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Heritage is almost univocally conceived of as valuable and good, something we care for and preserve for ourselves and future generations. Although traditionally associated with the unique and monumental, heritage has over the last decades been broadened in response to claims to incorporate more diverse and globally representative legacies. While such claims are of course welcome, they do not embrace the bulging unruly and obnoxious legacies that now haunt us; legacies that have become so conspicuously manifest that they are claimed as diagnostic of a new epoch, the Anthropocene. This book targets this exclusion. It claims that the current 'clash' between prevailing conceptions of heritage as...
This volume is the first comprehensive overview of Roman experimental archaeology, exploring its key themes, methodologies and applications through a diverse array of international case studies. Experiments, simulations and reconstructions are important methods for understanding the past, from uncovering how ancient objects and structures were made, used, destroyed, deposited and affected underground, to illuminating the experiences of tasting ancient foods, fighting alongside comrades or living in replicated structures. Although the incorporation of experimentation has had great success in prehistoric studies, greater reliance on the wealth of literary and material sources remaining from th...
Historians of Russia were relative latecomers to the field of environmental history. Yet, in the past decade, the exploration of Russian environmental history has burgeoned. Thinking Russia's History Environmentally showcases collaboration amongst an international set of scholars who focus on the contribution that the study of Russian environments makes to the global environmental field. Through discerning analysis of natural resources, the environment as a factor in historical processes such as industrialization, and more recent human-animal interactions, this volume challenges stereotypes of Russian history and inso doing, highlights the unexpected importance of Russian environments across a time framewell beyond the ecological catastrophes of the Soviet period.
In commemoration of Lothar von Falkenhausens 60th birthday, this volume assembles eighteen scholarly essays that explore the intersection between art, economy, and ritual in ancient East Asia. The contributions are clustered into four themes: Ritual Economy, Ritual and Sacrifice, Technology, Community, Interaction, and Objects and Meaning, which collectively reflect the theoretical, methodological, and historical questions that Falkenhausen has been examining via his scholarship, research, and teaching throughout his career. Most of the chapters work with archaeological and textual data from China, but there are also studies of materials from Mongolia, Korea, Southeast Asia and even Egypt, showing the global impact of Falkenhausens work. The chronological range of studies extends from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age in China, into the early imperial, medieval, and early modern periods. The authors discuss art, economy, ritual, interaction, and technology in the broad context of East Asian archaeology and its connection to the world beyond.
¿Cómo transforma un habitante común su casa en su hogar? ¿Qué elementos, mecanismos o acciones empleamos para construir la casa vivida? ¿Cuál es el significado de habitar?... Intentaremos responder estas preguntas complejas, poniendo a la luz el sentir de un grupo de habitantes del siglo XXI, que han sido interpelados mediante imágenes de la casa. Partiendo de la premisa de la capacidad de hablar de la fotografía sobre el habitar, confrontamos a los habitantes con series de imágenes de interiores domésticos, sobre las que se elaboran distintas encuestas y les invitamos también a tomar sus propias imágenes de la casa. Los resultados se compilan, organizan y estructuran en una taxonomía del habitar compuesta por cuarenta y siete parámetros, que explicitan la naturaleza compleja del hogar occidental contemporáneo. Finalmente, se revelan las sinergias, conexiones y relaciones existentes entre estos elementos, con la intención de retornar al ejercicio profesional de la arquitectura, a la práctica social de crear hogar, con una mirada depurada procedente de la comprensión de los otros y de su singular anhelo de habitar.
This book examines everyday artefacts of world politics: the things that everyday people make that tell stories about how the world works. The author argues that people engage in a unique form of multimodal storytelling about the world, their place in the world, and the world they want to live in through the artefacts that they make. Introducing a novel approach to artefactual analysis, the book explores textiles, jewellery, and pottery, and urges scholars of global politics to take these artefacts seriously. Based on original research, this book is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on concepts and approaches from across the humanities and social sciences, including archaeology, history, sociology, world politics, anthropology, and material studies. It will therefore be of interest to a wide range of readers.
In much recent thinking, social and cultural realms are thought of as existing prior to—or detached from—things, materiality, and landscape. It is often assumed, for example, that things are entirely 'constructed' by social or cultural perceptions and have no existence in and of themselves. Bjornar Olsen takes a different position. Drawing on a range of theories, especially phenomenology and actor-network-theory, Olsen claims that human life is fully mixed up with things and that humanity and human history emerge from such relationships. Things, moreover, possess unique qualities that are inherent in our cohabitation with them—qualities that help to facilitate existential security and memory of the past. This important work of archaeological theory challenges us to reconsider our ideas about the nature of things, past and present, demonstrating that objects themselves possess a dynamic presence that we must take into account if we are to understand the world we and they inhabit.
The recent crisis in the world of antiquities collecting has prompted scholars and the general public to pay more attention than ever before to the archaeological findspots and collecting histories of ancient artworks. This new scrutiny is applied to works currently on the market as well as to those acquired since (and despite) the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which aimed to prevent the trafficking in cultural property. When it comes to famous works that have been in major museums for many generations, however, the matter of their origins is rarely considered. Canonical pieces like the Barberini Togatus or the Fonseca bust of a Flavian lady appear in many scholarly studies and virtually every textbook on Roman art. But we have no more certainty about these works' archaeological contexts than we do about those that surface on the market today. This book argues that the current legal and ethical debates over looting, ownership and cultural property have distracted us from the epistemological problems inherent in all (ostensibly) ancient artworks lacking a known findspot, problems that should be of great concern to those who seek to understand the past through its material remains.
Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.