You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
An innovative 1996 discussion of architecture and its role in the culture of the ancient Andes.
Readers of detective stories are turning more toward historical crime fiction to learn both what everyday life was like in past societies and how society coped with those who broke the laws and restrictions of the times. The crime fiction treated here ranges from ancient Egypt through classical Greece and Rome; from medieval and renaissance China and Europe through nineteenth-century England and America. Topics include: Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael; Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose; Susanna Gregory’s Doctor Matthew Bartholomew; Peter Heck’s Mark Twain as detective; Anne Perry and her Victorian-era world; Caleb Carr’s works; and Elizabeth Peter’s Egyptologist-adventurer tales.
"Deeper understanding of history is enhanced by encasing it in art and interest. Crime fiction is one of the widest and most rapidly growing forms of literature. Historical crime fiction serves effectively the double purpose of entertaining while it teaches. The "truth" of the narrative account, the editors of this volume believe, is dependent on the understanding of human nature reflected in the author who writes the narrative. "Historical crime fiction," the editors of this volume write, "has an obligation and a golden opportunity. It must bring the past up to the present through the device of timeless crime and it must take the reader into the world about which is being written so that th...
Sustainable Lifeways addresses forces of conservatism and innovation in societies dependent on the exploitation of aquatic and other wild resources, agriculture, and specialized pastoralism. The volume gathers specialists working in four areas of the world with significant archaeological and paleoenvironmental databases: West Asia, the American Southwest, East Africa, and Andean South America, and contributing to research in three broad time scales: long term (spanning millennia), medium term (archaeological time, spanning centuries or a few thousand years), and recent (ethnohistoric or ethnographic, spanning years or decades). By bringing an archaeological eye to an examination of human res...
One of the most well-known things about the Classic Maya civilization is that it collapsed, which leads to many questions about what happened. Geared toward a general audience, this book argues that Classic Maya civilization did not in fact collapse in the literal sense of the word. Instead, it shifts the focus to the 700-plus years of societal growth and environmental conservation that preceded the transformation of Maya civilization about 1,000 years ago. Drawing on archaeological, environmental, and historical evidence, it explores the many ways that Maya communities addressed the challenges of climate change and other tropical environment stressors.
The Right of Nonuse provides a fresh and remarkably different perspective on the real causes of the ills plaguing the world's resources and environment. It re-examines the very nature of nature, and from this new perspective, argues that what is needed is for humans to grant to natural resources a legal right to be left alone - a right of nonuse. In the process, it explores the following questions: Why do natural resources continue to be depleted and removed at an alarming rate? Why are species becoming extinct at a pace that may be unprecedented? Why does the environment continue to be polluted? Why do the weather and climate seem to be changing? Perhaps most important, why have laws, legal...
Nineteen internationally renowned scholars discuss nine theoretically based case studies ranging in subject from the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers to the restructuring of gender relations in the US. Essential reading for all archaeologists.
Globalization and Global History argues that globalization is not an exotic and new phenomenon. Instead it emphasizes that globalization is something that has been with us as long as there have been people who are both interdependent and aware of that fact. Studying globalization from the vantage point of long-term global history permits theoretical and empirical investigation, allowing the authors collected to assess the extent of ongoing transformations and to compare them to earlier iterations. With this historical advantage, the extent of ongoing changes - which previously appeared unprecedented - can be contrasted to similar episodes in the past. The book is divided into three sections. The first focuses on how globalization has been written about from a historical perspective. The second part advances three different takes on how best to view globalization from a very long-term stance. The final section continues this interpretative thread by examining more narrow aspects of globalization processes, ranging from incorporation processes to systemic disruptions.