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The contributors to this volume—themselves from six continents and many representing indigenous and minority communities and disadvantaged countries—suggest strategies to strip archaeological theory and practice of its colonial heritage and create a discipline sensitive to its inherent inequalities.
This compilation of original research articles highlight the important cross-regional, cross-chronological, and comparative approaches to political and economic landscapes in ancient South Asia and its neighbors. Focusing on the Indus Valley period and Iron Age India, this volume incorporates new research in South Asia within the broader universe of archaeological scholarship. Contributions focus on four major themes: reinterpreting material culture; identifying domains and regional boundaries; articulating complexity; and modeling interregional interaction. These studies develop theoretical models that may be applicable researchers studying cultural complexity elsewhere in the world.
Bringing together 25 case studies from archaeological projects worldwide, Engaging Archaeology candidly explores personal experiences, successes, challenges, and even frustrations from established and senior archaeologists who share invaluable practical advice for students and early-career professionals engaged in planning and carrying out their own archaeological research. With engaging chapters, such as ‘How Not to Write a PhD Thesis on Neolithic Italy’ and ‘Accidentally Digging Central America's Earliest Village’, readers are transported to the desks, digs, and data-labs of the authors, learning the skills, tricks of the trade, and potential pit-falls of archaeological fieldwork a...
This work explores the archaeologies of daily living left by the indigenous and other displaced peoples impacted by European colonial expansion over the last 600 years. Case studies from North America, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Ireland significantly revise conventional historical narratives of those interactions, their presumed impacts, and their ongoing relevance for the material, social, economic, and political lives and identities of contemporary indigenous and other peoples.
The book examines the representation of women, their agency and subjectivity and gender relations in 18th- and 19th-century India. The chapters in the volume interrogate notions and discourses of ‘women’ and ‘gender’ during the period, historically shaped by multiple and even competing actors, practices and institutions. They highlight the ‘making of the woman’ across a wide spectrum of subject areas, regions and roles and attempt to understand the contradictions and differences in social experiences and identity formations of women. The volume also deals with prevalent notions of masculinity and femininity, normative and non-conformist expressions of gender and sexual identity and epistemological concerns of gender, especially in its intersectional interplay with other axes of caste, class, race, region and empire. Presenting unique understandings of our gendered pasts, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, gender studies and South Asian studies.
Decolonizing Anthropology is part of a broader effort that aims to advance the critical reconstruction of the discipline devoted to understanding humankind in all its diversity and commonality. The utility and power of a decolonized anthropology must continue to be tested and developed. May the results of ethnographic probes--the data, the social and cultural analysis, the theorizing, and the strategies for knowledge application--help scholars envision clearer paths toincreased understanding, a heightened sense of intercultural and international solidarity, and last, but certainly not least, world transformation.
In recent years, postcolonial theories have emerged as one of the significant paradigms of contemporary academia, affecting disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences. These theories address the complex processes if colonialism on culture and society—with repect to both the colonizers and the colonized—to help us understand the colonial experience in its entirety. The contributors to Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique present critical syntheses of archaeological and postcolonial studies by examining both Old and New World case studies, and they ask what the ultimate effect of postcolonial theorizing will be on the practice of archaeology in the twenty-first century.
The Affect of Crafting' presents an interrogation of materiality and crafting, a consideration of the situatedness of the technological practice of crafting itself, and the forms of relationships that exist between all things transformed in the act of crafting: bodies, minerals and landscapes.
Archaeology for whom? The dozen well-known contributors to this innovative volume suggest nothing less than a transformation of the discipline into a service-oriented, community-based endeavor. They wish to replace the primacy of meeting academic demands with meeting the needs and values of those outside the field who may benefit most from our work. They insist that we employ both rigorous scientific methods and an equally rigorous critique of those practices to ensure that our work addresses real-world social, environmental, and political problems. A transformed archaeology requires both personal engagement and a new toolkit. Thus, in addition to the theoretical grounding and case materials from around the world, each contributor offers a personal statement of their goals and an outline of collaborative methods that can be adopted by other archaeologists.
Challenging Colonial Narratives demonstrates that the traditional colonial dichotomy may reflect an artifice of the colonial discourse rather than the lived reality of the past. Matthew A. Beaudoin makes a striking case that comparative research can unsettle many deeply held assumptions and offer a rapprochement of the conventional scholarly separation of colonial and historical archaeology. To create a conceptual bridge between disparate dialogues, Beaudoin examines multigenerational nineteenth-century Mohawk and settler sites in southern Ontario, Canada. He demonstrates that few obvious differences exist and calls for more nuanced interpretive frameworks. Using conventional categories, met...