Search results
Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are well-known because of their rich grave goods, but this wealth can obscure their importance as local phenomena and the product of pluralistic multi-generational communities. This book explores over one hundred early Anglo-Saxon and some Merovingian cemeteries and aims to understand them using a multi-dimensional methodology. The performance of mortuary drama was a physical communication and so needed syntax and semantics. This local knowledge was used to negotiate the arrangement of cemetery spaces and to construct the stories that were told within them. For some families the emphasis of a mortuary ritual was on reinforcing and reproducing family narratives, but this was only one technique used to arrange cemetery space. This book offers an alternative way to explore the horizontal organisation of cemeteries from a holistic perspective. Each chapter builds on the last, using visual aesthetics, leitmotifs, spatial statistics, grave orientation, density of burial, mortuary ritual, grave goods, grave robbing, barrows, integral structures, skeletal trauma, stature, gender and age to build a detailed picture of complex mortuary spaces. This approach places community at the forefront of interpretation because people used and reused cemetery spaces and these people chose to emphasise different characteristics of the deceased because of their own attitudes, lifeways and lived experiences. This book will appeal to scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies and will also be of value to archaeologists interested in mortuary spaces, communities and social differentiation because it proposes a way to move beyond grave goods in the discussion of complex social identities.
An archaeology of lunacy examines the historic lunatic asylum from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing methods drawn from archaeology, social geography, and history to create a holistic view of the built heritage of the asylum as a distinctive building type. In the popular imagination, historic lunatic asylums were dark, monolithic, and homogenous, instruments for social confinement and punishment. This book aims to redress this historical reputation, showing how the built environment and material worlds of lunatic asylums were distinctive and idiosyncratic – and highly regional. They were also progressive spaces and proving grounds of architectural experimentation, where the reformed treatment practices known as moral management were trialled and refined. The standing remains of the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum system represent a unique opportunity to study a building-type in active transition, both materially and ideologically. When they were constructed, asylums were a composite of reform ideals, architectural materials, and innovative design approaches. An archaeological study of these institutions can offer a materially focused examination of how the buildings worked on a daily basis. This study combines critical analysis of the architecture, material remains, and historical documentary sources for lunatic asylums in England and Ireland. Students and scholars of later historical archaeology and built heritage will find the book a useful overview of this institutional site type, while historians of medicine will find the focus on interior design and architecture of use. The general public, for whom asylums frequently represent shadowy ruins or anonymous redevelopments, may be interested in learning more about the buildings.
This book presents a study of material images and asks how an appreciation of the making and unfolding of images and art alters archaeological accounts of prehistoric and historic societies. With contributions focusing on case studies including prehistoric Britain, Scandinavia, Iberia, the Americas and Dynastic Egypt, and including contemporary reflections on material images, it makes a novel contribution to ongoing debates relating to archaeological art and images. The book offers a New Materialist analysis of archaeological imagery, with an emphasis on considering the material character of images and their making and unfolding. The book reassesses the predominantly representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis and argues for the importance of considering the ontology of images. It considers images as processes or events and introduces the verb ‘imaging’ to underline the point that images are conditions of possibility that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Emergent images’, which focuses on practices of making; ‘Images as process’, which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and ‘Unfolding images’, which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. The book features contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists. The contributors to the book highlight the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, demonstrating that archaeologists need to recognise the dynamic and changeable character of images.
concerns the creativity of Aboriginal Tasmanians or emerging models of widespread and regular plant domestication. Stories of innovation are often stories of norms and elites. This is a discourse of the dominant in which the peripheral, the laggards, the resistant are steamrolled by the inevitable changes coming their way. They and their non-conforming ways of life are impediments to be overcome. Yet a social-archaeological approach, one that centers the people whose history is not recorded but is only apparent in bits of broken pottery or discarded flint, must grapple
on-the-Move’, Journal of Social Archaeology , 1 ( 1 ), 75–89 . Cloke , P. and Jones, O. , 2001 . ‘Dwelling, Place and Landscape: An Orchard in Somerset’, in: Environment and Planning A , Vol 33, 649–66 . Dewsbury , J. D. , Harrison, P., Rose, M. and Wylie, J. 2002
Hawai’i: dignity or debacle?’, University of Hawai’i Law Review, 22 (2000), 545–68; K. S. Fine-Dare, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); J. Watkins, ‘Becoming American or becoming Indian? NAGPRA, Kennewick and cultural affiliation’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 4:1 (2004), 60–80. 20 See www.worldarchaeologicalcongress.org/about-wac/codes-of-ethics/ 168-vermillion (accessed 16 October 2014). 21 Zimmerman, ‘Made radical by my own’, pp. 60–7; E. Williams and D. Johnston, ‘The
. Francioni (ed.), The 1972 World Heritage Convention: A Commentary (Oxford, 2008). 10 S. Labadi, ‘Representations of the nation and cultural diversity in discourses on World Heritage’, Journal of Social Archaeology 7 (2007), 147−70; A. A. Arantes, ‘Diversity, heritage and cultural politics’, Theory, Cuture and Society 24 (2007), 290−6; L. Meskell, ‘UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention at 40 challenging the economic and political order of international heritage conservation’, Current Anthropology 54 (2013), 483−94. 11 For photographs see A. Goumand, France interdite et
Raleigh’s estates in east Cork (Colin Rynne, ‘The Social Archaeology of MUP_Armitage_Ralegh.indd 134 07/10/2013 14:09 Love’s ‘emperye’ 135 ‘Ocean to Scinthia’, ‘strange’ colonial Ireland, like the poem’s ‘new worlds’, does not function merely as an anecdotal backdrop but rather as a fundamental part of its imperial, Petrarchan conceit: like the Queen herself, the country fuels the driving erotic energy of Raleigh’s despairing art. V. Love, war and riches Of the imperial conceits in ‘Ocean’, some refer explicitly to ‘new worlds’ and colonial opportunity there. But
: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1, 45–168. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2017). Cannibal Metaphysics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weismantel, M. (2015). ‘Seeing like an archaeologist: Vivieros de Castro at Chavín de Huántar’, Journal of Social Archaeology 15 (2), 139–59.
by the generalizing explanations of ECT. As stated in Chapter 1 , I do not believe that innovation as a process can be separated from people’s relationships with each other, with their wider communities, and with the material world. Thus, I suggest that we look to a more social and less sterilized approach to understanding innovation. Towards a social archaeology of innovation I would contend that innovation is not an event, but a multi-stranded and drawn-out process that plays out in the social sphere, as much as the economic or technological ones (if, of