619406X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1677

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Book Description
The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean offers new insights into the material and social practices of many different Mediterranean peoples during the Bronze and Iron Ages, presenting in particular those features that both connect and distinguish them. Contributors discuss in depth a range of topics that motivate and structure Mediterranean archaeology today, including insularity and connectivity; mobility, migration, and colonization; hybridization and cultural encounters; materiality, memory, and identity; community and household; life and death; and ritual and ideology. The volume's broad coverage of different approaches and contemporary archaeological practices will help practitioners of Mediterranean archaeology to move the subject forward in new and dynamic ways. Together, the essays in this volume shed new light on the people, ideas, and materials that make up the world of Mediterranean archaeology today, beyond the borders that separate Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Bodies of Maize, Eaters of Grain: Comparing material worlds, metaphor and the agency of art in the Preclassic Maya and Mycenaean early civilisations

Bodies of Maize, Eaters of Grain: Comparing material worlds, metaphor and the agency of art in the Preclassic Maya and Mycenaean early civilisations PDF Author: Marcus Jan Bajema
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1784916927
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This book offers a comparative study of the civilisations of the Late Preclassic lowland Maya and Mycenaean Greece. The approach used here seeks to combine traditional iconographic approaches with more recent models on metaphor and the social agency of things.

Trade and Civilisation

Trade and Civilisation PDF Author: Kristian Kristiansen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108425410
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
Provides the first global analysis of the relationship between trade and civilisation from the beginning of civilisation until the modern era.

Materiality and Social Practice

Materiality and Social Practice PDF Author: Joseph Maran
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
ISBN: 9781782975410
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Materiality and Social Practice investigates the transformative potential arising from the interplay between material forms, social practices and intercultural relations. Such a focus necessitates an approach that takes a transcultural perspective as a fundamental methodology and, then a broader understanding of the inter-relationship between humans and objects. Adopting a transcultural approach forces us to change archaeology's approach towards items coming from the outside. By using them mostly for reconstructing systems of exchange or for chronology, archaeology has for a long time reduced them to their properties as objects and as being foreign. This volume explores the notion that the significance of such items does not derive from the transfer from one place to another as such but, rather, from the ways in which they were used and contextualised. The main question is how, through their integration into discourses and practices, new frameworks of meaning were created conforming neither with what had existed in the receiving society nor in the area of origin of the objects.

Human Mobility and Technological Transfer in the Prehistoric Mediterranean

Human Mobility and Technological Transfer in the Prehistoric Mediterranean PDF Author: Evangelia Kiriatzi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316798925
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
The diverse forms of regional connectivity in the ancient world have recently become an important focus for those interested in the deep history of globalisation. This volume represents a significant contribution to this new trend as it engages thematically with a wide range of connectivities in the later prehistory of the Mediterranean, from the later Neolithic of northern Greece to the Levantine Iron Age, and with diverse forms of materiality, from pottery and metal to stone and glass. With theoretical overviews from leading thinkers in prehistoric mobilities, and commentaries from top specialists in neighbouring domains, the volume integrates detailed case studies within a comparative framework. The result is a thorough treatment of many of the key issues of regional interaction and technological diversity facing archaeologists working across diverse places and periods. As this book presents key case studies for human and technological mobility across the eastern Mediterranean in later prehistory, it will be of interest primarily to Mediterranean archaeologists, though also to historians and anthropologists.

Writing as Material Practice

Writing as Material Practice PDF 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.

Dynamics and Developments of Social Structures and Networks in Prehistoric and Protohistoric Cyprus

Dynamics and Developments of Social Structures and Networks in Prehistoric and Protohistoric Cyprus PDF Author: Teresa Bürge
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003833616
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
This volume substantiates the island of Cyprus as an important player in the history of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, and presents new theoretical and analytical approaches. The Cypriot Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age are characterised by an increasing complexity of social and political organisation, economic systems and networks. The book discusses and defines how specific types of material datasets and assemblages, such as architecture, artefacts, and ecofacts, and their contextualisation can form the basis of interpretative models of social structures and networks in ancient Cyprus. This is explored through four main themes: approaches to social dynamics; social and economic networks and connectivity; adaptability and agency; and social dynamics and inequality. The variety and transition of social structures on the island are discussed on multiple scales, from the local and relatively short-term to island-wide and eastern Mediterranean-wide and the longue durée. The focus of study ranges from urban to non-urban contexts, and are reflected in settlement, funerary, and other ritual contexts. Connections, both within the island and to the broader Eastern Mediterranean, and how these impact social and economic developments on the island, are explored. Discussions revolve around the potential of consolidating the models based on specialised studies into a cohesive interpretation of society on ancient Cyprus and its strategic connections with surrounding regions in a diachronic perspective from the Neolithic through the end of the Bronze Age, i.e. from roughly the seventh millennium to the eleventh century BCE. Prehistoric and Protohistoric Cyprus is intended for researchers and students of the archaeology and history of ancient Cyprus, the Aegean, and the Eastern Mediterranean.