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The Body as Material Culture
Bodies intrigue us. They promise windows into the past that other archaeological finds cannot by bringing us literally face to face with history. Yet 'the body' is also highly contested. Archaeological bodies are studied through two contrasting perspectives that sit on different sides of a disciplinary divide. On one hand lie science-based osteoarchaeological approaches. On the other lie understandings derived from recent developments in social theory that increasingly view the body as a social construction. Through a close examination of disciplinary practice, Joanna Sofaer highlights the tensions and possibilities offered by one particular kind of archaeological body, the human skeleton, with particular regard to the study of gender and age. Using a range of examples, she argues for reassessment of the role of the skeletal body in archaeological practice, and develops a theoretical framework for bioarchaeology based on the materiality and historicity of human remains.
Joshua Sofaer
Joshua Sofaer works across boundaries, borders and disciplines to create artworks that engage with all levels of society. In cultural institutions or on the street, for art galleries or personal homes, staged as operas or cast as golden sculptures, Sofaer’s work weaves with and through social fabric to consider the ideas that hold us together. Co-published with the Live Art Development Agency, this lavishly illustrated volume is the first in-depth study of the artist’s work, featuring discussions with producers and participants, documentary images and a new photographic essay, interviews with the artist himself, and thirteen commissioned essays by scholars, curators and artists from the ...
Material Identities
Material Identities examines the way that individuals use material objects as tools for projecting aspects of their identities. Considers the way identity is fashioned, launched, used, and admired in the material world. Contributors intervene from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, design and material culture. Considers contrasting media - painting, print, sculpture, dress, coinage, architecture, furniture, luxury items, and interior design. Explores the complexity of identity through the intersection notions of gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and class. Reaffirms the central role of public identities and their impact on social life.
Creativity in the Bronze Age
This book explores the nature of creativity in the European Bronze Age through developments in pottery, textiles, and metalwork.
Transottoman Matters
This volume analyzes historical processes of mobility by focusing on material objects. Mobility—as a shorthand for various related processes such as migration, transfer, entanglement, and translation—involves human actors, immaterial elements such as ideas and knowledge, but also objects in various forms and functions. For example, as material infrastructures they are the basis for transport and travel; as goods they are the object and purpose of trade or gift exchange. By focusing on the way objects determined certain processes of mobility and how their social meaning and materiality was transformed in these processes, the contributors hope to gain deeper insight into the historical relations between the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and Persia.
Clay in the Age of Bronze
This book is the first to explore creativity in the Bronze Age as expressed through the medium of clay.
Land of Our Fathers
The biblical motif of a land divinely-promised and given to Abraham and his descendants is argued to be an ideological reflex of post-monarchic, territorial disputes between competing socio-religious groups. The important biblical motif of a Promised Land is founded upon the ancient Near Eastern concept of ancestral land: hereditary space upon which families lived, worked, died and were buried. An essential element of concept of ancestral land was the belief in the post-mortem existence of the ancestors, who were venerated with grave offerings, mortuary feasts, bone rituals and standing stones. The Hebrew Bible is littered with stories concerning these practices and beliefs, yet the specific correlation of ancestor veneration and certain biblical land claims has gone unrecognized. The book remedies this in presenting evidence for the vital and persistent impact of ancestor veneration upon land claims. It proposes that ancestor veneration, which formed a common ground in the experiences of various socio-religious groups in ancient Israel, became in the Hebrew Bible an ideological battlefield upon which claims to the land were won and lost.
The Archaeology of Identities
This definitive sourcebook collates seminal articles from this increasingly important field, to present a comprehensive and well-balanced representation of approaches and interests in a single volume for students, lecturers and researchers.
A Companion to the Anthropology of Death
A thought-provoking examination of death, dying, and the afterlife Prominent scholars present their most recent work about mortuary rituals, grief and mourning, genocide, cyclical processes of life and death, biomedical developments, and the materiality of human corpses in this unique and illuminating book. Interrogating our most common practices surrounding death, the authors ask such questions as: How does the state wrest away control over the dead from bereaved relatives? Why do many mourners refuse to cut their emotional ties to the dead and nurture lasting bonds? Is death a final condition or can human remains acquire agency? The book is a refreshing reassessment of these issues and pra...
Children, Identity and the Past
In this volume, fourteen authors representing different academic fields and traditions present their work on children in past societies: how to recognise children in the archaeological record, the conditions of their lives and deaths and how they may have been perceived by their contemporaries. The case studies, from a number of European sites, cover a time-span from the Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages. A central theme in many of the contributions is socialisation and education as part of identity-forming processes. What was it like to be a child in Palaeolithic times? How did the Early Medieval Church approach the teaching of children? Socialisation is a theme echoed also in the two papers ...
