Author: Carl Knappett Publisher: ISBN: 9780198706939 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Think of a souvenir from a foreign trip, or an heirloom passed down the generations - distinctive individual artefacts allow us to think and act beyond the proximate, across both space and time. While this makes anecdotal sense, what does scholarship have to say about the role of artefacts inhuman thought? Surprisingly, material culture research tends also to focus on individual artefacts. But objects rarely stand independently from one another they are interconnected in complex constellations. This innovative volume asserts that it is such 'networks of objects' that instill objectswith their power, enabling them to evoke distant times and places for both individuals and communities.Using archaeological case studies from the Bronze Age of Greece throughout, Knappett develops a long-term, archaeological angle on the development of object networks in human societies. He explores the benefits such networks create for human interaction across scales, and the challenges faced byancient societies in balancing these benefits against their costs. In objectifying and controlling artefacts in networks, human communities can lose track of the recalcitrant pull that artefacts exercise. Materials do not always do as they are asked. We never fully understand all their aspects. Thiswe grasp in our everyday, unconscious working in the phenomenal world, but overlook in our network thinking. And this failure to attend to things and give them their due can lead to societal "disorientation".
Author: James G. Cusick Publisher: SIU Press ISBN: 0809334097 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 513
Book Description
People have long been fascinated about times in human history when different cultures and societies first came into contact with each other. Studies in Culture Contact defines the role of culture contact in human history, to identify issues in the study of culture contact in archaeology, and to provide a critical overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of culture and contact.
Author: Lieve Donnellan Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351003046 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
Archaeological Networks and Social Interaction focuses on conceptualisations of human interaction, human-thing entanglement, material affordances and agency. Network concepts in the archaeological discipline are ubiquitous these days. They range from loose concepts, used as metaphors to address a notion of connectivity, to highly formal and mathematically complex predictions of human behaviour. These different networked worlds sometimes clash and rarely converge. Archaeologists interested in network analysis, however, have achieved a much better understanding of the implications of adopting formal methods for studying social interaction and there have been theoretical advancements realising a better synergy between different theoretical perspectives. These nascent concerns are explored further in this volume with regional specialists exploring case studies from Prehistory to the Middle Ages throughout the Ancient and New Worlds, outlining how formal network approaches contribute to studying social interaction archaeologically. This book will be of interest to archaeologists wishing to access the latest research on networks and interconnectivity and how these approaches have been productively modified to archaeological research.
Author: Society for American Archaeology. Annual Meeting Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199697094 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 371
Book Description
Outgrowth of a session organized for the 75th Anniversary Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology held in St. Louis, Mo., in 2010. Cf. acknowledgments.
Author: Ryan Clasby Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 0813057825 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
This volume brings together archaeologists working in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia to construct a new prehistory of the Upper Amazon, outlining cultural developments from the late third millennium B.C. to the Inca Empire of the sixteenth century A.D. Encompassing the forested tropical slopes of the eastern Andes as well as Andean drainage systems that connect to the Amazon River basin, this vast region has been unevenly studied due to the restrictions of national borders, remote site locations, and limited interpretive models. The Archaeology of the Upper Amazon unites and builds on recent field investigations that have found evidence of extensive interaction networks along the major rivers—Santiago, Marañon, Huallaga, and Ucayali. Chapters detail how these rivers facilitated the movement of people, resources, and ideas between the Andean highlands and the Amazonian lowlands. Contributors demonstrate that the Upper Amazon was not a peripheral zone but a locus for complex societal developments. Reaching across geographical, cultural, and political boundaries, this volume shows that the trajectory of Andean civilization cannot be fully understood without a nuanced perspective on the region’s diverse patterns of interaction with the Upper Amazon. Contributors: Ryan Hechler | Kenneth R. Young | J. Scott Raymond | Warren Deboer | Inge Schjellerup | Charles Hastings | Atsushi Yamamoto | Bebel Ibarra Asencios | Francisco Valdez | Jason Nesbitt | Warren B. Church | Sonia Alconini | Rachel Johnson | Ryan Clasby | Estanislao Pazmino
Author: Daniel Contreras Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1317450620 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
The impacts of climate change on human societies, and the roles those societies themselves play in altering their environments, appear in headlines more and more as concern over modern global climate change intensifies. Increasingly, archaeologists and paleoenvironmental scientists are looking to evidence from the human past to shed light on the processes which link environmental and cultural change. Establishing clear contemporaneity and correlation, and then moving beyond correlation to causation, remains as much a theoretical task as a methodological one. This book addresses this challenge by exploring new approaches to human-environment dynamics and confronting the key task of constructing arguments that can link the two in concrete and detailed ways. The contributors include researchers working in a wide variety of regions and time periods, including Mesoamerica, Mongolia, East Africa, the Amazon Basin, and the Island Pacific, among others. Using methodological vignettes from their own research, the contributors explore diverse approaches to human-environment dynamics, illustrating the manifold nature of the subject and suggesting a wide variety of strategies for approaching it. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in Archaeology, Paleoenvironmental Science, Ecology, and Geology.
Author: Michael L. Galaty Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press ISBN: 1938770919 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
Employing survey archaeology, excavation, ethnographic study, and multinational archival work, the Shala Valley Project uncovered the many powerful, creative ways whereby the men and women of Shala shaped their world: through dynamic, world-systemic relationships with the powers that surrounded but never fully conquered them. The Shala Valley Project presents the highlanders, the malesore, in the full complexity of their lives, while also unveiling a new, deeper history for the region--a history that reaches back to an unexpected fortified Iron Age site. Light and Shadow tells many stories. Archaeologists, historians, and students of tribes, of empires, of imperial-indigenous relations, of blood feud, of kinship, of the built landscape, of world-systems theory and sustainability science, and more, will find much here to digest. The people of Shala, to which Light and Shadow is dedicated, may serve as an example in our modern age, one in which persistent, tribal peoples still fight for their survival, and seek to preserve some degree of independence from capitalist economies bent on their incorporation.
Author: Roberto Valcárcel Rojas Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 0813055652 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 425
Book Description
During Spanish colonization of the Greater Antilles, the islands’ natives were forced into labor under the encomienda system. The indigenous people became "Indios," their language, appearance, and identity transformed by the domination imposed by a foreign model that Christianized and "civilized" them. Yet El Chorro de Maíta retained many of its indigenous characteristics. In this volume--one of the first in English to examine and document an archaeological site in Cuba--Roberto Valcárcel Rojas analyzes the construction of colonial authority and the various attitudes and responses of natives and other ethnic groups. His pioneering study reveals the process of transculturation in which new individuals emerged--Indians, mestizos, criollos--and helps construct the vital link between the pre-Columbian world and the development of an integrated and new history.
Author: Ulrike Matthies Green Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 0813052297 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 227
Book Description
This volume introduces the Cross-Cultural Interaction Model (CCIM), a visual tool for studying the exchanges that take place between different cultures in borderland areas or across long distances. The model helps researchers untangle complex webs of connections among people, landscapes, and artifacts, and can be used to support multiple theoretical viewpoints. Through case studies, contributors apply the CCIM to various regions and time periods, including Roman Europe, the Greek province of Thessaly in the Late Bronze Age, the ancient Egyptian-Nubian frontier, colonial Greenland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Mississippian realm of Cahokia, ancient Costa Rica and Panama, and the Moquegua Valley of Peru in the early Middle Horizon period. They adapt the model to best represent their data, successfully plotting connections in many different dimensions, including geography, material culture, religion and spirituality, and ideology. The model enables them to expose what motivates people to participate in cultural exchange, as well as the influences that people reject in these interactions. These results demonstrate the versatility and analytical power of the CCIM. Bridging the gap between theory and data, this tool can prompt users to rethink previous interpretations of their research, leading to new ideas, new theories, and new directions for future study. Contributors: Meghan E. Buchanan | Michele R. Buzon | Kirk Costion | Bryan Feuer | Ulrike Matthies Green | Scott Palumbo | Stuart Tyson Smith | Peter Andreas Toft | Peter S. Wells
Author: Carl Knappett
Author: James G. Cusick
Author: Lieve Donnellan
Author: Society for American Archaeology. Annual Meeting
Author: Ryan Clasby
Author: Daniel Contreras
Author: Michael L. Galaty
Author: Roberto Valcárcel Rojas
Author: Ulrike Matthies Green
Author: Matthew A. Peeples