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Archaeology's links to international relations are well known: launching and sustaining international expeditions requires the honed diplomatic skills of ambassadors. U.S. foreign policy depends on archaeologists to foster mutual understanding, mend fences, and build bridges. This book explores how international partnerships inherent in archaeological legal instruments and policies, especially involvement with major U.S. museums, contribute to the underlying principles of U.S. cultural diplomacy. Drawing from analyses and discussion of several U.S. governmental agencies' treatment of international cultural heritage and its funding, the history of diplomacy-entangled research centers abroad, and the necessity of archaeologists' involvement in diplomatic processes, this seminal work has implications for the fields of cultural heritage, anthropology, archaeology, museum studies, international relations, law, and policy studies.
Archaeological artifacts have become a traded commodity in large part because the global reach of Western society allows easy access to the world's archaeological heritage. Acquired by the world's leading museums and private collectors, antiquities have been removed from archaeological sites, monuments, or cultural institutions and illegally traded. This collection of essays by world-recognized experts investigates the ways that com-modifying artifacts fuels the destruction of archaeological heritage and considers what can be done to protect it. Despite growing national and international legislation to protect cultural heritage, increasing numbers of archaeological sites—among them, war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq—are subject to pillage as the monetary value of artifacts rises. Offering comprehensive examinations of archaeological site looting, the antiquities trade, the ruin of cultural heritage resources, and the international efforts to combat their destruction, the authors argue that the antiquities market impacts cultural heritage around the world and is a burgeoning global crisis.
Scholars working in a number of disciplines – archaeologists, classicists, epigraphers, papyrologists, Assyriologists, Egyptologists, Mayanists, philologists, and ancient historians of all stripes – routinely engage with ancient textual sources that are either material remains from the archaeological record or historical products of other connections between the ancient world and our own. Examining the archaeology-text nexus from multiple perspectives, contributors to this volume discuss current theoretical and practical problems that have grown out of their work at the boundary of the division between archaeology and the study of early inscriptions. In 12 representative case-studies dra...
The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 was a landmark event in Egyptology that was celebrated around the world. Had Howard Carter found his prize a few years earlier, however, the treasures of Tut might now be in the British Museum in London rather than the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. That's because the years between World War I and World War II were a transitional period in Middle Eastern archaeology, as nationalists in Egypt and elsewhere asserted their claims to antiquities discovered within their borders. These claims were motivated by politics as much as by scholarship, with nationalists seeking to unite citizens through pride in their ancient past as they challenged Western pow...
Beyond their often beautiful exhibition halls, many museums contain vast, hidden spaces in which objects may be stored, conserved, or processed. Museums can also include unseen archives, study rooms, and libraries which are inaccessible to the public. This collection of essays focuses on this domain, an area that has hitherto received little attention. Divided into four sections, the book critically examines the physical space of museum storage areas, the fluctuating historical fortunes of exhibits, the growing phenomenon of publicly visible storage, and the politics of objects deemed worthy of collection but unsuitable for display. In doing so, it explores issues including the relationship between storage and canonization, the politics of collecting, the use of museum storage as a form of censorship, the architectural character of storage space, and the economic and epistemic value of museum objects. Essay contributions come from a broad combination of museum directors, curators, archaeologists, historians, and other academics.
This is the first volume specifically dedicated to the consolidation and clarification of Heritage Studies as a distinct field with its own means of investigation. It presents the range of methods that can be used and illustrates their application through case studies from different parts of the world, including the UK and USA. The challenge that the collection makes explicit is that Heritage Studies must develop a stronger recognition of the scope and nature of its data and a concise yet explorative understanding of its analytical methods. The methods considered fall within three broad categories: textual/discourse analysis, methods for investigating people’s attitudes and behaviour; and ...
A revealing look at ancient art in the Menil Collection that addresses the problem of objects lacking archaeological context This innovative anthology discusses a diversity of ancient Mediterranean objects--a Mesopotamian votive figure, a Egyptian relief from the New Kingdom, and a Greek Geometric fawn among them--in the Menil Collection and three other US museums. It offers new models for understanding works from antiquity that lack archaeological context. Essays by 13 authors written with the layperson in mind employ a creative mixture of iconography, technical studies, and modern provenance research to gain insight into the meaning of the objects themselves and what they can teach us more...
This volume with contributions from a cross-section of disciplines provide insights into the methodological, theoretical, and ethical issues facing scholars when working with ancient texts in modern contexts.
This Handbook reviews the state of mortuary archaeology and its practice with forty-four chapters focusing on the history of the discipline and its current scientific techniques and methods. Written by leading scholars in the field, it derives its examples and case studies from a wide range of time periods and geographical areas.