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A bold new method of theorizing about the prehistoric past
Annotation In light of recently discovered population centers of pre-colonial Maya that could not have been sustained by the slash-and-burn agriculture which most anthropologists believe was the dominant method of food production for the culture, the editors of this volume view the analysis of the Maya diet as particularly important for understanding the pre-Columbian population. They present 12 papers that discuss evidence from the fields of faunal and botanical analysis, paleopathology, and bone chemistry. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Recipient of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Volume 2 presents the concluding research on Sitagroi, a prehistoric settlement mound in northeastern Greece, excavated between 1968 and 1970. This volume offers a detailed report on the plant remains along with a full treatment of craft and technology: artifacts of adornment; tools of bone and flaked stone; artifacts and tools of bone and ground and polished stone (and petrology); tools of the spinner, weaver and mat maker; pottery technology; metallurgy; and special clay finds such as seals, miniatures, and utensils. This rich presentation offers unparalleled insights into the life of the prehistoric inhabitants of the area. Sitagroi now becomes one of the most comprehensively published sites from prehistoric Europe and will be indispensable for all those concerned with European prehistory.
This book examines the contested re-readings of “Korea” in early Chinese historical records and their influence on the formation of Korean-ness in later periods. The earliest written records on “Koreans” are found in Chinese documents produced during the Han dynasty, from the third century BCE to the third century CE. Since then, these early Chinese records have been used as primary sources for writing early Korean history in Korea, China, and Japan. This study analyzes the various reinterpretations and utilizations of these early records that became more diverse by the late nineteenth century, when the reconstruction of ancient history became a crucial part of the formation of Korean national consciousness. Korea’s modern historiography was complicated by a thirty-five year colonial experience (1910–1945) under Japan. During this period, Japanese colonial scholars attempted to depict Korean history as stagnant, heteronymous, and replete with factional strife, while Korean nationalist historians strove to construct an indigenous Korean nation in order to mobilize Koreans’ national consciousness and recover political sovereignty. While focused on Korea and Northeast Asia, the links between historiography and political ideology investigated in this study are pertinent to historians in general.
The Cambridge World Prehistory provides a systematic and authoritative examination of the prehistory of every region around the world from the early days of human origins in Africa two million years ago to the beginnings of written history, which in some areas started only two centuries ago. Written by a team of leading international scholars, the volumes include both traditional topics and cutting-edge approaches, such as archaeolinguistics and molecular genetics, and examine the essential questions of human development around the world. The volumes are organised geographically, exploring the evolution of hominins and their expansion from Africa, as well as the formation of states and development in each region of different technologies such as seafaring, metallurgy and food production. The Cambridge World Prehistory reveals a rich and complex history of the world. It will be an invaluable resource for any student or scholar of archaeology and related disciplines looking to research a particular topic, tradition, region or period within prehistory.
Across the nineteenth century, scholars in Britain, France and the German lands sought to understand their earliest ancestors: the Germanic and Celtic tribes known from classical antiquity, and the newly discovered peoples of prehistory. New fields – philology, archeology and anthropology – interacted, breaking down languages, unearthing artifacts, measuring skulls and recording the customs of "savage" analogues. This was a decidedly national process: disciplines institutionalized on national levels, and their findings seen to have deep implications for the origins of the nation and its "racial composition." However, this operated within broader currents. The wide spread of material and novelty of the methods meant that these approaches formed connections across Europe and beyond, even while national rivalries threatened to tear these networks apart. Race, Science and the Nation follows this tension, offering a simultaneously comparative, cross-national and multi-disciplinary history of the scholarly reconstruction of European prehistory. As well as showing how interaction between disciplines was key to their formation, it makes arguments of keen relevance to studies of racial thought and nationalism. It shows these researches often worked against attempts to present the chaotic multi-layered ancient eras as times of mythic origin. Instead, they argued that the modern nations of Europe were not only diverse, but were products of long processes of social development and "racial" fusion. This book therefore brings to light a formerly unstudied motif of nineteenth-century national consciousness, showing how intellectuals in the era of nation-building themselves drove an idea of their nations being "constructed" from a useable past.
According to the myth of matriarchal prehistory, men and women lived together peacefully before recorded history. Society was centered around women, with their mysterious life-giving powers, and they were honored as incarnations and priestesses of the Great Goddess. Then a transformation occurred, and men thereafter dominated society. Given the universality of patriarchy in recorded history, this vision is understandably appealing for many women. But does it have any basis in fact? And as a myth, does it work for the good of women? Cynthia Eller traces the emergence of the feminist matriarchal myth, explicates its functions, and examines the evidence for and against a matriarchal prehistory. Finally, she explains why this vision of peaceful, woman-centered prehistory is something feminists should be wary of.
Chronicles the history of the United States from the end of the Civil War through the difficult years of the Reconstruction.
Nineteenth-century paleontologists boasted that, shown a single bone, they could identify or even reconstruct the extinct creature it came from with infallible certainty—“Show me the bone, and I will describe the animal!” Paleontologists such as Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen were heralded as scientific virtuosos, sometimes even veritable wizards, capable of resurrecting the denizens of an ancient past from a mere glance at a fragmentary bone. Such extraordinary feats of predictive reasoning relied on the law of correlation, which proposed that each element of an animal corresponds mutually with each of the others, so that a carnivorous tooth must be accompanied by a certain kind of jawbone, neck, stomach, limbs, and feet. Show Me the Bone tells the story of the rise and fall of this famous claim, tracing its fortunes from Europe to America and showing how it persisted in popular science and literature and shaped the practices of paleontologists long after the method on which it was based had been refuted. In so doing, Gowan Dawson reveals how decisively the practices of the scientific elite were—and still are—shaped by their interactions with the general public.