Download or read book Archaeology and its Discontents written by John C. Barrett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeology and its Discontents examines the state of archaeology today and its development throughout the twentieth century, making a powerful case for new approaches. Surveying the themes of twentieth-century archaeological theory, Barrett looks at their successes, limitations, and failures. Seeing more failures and limitations than successes, he argues that archaeology has over-focused on explaining the human construction of material variability and should instead be more concerned with understanding how human diversity has been constructed. Archaeology matters, he argues, precisely because of the insights it can offer into the development of human diversity. The analysis and argument are illustrated throughout by reference to the development of the European Neolithic. Arguing both for new approaches and for the importance of archaeology as a discipline, Archaeology and its Discontents is for archaeologists at all levels, from student to professor and trainee to experienced practitioner.
Download or read book Archaeology and Its Discontents written by John C. (University of Sheffield) Barrett and published by Themes in Archaeology Series. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeology and its Discontents examines the state of archaeology today and its development throughout the twentieth century, making a powerful case for new approaches. Surveying the themes of twentieth-century archaeological theory, Barrett looks at their successes, limitations, and failures. Seeing more failures and limitations than successes, he argues that archaeology has over-focused on explaining the human construction of material variability and should instead be more concerned with understanding how human diversity has been constructed. Archaeology matters, he argues, precisely because of the insights it can offer into the development of human diversity. The analysis and argument are illustrated throughout by reference to the development of the European Neolithic. Arguing both for new approaches and for the importance of archaeology as a discipline, Archaeology and its Discontents is for archaeologists at all levels, from student to professor and trainee to experienced practitioner.
Download or read book What is Media Archaeology written by Jussi Parikka and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities. What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.
Download or read book Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul written by Guy Halsall and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bundeling van de zeven belangrijkste essays over de sociale interpretatie van de Merovingische begraafplaatsen-archeologie.
Download or read book Threats written by David P. Barash and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It's a rare author who can combine literary erudition and an easy fluency of style together with expert knowledge of psychology and evolutionary biology. David Barash adds to all this a far-seeing wisdom and a humane decency that shines through on every page. The concluding section on the senseless and dangerous futility of nuclear deterrence theory is an irrefutable tour de force which should be read by every politician and senior military officer. If only!" -- Richard Dawkins From hurricanes and avalanches to diseases and car crashes, threats are everywhere. Beyond objective threats like these, there are also subjective ones: situations in which individuals threaten each other or feel threatened by society. Animals, too, make substantial use of threats. Evolution manipulates threats like these in surprising ways, leading us to question the ethics of honest versus dishonest communication. Rarely acknowledged--and yet crucially important--is the fact that humans, animals, and even plants don't only employ threats, they often respond with counter-threats that ultimately make things worse. By exploring the dynamic of threat and counter-threat, this book expands on many fraught human situations, including the fear of death, of strangers, and of "the other." Each of these leads to unique challenges, such as the specter of eternal damnation, the murderous culture of guns and capital punishment, and the emergence of right-wing nationalist populism. Most worrisome is the illusory security of deterrence, the idea that we can use the threat of nuclear war to prevent nuclear war! Threats are so widespread that we often don't realize how deeply they are ingrained in our minds or how profoundly and counter-productively they operate. Animals, humans, societies, and even countries internalize threats, behind which lie a myriad of intriguing questions: How do we know when to take a threat seriously? When do threats make things worse? Can they make things better? What can we do to use them wisely rather than destructively? In a comprehensive exploration into questions like these, noted scientist David P. Barash explains some of the most important characteristics of life as we know it.
Download or read book Being and Becoming Indigenous Archaeologists written by George Nicholas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume tells the stories—in their own words-- of 37 indigenous archaeologists from six continents, how they became archaeologists, and how their dual role affects their relationships with their community and their professional colleagues.
Download or read book Liberalism and Its Discontents written by Alan Brinkley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did liberalism, the great political tradition that from the New Deal to the 1960s seemed to dominate American politics, fall from favor so far and so fast? In this history of liberalism since the 1930s, a distinguished historian offers an eloquent account of postwar liberalism, where it came from, where it has gone, and why. The book supplies a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a valuable and clear perspective on the state of our nation's politics today. Liberalism and Its Discontents moves from a penetrating interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal to an analysis of the profound and frequently corrosive economic, social, and cultural changes that have undermined the liberal tradition. The book moves beyond an examination of the internal weaknesses of liberalism and the broad social and economic forces it faced to consider the role of alternative political traditions in liberalism's downfall. What emerges is a picture of a dominant political tradition far less uniform and stable--and far more complex and contested--than has been argued. The author offers as well a masterly assessment of how some of the leading historians of the postwar era explained (or failed to explain) liberalism and other political ideologies in the last half-century. He also makes clear how historical interpretation was itself a reflection of liberal assumptions that began to collapse more quickly and completely than almost any scholar could have imagined a generation ago. As both political history and a critique of that history, Liberalism and Its Discontents, based on extraordinary essays written over the last decade, leads to a new understanding of the shaping of modern America.
Download or read book Archaeology and Modernity written by Julian Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study to explore the relationship between archaeology and modern thought, showing how philosophical ideas that developed in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries still dominate our approach to the material remains of ancient societies. Addressing current debates from a new viewpoint, Archaeology and Modernity discusses the modern emphasis on method rather than ethics or meaning, our understanding of change in history and nature, the role of the nation-state in forming our views of the past, and contemporary notions of human individuality, the mind, and materiality.
Download or read book Barbarism and Its Discontents written by Maria Boletsi and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which "civilization" fosters its self-definition and superiority by labeling others "barbarians." Since the 1990s, and especially since 9/11, these terms have become increasingly popular in Western political and cultural rhetoric—a rhetoric that divides the world into forces of good and evil. This study intervenes in this recent trend and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential. Boletsi recasts barbarism as a productive concept, finding that it is a common thread in works of literature, art, and theory. By dislodging barbarism from its conventional contexts, this book reclaims barbarism's edge and proposes it as a useful theoretical tool.
Download or read book Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology written by Jane Lydon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Ideas of Landscape written by Matthew Johnson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideas of Landscape discusses the current theory and practice of landscape archaeology and offers an alternative agenda for landscape archaeology that maps more closely onto the established empirical strengths of landscape study and has more contemporary relevance. The first historical assessment of a critical period in archaeology Takes as its focus the so-called English landscape tradition -- the ideological underpinnings of which come from English Romanticism, via the influence of the “father of landscape history”: W. G. Hoskins Argues that the strengths and weaknesses of landscape archaeology can be traced back to the underlying theoretical discontents of Romanticism Offers an alternative agenda for landscape archaeology that maps more closely onto the established empirical strengths of landscape study and has more contemporary relevance
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World written by Paul Graves-Brown and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been clear for many years that the ways in which archaeology is practised have been a direct product of a particular set of social, cultural, and historical circumstances - archaeology is always carried out in the present. More recently, however, many have begun to consider how archaeological techniques might be used to reflect more directly on the contemporary world itself: how we might undertake archaeologies of, as well as in the present. This Handbook is the first comprehensive survey of an exciting and rapidly expanding sub-field and provides an authoritative overview of the newly emerging focus on the archaeology of the present and recent past. In addition to detailed archaeological case studies, it includes essays by scholars working on the relationships of different disciplines to the archaeology of the contemporary world, including anthropology, psychology, philosophy, historical geography, science and technology studies, communications and media, ethnoarchaeology, forensic archaeology, sociology, film, performance, and contemporary art. This volume seeks to explore the boundaries of an emerging sub-discipline, to develop a tool-kit of concepts and methods which are applicable to this new field, and to suggest important future trajectories for research. It makes a significant intervention by drawing together scholars working on a broad range of themes, approaches, methods, and case studies from diverse contexts in different parts of the world, which have not previously been considered collectively.
Download or read book Unmaking Waste written by Sarah Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-05-26 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the concept of waste from fresh historical, cultural, and geographical perspectives. Garbage is often assumed to be an inevitable part and problem of human existence. But when did people actually come to think of things as “trash”—as becoming worthless over time or through use, as having an end? Unmaking Waste tackles these questions through a long-term, cross-cultural approach. Drawing on archaeological finds, historical documents, and ethnographic observations to examine Europe, the United States, and Central America from prehistory to the present, Sarah Newman traces how different ideas about waste took shape in different times and places. Newman examines what people consider to be “waste” and how they interact with it, as well as what happens when different perceptions of trash come into conflict. Conceptions of waste have shaped forms of reuse and renewal in ancient Mesoamerica, early modern ideas of civility and forced religious conversion in New Spain, and even the modern discipline of archaeology. Newman argues that centuries of assumptions imposed on other places, times, and peoples need to be rethought. This book is not only a broad reconsideration of waste; it is also a call for new forms of archaeology that do not take garbage for granted. Unmaking Waste reveals that waste is not—and never has been—an obvious or universal concept.
Download or read book The First Stones written by William Britnell and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together the results of recent research on the Neolithic long cairns lying in the shadow of the Black Mountains in south-east Wales, focusing upon Penywyrlod and Gwernvale, the two best known tombs within the group, previously excavated in the 1970s. Important results lie in both new site detail and reassessment of the wider context. Small-scale excavation, geophysical survey and geological assessment at Penywyrlod - the largest of the Welsh long cairns - gave further information about the distinctive external and internal architecture of the monument. In turn, this opened the opportunity to reassess the pre-monument sequence at Gwernvale, with re-examination of both Mesolithic and Neolithic occupations, including timber structures and middens, lithic and pottery assemblages, and cereal remains. The frame for wider reassessment is given by fresh chronological modelling both of the monuments themselves, suggesting a sequence from Penywyrlod and Pipton to Ty Isaf and Gwernvale, probably spanning the 38th to 36th centuries cal BC, and of early Neolithic activity in south Wales and the Marches across the same sort of period. A detailed study of the major assemblages of human remains from the Black Mountains tombs includes evidence for diet, trauma and lifestyles of the populations represented. Recent isotope analysis of human remains from the tombs is also reviewed, implying social mobility and migration within local populations during the early Neolithic. This book makes a significant contribution to the study of tomb building, treatment of the dead, place making, and Neolithisation in western Britain. Viewed within the context of tombs within the Cotswold-Severn tradition as a whole, it leads to an appreciation of the local and regional distinctiveness of architecture and mortuary practice exhibited by the tombs in this area of south-east Wales, emerging as part of the intake of a significant inland area in the early centuries of the Neolithic.
Download or read book Archaeological Theory Today written by Ian Hodder and published by Polity. This book was released on 2012-03-26 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title brings together some of the major exponents and innovators in the discipline to introduce their individual areas of specialism. It summarizes the latest developments in the field and looks to the future of the discipline.
Download or read book Archaeology and Capitalism written by Yannis Hamilakis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume focus on the inherent political nature of archaeology and its relationship to power, and explore how archaeologists can become more overtly agents of social change for individuals and communities.
Download or read book A Russian Perspective on Theoretical Archaeology written by Stephen Leach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both the work and the life of Leo S. Klejn, Russia’s foremost archaeological theorist, remain generally unrecognized by Western scholars. Until now. In this biography and summary of his work, Stephen Leach outlines Klejn’s wide-ranging theoretical contributions on the place and nature of archaeology. The book details-Klejn’s diverse work on ethnogenesis, migration, Homeric studies, pagan Slavic religion, homosexuality, and the history of archaeology;-his life challenges as a Russian Jewish scholar, jailed for homosexuality by the KGB and for his challenges to Marxist dogma;-his key contributions to theoretical archaeology and, in particular, Klejn’s comparisons between archaeologists and forensic scientists.
