Download or read book Pot potter Entanglements and Networks of Agency in Late Woodland Period c AD 900 1300 Southwestern Ontario Canada written by Christopher M. Watts and published by British Archaeological Reports Oxford Limited. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complementary strands of thought are here woven together to further the notion that people and things are entangled in interdependent webs of action, and a view of social life as engendered by the ways we apprehend and interact with the material world. It is argued that material culture can be considered agential insofar as it serves to condition certain sensory responses from its users. An analysis of Late Woodland period pottery production in southwestern Ontario provides a case study: over 800 earthenware vessels are analyzed from Iroquoian and Algonquian (Western Basin) sites. The results suggest that Iroquoian potting practices were organized around a design repertoire to which most potters subscribed. These patterns contrast with the Western Basin assemblages, which hint at a greater degree of design heterogeneity and a wider array of choice. The discordant nature of Western Basin decorative practices points to a form of human/non-human interaction markedly different from the milieu experienced by Iroquoian artisans.
Download or read book Engaging Archaeology written by Stephen W. Silliman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-02-21 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together 25 case studies from archaeological projects worldwide, Engaging Archaeology candidly explores personal experiences, successes, challenges, and even frustrations from established and senior archaeologists who share invaluable practical advice for students and early-career professionals engaged in planning and carrying out their own archaeological research. With engaging chapters, such as ‘How Not to Write a PhD Thesis on Neolithic Italy’ and ‘Accidentally Digging Central America's Earliest Village’, readers are transported to the desks, digs, and data-labs of the authors, learning the skills, tricks of the trade, and potential pit-falls of archaeological fieldwork and collections research. Case studies collectively span many regions, time periods, issues, methods, and materials. From the pre-Columbian Andes to Viking Age Iceland, North America to the Middle East, Medieval Ireland to remote north Australia, and Europe to Africa and India, Engaging Archaeology is packed with rich, first-hand source material. Unique and thoughtful, Stephen W. Silliman’s guide is an essential course book for early-stage researchers, advanced undergraduates, and new graduate students, as well as those teaching and mentoring. It will also be insightful and enjoyable reading for veteran archaeologists.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Ceramic Analysis written by Alice M. W. Hunt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws together topics and methodologies essential for the socio-cultural, mineralogical, and geochemical analysis of archaeological ceramic, one of the most complex and ubiquitous archaeomaterials in the archaeological record. It provides an invaluable resource for archaeologists, anthropologists, and archaeological materials scientists.
Download or read book Material Agency written by Carl Knappett and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-12-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thus far an ‘agent’ in the social sciences has always meant someone whose actions bring about change. In this volume, the editors challenge this position and examine the possibility that agency is not a solely human property. Instead, this collection of archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists explores the symbiotic relationships between humans and material entities (a key opening a door, a speed bump raising a car) as they engage with one another.
Download or read book Relational Archaeologies written by Christopher Watts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of us accept as uncontroversial the belief that the world is comprised of detached and disparate products, all of which are reducible to certain substances. Of those things that are alive, we acknowledge that some have agency while others, such as humans, have more advanced qualities such as consciousness, reason and intentionality. So deeply-seated is this metaphysical belief, along with the related distinctions we draw between subject/object, mind/body and nature/culture that many of us tacitly assume past groups approached and apprehended the world in a similar fashion. Relational Archaeologies questions how such a view of human beings, ‘other-than-human’ creatures and things affects our reconstruction of past beliefs and practices. It proceeds from the position that, in many cases, past societies understood their place in the world as positional rather than categorical, as persons bound up in reticular arrangements with similar and not so similar forms regardless of their substantive qualities. Relational Archaeologies explores this idea by emphasizing how humans, animals and things come to exist by virtue of the dynamic and fluid processes of connection and transaction. In highlighting various counter-Modern notions of what it means ‘to be’ and how these can be teased apart using archaeological materials, contributors provide a range of approaches from primarily theoretical/historicized treatments of the topic to practical applications or case studies from the Americas, the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Download or read book Place Making in the Pretty Harbour written by Matthew Betts and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book describes in detail the findings of five seasons (2008-2012) of survey and excavation in Port Joli, and ten years of laboratory analysis, undertaken by the Canadian Museum of History, in collaboration with Acadia First Nation. It also incorporates data recovered from previous archaeological work conducted in Port Joli by Erskine, Raddall, Millard, and others, providing a complete synthesis of one of Nova Scotia’s richest Indigenous archaeological records. Reviving the art of a traditional archaeology “site monograph”, the work provides a complete presentation of all the archaeological information recovered, including full-colour artifact plates, technical drawings, profiles, and maps, in addition to a complete data description and synthesis. The final chapter presents a culture history of the Port Joli, summarizing how the “pretty harbour” became a central place for Mi’kmaq prior to the arrival of Europeans. A copublication with the Canadian Museum of History. This book is published in English. - L’ouvrage décrit avec précision les résultats de cette initiative du Musée canadien de l’histoire, menée en collaboration avec la Première Nation d’Acadia, attribuables à cinq saisons (de 2008 à 2012) d’études et de fouilles menées à Port Joli ainsi qu’à 10 années d’analyses en laboratoire. Il comprend aussi des données provenant de travaux archéologiques antérieurs menés à Port Joli par Erskine, Raddall, Millard et d’autres, offrant ainsi une synthèse complète de l’un des plus importants inventaires archéologiques autochtones de la Nouvelle-Écosse. Conjuguant l’approche monographique plus traditionnelle pour traiter d’un site archéologique, cet ouvrage fournit un portrait détaillé de toutes les informations archéologiques récupérées, notamment des artefacts tels que des assiettes colorées, des dessins techniques, des profils et des cartes, en plus d’une description complète des données recueillies. Le dernier chapitre offre une histoire culturelle de Port Joli, résumant comment ce « joli port » est devenu un endroit central pour les Mi’kmaq avant l’arrivée des Européens. Une coédition avec le Musée canadien de l’histoire. Ce livre est publié en anglais.
Download or read book The Times of Their Lives written by A. W. R. Whittle and published by Oxbow Books Limited. This book was released on 2018 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Times of their Lives' explains how archaeologists can now move away from thinking about history in terms of thousands of years, to periods from one or two centuries down to lifetimes and generations - a little more than two decades. This vastly improved precision comes from the application of Bayesian chronological frameworks for the interpretation of radiocarbon dates. If they do the right things, archaeologists in general and prehistorians in particular need not confine themselves any longer to the long term, which has often been seen as the defining currency of the discipline.0Many prehistorians are still uncomfortable with the choice of narratives now available - or have not yet critically rethought old habits. This book will show how temporally much more precise accounts of the past can be achieved, across a broad range of contexts and situations. It offers a series of case studies across much of the continent, to provide much more precise timings of key features and trends in the European Neolithic sequence than are currently available, and to construct much more precise estimates of the duration of events and phenomena. From these there is the possibility to open up new insights into the tempo of change through the detailed study of selected sites and situations across the span of the European Neolithic, from the sixth to the early third millennia cal BC. At stake is our ability to study the lives of Neolithic people everywhere at the scale of lifetimes, something unimaginable even a few years ago.
Download or read book Being Scioto Hopewell Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross Cultural Perspective written by Christopher Carr and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-05 with total page 1564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, in two volumes, breathes fresh air empirically, methodologically, and theoretically into understanding the rich ceremonial lives, the philosophical-religious knowledge, and the impressive material feats and labor organization that distinguish Hopewell Indians of central Ohio and neighboring regions during the first centuries CE. The first volume defines cross-culturally, for the first time, the “ritual drama” as a genre of social performance. It reconstructs and compares parts of 14 such dramas that Hopewellian and other Woodland-period peoples performed in their ceremonial centers to help the soul-like essences of their deceased make the journey to an afterlife. The second volume builds and critiques ten formal cross-cultural models of “personhood” and the “self” and infers the nature of Scioto Hopewell people’s ontology. Two facets of their ontology are found to have been instrumental in their creating the intercommunity alliances and cooperation and gathering the labor required to construct their huge, multicommunity ceremonial centers: a relational, collective concept of the self defined by the ethical quality of the relationships one has with other beings, and a concept of multiple soul-like essences that compose a human being and can be harnessed strategically to create familial-like ethical bonds of cooperation among individuals and communities. The archaeological reconstructions of Hopewellian ritual dramas and concepts of personhood and the self, and of Hopewell people’s strategic uses of these, are informed by three large surveys of historic Woodland and Plains Indians’ narratives, ideas, and rites about journeys to afterlives, the creatures who inhabit the cosmos, and the nature and functions of soul-like essences, coupled with rich contextual archaeological and bioarchaeological-taphonomic analyses. The bioarchaeological-taphonomic method of l’anthropologie de terrain, new to North American archaeology, is introduced and applied. In all, the research in this book vitalizes a vision of an anthropology committed to native logic and motivation and skeptical of the imposition of Western world views and categories onto native peoples.
Download or read book Bows and Arrows of the Greenland Thule Culture 1200 1900 AD written by Sebastian J. Pfeifer and published by British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Limited. This book was released on 2021 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the regional diversity and chronological development of the archery technology of the Thule culture in Greenland. Archaeological and ethnographic material in the collections of the Nat. Mus. of Denmark is analyzed.
Download or read book The Nodwell Site written by James Vallière Wright and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 1974-01-01 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A report on the Nodwell Site, a mid-fourteenth century ancestral Huron-Petun village site, that was almost completely excavated in 1971 by a joint National Museum of Man and Royal Ontario Museum expedition.
Download or read book Extending the Rafters written by Michael K. Foster and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1984-06-30 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the Iroquois, "extending the rafters" meant adding onto the longhouse, both in the literal sense of making room for new families and in the figurative sense of adding adopted individuals or tribes to the League of Five Nations. Similarly, this book extends Iroquois studies. The distinguished contributors represent such diverse areas of anthropology as ethnology, ethnohistory, and archaeology. They address issues that cut across disciplinary lines, making this book a significant, state-of-the-art survey. The topics explored revolve around the influence, contributions, field work, and teachings of anthropologist William N. Fenton, a founder of the discipline of ethnohistory. The essays run the gamut from prehistory to contemporary political issues, from individuals to women and nations, and from language to ritual.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Childhood written by Sally Elizabeth Ellen Crawford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, experts from around the world investigate childhood in the past, showing why it is important to understand childhood, why different cultures construct different ideas of how to rear children, what part children play in the community, and when and why childhood ends.
Download or read book Relational Archaeologies written by Christopher Watts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of us accept as uncontroversial the belief that the world is comprised of detached and disparate products, all of which are reducible to certain substances. Of those things that are alive, we acknowledge that some have agency while others, such as humans, have more advanced qualities such as consciousness, reason and intentionality. So deeply-seated is this metaphysical belief, along with the related distinctions we draw between subject/object, mind/body and nature/culture that many of us tacitly assume past groups approached and apprehended the world in a similar fashion. Relational Archaeologies questions how such a view of human beings, ‘other-than-human’ creatures and things affects our reconstruction of past beliefs and practices. It proceeds from the position that, in many cases, past societies understood their place in the world as positional rather than categorical, as persons bound up in reticular arrangements with similar and not so similar forms regardless of their substantive qualities. Relational Archaeologies explores this idea by emphasizing how humans, animals and things come to exist by virtue of the dynamic and fluid processes of connection and transaction. In highlighting various counter-Modern notions of what it means ‘to be’ and how these can be teased apart using archaeological materials, contributors provide a range of approaches from primarily theoretical/historicized treatments of the topic to practical applications or case studies from the Americas, the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Download or read book Iroquoia written by William Engelbrecht and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-23 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a book that spans the Iroquoian culture from its ancient roots to its survival in the modern world, William Engelbrecht maintains that two themes pervade this development: warfare and spirituality. An investigation of oral tradition, archaeology, and historical records provides new insight into this now largely vanished world known as Iroquoia. Engelbrecht covers a wide geographic range, exploring regional and temporal differences in material culture and subsistence patterns. He finds change over time in the distribution and size of communities and in response to environmental demographic, and social factors. In addition, he furthers the controversial debate that "arrow sacrifice" and other beliefs spread from Mesoamerica with the dispersal of maize and horticulture. Although scholars have suggested that palisaded hilltop Iroquoian villages were constructed with an eye for defense, this book is unique in showing that the longhouse—known mainly as a community forum and spiritual place—may also have served as a defense structure. Throughout this work, which will become the new standard text to which scholars will refer, Engelbrecht reminds us that the the study of the Iroquoian people continues to enrich and inform the modern world.
Download or read book The Mantle Site written by Jennifer Birch and published by AltaMira Press. This book was released on 2012-12-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first detailed analysis of a completely excavated northern Iroquoian community, a sixteenth-century ancestral Wendat village on the north shore of Lake Ontario. The site resulted from the coalescence of multiple small villages into one well-planned and well-integrated community. Jennifer Birch and Ronald F. Williamson frame the development of this community in the context of a historical sequence of site relocations. The social processes that led to its formation, the political and economic lives of its inhabitants, and their relationships to other populations in northeastern North America are explored using multiple scales of analysis. This book is key for those interested in the history and archaeology of eastern North America, the social, political, and economic organization of Iroquoian societies, the archaeology of communities, and processes of settlement aggregation.
Download or read book The Science of Roman History written by Walter Scheidel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the latest cutting-edge science offers a fuller picture of life in Rome and antiquity This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive look at how the latest advances in the sciences are transforming our understanding of ancient Roman history. Walter Scheidel brings together leading historians, anthropologists, and geneticists at the cutting edge of their fields, who explore novel types of evidence that enable us to reconstruct the realities of life in the Roman world. Contributors discuss climate change and its impact on Roman history, and then cover botanical and animal remains, which cast new light on agricultural and dietary practices. They exploit the rich record of human skeletal material--both bones and teeth—which forms a bio-archive that has preserved vital information about health, nutritional status, diet, disease, working conditions, and migration. Complementing this discussion is an in-depth analysis of trends in human body height, a marker of general well-being. This book also assesses the contribution of genetics to our understanding of the past, demonstrating how ancient DNA is used to track infectious diseases, migration, and the spread of livestock and crops, while the DNA of modern populations helps us reconstruct ancient migrations, especially colonization. Opening a path toward a genuine biohistory of Rome and the wider ancient world, The Science of Roman History offers an accessible introduction to the scientific methods being used in this exciting new area of research, as well as an up-to-date survey of recent findings and a tantalizing glimpse of what the future holds.
Download or read book Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors written by P.R. Wilkinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 2991 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating collection of traditional metaphors and figures of speech, groups expressions according to theme. The second edition includes over 1,500 new entries, more information on first known usages, a new introduction and two expanded indexes. It will appeal to those interested in cultural history and the English language.
