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Reclaiming Heritage
Struggles over the meaning of the past are common in postcolonial states. State cultural heritage programs build monuments to reinforce in nation building efforts—often supported by international organizations and tourist dollars. These efforts often ignore the other, often more troubling memories preserved by local communities—markers of colonial oppression, cultural genocide, and ethnic identity. Yet, as the contributors to this volume note, questions of memory, heritage, identity and conservation are interwoven at the local, ethnic, national and global level and cannot be easily disentangled. In a fascinating series of cases from West Africa, anthropologists, archaeologists and art historians show how memory and heritage play out in a variety of postcolonial contexts. Settings range from televised ritual performances in Mali to monument conservation in Djenne and slavery memorials in Ghana.
Stone Worlds
This book represents an innovative experiment in presenting the results of a large-scale, multidisciplinary archaeological project. The well-known authors and their team examined the Neolithic and Bronze Age landscapes on Bodmin Moor of Southwest England, especially the site of Leskernick. The result is a multivocal, multidisciplinary telling of the stories of Bodmin Moor—both ancient and modern—using a large number of literary genres and academic disciplines. Dialogue, storytelling, poetry, photo essays and museum exhibits all appear in the volume, along with contributions from archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, geologists, and ecologists. The result is a major synthesis of the Bronze Age settlements and ritual sites of the Moor, contextualized within the Bronze Ages of southwestern and central Britain, and a tracing of the changing meaning of this landscape over the past five thousand years. Of obvious interest to those in British prehistory, this is a substantial presentation of a groundbreaking project that will also be of interest to many concerned with the interpretation of social landscapes and the public presentation of archaeology.
Archaeology and the Media
The public’s fascination with archaeology has meant that archaeologists have had to deal with media more regularly than other scholarly disciplines. How archaeologists communicate their research to the public through the media and how the media view archaeologists has become an important feature in the contemporary world of academic and professional archaeologists. In this volume, a group of archaeologists, many with media backgrounds, address the wide range of questions in this intersection of fields. An array of media forms are covered including television, film, photography, the popular press, art, video games, radio and digital media with a focus on the overriding question: What are the long-term implications of the increasing exposure through and reliance upon media forms for archaeology in the contemporary world? The volume will be of interest to archaeologists and those teaching public archaeology courses.
Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process
The remains of hunter-gatherer groups are the most commonly discovered archaeological resources in the world, and their study constitutes much of the archaeological research done in North America. In spite of paradigm-shifting discoveries elsewhere in the world that may indicate that hunter-gatherer societies were more complex than simple remnants of a prehistoric past, North American archaeology by and large hasn’t embraced these theories, instead maintaining its general neoevolutionary track. This book will change that. Combining the latest empirical studies of archaeological practice with the latest conceptual tools of anthropological and historical theory, this volume seeks to set a ne...
Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution
Social scientists can learn a lot from evolutionary biology - from systematics and principles of evolutionary ecology to theories of social interaction including competition, conflict and cooperation, as well as niche construction, complexity, eco-evo-devo, and the role of the individual in evolutionary processes. Darwinian sociocultural evolutionary theory applies the logic of Darwinism to social-learning based cultural and social change. With a multidisciplinary approach for graduate biologists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, social psychologists, archaeologists, linguists, economists, political scientists and science and technology specialists, the author presents this model of evolution drawing on a number of sophisticated aspects of biological evolutionary theory. The approach brings together a broad and inclusive theoretical framework for understanding the social sciences which addresses many of the dilemmas at their forefront - the relationship between history and necessity, conflict and cooperation, the ideal and the material and the problems of agency, subjectivity and the nature of social structure.
Return to Alexandria
Beverley Butler’s ethnography of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina project critiques the underlying western foundational concepts and values behind the Library in a nuanced postcolonial examination of memory, cultural revival, and homecoming.
Darwin's Bridge
Darwin's Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences explores the meaning of consilience and considers the unity of human evolution, human nature, social dynamics, art, and narrative. Bringing together cutting-edge scientists and scholars across a range of fields of knowledge production, this volume makes it possible to see how far we have come toward unifying knowledge about the human species, what major issues are still in contention, and what areas of research are likely to produce further progress.
Ceramics of the Merv Oasis
Our knowledge of many groups or periods has benefited from systematic ceramic analysis, however as yet the Sasanian Empire of ancient Persia (224-651 AD) has not be subjected to the same examination. Merv, an expansive ancient city located in an oasis in the Central Asian steppes, was for millennia a gateway for travelers and traders along the Silk Road between east and west. Puschnigg’s detailed study of Merv’s Sasanian pottery creates a benchmark for other work on this ceramic corpus. She dissects the frequency, dates, wares, and profiles of hundreds of securely excavated pieces and compares them with the finds from earlier Russian studies, generally unavailable to western researchers. Puschnigg uses this material to provide insights into the social and economic dimensions of the Sasanian world, as well as providing researchers with a catalog of typical shapes and wares.
Nukak
From Gustavo Politis, one of the most renowned South American archaeologists, comes the first in-depth study in English of the last “undiscovered” people of the Amazon. His work is groundbreaking and urgent, both because of encroaching guerrilla violence that makes Nukak existence perilously fragile, and because his work with the Nukak represented one of the last opportunities to conduct research with hunter-gatherers using contemporary methodological and the theoretical tools. Through a rich and comprehensive ethno-archaeological portrait of material culture “in the making,” this work makes methodological and conceptual advances in the interpretation of hunter-gather societies. Politis’s conclusions, based on six years of original research and on comparative analysis, are integrative and contribute to the identification of the multiple factors involved in the formation of hunter-gatherer archaeological assemblages.
Decolonizing Conservation
This book argues for an important shift in cultural heritage conservation, away from a focus on maintaining the physical fabric of material culture toward the impact that conservation work has on people’s lives. In doing so, it challenges the commodification of sacred objects and places by western conservation thought and attempts to decolonize conservation practice. To do so, the authors examine conservation activities at Maori marae—meeting houses—located in the US, Germany, and England and contrasts them with changes in marae conservation in New Zealand. A key case study is the Hinemihi meeting house, transported to England in the 1890s where it was treated as a curiosity by visitors to Clandon Park for over a century, and more recently as a focal point of cultural activity for UK Maori communities. Recent efforts to include various Maori stakeholder communities in the care of this sacred structure is a key example of community based conservation that can be replicated in heritage practice around the world.
