You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
While the archaeological legacies of Greece and Cyprus are often considered to represent some of the highest values of Western civilization—democracy, progress, aesthetic harmony, and rationalism—this much adored and heavily touristed heritage can quickly become the stage for clashes over identity and memory. In Contested Antiquity, Esther Solomon curates explorations of how those who safeguard cultural heritage are confronted with the best ways to represent this heritage responsibly. How should visitors be introduced to an ancient Byzantine fortification that still holds the grim reminders of the cruel prison it was used as until the 1980s? How can foreign archaeological institutes engage with another nation's heritage in a meaningful way? What role do locals have in determining what is sacred, and can this sense of the sacred extend beyond buildings to the surrounding land? Together, the essays featured in Contested Antiquity offer fresh insights into the ways ancient heritage is negotiated for modern times.
This book argues that religious beliefs played a significant role in the social changes that occurred in Middle Helladic Greece.
The eighth and seventh centuries BCE were a time of flourishing exchange between the Mediterranean and the Near East. One of the period’s key imports to the Hellenic and Italic worlds was the image of the griffin, a mythical monster that usually possesses the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. In particular, bronze cauldrons bore griffin protomes—figurative attachments showing the neck and head of the beast. Crafted in fine detail, the protomes were made to appear full of vigor, transfixing viewers. Bronze Monsters and the Cultures of Wonder takes griffin cauldrons as case studies in the shifting material and visual universes of pre-classical antiquity, arguing that they were perce...
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Classics in International Modernism and the Avant-Garde examines how the writers and artists who lived from roughly the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth sought to build a new world from the ashes of one marked by two world wars, global economic depression, the rise of nationalism, and the collapse of empires. By surveying the modernist appropriation of Ancient Greece and Rome, the fourteen chapters in this volume demonstrate how the Classics, as foundational texts of the old order, were nevertheless adapted to suit the stylistic innovation and formal experimentation that characterized modernist and avant-garde literature and art.
This book interprets how ancient civilizations responded to various stresses, including environmental change, warfare, and the fragmentation of political institutions. It focuses on what happened during and after the decline of once powerful regimes, and posits that they experienced social resilience and transformation instead of collapse.
This volume from the "Acta Hyperborea" series of archaeological studies covers the topic of urbanization in the Mediterranean in the 9th to 6th centuries BC. "Acta Hyperborea" is a periodical by a group of classical archaeologists associated with Danish universities and museums. Although primarily a journal of classical archaeology, it also covers other fields in classical scholarship. One of the main objectives of the periodical is the interdisciplinary approach to promote a dialogue between historians, philologists and archaeologists.
In The Long Sixth Century in Eastern Europe, Florin Curta offers a social and economic history of East Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe during the 6th and 7th centuries. It challenges the current model of transition from Antiquity to the early Middle Ages on the basis of an interpretation of the written sources, but especially of an enormous amount of archaeological evidence accumulated in the last 50 years or so. It deals with societies in close contact with the Roman world, as well with those located very far from it. It addresses questions of property, subsistence, crafts, trade, and social change.
In Western Ways, for the first time, the "foreign schools" in Rome and Athens, institutions dealing primarily with classical archaeology and art history, are discussed in historical terms as vehicles and figureheads of national scholarship. By emphasising the agency and role of individuals in relation to structures and tradition, the book shows how much may be gained by examining science and politics as two sides of the same coin. It sheds light on the scholarly organisation of foreign schools, and through them, on the organisation of classical archaeology and classical studies around the Mediterranean. With its breadth and depth of archival resources, Western Ways offers new perspectives on funding, national prestige and international collaboration in the world of scholarship, and places the foreign schools in a framework of nineteenth and twentieth century Italian and Greek history.
This book compiles a series of case studies derived from archaeological excavation in Greek cultural contexts in the Mediterranean (ca. 800-100 B.C), addressing the current state of the field, the goals and direction of Greek archaeology, and its place in archaeological thought and practice. Overviews of archaeological sites and analyses of assemblages and contexts explore how new forms of data; methods of data recovery and analysis; and sampling strategies have affected the discourse in classical archaeology and the range of research questions and strategies at our disposal. Recent excavations and field practices are steering the way that we approach Greek cultural landscapes and form broad...