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Archaeology’s Visual Culture explores archaeology through the lens of visual culture theory. The insistent visuality of archaeology is a key stimulus for the imaginative and creative interpretation of our encounters with the past. Balm investigates the nature of this projection of the visual, revealing an embedded subjectivity in the imagery of archaeology and acknowledging the multiplicity of meanings that cohere around artifacts, archaeological sites and museum displays. Using a wide range of case studies, the book highlights how archaeologists can view objects and the consequences that ensue from these ways of seeing. Throughout the book Balm considers the potential for documentary imag...
Marking the Land investigates how hunter-gatherers use physical landscape markers and environmental management to impose meaning on the spaces they occupy. The land is full of meaning for hunter-gatherers. Much of that meaning is inherent in natural phenomena, but some of it comes from modifications to the landscape that hunter-gatherers themselves make. Such alterations may be intentional or unintentional, temporary or permanent, and they can carry multiple layers of meaning, ranging from practical signs that provide guidance and information through to less direct indications of identity or abstract, highly symbolic signs of sacred or ceremonial significance. This volume investigates the conditions which determine the investment of time and effort in physical landscape marking by hunter-gatherers, and the factors which determine the extent to which these modifications are symbolically charged. Considering hunter-gatherer groups of varying sociocultural complexity and scale, Marking the Land provides a systematic consideration of this neglected aspect of hunter-gatherer adaptation and the varied environments within which they live.
As a discipline, Archaeology has developed rapidly over the last half-century. The increase in so-called ‘public archaeology,’ with its wide range of television programming, community projects, newspaper articles, and enhanced site-based interpretation has taken archaeology from a closed academic discipline of interest to a tiny minority to a topic of increasing interest to the general public. This book explores how archaeologists share information – with specialists from other disciplines working within archaeology, other archaeologists, and a range of non-specialist groups. It emphasises that to adequately address contemporary levels of interest in their subject, archaeologists must ...
This second volume on Early Cycladic (and Cycladicising) sculptures found in the Aegean, examines finds from mainland Greece, along with the rarer items from the north and east Aegean, with the exception of those discovered in the Cyclades (covered in the preceding volume), and of those found in Crete. The significance of these finds is that these are the principal testimonies of the influence of the Early Bronze Age Cycladic cultures in the wider Aegean. This influence is shown both by the export of sculptures produced in the Cyclades (and made of Cycladic marble), and of their imitations, produced elsewhere in the Aegean, usually of local marble. They hold the key, therefore, to the cultur...
This edited volume investigates knowledge networks based on materials and associated technologies in Prehistoric Europe and the Classical Mediterranean. It emphasises the significance of material objects to the construction, maintenance, and collapse of networks of various forms – which are central to explanations of cultural contact and change. Focusing on the materiality of objects and on the way in which materials are used adds a multidimensional quality to networks. The properties, functions, and styles of different materials are intrinsically linked to the way in which knowledge flows and technologies are transmitted. Transmission of technologies from one craft to another is one of th...
Within the colonial history of the British Empire there are difficulties in reconstructing the lives of people that came from very different traditions of experience. The Archaeology of Roman Britain argues that a similar critical approach to the lives of people in Roman Britain needs to be developed, not only for the study of the local population but also those coming into Britain from elsewhere in the Empire who developed distinctive colonial lives. This critical, biographical approach can be extended and applied to places, structures, and things which developed in these provincial contexts as they were used and experienced over time. This book uniquely combines the study of all of these e...
While much has been achieved in understanding and managing weather effects and erosion phenomena affecting ancient imagery within the relatively protected environments of caves and rock-shelters, the same cannot be said of rock-art panels situated in the open-air. Despite the fact that the number of known sites has risen dramatically in recent decades there are few examples in which the weathering and erosion dynamics are under investigation with a view to developing proposals to mitigate the impact of natural and cultural processes. Most of the work being done in different parts of the world appears to be ad-hoc, with minimal communication on such matters between teams and with the wider ar...
Though archaeologists have long acknowledged the work of social anthropologists, anthropologists have been much less eager to repay the compliment. This volume argues that the time has come to recognise the insights archaeological approaches can bring to anthropology. Archaeology's rigorous approach to evidence and material culture; its ability to develop flexible research methodologies; its readiness to work with large-scale models of comparative social change, and to embrace the latest technology all means that it can offer valuable methods that can enrich and enhance current anthropological thinking.Cross-disciplinary and international in scope, this exciting volume draws together cutting-edge essays on the relationship between the two disciplines, arguing for greater collaboration and pointing to new concepts and approaches for anthropology. With contributions from leading scholars, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of archaeology, anthropology and related disciplines.
Space and Time in Mediterranean Prehistory addresses these two concepts as interrelated, rather than as separate categories, and as a means for understanding past social relations at different scales. The need for this volume was realised through four main observations: the ever growing interest in space and spatiality across the social sciences; the comparative theoretical and methodological neglect of time and temporality; the lack in the existing literature of an explicit and balanced focus on both space and time; and the large amount of new information coming from prehistoric Mediterranean. It focuses on the active and interactive role of space and time in the production of any social en...
Covering major theoretical and methodological developments over recent decades in areas like social institutions, settlement types, gender, status, and power, this book addresses the developing understanding of where and how people in the past created and used domestic space. It will be a useful synthesis for scholars and an ideal text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in archaeology and architecture.