You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A new generation of archaeologists has thrown down a challenge to post-processual theory, arguing that characterizing material symbols as arbitrary overlooks the material character and significance of artifacts. This volume showcases the significant departure from previous symbolic approaches that is underway in the discipline. It brings together key scholars advancing a variety of cutting edge approaches, each emphasizing an understanding of artifacts and materials not in terms of symbols but relationally, as a set of associations that compose people’s understanding of the world. Authors draw on a diversity of intellectual sources and case studies, paving a dynamic road ahead for archaeology as a discipline and theoretical approaches to material culture.
Archaeology is in crisis. Spatial turns, material turns and the ontological turn have directed the discipline away from its hard-won battle to find humanity in the past. Meanwhile, popularised science, camouflaged as archaeology, produces shock headlines built on ancient DNA that reduce humanity’s most intriguing historical problems to two-dimensional caricatures. Today archaeology finds itself less able than ever to proclaim its relevance to the modern world. This volume foregrounds the relevance of the scholarship of John Barrett to this crisis. Twenty-four writers representing three generations of archaeologists scrutinise the current turmoil in the discipline and highlight the resoluti...
The papers in this book question the tyranny of typological thinking in archaeology through case studies from various South American countries (Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil) and Antarctica. They aim to show that typologies are unavoidable (they are, after all, the way to create networks that give meanings to symbols) but that their tyranny can be overcome if they are used from a critical, heuristic and non-prescriptive stance: critical because the complacent attitude towards their tyranny is replaced by a militant stance against it; heuristic because they are used as means to reach alternative and suggestive interpretations but not as ultimate and definite destinies; a...
Making and Growing brings together the latest work in the fields of anthropology and material culture studies to explore the differences - and the relation - between making things and growing things, and between things that are made and things that grow. Though the former are often regarded as artefacts and the latter as organisms, the book calls this distinction into question, examining the implications for our understanding of materials, design and creativity. Grounding their arguments in case studies from different regions and historical periods, the contributors to this volume show how making and growing give rise to co-produced and mutually modifying organisms and artefacts, including human persons. They attend to the properties of materials and to the forms of knowledge and sensory experience involved in these processes, and explore the dynamics of making and undoing, growing and decomposition. The book will be of broad interest to scholars in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, material culture studies, history and sociology.
The Prehistory of Food sets subsistence in its social context by focusing on food as a cultural artefact. It brings together contributors with a scientific and biological expertise as well as those interested in the patterns of consumption and social change, and includes a wide range of case studies.
This 378 page archaeological publication covers the development, definition, classification, and world-wide deployment of the lithic bipoint and includes numerous photographs, drawings, and maps. The bipoint is a legacy implement from the Old World that is found through time/space all over America. It was brought into the U.S. on both coasts; the Pacific Coast introduction was around 17,000 years ago and the Atlantic Coast was 23,000 years ago. The basic bipoint is defined and its manufacturing processes are presented along with bipoint properties, shape/form, resharpening, and cultural associations. This publication illustrates numerous bipoints from the Atlantic and Pacific states (and within the U.S.) and presents some of their inferred chronologies which are the oldest in the New World. Several morphologies between American and Iberian bipoints are compared, namely the famous Virginia Cinmar bipoint. It concludes that a Solutrean occupation did occur on the U.S. Atlantic coastal plain. The bipoint is the most misclassified artifact in American archaeology. The book is indexed and has extensive references.
Andean Ontologies is a fascinating interdisciplinary investigation of how ancient Andean people understood their world and the nature of being. Exploring pre-Hispanic ideas of time, space, and the human body, these essays highlight a range of beliefs across the region’s different cultures, emphasizing the relational aspects of identity in Andean worldviews. Studies included here show that Andeans physically interacted with their pasts through recurring ceremonies in their ritual calendar and that Andean bodies were believed to be changeable entities with the ability to interact with nonhuman and spiritual worlds. A survey of rock art describes Andeans’ changing relationships with places ...
The National Museum in Denmark possesses a large number of vessels from Argentina. Very few people knew about the existence of archaeological material from Argentina at the National Museum. And none had ever investigated these materials; neither have there been any previous studies of Argentinian Archaeology in Denmark. Since 2003, the Ethnographic institutions in Stockholm and Göteborg were contacted to enlarge the knowledge of Argentinian Archaeology, as they have large collections of Argentinian artefacts. In Denmark, there are no institutions focusing on this subject. The investigation of the following material was presented at several international congresses in Denmark, Sweden and Argentina, and now culminate in the cataloguing of the archaeological material located at the National Museum in Denmark, providing a spectrum of Argentinian Archaeology.
"The one source that sets reference collections on Latin American studies apart from all other geographic areas of the world.... The Handbook has provided scholars interested in Latin America with a bibliographical source of a quality unavailable to scholars in most other branches of area studies." —Latin American Research Review Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year b...
The ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology was founded in the early 1980s by Ellen Hickmann, John Blacking, Mantle Hood and Cajsa S. Lund. This is the first volume of the new anthology series published by the study group, turning to the topic of music and religion in past cultures. Each volume of the series is composed of concise case studies, bringing together the world's foremost researchers on a particular subject, reflecting the wide scope of music-archaeological research world-wide. The series draws in perspectives from a range of different disciplines, including newly emerging fields such as archaeoacoustics, but particularly encouraging both music-archaeological and ethnomusicological perspectives.