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One of the great historical mysteries of recent centuries has to do with the discovery of Australia and New Zealand before the 17th century. Did 16th century Portuguese navigators reach the shores of these two countries and chart them? This book catalogues all major attempts over the last 500 years to answer these questions.
The contribution of German ethnography to Australian anthropological scholarship on Aboriginal societies and cultures has been limited, primarily because few people working in the field read German. But it has also been neglected because its humanistic concerns with language, religion and mythology contrasted with the mainstream British social anthropological tradition that prevailed in Australia until the late 1960s. The advent of native title claims, which require drawing on the earliest ethnography for any area, together with an increase in research on rock art of the Kimberley region, has stimulated interest in this German ethnography, as have some recent book translations. Even so, seve...
For more than 200 years, scholars and amateurs alike have wrestled with the problem -- did sixteenth century Portuguese navigators sail down the east coast of Australia and along the shores of New Zealand, charting the coastlines as they went? Employing endless speculation, all kinds of people have proposed all kinds of theories, not one of which resulted in a resolution over those two centuries. This book is different. Forsaking the speculation and guesswork model, it finally lays the matter to rest beyond all reasonable doubt
For more than two hundred years, scholars and amateurs alike have wrestled with the problem -- did 16th century Portuguese navigators sail down the east coast of Australia, and along the shores of New Zealand? Employing endless speculation, all kinds of people have proposed all kinds of theories, but not one ever resulted in a resolution. This book is different. Forsaking all speculation and guesswork, it finally puts the matter to rest beyond all reasonable doubt.
In The Politics of Ritual Change, John Thames explores the intersection of ritual and politics in the zukru festival texts from Emar and suggests a new understanding of the Hittite Empire’s relationship to northern Syria in the 13th century BCE.
A fascinating case study of the archaeological site at Murujuga, Australia Located in the Dampier Archipelago of Western Australia, Murujuga is the single largest archaeological site in the world. It contains an estimated one million petroglyphs, or rock art motifs, produced by the Indigenous Australians who have historically inhabited the archipelago. To date, there has been no comprehensive survey of the site's petroglyphs or those who created them. Since the 1960s, regional mining interests have caused significant damage to this site, destroying an estimated 5 to 25 percent of the petroglyphs in Murujuga. Today, Murujuga holds the unenviable status of being one of the most endangered arch...
Includes entries for maps and atlases.
"In 2007, a tsunami slammed a small island in the western Solomon Islands, wreaking havoc on its coastal communities and ecosystems. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic and environmental science research, Matthew Lauer provides an intimate account of this catastrophic event that explores how a century of colonization, Christianity, and increasing entanglement with capitalism prefigured the local response and the tumultuous recovery process. Despite near total destruction of several villages, few people lost their lives, as nearly everyone fled to high ground before the tsunami struck. To understand their astonishing, lifesaving response, Lauer argues that we need to rethink the popular portrayals of indigenous ecological knowledge that inform environmental research and contemporary disaster mitigation strategies so as to avoid displacing those aspects of indigenous knowing and being that tend to be overlooked. In an increasingly disaster-prone era of ecological crises, this important study challenges readers to expand their thinking about the causes and consequences of calamities, the effects of disaster relief and recovery efforts, and the nature of local knowledge"--
In his (1921) book, Language, Sapir made the famous observation, “All grammars leak” (38). By this he meant that within the systematic paradigms, rules and routinized patterns of any grammar, we always find a few irregularities and surprises. The same can be said for linguistic typologies. Typological theories are critical tools for linguists, for exploring differences and similarities among languages, for learning about the cognitive factors and social practices that make languages the way they are, and for making predictions about other properties of languages that are members of a certain type. So what do we do when a typology leaks? This paper follows the spirit of such work as Aske (1989) on path types and Mithun and Chafe (1999) on grammatical relations types to understand the grammatical and functional motivations of language-internal typological diversity: that is, why and how a single language uses patterns and constructions of more than one type. .
Asian Treasures: Gems of the Written Word showcases Asian writing, printing and books of beauty and historical significance that are housed in the National Library of Australia. Written by Andrew Gosling, former chief librarian for the Library's Asian Collections, Asian Treasures provides a fascinating glimpse into the remarkable pieces-old and modern-that the Library has acquired from the Asian region.