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While the practice of the banquet or ceremonial feast has been recognized in many societies around the world, living, ancient or extinct, it had not yet been the subject of a large-scale synthesis. This book offers an interdisciplinary study of the festive banquet in relation to the cosmogonies and social practices of the social spaces concerned.
Ethnographic museums, now often rebranded as collections of 'world cultures', appear permanently problematic, even as their contexts and the orientation of their activities change. Across Europe and elsewhere, curators and other museum staff are committed to dialogue and collaboration with the peoples from whom collections were made. But their vast assemblages of artifacts, removed from countries of origin primarily during the colonial period, and assumed, mostly inaccurately, to have been looted, seem always in question.Photo-Museology arises from an art project undertaken over 25 years. From the early 1990s, Mark Adams and Nicholas Thomas together investigated sites of cross-cultural encou...
From about 5500 cal BC to soon after 5000 cal BC, the lifeways of the first farmers of central Europe, the LBK culture (Linearbandkeramik), are seen in distinctive practices of longhouse use, settlement forms, landscape choice, subsistence, material culture and mortuary rites. Within the five or more centuries of LBK existence a dynamic sequence of changes can be seen in, for instance, the expansion and increasing density of settlement, progressive regionalisation in pottery decoration, and at the end some signs of stress or even localised crisis. Although showing many features in common across its very broad distribution, however, the LBK phenomenon was not everywhere the same, and there is...
This book provides a broad overview of the key concepts in public archaeology, a research field that examines the relationship between archaeology and the public, in both theoretical and practical terms. While based on the long-standing programme of undergraduate and graduate teaching in public archaeology at UCL’s renowned Institute of Archaeology, the book also takes into account the growth of scholarship from around the world and seeks to clarify what exactly ‘public archaeology’ is by promoting an inclusive, socially and politically engaged vision of the discipline. Written for students and practitioners, the individual chapters provide textbook-level introductions to the themes, t...
Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).
Many of us accept as uncontroversial the belief that the world is comprised of detached and disparate products, all of which are reducible to certain substances. Of those things that are alive, we acknowledge that some have agency while others, such as humans, have more advanced qualities such as consciousness, reason and intentionality. So deeply-seated is this metaphysical belief, along with the related distinctions we draw between subject/object, mind/body and nature/culture that many of us tacitly assume past groups approached and apprehended the world in a similar fashion. Relational Archaeologies questions how such a view of human beings, ‘other-than-human’ creatures and things aff...
The Low Countries are famous for their radically changing landscape over the last 1,000 years. Like the landscape, the linguistic situation has also undergone major changes. In Holland, an early form of Frisian was spoken until, very roughly, 1100, and in parts of North Holland it disappeared even later. The hunt for traces of Frisian or Ingvaeonic in the dialects of the western Low Countries has been going on for around 150 years, but a synthesis of the available evidence has never appeared. The main aim of this book is to fill that gap. It follows the lead of many recent studies on the nature and effects of language contact situations in the past. The topic is approached from two different angles: Dutch dialectology, in all its geographic and diachronic variation, and comparative Germanic linguistics. In the end, the minute details and the bigger picture merge into one possible account of the early and high medieval processes that determined the make-up of western Dutch.
How did medieval Europeans use and change their environments, think about the natural world, and try to handle the natural forces affecting their lives? This groundbreaking environmental history examines medieval relationships with the natural world from the perspective of social ecology, viewing human society as a hybrid of the cultural and the natural. Richard Hoffmann's interdisciplinary approach sheds important light on such central topics in medieval history as the decline of Rome, religious doctrine, urbanization and technology, as well as key environmental themes, among them energy use, sustainability, disease and climate change. Revealing the role of natural forces in events previously seen as purely human, the book explores issues including the treatment of animals, the 'tragedy of the commons', agricultural clearances and agrarian economies. By introducing medieval history in the context of social ecology, it brings the natural world into historiography as an agent and object of history itself.