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Showing 121 - 140 of 3158 items
By Michele George. 2013
Replete now with its own scholarly traditions and controversies, Roman slavery as a field of study is no longer limited…
to the economic sphere, but is recognized as a fundamental social institution with multiple implications for Roman society and culture. The essays in this collection explore how material culture - namely, art, architecture, and inscriptions - can illustrate Roman attitudes towards the institution of slavery and towards slaves themselves in ways that significantly augment conventional textual accounts.Providing the first interdisciplinary approach to the study of Roman slavery, the volume brings together diverse specialists in history, art history, and archaeology. The contributors engage with questions concerning the slave trade, manumission, slave education, containment and movement, and the use of slaves in the Roman army.By Francis Wenban-Smith, Fiona Coward, Robert Hosfield, Matt Pope. 2015
This volume provides a landscape narrative of early hominin evolution, linking conventional material and geographic aspects of the early archaeological…
record with wider and more elusive social, cognitive and symbolic landscapes. It seeks to move beyond a limiting notion of early hominin culture and behavior as dictated solely by the environment to present the early hominin world as the outcome of a dynamic dialogue between the physical environment and its perception and habitation by active agents. This international group of contributors presents theoretically informed yet empirically based perspectives on hominin and human landscapes.By Sophia-Karin Psarras. 2015
Han Material Culture is an analysis of Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) Chinese archaeology based on a comparison of the…
forms of vessels found in positively dated tombs. The resultant chronological framework allows for the cross dating of tombs across China, of which approximately one thousand are documented here. In the context of this body of data, the development of not only vessel types but also tomb structure and decor is reevaluated, together with the pervasive intercultural exchange visible in all areas of this material. The Han dynasty emerges as a creative, surprisingly open society, heir to the Bronze Age and herald of what might be called the Age of Ceramics.By Vernon James Knight. 1990
This book offers an overview of iconographic methods and their application to archaeological analysis. It offers a truly interdisciplinary approach…
that draws equally from art history and anthropology. Vernon James Knight, Jr begins with an historiographical overview, addressing the methodologies and theories that underpin both archaeology and art history. He then demonstrates how iconographic methods can be integrated with the scientific methods that are at the core of much archaeological inquiry. Focusing on artifacts from the pre-Columbian civilizations of North and Meso-American sites, Knight shows how the use of iconographic analysis yields new insights into these objects and civilizations.By Sue Ann Mccarty, Benjamin S. Arbuckle. 2014
Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World explores the current trends in the social archaeology of human-animal relationships, focusing on…
the ways in which animals are used to structure, create, support, and even deconstruct social inequalities. The authors provide a global range of case studies from both New and Old World archaeology--a royal Aztec dog burial, the monumental horse tombs of Central Asia, and the ceremonial macaw cages of ancient Mexico among them. They explore the complex relationships between people and animals in social, economic, political, and ritual contexts, incorporating animal remains from archaeological sites with artifacts, texts, and iconography to develop their interpretations.Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World presents new data and interpretations that reveal the role of animals, their products, and their symbolism in structuring social inequalities in the ancient world. The volume will be of interest to archaeologists, especially zooarchaeologists, and classical scholars of pre-modern civilizations and societies.By Rowan K. Flad, Pochan Chen. 2013
Ancient Central China provides an up-to-date synthesis of archaeological discoveries in the upper and middle Yangzi River region of China,…
including the Three Gorges Dam reservoir zone. It focuses on the Late Neolithic (late third millennium BC) through the end of the Bronze Age (late first millennium BC) and considers regional and interregional cultural relationships in light of anthropological models of landscape. Rowan K. Flad and Pochan Chen show that centers and peripheries of political, economic, and ritual activities were not coincident, and that politically peripheral regions such as the Three Gorges were crucial hubs in interregional economic networks, particularly related to prehistoric salt production. The book provides detailed discussions of recent archaeological discoveries and data from the Chengdu Plain, Three Gorges, and Hubei to illustrate how these various components of regional landscape were configured across Central China.By Nathan Goodale, William Andrefsky. 2015
Stone tool analysis relies on a strong background in analytical and methodological techniques. However, lithic technological analysis has not been…
well integrated with a theoretically-informed approach to understanding how humans procured, made, and used stone tools. Evolutionary theory has great potential to fill this gap. This collection of essays brings together several different evolutionary perspectives to demonstrate how lithic technological systems are a byproduct of human behavior. The essays cover a range of topics, including human behavioral ecology, cultural transmission, phylogenetic analysis, risk management, macroevolution, dual inheritance theory, cladistics, central place foraging, costly signaling, selection, drift, and various applications of evolutionary ecology.By Josephine Quinn. 2018
Who were the ancient Phoenicians, and did they actually exist?The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans,…
trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the “Phoenicians” never actually existed. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies—and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources.Josephine Quinn shows how the belief in this historical mirage has blinded us to the compelling identities and communities these people really constructed for themselves in the ancient Mediterranean, based not on ethnicity or nationhood but on cities, family, colonial ties, and religious practices. She traces how the idea of “being Phoenician” first emerged in support of the imperial ambitions of Carthage and then Rome, and only crystallized as a component of modern national identities in contexts as far-flung as Ireland and Lebanon.In Search of the Phoenicians delves into the ancient literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and artistic evidence for the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians, ranging from the Levant to the Atlantic, and from the Bronze Age to late antiquity and beyond. A momentous scholarly achievement, this book also explores the prose, poetry, plays, painting, and polemic that have enshrined these fabled seafarers in nationalist histories from sixteenth-century England to twenty-first century Tunisia.By Peter Bellwood. 2013
The first publication to outline the complex global story of human migration and dispersal throughout the whole of human prehistory.…
Utilizing archaeological, linguistic and biological evidence, Peter Bellwood traces the journeys of the earliest hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist migrants as critical elements in the evolution of human lifeways. The first volume to chart global human migration and population dispersal throughout the whole of human prehistory, in all regions of the world An archaeological odyssey that details the initial spread of early humans out of Africa approximately two million years ago, through the Ice Ages, and down to the continental and island migrations of agricultural populations within the past 10,000 years Employs archaeological, linguistic and biological evidence to demonstrate how migration has always been a vital and complex element in explaining the evolution of the human species Outlines how significant migrations have affected population diversity in every region of the world Clarifies the importance of the development of agriculture as a migratory imperative in later prehistory Fully referenced with detailed maps throughoutBy David Petrain. 2014
The Tabulae Iliacae are a group of carved stone plaques created in the context of early Imperial Rome that use…
miniature images and text to retell stories from Greek myth and history - chief among them Homer's Iliad and the fall of Troy. In this book, Professor Petrain moves beyond the narrow focus on the literary and iconographic sources of the Tabulae that has characterized earlier scholarship. Drawing on ancient and modern theories of narrative, he explores instead how the tablets transfer the Troy saga across both medium and culture as they create a system of visual storytelling that relies on the values and viewing habits of Roman viewers. The book comprehensively situates the tablets in the urban fabric of Augustan Rome. New photographs of the tablets, together with re-editions and translations of key inscriptions, offer a new, clearer view of these remarkable documents of the Roman appropriation of Greek epic.By Ingrid D. Rowland. 2014
When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the force of the explosion blew the top right off the mountain, burying nearby…
Pompeii in a shower of volcanic ash. Ironically, the calamity that proved so lethal for Pompeii's inhabitants preserved the city for centuries, leaving behind a snapshot of Roman daily life that has captured the imagination of generations. The experience of Pompeii always reflects a particular time and sensibility, says Ingrid Rowland. From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town explores the fascinating variety of these different experiences, as described by the artists, writers, actors, and others who have toured the excavated site. The city's houses, temples, gardens--and traces of Vesuvius's human victims--have elicited responses ranging from awe to embarrassment, with shifting cultural tastes playing an important role. The erotic frescoes that appalled eighteenth-century viewers inspired Renoir to change the way he painted. For Freud, visiting Pompeii was as therapeutic as a session of psychoanalysis. Crown Prince Hirohito, arriving in the Bay of Naples by battleship, found Pompeii interesting, but Vesuvius, to his eyes, was just an ugly version of Mount Fuji. Rowland treats readers to the distinctive, often quirky responses of visitors ranging from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain to Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. Interwoven throughout a narrative lush with detail and insight is the thread of Rowland's own impressions of Pompeii, where she has returned many times since first visiting in 1962.By Debra L. Martin, Cheryl P. Anderson. 2014
Every year, there are over 1. 6 million violent deaths worldwide, making violence one of the leading public health issues…
of our time. And with the 20th century just behind us, it's hard to forget that 191 million people lost their lives directly or indirectly through conflict. This collection of engaging case studies on violence and violent deaths reveals how violence is reconstructed from skeletal and contextual information. By sharing the complex methodologies for gleaning scientific data from human remains and the context they are found in, and complementary perspectives for examining violence from both past and contemporary societies, bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology prove to be fundamentally inseparable. This book provides a model for training forensic anthropologists and bioarchaeologists, not just in the fundamentals of excavation and skeletal analysis, but in all subfields of anthropology, to broaden their theoretical and practical approach to dealing with everyday violence.By Richard Posamentir. 2010
Chersonesan Studies 1 presents the painted grave stelai of the Early Hellenistic necropolis of Chersonesos Taurike, a Greek city on…
the northern shore of the Black Sea. This unique collection of over one hundred objects is of major interest to students of ancient art and Greek culture. Their polychrome decoration has been extraordinarily well preserved, a rarity in the ancient world. They compose a remarkable, even unique, body of evidence of Greek funerary memorial sculpture: their shapes are gender-specific, their depicted objects are gender- and age-specific, and they can be ascribed to a handful of specific workshops. Their surprising uniformity requires an explanation, since comparable assemblages from other parts of the Greek world show substantial diversity in all these aspects. This book provides the first complete catalog and description of the stelai, together with full-color illustrations of all the significant stelai and many details. Through his painstaking recovery and reassembling of fragments, as well as the use of advanced photographic techniques, Richard Posamentir has been able to add a whole new dimension to the study of these artifacts. The volume covers the history of the stelai, analysis of the workshops, and reconstruction of the necropolis that the stelai originally graced. A comparison chapter discusses how the stelai fit into the context of Greek funerary art and provides insights into the culture and society of a city on the Black Sea.Heroic Offerings sheds light on the study of religion in Sparta, one of Greece's most powerful city-states and the long-term rival…
of Athens. Sparta's history is well known, but its archaeology has been much less satisfactorily explored. Through the comprehensive study of a distinctive class of terracotta votive offerings from a specific sanctuary, Gina Salapata explores both coroplastic art and regional religion. By integrating archaeological, historical, literary, and epigraphic sources, she provides important insights into the heroic cults of Lakonia and contributes to an understanding of the political and social functions of local ritual practice. This volume focuses on a large group of decorated terracotta plaques, from the sixth to fourth centuries BCE. These molded plaques were discovered with other offerings in a sanctuary deposit excavated near Sparta more than fifty years ago, but they have remained unpublished until now. They number over 1,500 complete and fragmentary pieces. In technique, style, and iconography they form a homogeneous group unlike any other from mainland Greece. The large number of plaques and variety of types reveal a stable and vigorous coroplastic tradition in Lakonia during the late Archaic and Classical period. Heroic Offerings will be of interest to students and scholars of Greek history, art, and archaeology, to those interested in ancient religious practice in the Mediterranean, and to all inspired by Athens' chief political rival, Sparta. This volume received financial support from the Archaeological Institute of America.By James L., Fitzsimmons. 2009
Like their regal counterparts in societies around the globe, ancient Maya rulers departed this world with elaborate burial ceremonies and…
lavish grave goods, which often included ceramics, red pigments, earflares, stingray spines, jades, pearls, obsidian blades, and mosaics. Archaeological investigation of these burials, as well as the decipherment of inscriptions that record Maya rulers' funerary rites, have opened a fascinating window on how the ancient Maya envisaged the ruler's passage from the world of the living to the realm of the ancestors. Focusing on the Classic Period (AD 250-900), James Fitzsimmons examines and compares textual and archaeological evidence for rites of death and burial in the Maya lowlands, from which he creates models of royal Maya funerary behavior. Exploring ancient Maya attitudes toward death expressed at well-known sites such as Tikal, Guatemala, and Copan, Honduras, as well as less-explored archaeological locations, Fitzsimmons reconstructs royal mortuary rites and expands our understanding of key Maya concepts including the afterlife and ancestor veneration.By Bleda S. Düring. 2011
In this book, Bleda Düring offers an archaeological analysis of Asia Minor, the area equated with much of modern-day Turkey,…
from 20,000 to 2,000 BC. During this period human societies moved from small-scale hunter-gatherer groups to complex and hierarchical communities with economies based on agriculture and industry. Dr Düring traces the spread of the Neolithic way of life, which ultimately reached across Eurasia, and the emergence of key human developments, including the domestication of animals, metallurgy, fortified towns and long-distance trading networks. Situated at the junction between Europe and Asia, Asia Minor has often been perceived as a bridge for the movement of technologies and ideas. By contrast, this book argues that cultural developments followed a distinctive trajectory in Asia Minor from as early as 9,000 BC.By Terence Grieder. 2009
Challuabamba (chī-wa-bamba)--now a developing suburb of Cuenca, the principal city in the southern highlands of Ecuador--has been known for a…
century as an ancient site that produced exceptionally fine pottery in great quantities. Suspecting that Challuabamban ceramics might provide a link between earlier, preceramic culture and later, highly developed Formative period art, Terence Grieder led an archaeological investigation of the site between 1995 and 2001. In this book, he and the team of art historians and archaeologists who excavated at Challuabamba present their findings, which establish the community's importance as a center in a network of trade and artistic influence that extended to the Amazon River basin and the Pacific Coast. Art and Archaeology of Challuabamba, Ecuador presents an extensive analysis of ceramics dating to 2100-1100 BC, along with descriptions of stamps and seals, stone and shell artifacts, burials and their offerings, human remains, and zooarchaeology. Grieder and his coauthors demonstrate that the pottery of Challuabamba fills a gap between early and late Formative styles and also has a definite connection with later highland styles in Peru. They draw on all the material remains to reconstruct the first clear picture of Challuabamba's prehistory, including agriculture and health, interregional contacts and exchange, red-banded incised ware and ceramic production, and shamanism and cosmology. Because southern Ecuador has received relatively little archaeological study, Art and Archaeology of Challuabamba, Ecuador offers important baseline data for what promises to be a key sector of the prehistoric Andean region.By Lisa Breglia. 2006
From ancient Maya cities in Mexico and Central America to the Taj Mahal in India, cultural heritage sites around the…
world are being drawn into the wave of privatization that has already swept through such economic sectors as telecommunications, transportation, and utilities. As nation-states decide they can no longer afford to maintain cultural properties—or find it economically advantageous not to do so in the globalizing economy—private actors are stepping in to excavate, conserve, interpret, and represent archaeological and historical sites. But what are the ramifications when a multinational corporation, or even an indigenous village, owns a piece of national patrimony which holds cultural and perhaps sacred meaning for all the country's people, as well as for visitors from the rest of the world?By Erminia Lapadula. 2012
This volume in the Institute of Classical Archaeology’s series on rural settlements in the countryside (chora) of Metaponto presents the…
excavation of the Late Roman farmhouse at San Biagio. Located near the site of an earlier Greek sanctuary, this modest but well-appointed structure was an unexpected find from a period generally marked by large landholdings and monumental villas. Description of earlier periods of occupation (Neolithic and Greek) is followed by a detailed discussion of the farmhouse itself and its historical and socioeconomic context. The catalogs and analyses of finds include impressive deposits of coins from the late third and early fourth centuries AD. Use of virtual reality CAD software has yielded a deeper understanding of the architectural structure and its reconstruction. A remarkable feature is the small bath complex, with its examples of window glass. This study reveals the existence of a small but viable rural social and economic entity and alternative to the traditional image of crisis and decline during the Late Imperial period.By Robert A. Ricklis. 1996
Popular lore has long depicted the Karankawa Indians as primitive scavengers (perhaps even cannibals) who eked out a meager subsistence…
from fishing, hunting and gathering on the Texas coastal plains. That caricature, according to Robert Ricklis, hides the reality of a people who were well-adapted to their environment, skillful in using its resources, and successful in maintaining their culture until the arrival of Anglo-American settlers. The Karankawa Indians of Texas is the first modern, well-researched history of the Karankawa from prehistoric times until their extinction in the nineteenth century. Blending archaeological and ethnohistorical data into a lively narrative history, Ricklis reveals the basic lifeway of the Karankawa, a seasonal pattern that took them from large coastal fishing camps in winter to small, dispersed hunting and gathering parties in summer. In a most important finding, he shows how, after initial hostilities, the Karankawa incorporated the Spanish missions into their subsistence pattern during the colonial period and coexisted peacefully with Euroamericans until the arrival of Anglo settlers in the 1820s and 1830s. These findings will be of wide interest to everyone studying the interactions of Native American and European peoples.