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The Statues that Walked
The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works? No such astonishing numbers of massive statues are found anywhere else in the Pacific. How could the islanders possibly have moved so many multi-ton monoliths from the quarry inland, where they were carved, to their posts along the coastline? And most intriguing and vexin...
Time's River
An archaeologically rich region, in advance of impending disturbance
Mapping Our Ancestors
Much of what we are comes from our ancestors. Through cultural and biological inheritance mechanisms, our genetic composition, instructions for constructing artifacts, the structure and content of languages, and rules for behavior are passed from parents to children and from individual to individual. Mapping Our Ancestors demonstrates how various genealogical or "phylogenetic" methods can be used both to answer questions about human history and to build evolutionary explanations for the shape of history. Anthropologists are increasingly turning to quantitative phylogenetic methods. These methods depend on the transmission of information regardless of mode and as such are applicable to many a...
The Power of Nature
In The Power of Nature archaeologists address the force and impact of nature relative to human knowledge, action, and volition. Case studies from around the world focusing on different levels of sociopolitical complexity—ranging from early agricultural societies to states and empires—address the ways in which nature retains the upper hand in human agentive environmental discourse, providing an opportunity for an insightful perspective on the current anthropological emphasis on how humans affect the environment. Climatic events, pathogens, and animals as nonhuman agents, ranging in size from viruses to mega-storms, have presented our species with dynamic conditions that overwhelm human ca...
Distant Reading
How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions. From the evolutionary model of "Modern European Literature," through the geo-cultural insights of "Conjectures of World Literature" and "Planet Hollywood," to the quantitative findings of "Style, inc." and the abstract patterns of "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of "distant reading," that has come to define-well beyond the wildest expectations of its author-a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.
Handbook of Archaeological Theories
This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the latest thinking about archaeological theory. The authors provide a comprehensive picture of the theoretical foundations by which archaeologists contextualize and analyze their archaeological data. Student readers will also gain a sense of the immense power that theory has for building interpretations of the past, while recognizing the wonderful archaeological traditions that created it. An extensive bibliography is included. This volume is the single most important reference for current information on contemporary archaeological theories.
Paradise Past
In the 400 years from Magellan's entrance into Pacific waters to 1920, the lives of the people of the South Pacific were utterly transformed. Exotic diseases from Europe and America, particularly the worldwide influenza pandemic, were deadly for islanders. Ardent missionaries changed the belief systems and lives of nearly all Polynesians, Aborigines, and those Papuans and Melanesians living in areas accessible to westerners. By 1920 every island and atoll in the South Seas had been claimed as a colony or protectorate of a power such as Britain, France or the United States. Factors aiding this imperial sweep included European outposts such as Sydney, advances in maritime technology, the work of missionaries, a desire to profit from the area's relatively sparse resources, and international rivalry that led to the scramble for colonies. The coming of westerners, as this book points out, was not entirely negative, as head-hunting, cannibalism, chronic warfare, human sacrifice, and other practices were diminished--but whole cultures were irreversibly changed or even eradicated.
Handbook of Stemmatology
Stemmatology studies aspects of textual criticism that use genealogical methods to analyse a set of copies of a text whose autograph has been lost. This handbook is the first to cover the entire field, encompassing both theoretical and practical aspects of traditional as well as modern digital methods and their history. As an art (ars), stemmatology’s main goal is editing and thus presenting to the reader a historical text in the most satisfactory way. As a more abstract discipline (scientia), it is interested in the general principles of how texts change in the process of being copied. Thirty eight experts from all of the fields involved have joined forces to write this handbook, whose ei...
Mysteries of Easter Island
On Easter in 1722, a fleet of Dutch ships exploring the southeastern Pacific Ocean came across a small island that at first seemed uninhabited. Instead, the sailors found a community of people—and hundreds of giant stone statues. Easter Island and its statues have long been a source of mystery for explorers, historians, and tourists. How did people come to live in such a remote place? How had the islanders carved such enormous statues without metal tools? And how had they moved them? Read all about the myths and theories surrounding Easter Island, as well as the science researchers are using to learn more.
Adaptability
Adaptability is the key human trait. The ability to adapt faster and smarter than the situation is what makes the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win. Our history is a story of adaptation and change. And in this time of brutal competition and economic uncertainty, it has never been more important to understand how to adapt successfully. In a series of powerful rules, Max McKeown explores how to increase the adaptability of you and your organization to create winning positions. Fascinating real-world examples from business, government, the military and sport bring the rules of adaptability to life - from the world s most innovative corporations to street-level creativity emerging from the slums. Adaptability is a powerful, practical and inspirational guide to success in uncertain times.
