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This is the first of the final reports on the excavations by the University of California at Nemea in the 1970's and 1980's. It contains the topographical and architectural studies: the Sacred Square (D Birge); the Xenon (L H Kraynak); and the Bath (S G Miller) . Includes a catalogue of the artifacts found.
Annotation The authors describe Nemea, one of the five Greek sites of ancient athletic games, and examine in great detail the coins discovered there, from the classical period to the Early Christian period and after.
Since 1974, under the direction of Stephen G. Miller, the Classics Department of the University of California, Berkeley, has been excavating at Nemea, one of four sites in Greece of ancient athletic games and festivals. This second volume in theExcavations at Nemeaseries presents the Early Hellenistic stadium, used to celebrate the games from around 330 to 271 b.c. The presentation of remains includes findings on related structures--the entrance tunnel, with its ancient graffiti, and the Apodyterion, or undressing room, used by the athletes who competed--as well as on the track, the hydraulic system, the seating for judges and spectators, the starting line, the starting mechanism, and the tu...
This volume concerns premodern understandings of vegetal nature that encompass multiple semantics and perspectives. Scholars from the disparate fields of art history, literature, and religious studies present tantalizing studies of trees and plants in sacred and secular thought. Some discuss the concept of the Book of Nature and its implications. Others explore narratives of symbiosis between humans and vegetal material, tree-dwelling hermits, spirits metamorphosing into wood, flowers or trees that sprout from bodies or the dissolution of the self into the natural world. Complementary to these approaches are studies that suggest a collapsing of time and space in spiritually charged yet ambiguous natural motifs or topographies where forests or groves are spaces of transformative experience.
How did ancient societies change the environment and how do their actions continue to affect us today? In this dramatically revised and expanded second edition of the work entitled Pan’s Travail, J. Donald Hughes examines the environmental history of the classical period and argues that the decline of ancient civilizations resulted in part from their exploitation of the natural world. Focusing on Greece and Rome, as well as areas subject to their influences, Hughes offers a detailed look at the impact of humans and their technologies on the ecology of the Mediterranean basin. Evidence of deforestation in ancient Greece, the remains of Roman aqueducts and mines, and paintings on centuries-o...
This book argues that long-distance trade in luxury items – such as diamonds, gold, cinnamon, scented woods, ivory and pearls, all of which require little overhead in their acquisition and were relatively easy to transport – played a foundational role in the creation of what we would call "global trade" in the first millennium CE. The book coins the term "dark matter economy" to better describe this complex – though mostly invisible – relationship to normative realities. The first full integration of dark matter economy with the emerging global flows took place in South India and Sri Lanka at the beginning of the millennium. The book then moves to other places in the world – "sweet...
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Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History Combining rigorous research with lyrical writing, Elderflora chronicles the complex roles ancient trees have played in the modern world and illuminates how we might need old trees now more than ever. Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reveals in Elderflora, our respect took a modern turn in the eighteenth century when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travellers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests suc...
The Hebrew Bible differs on which cultic items used in worship were appropriate for use within YHWHism. By analyzing passages mentioning "high places" (bamot), sacred trees (asherim), etc., this study finds many cultic practices were acceptable.