Sentient Archaeologies

Sentient Archaeologies PDF Author: Courtney Nimura
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789259339
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 732

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Book Description
Archaeology in the past century has seen a major shift from theoretical frameworks that treat the remains of past societies as static snapshots of particular moments in time to interpretations that prioritize change and variability. Though established analytical concepts, such as typology, remain key parts of the archaeologist’s investigative toolkit, data-gathering strategies and interpretative frameworks have become infused progressively with the concept that archaeology is living, in the sense of both the objects of study and the discipline as a whole. The significance for the field is that researchers across the world are integrating ideas informed by relational epistemologies and mutually constructive ontologies into their work from the initial stage of project design all the way down to post-excavation interpretation. This volume showcases examples of such work, highlighting the utility of these ideas to exploring material both old and new. The illuminating research and novel explanations presented contribute to resolving long-standing problems in regional archaeologies across Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Oceania. In this way, this volume reinvigorates approaches taken towards older material but also acts as a springboard for future innovative discussions of theory in archaeology and related disciplines.

Sentient Archaeologies

Sentient Archaeologies PDF Author: Courtney Nimura
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789259339
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 732

Get Book Here

Book Description
Archaeology in the past century has seen a major shift from theoretical frameworks that treat the remains of past societies as static snapshots of particular moments in time to interpretations that prioritize change and variability. Though established analytical concepts, such as typology, remain key parts of the archaeologist’s investigative toolkit, data-gathering strategies and interpretative frameworks have become infused progressively with the concept that archaeology is living, in the sense of both the objects of study and the discipline as a whole. The significance for the field is that researchers across the world are integrating ideas informed by relational epistemologies and mutually constructive ontologies into their work from the initial stage of project design all the way down to post-excavation interpretation. This volume showcases examples of such work, highlighting the utility of these ideas to exploring material both old and new. The illuminating research and novel explanations presented contribute to resolving long-standing problems in regional archaeologies across Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Oceania. In this way, this volume reinvigorates approaches taken towards older material but also acts as a springboard for future innovative discussions of theory in archaeology and related disciplines.

Sentient Archaeologies

Sentient Archaeologies PDF Author: Courtney Nimura
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789259347
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Archaeology in the past century has seen a major shift from theoretical frameworks that treat the remains of past societies as static snapshots of particular moments in time to interpretations that prioritize change and variability. Though established analytical concepts, such as typology, remain key parts of the archaeologist’s investigative toolkit, data-gathering strategies and interpretative frameworks have become infused progressively with the concept that archaeology is living, in the sense of both the objects of study and the discipline as a whole. The significance for the field is that researchers across the world are integrating ideas informed by relational epistemologies and mutually constructive ontologies into their work from the initial stage of project design all the way down to post-excavation interpretation. This volume showcases examples of such work, highlighting the utility of these ideas to exploring material both old and new. The illuminating research and novel explanations presented contribute to resolving long-standing problems in regional archaeologies across Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Oceania. In this way, this volume reinvigorates approaches taken towards older material but also acts as a springboard for future innovative discussions of theory in archaeology and related disciplines.

Archaeologies of the Future

Archaeologies of the Future PDF Author: Fredric Jameson
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789602998
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 688

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Book Description
In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson's most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age. The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness . alien life and alien worlds . and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson's essential essays, including "The Desire Called Utopia," conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.

Visual Culture: Histories, archaeologies and genealogies of visual culture

Visual Culture: Histories, archaeologies and genealogies of visual culture PDF Author: Joanne Morra
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415326438
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
These texts represent both the formation of visual culture, and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.

Archaeologies of Rock Art

Archaeologies of Rock Art PDF Author: Andrés Troncoso
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351869086
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Rock art in South America is as diverse as the continent itself. In this vast territory, different peoples produced engravings, paintings, and massive earthworks, from the Atacama to the Amazon. These marks on the landscape were made by all different kinds of peoples, from some of the earliest hunter-gatherers in the continent, to the very complex societies within the Inca Empire. This book brings together the work of specialists from throughout the continent, addressing this diversity, as well as the variety of approaches that the Archaeology of rock art has taken in South America. Constructed of eleven thought-provoking chapters and arranged in three thematic sections, the book presents different theoretical approaches that are currently being used to understand the roles rock art played in prehistoric communities. The editors have skillfully crafted a book that presents the contribution the study of South American rock art can offer to the global research of this materiality, both theoretically and methodologically. This book will interest a broad range of scholars researching in archaeology, anthropology, history of art, heritage and conservation, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students who will find interesting case studies showcasing the diverse ways in which rock art can be approached. Despite its focus on South America, the book is intended as a contribution towards the global study of rock art.

Sentient Conceptualisations

Sentient Conceptualisations PDF Author: Cristian Simonetti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131722065X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Sentient Conceptualisations is about how scientists studying the past understand time in relation to space. Simonetti argues that the feelings for depths and surfaces, arising from the bodily movements and gestures of scientific practice, strongly influence conceptualisations of space and time. With an anthropological eye, Simonetti explores the ways archaeologists and those from related disciplines develop expert knowledge in varied environments. The book draws on ethnographic work carried out with Chilean and Scottish archaeologists, working both on land and underwater, to analyse in depth the visual language of science and what it reveals about the relation between thinking and feeling.

The Sentient Archive

The Sentient Archive PDF Author: Bill Bissell
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819577766
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The Sentient Archive gathers the work of scholars and practitioners in dance, performance, science, and the visual arts. Its twenty-eight rich and challenging essays cross boundaries within and between disciplines, and illustrate how the body serves as a repository for knowledge. Contributors include Nancy Goldner, Marcia B. Siegel, Jenn Joy, Alain Platel, Catherine J. Stevens, Meg Stuart, André Lepecki, Ralph Lemon, and other notable scholars and artists. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Archaeological Investigation

Archaeological Investigation PDF Author: Martin Carver
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040046665
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 790

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Book Description
The thoroughly updated second edition of Archaeological Investigation reviews and explains the practices of field archaeology in the world today. Now co-authored by Madeleine Hummler, the book’s scope has been enlarged in time and space, reaching out to the different methods and strategies applied in both the academic and commercial sectors in diverse terrain on land and under the sea. Archaeological Investigation accompanies the reader on a journey from absolute beginner to professional. Part 1 (Principles) sets the scene for newcomers, showing the axial role of fieldwork in rediscovering the past. Part 2 (In the Field) is aimed at those setting out to collect primary data by the diverse methods of modern survey and excavation. Word pictures on "First day in the field" and "First day on a dig" provide friendly introductions to the high-tech enterprise that fieldwork has become. Now fully engaged in the process, newcomers to archaeology are ready, in Part 3 (Writing Up), to take part in the process of making the discoveries known. Here the findings of fieldwork are marshalled to analyse the assemblage, the use of space and the chronology of what happened. The results are then combined in a synthesis and communicated through websites, museums, the display of sites and above all through publication. Part 4 (Design) engages the reader in archaeology’s primary action: how to design projects that conserve, rediscover and explain the human past, beginning with a review of some landmark examples (Chapter 13). The final chapter (The Profession) reviews the role of the state, the academy, the commercial sector and the public in making archaeology happen – and why it matters. Building on the authors’ extensive experience, Archaeological Investigation remains an inspiring, provocative, informative and entertaining book for students and professionals, arguing that the investigation of the human and environmental past is highly relevant to contemporary society and its future.

Relational Archaeologies

Relational Archaeologies PDF Author: Christopher Watts
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135903190
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Many of us accept as uncontroversial the belief that the world is comprised of detached and disparate products, all of which are reducible to certain substances. Of those things that are alive, we acknowledge that some have agency while others, such as humans, have more advanced qualities such as consciousness, reason and intentionality. So deeply-seated is this metaphysical belief, along with the related distinctions we draw between subject/object, mind/body and nature/culture that many of us tacitly assume past groups approached and apprehended the world in a similar fashion. Relational Archaeologies questions how such a view of human beings, ‘other-than-human’ creatures and things affects our reconstruction of past beliefs and practices. It proceeds from the position that, in many cases, past societies understood their place in the world as positional rather than categorical, as persons bound up in reticular arrangements with similar and not so similar forms regardless of their substantive qualities. Relational Archaeologies explores this idea by emphasizing how humans, animals and things come to exist by virtue of the dynamic and fluid processes of connection and transaction. In highlighting various counter-Modern notions of what it means ‘to be’ and how these can be teased apart using archaeological materials, contributors provide a range of approaches from primarily theoretical/historicized treatments of the topic to practical applications or case studies from the Americas, the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Incomplete Archaeologies

Incomplete Archaeologies PDF Author: Emily Miller Bonney
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1785701185
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept – assemblages – and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists – and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated. The ultimate aim is to reassert an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasize the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artifacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology’s seeming-seamless epistemological objects.