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Book The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing

Download or read book The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing written by Stephen D. Houston and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing is an important story of intellectual discovery and a tale of code breaking comparable to the interpreting of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the decoding of cuneiform. This book provides a history of the interpretation of Maya hieroglyphs. Introductory essays offer the historical context and describe the personalities and theories of the many authors who contributed to the understanding of these ancient glyphs.

Book The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied

Download or read book The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied written by Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian of Wied and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-04-09 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Made famous through the paintings of Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, the North American expedition of German naturalist Prince Maximilian of Wied in 1832–34 was the first scientific exploration of the Missouri River’s upper reaches since the epic journey of Lewis and Clark almost thirty years earlier. Maximilian’s journal has never been presented fully in English—until now. This collector’s-quality, oversized volume, the first of a three-volume set, draws on the Maximilian-Bodmer Collection at Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. The North American Journals offer an incomparable view of the upper Missouri and its Native peoples at a pivotal moment in the history of the American West. This meticulous account, newly translated with extensive modern annotation, faithfully reproduces Maximilian’s 110 drawings and watercolors as well as his own notes, asides, and appendices. Volume I, which covers May 1832 to April 1833, documents Maximilian’s voyage to North America and his first encounters with Indians upon reaching the West. This is an essential resource for nineteenth-century western American history and a work of lasting value. This book is published with the assistance of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Book Epigraphy

    Book Details:
  • Author : Victoria Reifler Bricker
  • Publisher : University of Texas Press
  • Release : 1992
  • ISBN : 0292776500
  • Pages : 202 pages

Download or read book Epigraphy written by Victoria Reifler Bricker and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is designed to recognize the important role that epigraphy has come to play in Middle American scholarship and to document significant achievements in three areas: dynastic history, phonetic decipherment, and calendrics.

Book Early Images of the Americas

Download or read book Early Images of the Americas written by Jerry M. Williams and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions from anthropology, history, political science, literature, the natural sciences, religion, and philosophy provide a comprehensive overview of the diverse influences America had on Europe. Topics covered include the impact of early botanical and geographic studies on Europe and on the scientific revolution, the structure of indigenous and colonial cultures, and the ideology and ethics of conquest and enslavement. Together, these essays constitute a reevaluation of the images held by the first colonists via new ways of understanding some of the main figures, processes, and events of that era.

Book Language in the Americas

Download or read book Language in the Americas written by Joseph Harold Greenberg and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned primarily with the evidence for the validity of a genetic unit, Amerind, embracing the vast majority of New World languages. The only languages excluded are those belonging to the Na-Dene and Eskimo- Aleut families. It examines the now widely held view that Haida, the most distant language genetically, is not to be included in Na-Dene. It confined itself to Sapir's data, although the evidence could have been buttressed considerably by the use of more recent materials. What survives is a body of evidence superior to that which could be adduced under similar restrictions for the affinity of Albanian, Celtic, and Armenian, all three universally recognized as valid members of the Indo-European family of languages. A considerable number of historical hypotheses emerge from the present and the forthcoming volumes. Of these, the most fundamental bears on the question of the peopling of the Americas. If the results presented in this volume and in the companion volume on Eurasiatic are valid, the classification of the world's languages based on genetic criteria undergoes considerable simplification.

Book Transformations

    Book Details:
  • Author : Helen Schwartzman
  • Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
  • Release : 2012-12-06
  • ISBN : 1461339383
  • Pages : 395 pages

Download or read book Transformations written by Helen Schwartzman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing a book about play leads to wondering. In writing this book, I wondered first if it would be taken seriously and then if it might be too serious. Eventually, I realized that these concerns were cast in terms of the major dichotomy that I wished to question, that is, the very perva sive and very inaccurate division that Western cultures make between play and seriousness (or play and work, fantasy and reality, and so forth). The study of play provides researchers with a special arena for re-thinking this opposition, and in this book an attempt is made to do this by reviewing and evaluating studies of children's transformations (their play) in relation to the history of anthropologists' transformations (their theories). While studying play, I have wondered in the company of many individuals. I would first like to thank my husband, John Schwartzman, for acting as both my strongest supporter and, as an anthropological colleague, my severest critic. His sense of nonsense is always novel as well as instructive. I am also very grateful to Linda Barbera-Stein for her Sherlock Holmes style help in locating obscure references, checking and cross-checking information, and patience and persistence in the face of what at times appeared to be bibliographic chaos. I also owe special thanks to my teachers of anthropology-Paul J. Bohannan, Johannes Fabian, Edward T. Hall, and Roy Wagner-whose various orientations have directly and indirectly influenced the approach presented in this book.

Book The Teaching of Anthropology  Abridged Edition

Download or read book The Teaching of Anthropology Abridged Edition written by David G. Mandelbaum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

Book Linguistics and Archaeology in the Americas

Download or read book Linguistics and Archaeology in the Americas written by Eithne B. Carlin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-05-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume, an international group of leading specialists, guide us through different aspects of the study of Amerindian languages and societies that lie at the heart of the extensive and multi-facetted work of Willem Adelaar, the forerunning specialist in Native American studies of Meso and South America, and Professor of Amerindian Studies at Leiden University. The contributors focus on three larger regions, the Andes, Amazonia, Meso-America and the Circum-Caribbean region, giving us a state of the art overview of current linguistic and archaeological research trends that illuminate the dynamicity and historicity of the Americas, in migratory movements, contact situations, grouping and re-grouping of identities and the linguistic results thereof. This book is a must-have for all scholars of the American continent.

Book A Grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik  CAY

Download or read book A Grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik CAY written by Osahito Miyaoka and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 1712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume is a major grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY). It is the culmination of the author's linguistic studies done in Alaska and elsewhere since around 1960, with assistance of many native speakers. Central Alaskan Yupik is currently the most vigorous of the nineteen remaining Native Alaskan languages. Descriptive in nature, extensive and deep, this grammar is of typological and of ethnological/anthropological interest. Given the severely endangered state of the language, this much of descriptive linguistic material is without comparison in the field.

Book An Inquiry Into the Ethnic Resolution of Mesolithic Regional Groups

Download or read book An Inquiry Into the Ethnic Resolution of Mesolithic Regional Groups written by R R Newell and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent Western European Mesolithic research has greatly augmented our understanding of the time and space parameters of material derived from settlements. Perusals of those regularities have led to a renewed scrutiny of the ethnographic literature in an attempt to perceive the resulting temporal and spatial units as anthropologically relevant regional groups. The proposition that the breeding population was identical to the ethnic identity of the participants is untenable. After a review of the physical anthropological composition of that population and its forms of social and spatial organization, the emic relevance of decorative ornamentation and costume is established in terms of society-specific styles. Proceeding from a series of tenets of processual ethnographic analogy, the ornaments extant in the post- glacial hunter-fisher-gatherer cultures of Western Europe are examined for their formal properties and time and space parameters. By means of an explicit set of postulates they are tested for the identification, definition and territorial placement of mesolithic social, ethnic and linguistic groups.

Book The Invisible War

    Book Details:
  • Author : David Tavarez
  • Publisher : Stanford University Press
  • Release : 2011-02-14
  • ISBN : 080477739X
  • Pages : 400 pages

Download or read book The Invisible War written by David Tavarez and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples—a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare. The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts in Central Mexico to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century. The author's innovative interpretation of these efforts is punctuated by three events: the creation of an Inquisition tribunal in Mexico in 1571; the native rebellion of Tehuantepec in 1660; and the emergence of eerily modern strategies for isolating idolaters, teaching Spanish to natives, and obtaining medical proof of sorcery from the 1720s onwards. Rather than depicting native devotions solely from the viewpoint of their colonial codifiers, this book rescues indigenous perspectives on their own beliefs. This is achieved by an analysis of previously unknown or rare ritual texts that circulated in secrecy in Nahua and Zapotec communities through an astute appropriation of European literacy. Tavárez contends that native responses gave rise to a colonial archipelago of faith in which local cosmologies merged insights from Mesoamerican and European beliefs. In the end, idolatry eradication inspired distinct reactions: while Nahua responses focused on epistemological dissent against Christianity, Zapotec strategies privileged confrontations in defense of native cosmologies.

Book Speech Play

    Book Details:
  • Author : Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
  • Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
  • Release : 2016-11-11
  • ISBN : 1512803154
  • Pages : 320 pages

Download or read book Speech Play written by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From riddles to proverbs, from jingles to jokes, from mnemonics to pig Latin to dueling with words, speech play is central to social life in all of its forms. These essays describe a variety of speech play genres, formulate the "rules" for play with language, and discuss the relevance of speech play to current issues in linguistic theory, cognitive development, and the ethnography of speaking.

Book Early Inuit Studies

    Book Details:
  • Author : Igor Krupnik
  • Publisher : Smithsonian Institution
  • Release : 2016-02-16
  • ISBN : 1935623710
  • Pages : 592 pages

Download or read book Early Inuit Studies written by Igor Krupnik and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of 15 chronologically arranged papers is the first-ever definitive treatment of the intellectual history of Eskimology—known today as Inuit studies—the field of anthropology preoccupied with the origins, history, and culture of the Inuit people. The authors trace the growth and change in scholarship on the Inuit (Eskimo) people from the 1850s to the 1980s via profiles of scientists who made major contributions to the field and via intellectual transitions (themes) that furthered such developments. It presents an engaging story of advancement in social research, including anthropology, archaeology, human geography, and linguistics, in the polar regions. Essays written by American, Canadian, Danish, French, and Russian contributors provide for particular trajectories of research and academic tradition in the Arctic for over 130 years. Most of the essays originated as papers presented at the 18th Inuit Studies Conference hosted by the Smithsonian Institution in October 2012. Yet the book is an organized and integrated narrative; its binding theme is the diffusion of knowledge across disciplinary and national boundaries. A critical element to the story is the changing status of the Inuit people within each of the Arctic nations and the developments in national ideologies of governance, identity, and treatment of indigenous populations. This multifaceted work will resonate with a broad audience of social scientists, students of science history, humanities, and minority studies, and readers of all stripes interested in the Arctic and its peoples.

Book Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians  Volume 5

Download or read book Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians Volume 5 written by Victoria Reifler Bricker and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1981, under the editorship of Victoria Bricker, UT Press began to issue supplemental volumes to the classic sixteen-volume work Handbook of Middle American Indians. These supplements are intended to update scholarship in various areas and to cover topics of current interest that may not have been included in the original Handbook. This volume is designed to recognize the important role that epigraphy has come to play in Middle American scholarship and to document significant achievements in three areas: dynastic history, phonetic decipherment, and calendrics. The book covers four of the major pre-Columbian scripts in the region (Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec, and Maya) and one that is relatively unknown (Tlapanec).

Book Collections as Relations

Download or read book Collections as Relations written by Hansjörg Dilger and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-04 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores anthropological and global art collections as a catalyst, a medium, and an expression of relations. Relations—between and among objects and media, people, and material and immaterial contexts—define, configure, and potentially transform collection-related social and professional networks, discourses and practices, and increasingly museums and other collecting institutions themselves. The contributors argue that a focus on the—often contested—making and remaking of relations provides a unique conceptual entrypoint for understanding collections’—and ‘their’ objects’ and media’s—complex histories, contemporary webs of interactions, and potential futures. The chapters examine the local, translocal, and transregional relations of collections with regard to their affective, aesthetic, performative, and socio-moral qualities and situate them in the larger geopolitical constellations of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial settings. Together they investigate ongoing shifts in the relations of collections and collecting institutions by identifying alternative approaches to conceive of, and deal with, anthropological and global art collections, objects, and media in the future. The book is of interest to scholars from anthropology, global art history, museum studies, and heritage studies.

Book The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture

Download or read book The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture written by David Brion Davis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1988-10-20 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of several national awards including the 1967 Pulitzer Prize, this classic study by David Brion Davis has given new direction to the historical and sociological research of society's attitude towards slavery. Davis depicts the various ways different societies have responded to the intrinsic contradictions of slavery from antiquity to the early 1770's in order to establish the uniqueness of the abolitionists' response. While slavery has always caused considerable social and psychological tension, Western culture has associated it with certain religious and philosophical doctrines that gave it the highest sanction. The contradiction of slavery grew more profound when it became closely linked with American colonization, which had as its basic foundation the desire and opportunity to create a more perfect society. Davis provides a comparative analysis of slave systems in the Old World, a discussion of the early attitudes towards American slavery, and a detailed exploration of the early protests against Negro bondage, as well as the religious, literary, and philosophical developments that contributed to both sides in the controversies of the late eighteenth century. This exemplary introduction to the history of slavery in Western culture presents the traditions in thought and value that gave rise to the attitudes of both abolitionists and defenders of slavery in the late eighteenth century as well as the nineteenth century.