Download or read book Archaeology Narrative and the Politics of the Past written by Julia A. King and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2012-07-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches—archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical—to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces. The sites King examines include the region’s vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary’s City, established as Maryland’s first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary’s City, for example, early on became the center of Maryland’s “founding narrative” of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the area’s Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories. As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region’s more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research—particularly archaeological research—that produces new stories and “counter-narratives” that challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a complicated past. Julia A. King is an associate professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she coordinates the Museum Studies Program and directs the SlackWater Center, a consortium devoted to exploring, documenting, and interpreting the changing landscapes of Chesapeake communities. She is also coeditor, with Dennis B. Blanton, of Indian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region.
Download or read book The Politics of the Past written by P. W. Gathercole and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stimulating collection demonstrates the inadequacy of a history that is always written by the "winners." Drawing on original studies from Africa, North America, Australia and the Pacific in order to make its points,The Politics of the Pastemphasizes that archaeology has a crucial role to play in promoting a more balanced, eclectic approach to the past. The essays in the book are organized around four themes: the forms and consequences of the Eurocentric heritage, the conflicting perspectives of rulers and ruled, the significance of administrative and institutional rivalries, and the divide between professional and popular views of archaeology. This illuminating book aims to enrich historical and archaeological inquiry and interpretation,
Download or read book Traces of the Past written by Karen Bassi and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative multidisciplinary study of the relationship between visual perception and temporal meaning in ancient Greek literature and history writing
Download or read book Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology written by Ruth M. Van Dyke and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeking to move beyond the customary limits of archaeological prose and representation, Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology presents archaeology in a variety of nontraditional formats. The volume demonstrates that visual art, creative nonfiction, archaeological fiction, video, drama, and other artistic pursuits have much to offer archaeological interpretation and analysis. Chapters in the volume are augmented by narrative, poetry, paintings, dialogues, online databases, videos, audio files, and slideshows. The work will be available in print and as an enhanced ebook that incorporates and showcases the multimedia elements in archaeological narrative. While exploring these new and not-so-new forms, the contributors discuss the boundaries and connections between empirical data and archaeological imagination. Both a critique and an experiment, Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology addresses the goals, advantages, and difficulties of alternative forms of archaeological representation. Exploring the idea that academically sound archaeology can be fun to create and read, the book takes a step beyond the boundaries of both traditional archaeology and traditional publishing.
Download or read book Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology written by Bonnie Effros and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the entanglement between archaeology, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and war. Popular sentiment in the West has tended to embrace the adventure rather than ponder the legacy of archaeological explorers; allegations by imperial powers of "discovering" archaeological sites or "saving" world heritage from neglect or destruction have often provided the pretext for expanding political influence. Consequently, citizens have often fallen victim to the imperial war machine, seeing their lands confiscated, their artifacts looted, and the ancient remains in their midst commercialized. Spanning the globe with case studies from East Asia, Siberia, Australia, North and South America, Europe, and Africa, sixteen contributions written by archaeologists, art historians, and historians from four continents offer unusual breadth and depth in the assessment of various claims to patrimonial heritage, contextualized by the imperial and colonial ventures of the last two centuries and their postcolonial legacy.
Download or read book Nationalism Politics and the Practice of Archaeology written by Philip L. Kohl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeology has often been put to political use, particularly by nationalists. The case studies in this timely collection range from the propaganda purposes served by archaeology in the Nazi state, through the complex interplay of official dogma and academic prehistory in the former Soviet Union, to lesser-known instances of ideological archaeology in other European countries, in China, Japan, Korea and the Near East. The introductory and concluding chapters draw out some of the common threads in these experiences, and argue that archaeologists need to be more sophisticated about the use and abuse of their studies. The editors have brought together a distinguished international group of scholars. Whilst archaeologists will find that this book raises cogent questions about their own work, these problems also go beyond archaeology to implicate history and anthropology more generally.
Download or read book Challenging Colonial Narratives written by Matthew A. Beaudoin and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, methodologies, and interpretative processes from Indigenous and settler archaeologies, Beaudoin encourages archaeologists and scholars to focus on the different or similar aspects among sites to better understand the nineteenth-century life of contemporaneous Indigenous and settler peoples. Beaudoin posits that the archaeological record represents people’s navigation through the social and political constraints of their time. Their actions, he maintains, were undertaken within the understood present, the remembered past, and perceived future possibilities. Deconstructing existing paradigms in colonial and postcolonial theories, Matthew A. Beaudoin establishes a new, dynamic discourse on identity formation and politics within the power relations created by colonization that will be useful to archaeologists in the academy as well as in cultural resource management.
Download or read book Archaeology as Political Action written by Randall H. McGuire and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-04-03 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It is rare to read an archaeological book that has the capacity to inspire, as this one has.”—Mark P. Leone, author of The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital “Archaeology as Political Action is a highly original work that will be important for archaeologists and others concerned with processes of social change in the world today and, more importantly, with making a difference.”—Thomas C. Patterson, coeditor of Foundations of Social Archaeology “This powerful statement by a leading archaeological thinker has profound implications for rigorous archaeological interpretation, community collaboration, and political intervention.”—Stephen W. Silliman, coeditor of Historical Archaeology
Download or read book Controlling the Past Owning the Future written by Ran Boytner and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the political uses—and misuses—of archaeology in the Middle East? In answering this question, the contributors to this volume lend their regional expertise to a variety of case studies, including the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, the commercialization of archaeology in Israel, the training of Egyptian archaeology inspectors, and the debate over Turkish identity sparked by the film Troy, among other provocative subjects. Other chapters question the ethical justifications of archaeology in places that have “alternative engagements with the material past.” In the process, they form various views of the role of the archaeologist, from steward of the historical record to agent of social change. The diverse contributions to this volume share a common framework in which the political use of the past is viewed as a process of social discourse. According to this model, political appropriations are seen as acts of social communication designed to accrue benefits to particular groups. Thus the contributors pay special attention to competing social visions and the filters these impose on archaeological data. But they are also attentive to the potential consequences of their own work. Indeed, as the editors remind us, “people’s lives may be affected, sometimes dramatically, because of the material remains that surround them.” Rounding out this important volume are critiques by two top scholars who summarize and synthesize the preceding chapters.
Download or read book Digging Politics written by James Koranyi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digging Politics explores uses of the ancient past in east-central Europe spanning the fascist, communist and post-communist period. Contributions range from East Germany to Poland to Romania to the Balkans. The volume addresses two central questions: Why then and why there. Without arguing for an east-central European exceptionalism, Digging Politics uncovers transnational phenomena across the region that have characterized political wrangling over ancient pasts. Contributions include the biographies of famous archaeologists during the Cold War, the wrought history of organizational politics of archaeology in Romania and the Balkans, politically charged Cold War exhibitions of the Thracians, the historical re-enactment of supposed ancient Central tribes in Hungary, and the virtual archaeology of Game of Thrones in Croatia. Digging Politics charts the extraordinary story of ancient pasts in modern east-central Europe.
Download or read book Narratives of Persistence written by Lee Panich and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives of Persistence charts the remarkable persistence of California's Ohlone and Paipai people over the past five centuries. Lee M. Panich draws connections between the events and processes of the deeper past and the way the Ohlone and Paipai today understand their own histories and identities.
Download or read book Subjects and Narrative in Archaeology written by Ruth M. Van Dyke and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2015-04-03 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeking to move beyond the customary limits of archaeological prose and representation, Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology presents archaeology in a variety of nontraditional formats. The volume demonstrates that visual art, creative nonfiction, archaeological fiction, video, drama, and other artistic pursuits have much to offer archaeological interpretation and analysis. Chapters in the volume are augmented by narrative, poetry, paintings, dialogues, online databases, videos, audio files, and slideshows. The work will be available in print and as an enhanced ebook that incorporates and showcases the multimedia elements in archaeological narrative. While exploring these new and not-so-new forms, the contributors discuss the boundaries and connections between empirical data and archaeological imagination. Both a critique and an experiment, Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology addresses the goals, advantages, and difficulties of alternative forms of archaeological representation. Exploring the idea that academically sound archaeology can be fun to create and read, the book takes a step beyond the boundaries of both traditional archaeology and traditional publishing.
Download or read book Archaeology Politics and Islamicate Cultural Heritage in Europe written by David Govantes Edwards and published by Equinox Publishing (UK). This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeology, Politics and Islamicate Cultural Heritage in Europe responds to the wishes of specialists in the history and archaeology of Islamicate societies in Europe to explore the integration of these societies into historical narratives. In order to deal with the multiple implications and wide ramifications of the subject matter, the book offers a collection of papers that cover a broad range of topics, including historiography, gender and family studies, material culture, historical and contemporary identities, historical heritage management, and archaeological theory, while paying attention to the peculiarities of the record in European regions in which Islamicate societies have played a major historical role (and others in which this role may not be quite so obvious, such as Scandinavia). These wide-ranging subjects find their commonality in the book's aim of challenging the dominant simplifying narratives and their stress on interruption and exception.The impact of historical narratives in national and social identities is reflected in a wide range of issues, including school curricula, heritage management, the organisation of academic departments, the presentation of Islamicate history and archaeology in the media and the politics of identity of majority and minority groups. The volume does not avoid these questions, but tackles them head-on, challenging the unwillingness of some academics to engage in potentially disruptive political issues.
Download or read book Archaeology Nation and Race written by Raphael Greenberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-17 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded in decades of research, this book covers contemporary matters such as the entanglement of race and nationalism with archaeology.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis written by Barbara L. Voss and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Compelling new evidence, careful documentation, and an artfully woven narrative make The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis a path-breaking book for sociocultural scholars as well as for general readers interested in the politics of identity, ethnicity, gender, and the colonial and U.S. Western history.”—Transforming Anthropology “Voss’s lucid explanations of method and theory make the book accessible to a broad range of audiences, from upper-level undergraduate and graduate students to professionals and lay audiences. . . . Its interdisciplinarity, indeed, may help to sell archaeology to audiences who do not typically consider archaeological evidence as an option for identity studies.”—Current Anthropology “The book reminds historians that other disciplines can offer fruitful methodological forays into well-trodden areas of study.”—Journal of American History “Those scholars studying various aspects of the Hispanic worldwide empire would be well advised to peruse Voss’s work.”—Historical Archaeology “[W]ell written, theoretically sophisticated, and unburdened by abstract concepts or hyper-qualified verbiage.”—H-Net Reviews “[E]ngaging. Overall, the text belongs in the library of every student of Spanish and Mexican Alta California. . . . The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis will become an anthropological standard.”—Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology “[A] must-read for all interested not only in colonial California, but for all historical archaeologists and to any archaeologist interested in the examination of identities.”—Cambridge Archaeological Journal “Shows how individuals negotiate ethnic identity through everyday objects and actions.”—SMRC Revista In this interdisciplinary study, Barbara Voss examines religious, environmental, cultural, and political differences at the Presidio of San Francisco, California, to reveal the development of social identities within the colony. Voss reconciles material culture with historical records, challenging widely held beliefs about ethnicity.
Download or read book Selective Remembrances written by Philip L. Kohl and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When political geography changes, how do reorganized or newly formed states justify their rule and create a sense of shared history for their people? Often, the essays in Selective Remembrances reveal, they turn to archaeology, employing the field and its findings to develop nationalistic feelings and forge legitimate distinctive national identities. Examining such relatively new or reconfigured nation-states as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, India, and Thailand, Selective Remembrances shows how states invoke the remote past to extol the glories of specific peoples or prove claims to ancestral homelands. Religion has long played a key role in such efforts, and the contributors take care to demonstrate the tendency of many people, including archaeologists themselves, to view the world through a religious lens—which can be exploited by new regimes to suppress objective study of the past and justify contemporary political actions. The wide geographic and intellectual range of the essays in Selective Remembrances will make it a seminal text for archaeologists and historians.
Download or read book The Archaeology of the Bible written by James K. Hoffmeier PhD. and published by Lion Hudson Ltd. This book was released on 2019-03-22 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past 200 years archaeological work has provided new information that allows us to peer into the past and open chapters of human history that have not been read for centuries, or even millennia. In The Archaeology of the Bible James K. Hoffmeier provides the reader with an incisive account of archaeology's role in shaping our understanding of the biblical texts. Fundamental issues addressed throughout include how archaeological discoveries relate to biblical accounts, and the compatibility of using scientific disciplines to prove or disprove a religious book such as the Bible. This work is an ideal introduction to the societies and events of the Ancient Near East and their relation to our interpretation of the Bible.
