Download or read book Reconceptualizing the Archaeology of Southern India written by Peter Johansen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a paradigm shift in the long-term study of South India’s deep history. It refuses the disciplinary constraints of history and prehistory and interrogates the archaeological and textual records of the Deccan to disrupt its conventional archaeological periodizations, which have tended to reify and dehistoricize social and cultural differences. This book draws on over 20 years of original archaeological research from the southern Deccan region of India to critically reappraise the historiography that has framed its deep history. It fundamentally questions conventional archaeological paradigms, rooted in early colonial scholarship, which have structured interpretations of deep time with curiously ahistorical narratives of the past. This volume offers a more nuanced assessment of historical changes across a diversity of cultural, social, and political practices through the novel application of theoretical framings to archaeological and historical data, including political ecology, techno-politics, resource materialities, and landscape production. This book will interest an interdisciplinary audience of graduate and undergraduate students and professional academics, primarily in the fields of archaeology, history, and South Asian studies. Its theoretical interventions will also be of interest to those invested in the anthropology and the archaeology of politics, chronology, historicity, historiography, materiality and landscapes.
Download or read book Reconceptualizing the Archaeology of Southern India written by Peter Johansen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconceptualizing the Archaeology of Southern India presents a paradigm shift in the long-term study of South India's deep history and embraces a new historiography of the Deccan that interrogates the archaeological and textual records.
Download or read book Conceptualizing Re conceptualizing Africa written by Maghan Keita and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa is a legitimizing factor in the world: some might argue because of the weakness of its position in the world; others might say because of the realization on the part of some African leaders that there are strengths inherent to their states' positions that can be tapped. Africa’s place in the world is being re-thought and re-shaped. And that is exactly what this book is about: the authors invite and incite the reader to a much closer and nuanced reading of Africa and its history, and the way in which that history, over time and space allows for a re-conceptualization of Africa’s role and place in the world. The authors evoke W.E.B. Du Bois on the invention of identity in the modern world. In that light, these works remind us, as Du Bois would, that the current invention of Africa is indeed a modern one; an identity configured in numerous ways, with and without our interventions. Contributions by Lamont de Haven King (State and Ethnicity in Nigeria), Jesse Benjamin (Nubians and Nabateans), Jeremy Prestholdt (Portuguese on the Swahili Coast), Thomas Ricks (Slaves in Shi’i Iran, AD 1500-1900) Launay Robert (Late-Seventeenth Century Narratives of Travel to Asia) and Richard J. Payne and Cassandra Veney (Taiwan and Africa)
Download or read book Connections and Complexity written by Shinu Anna Abraham and published by Left Coast Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The set of case studies presented in this volume emphasize the significance of new research in South Asia within the broader universe of archaeological scholarship.
Download or read book Ten Thousand Years of Inequality written by Timothy A. Kohler and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is wealth inequality a universal feature of human societies, or did early peoples live an egalitarian existence? How did inequality develop before the modern era? Did inequalities in wealth increase as people settled into a way of life dominated by farming and herding? Why in general do such disparities increase, and how recent are the high levels of wealth inequality now experienced in many developed nations? How can archaeologists tell? Ten Thousand Years of Inequality addresses these and other questions by presenting the first set of consistent quantitative measurements of ancient wealth inequality. The authors are archaeologists who have adapted the Gini index, a statistical measure of wealth distribution often used by economists to measure contemporary inequality, and applied it to house-size distributions over time and around the world. Clear descriptions of methods and assumptions serve as a model for other archaeologists and historians who want to document past patterns of wealth disparity. The chapters cover a variety of ancient cases, including early hunter-gatherers, farmer villages, and agrarian states and empires. The final chapter synthesizes and compares the results. Among the new and notable outcomes, the authors report a systematic difference between higher levels of inequality in ancient Old World societies and lower levels in their New World counterparts. For the first time, archaeology allows humanity’s deep past to provide an account of the early manifestations of wealth inequality around the world. Contributors Nicholas Ames Alleen Betzenhauser Amy Bogaard Samuel Bowles Meredith S. Chesson Abhijit Dandekar Timothy J. Dennehy Robert D. Drennan Laura J. Ellyson Deniz Enverova Ronald K. Faulseit Gary M. Feinman Mattia Fochesato Thomas A. Foor Vishwas D. Gogte Timothy A. Kohler Ian Kuijt Chapurukha M. Kusimba Mary-Margaret Murphy Linda M. Nicholas Rahul C. Oka Matthew Pailes Christian E. Peterson Anna Marie Prentiss Michael E. Smith Elizabeth C. Stone Amy Styring Jade Whitlam
Download or read book Writing as Material Practice written by Kathryn E. Piquette and published by Ubiquity Press. This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing as Material Practice grapples with the issue of writing as a form of material culture in its ancient and more recent manifestations, and in the contexts of production and consumption. Fifteen case studies explore the artefactual nature of writing — the ways in which materials, techniques, colour, scale, orientation and visibility inform the creation of inscribed objects and spaces, as well as structure subsequent engagement, perception and meaning making. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years, from c.3200 BCE to the present day, and ranging in spatial context from the Americas to the Near East, the chapters in this volume bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific and broader questions of writing materialities. The authors also aim to place past graphical systems in their social contexts so they can be understood in relation to the people who created and attributed meaning to writing and associated symbolic modes through a diverse array of individual and wider social practices.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Politics written by Andrew M. Bauer and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Archaeology of Politics is a collection of essays that examines political action and practice in the past through studies and analyses of material culture from the perspective of anthropological archaeology. Contributors to this volume explore a variety of multi-scalar relationships between past peoples, places, objects and environments. At stake in this volume is what it is that constitutes politics, its social and cultural location, fields of analysis, its materiality and sociology and especially its position and possibilities as a conceptual and analytical category in archaeological investigations of past socio-cultural worlds. Our primary goals are twofold: the problematization and re-conceptualization of politics from its understanding as a reified essence or structure of political forms (e.g., a State) to a fluid, dynamic and culturally inflected set of practices; and, second, to consider politics’ entanglement with the materiality of socio-cultural worlds at multiple-scales through the demonstration of innovative analytical approaches to the material record. The volume is a tightly integrated group of essays exploring an assortment of case studies that offer new theoretical insight to archaeological and historical analyses of politics.
Download or read book An archaeology of innovation written by Catherine J. Frieman and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An archaeology of innovation is the first monograph-length investigation of innovation and the innovation process from an archaeological perspective. It interrogates the idea of innovation that permeates our popular media and our political and scientific discourse, setting this against the long-term perspective that only archaeology can offer. Case studies span the entire breadth of human history, from our earliest hominin ancestors to the contemporary world. The book argues that the present narrow focus on pushing the adoption of technical innovations ignores the complex interplay of social, technological and environmental systems that underlies truly innovative societies; the inherent connections between new technologies, technologists and social structure that give them meaning and make them valuable; and the significance and value of conservative social practices that lead to the frequent rejection of innovations.
Download or read book Climate without Nature written by Andrew M. Bauer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anthropocene narrative reproduces an ideological divide between Society and Nature and forecloses an inclusive politics of global warming.
Download or read book Reconceptualizing India Studies written by Balagangadhara, and published by OUP India. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a radical analysis of postcolonial studies as a discipline and modern India as a domain of study. It discusses wide variety of issues such as different definitions of culture, colonialism, secularism, and orientalist discourse.
Download or read book Handbook of East and Southeast Asian Archaeology written by Junko Habu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-08 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of East and Southeast Asian Archaeology focuses on the material culture and lifeways of the peoples of prehistoric and early historic East and Southeast Asia; their origins, behavior and identities as well as their biological, linguistic and cultural differences and commonalities. Emphasis is placed upon the interpretation of material culture to illuminate and explain social processes and relationships as well as behavior, technology, patterns and mechanisms of long-term change and chronology, in addition to the intellectual history of archaeology as a discipline in this diverse region. The Handbook augments archaeologically-focused chapters contributed by regional scholars by providing histories of research and intellectual traditions, and by maintaining a broadly comparative perspective. Archaeologically-derived data are emphasized with text-based documentary information, provided to complement interpretations of material culture. The Handbook is not restricted to art historical or purely descriptive perspectives; its geographical coverage includes the modern nation-states of China, Mongolia, Far Eastern Russia, North and South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and East Timor.
Download or read book Still Life written by Henrietta L. Moore and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How adequate are our theories of globalisation for analysing the worlds we share with others? In this provocative new book, Henrietta Moore asks us to step back and re-examine in a fresh way the interconnections normally labeled 'globalisation'. Rather than beginning with abstract processes and flows, Moore starts by analyzing the hopes, desires and satisfactions of individuals in their day-to-day lives. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from African initiation rituals to Japanese anime, from sex in virtual worlds to Schubert songs, Moore develops a theory of the ethical imagination, exploring how ideas about the human subject, and its capacities for self-making and social transformation, form a basis for reconceptualizing the role and significance of culture in a global age. She shows how the ideas of social analysts and ordinary people intertwine and diverge, and argues for an ethics of engagement based on an understanding of the human need to engage with cultural problems and seek social change. This innovative and challenging book is essential reading for anyone interested in the key debates about culture and globalization in the contemporary world.
Download or read book Connecting Continents written by Krish Seetah and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the vast and culturally diverse Indian Ocean region has increasingly attracted the attention of anthropologists, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and other researchers. Largely missing from this growing body of scholarship, however, are significant contributions by archaeologists and consciously interdisciplinary approaches to studying the region’s past and present. Connecting Continents addresses two important issues: how best to promote collaborative research on the Indian Ocean world, and how to shape the research agenda for a region that has only recently begun to attract serious interest from historical archaeologists. The archaeologists, historians, and other scholars who have contributed to this volume tackle important topics such as the nature and dynamics of migration, colonization, and cultural syncretism that are central to understanding the human experience in the Indian Ocean basin. This groundbreaking work also deepens our understanding of topics of increasing scholarly and popular interest, such as the ways in which people construct and understand their heritage and can make use of exciting new technologies like DNA and environmental analysis. Because it adopts such an explicitly comparative approach to the Indian Ocean, Connecting Continents provides a compelling model for multidisciplinary approaches to studying other parts of the globe. Contributors: Richard B. Allen, Edward A. Alpers, Atholl Anderson, Nicole Boivin, Diego Calaon, Aaron Camens, Saša Čaval, Geoffrey Clark, Alison Crowther, Corinne Forest, Simon Haberle, Diana Heise, Mark Horton, Paul Lane, Martin Mhando, and Alistair Patterson.
Download or read book New Subaltern Politics written by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume builds upon a series of conference panels and workshops that were organized between 2011 and 2013, in such diverse places as Honolulu, Nottingham and Bergen"--Acknowledgements.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Knowledge Traditions of the Indian Ocean World written by Himanshu Prabha Ray and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-11-18 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines knowledge traditions that held together the fluid and overlapping maritime worlds of the Indian Ocean in the premodern period, as evident in the material and archaeological record. It breaks new ground by shifting the focus from studying cross-pollination of ideas from textual sources to identifying this exchange of ideas in archaeological and historical documentation. The themes covered in the book include conceptualization of the seas and maritime landscapes in Sanskrit, Arabic and Chinese narratives; materiality of knowledge production as indicated in the archaeological record of communities where writing on stone first appears; and anchoring the coasts, not only through an understanding of littoral shrines and ritual landscapes, but also by an analysis of religious imagery on coins, more so at the time of the introduction of new religions such as Islam in the Indian Ocean around the eighth century. This volume will be of great interest to researchers and scholars of archaeology, anthropology, museum and heritage studies, Indian Ocean studies, maritime studies, South and Southeast Asian studies, religious studies and cultural studies.
Download or read book Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World written by Justin Leidwanger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-22 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses network ideas to explore how the sea connected communities across the ancient Mediterranean. We look at the complexity of cultural interaction, and the diverse modes of maritime mobility through which people and objects moved. It will be of interest to Mediterranean specialists, ancient historians, and maritime archaeologists.
Download or read book Entangled written by Ian Hodder and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful and innovative argument that explores the complexity of the human relationship with material things, demonstrating how humans and societies are entrapped into the maintenance and sustaining of material worlds Argues that the interrelationship of humans and things is a defining characteristic of human history and culture Offers a nuanced argument that values the physical processes of things without succumbing to materialism Discusses historical and modern examples, using evolutionary theory to show how long-standing entanglements are irreversible and increase in scale and complexity over time Integrates aspects of a diverse array of contemporary theories in archaeology and related natural and biological sciences Provides a critical review of many of the key contemporary perspectives from materiality, material culture studies and phenomenology to evolutionary theory, behavioral archaeology, cognitive archaeology, human behavioral ecology, Actor Network Theory and complexity theory
