Download or read book Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity written by John Salmon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity shows how today's environmental and ecological concerns can help illuminate our study of the ancient world. The contributors consider how the Greeks and Romans perceived their natural world, and how their perceptions affected society. The effects of human settlement and cultivation on the landscape are considered, as well as the representation of landscape in Attic drama. Various aspects of farming, such as the use of terraces and the significance of olive growing are examined. The uncultivated landscape was also important: hunting was a key social ritual for Greek and hellenistic elites, and 'wild' places were not wastelands but played an essential economic role. The Romans' attempts to control their environment are analyzed. This volume shows how Greeks and Romans worked hand in hand with their natural environment and not against it. It represents an outstanding collaboration between the disciplines of history and archaeology.
Download or read book Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity written by Ralph Haussler and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.
Download or read book Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-05-18 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Valuing Landscape explores how physical environments affected the cultural imagination of Greco-Roman Antiquity. It demonstrates the values attached to mountains, the underworld, sacred landscapes, and battlefields, and the evaluations of locale connected with migration, exile, and travel.
Download or read book Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity written by Debbie Felton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-27 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last two decades, research in cultural geography and landscape studies has influenced many humanities fields, including Classics, and has increasingly drawn our attention to the importance of spaces and their contexts, both geographical and social: how spaces are described by language, what spaces are used for by individuals and communities, and how language, use, and the passage of time invest spaces with meaning. In addition to this ‘spatial’ turn in scholarship, recent years have also seen an ‘emotive’ turn – an increased interest in the study of emotion in literature. Many works on landscape in classical antiquity focus on themes such as the sacred and the pastoral and the emotions such spaces evoke, such as (respectively) feelings of awe or tranquillity in settings both urban and rural. Far less scholarship has been generated by the locus terribilis, the space associated with negative emotions because of the bad things that happen there. In short, the recent ‘emotive’ turn in humanities studies has so far largely neglected several of the more negative emotions, including anxiety, fear, terror, and dread. The papers in this volume focus on those neglected negative emotions, especially dread – and they do so while treating many types of space, including domestic, suburban, rural and virtual, and while covering many genres and authors, including the epic poems of Homer, Greek tragedy, Roman poetry and historiography, medical writing, paradoxography and the short story.
Download or read book Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity written by Ralph Haussler and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.
Download or read book Landscapes from Antiquity written by Simon Stoddart and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first volume of an exciting new project; Antiquity , drawing on its 75-year tradition of publishing articles of enduring value, has brought together twenty-four classic papers on a central archaeological theme. The papers have been selected to represent ancient and modern landscape approaches, organized into thematic sections: Early studies of Fox and Curwen, aerial photography of Bradford, Crawford and St Joseph, survey method, integrated regional landscapes, physical, industrial, contested and experienced landscapes. Each section is introduced with an overview and personal perspective by Simon Stoddart, the current editor of Antiquity . As he points out in the introduction, the editor of Antiquity has always drawn on the most exciting and relevant of current research. Consequently the frequency and content of landscape in Antiquity provides illuminating commentary on the definition and prominence of the theme landscape in archaeological research. Contents: Early studies of landscape: Prehistoric Cart-tracks in Malta ( T. Zammit ); Dykes ( Cyril Fox ); The Hebrides: a Cultural Backwater ( E. Cecil Curwen ); Native Settlements of Northumberland ( A. H. A. Hogg ). The impact of aerial photography: Woodbury. Two marvellous air-photographs ( O. G. S. Crawford ); Iron Age square enclosures in Rhineland ( K. V. Decker and I. Scollar ); Aerial reconnaissance in Picardy ( R. Agache ); Air reconnaissance: recent results ( J. K. St Joseph ). Survey method and analysis: Understanding early medieval pottery distributions ( A. J. Schofield ); Exploring the topography of the mind: GIS, social space and archaeology ( Marcos Llobera ). Integrated landscape archaeology: Neolithic settlement patterns at Avebury, Wiltshire ( Robin Holgate ); Stonehenge for the ancestors: the stones pass on the message ( M. Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina ); Aerial reconnaissance of the Fen Basin ( D. N. Riley ); The Fenland Project: from survey management and beyond ( John Coles and David Hall ); Siticulosa Apulia ( John Bradford and P. R. Williams-Hunt ); Archaeology and the Etruscan countryside ( Graeme Barker ). Physical landscapes: Active tectonics and land-use strategies: a Palaeolithic example from northwest Greece ( Geoff Bailey, Geoff King and Derek Sturdy ); A guide for archaeologists investigating Holocene landscapes ( A. J. Howard and M. G. Macklin ). Industrial landscapes: Trouble at t'mill: industrial archaeology in the 1980s ( C. M. Clark ); Towards an archaeology of navvy huts and settlements of the industrial revolution ( Michael Morris ). Contested landscapes: The Berlin Wall: production, preservation and consumption of a 20th-century monument ( Frederick Baker ); Seeing stars: character and identity in the landscapes of modern Macedonia ( Keith Brown ). Experienced landscapes: Forms of power: dimensions of an Irish megalithic landscape ( Jean McMann ); Late woodland landscapes of Wisconsin: ridges, fields, effigy mounds and territoriality ( William Gustav Gartner ).
Download or read book Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity written by Cillian O'Hogan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work considers the representation of the geographical and cultural landscapes of late antiquity in the work of the Latin poet Prudentius. It argues that his use of allusion to Augustan and early imperial Latin authors presents these landscapes as being marked by the arrival of Christianity, though retaining the grandeur of the pagan past.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes written by Bleda S. Düring and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes examines the transformation of rural landscapes and societies that formed the backbone of ancient empires in the Near East and Mediterranean. Through a comparative approach to archaeological data, it analyses the patterns of transformation in widely differing imperial contexts in the ancient world. Bringing together a range of studies by an international team of scholars, the volume shows that empires were dynamic, diverse, and experimental polities, and that their success or failure was determined by a combination of forceful interventions, as well as the new possibilities for those dominated by empires to collaborate and profit from doing so. By highlighting the processes that occur in rural and peripheral landscapes, the volume demonstrates that the archaeology of these non-urban and literally eccentric spheres can provide an important contribution to our understanding of ancient empires. The 'bottom up' approach to the study of ancient empires is crucial to understanding how these remarkable socio-political organisms could exist and persist.
Download or read book Landscapes in Flux written by John Chapman and published by Oxbow Books Limited. This book was released on 1997 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape archaeology, a recent theoretical discovery in the west, has long been practised by eastern european scholars. This stimulating collection of papers ranges over the whole of central and eastern Europe and from the Neolithic to the early Medieval periods.
Download or read book Boeotian Landscapes written by Emeri Farinetti and published by British Archaeological Reports Limited. This book was released on 2011 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this research is to illustrate a possible way of dealing with a regional landscape and its long-term settlement history based on the integration of archaeological data applying a GIS based approach to the social dimension of the landscape. The large province area (ca 2,500 sqkm) of Boeotia (Central Greece) is examined by means of GIS (Geographical Information System), processing data from different archaeological, historical and environmental sources. The methodology established, dealing jointly with material culture and the environment, follows a critical comparative regional approach and opts for both region and micro-regions as the analytical unit. It aims mainly to assess landscape characters and the interface between human and social actions and landscape by critically assessing, first of all, the available archaeological record constituted by diverse, variegate and often incoherent data sets. The main periods of interest are the historical periods from Archaic to Late Roman, while earlier (Neolithic to Geometric) and later periods are taken into account for the analysis and understanding of diachronical processes which took place at the microregional and regional levels. Contents: Part I. Research framework and methodology: Regional approaches to landscape studies; The GIS datasets: collection, recording and management; The physical landscape datasets; The archaeological/cultural datasets and the research methodology. Part II . The Boeotian landscape: The Boeotian landscape: topography and environment; The Boeotian landscape: state of archaeological research; The chorai/regions of Boeotia; Central Helicon: Koroneiake; Northern Helicon: Levadeia; Chaironeia valley: Chaironeiake; The Copais area: Orchomenos; The Northern mountains of the Copais: Hyettia; The Copais area: Copai and the North-East bay; The Copais area: Akraiphiai; The Copais area: Haliartia; Eastern Helicon: Thespike; Three small chorai to the Gulf of Corinth: Siphai, Thisbe, Chorseiai; The upper Asopos basin: Parasopia and Plataea; The Theban plain and the area of the lakes: Thebais; The area of Anthedon and the Skroponeri bay: Anthedonia; The Tanagra plain and Eastern Boeotia; Socio-political and cultural landscapes of ancient Boeotia; Concluding remarks. Appendix I. Analytical description of the archaeological landscape components and activity loci; Appendix II. The geographical sub-regions of Boeotia; Appendix III. List of units of archaeological evidence and their attribution to archaeological landscape components.
Download or read book Geography in Classical Antiquity written by Daniela Dueck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the earliest ideas of geography in antiquity and how much knowledge there was of the physical world.
Download or read book Landscapes Gender and Ritual Space written by Susan Guettel Cole and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-03-31 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The division of land and consolidation of territory that created the Greek polis also divided sacred from productive space, sharpened distinctions between purity and pollution, and created a ritual system premised on gender difference. Regional sanctuaries ameliorated competition between city-states, publicized the results of competitive rituals for males, and encouraged judicial alternatives to violence. Female ritual efforts, focused on reproduction and the health of the family, are less visible, but, as this provocative study shows, no less significant. Taking a fresh look at the epigraphical evidence for Greek ritual practice in the context of recent studies of landscape and political organization, Susan Guettel Cole illuminates the profoundly gendered nature of Greek cult practice and explains the connections between female rituals and the integrity of the community. In a rich integration of ancient sources and current theory, Cole brings together the complex evidence for Greek ritual practice. She discusses relevant medical and philosophical theories about the female body; considers Greek ideas about purity, pollution, and ritual purification; and examines the cult of Artemis in detail. Her nuanced study demonstrates the social contribution of women's rituals to the sustenance of the polis and the identity of its people.
Download or read book Inscriptions of Nature written by Pratik Chakrabarti and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn how the deep history of nature became a dominant paradigm of historical thinking, through a study of landscapes of India. Winner of the BSHS Pickstone Prize by the British Society for the History of Science, Shortlisted for the Pfizer Award for an Outstanding Book in the History of Science by the History of Science Society In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging—often for sewage, transport, or minerals—revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants—past, present, and future. In Inscriptions of Nature, Pratik Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality. Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.
Download or read book Ancient Landscapes of Zoara I written by Konstantinos D. Politis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biblical Zoara is located in the Ghor as-Safi, precisely at the lowest place on earth. Its environmental and cultural history is therefore unique. During two decades, an archaeological project was conducted which discovered many significant finds of human occupations spanning some 12,000 years. These have been meticulously studied and the results are now presented here in Volume I. Volume II will follow and will complete and complement Volume I.
Download or read book Ancient Landscapes written by John Bradford and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1980 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author intends to ensure that the practice, potentialities, and limitations of aerial archaeological photography are more widely and fully understood. The primary emphasis of the book is on Mediterranean countries which offer a wide scope for aerial discovery.
Download or read book Cave and Worship in Ancient Greece written by Stella Katsarou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cave and Worship in Ancient Greece brings together a series of stimulating chapters contributing to the archaeology and our modern understanding of the character and importance of cave sanctuaries in the fi rst millennium BCE Mediterranean. Written by emerging and established archaeologists and researchers, the book employs a fascinating and wide range of approaches and methodologies to investigate, and interpret material assemblages from cave shrines, many of which are introduced here for the fi rst time. An introductory section explores the emergence and growth of caves as centres of cult and religion. The chapters then probe some of the meanings attached to cave spaces and votive materials such as terracotta fi gurines, and ceramics, and those who created and used them. The authors use sensory and gender approaches, discuss the identity of the worshippers, and the contribution of statistical analysis to the role of votive materials. At the heart of the volume is the examination of cave materials excavated on the Cycladic islands and Crete, in Attika and Aitoloakarnania, on the Ionian islands and in southern Italy. This is a welcome volume for students of prehistoric and classical archaeology,enthusiasts of the history of caves, religion, ancient history, and anthropology.
Download or read book Landscapes of Change written by Neil Christie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only in recent years has archaeology begun to examine in a coherent manner the transformation of the landscape from classical through to medieval times. In Landscapes of Change, leading scholars in the archaeology of the late antique and early medieval periods address the key results and directions of Roman rural fieldwork. In so doing, they highlight problems of analysis and interpretation whilst also identifying the variety of transformations that rural Europe experienced during and following the decline of Roman hegemony. Whilst documents and standing buildings predominate in the urban context to provide a coherent and tangible guide to the evolving urban form and its society since Roman times, the countryside in many ages remains rather shadowy - a context for the cultivation, gathering and movement of food and other resources, inhabited by farmers, villagers and miners. Whilst the Roman period is adequately served through occasional extant remains and through the survey and excavation of villas and farmsteads, as well as the writings of agronomists, the medieval one is generally well marked by the presence of still extant villages across Europe, often dependent on castles and manors which symbolise the so-called 'feudal' centuries. But the intervening period, the fourth to tenth centuries, is that with the least documentation and with the fewest survivals. What happened to the settlement units that made up the Roman rural world? When and why do new settlement forms emerge? Landscapes of Change is essential reading for anyone wanting an up-to-date summary of the results of archaeological and historical investigations into the changing countryside of the late Roman, late antique and early medieval world, between the fourth and tenth centuries AD. It questions numerous aspects of change and continuity, assessing the levels of impact of military and economic decay, the spread and influence of Christianity, and the role of Germanic, Slav and Arab settlements in disrupting and redefining the ancient rural landscapes.
