This book studies current approaches to the archaeology of mountainous landscapes, presenting research results from different scientific contexts. To discuss these issues, and to study different aspects of human activity in the mountains and adjacent regions it incorporates archaeological, botanical, zooarchaeological and ethnological information.
Mountains contain a rich and diverse set of remnants left by human societies. They have been inhabited since prehistory and have been transformed by human activity during prehistorical and historical times, and that history defines mountain landscapes as we know them today. Archaeology of Mountain Landscapes contains twenty contributions by forty-one specialists currently researching mountain areas in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The different case studies address the subject diachronically, ranging from prehistory to modern times, and employ a variety of methodological strategies, including archaeological surveys and excavation, paleoenvironmental studies, and historical and ethnographical research. This volume demonstrates how multidisciplinary archaeological fieldwork is radically changing our vision of mountain landscapes. Viewing mountain landscapes as archaeological documents contributes to our understanding of the history of mountain environments and offers new archaeological datasets to use in the interpretation of human societies. Taken together, the essays collected here offer a comprehensive view of current research and suggest new directions for future study.
Il numero 35.1, 2024 di Archeologia e Calcolatori è un volume ricco e articolato che contiene tre sezioni speciali e un gruppo di 15 contributi dedicati all’applicazione delle più attuali tecnologie informatiche nei diversi settori della ricerca archeologica, in cui si nota una crescente attenzione verso il dato visuale e la modellazione virtuale. La prima sezione, curata da G. Gambacurta e F. Bortolami, è dedicata agli Atti del workshop (Venezia 25 settembre 2023) “Necropoli etrusco-italiche: archeologia digitale e paesaggio funerario”, che offrono un interessante focus sul tema della ricostruzione del paesaggio funerario attraverso le nuove tecnologie, presentando alcuni significativi casi di studio. La seconda sezione è curata da V. Fromageot-Laniepce e A.V. Szabados e tratta di “Images antiques et humanités numériques”, tematica particolarmente fertile negli studi della scuola francese. La sezione, in particolare, riferisce i risultati dei seminari ArcheoNum, organizzati dall’equipe CNRS-ArScAn con l’obiettivo di creare uno spazio di dialogo sulle questioni dell’archeologia e del patrimonio culturale digitali. La terza sezione, curata da A. Caravale. P. Moscati e I. Rossi, chiude il volume, pubblicando i primi risultati del lavoro di alcuni gruppi di ricerca impegnati nel Progetto PNRR H2IOSC, che mira a creare un cluster di Infrastrutture di Ricerca nei settori delle Scienze Umane, delle Tecnologie Linguistiche e dei Beni Culturali.
A cultural and literary history of mountains in classical antiquity The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. The Folds of Olympus is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those interested in mountains and the environment, the book offers a powerful account of the landscape at the heart of much Greek and Roman culture. Jason König charts the importance of mountains in religion and pilgrimage, the aesthetic vision of mountains in art and literature, the place of mountains in conquest and warfare, and representations of mountain life. He shows how mountains were central to the way in which the inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean understood the boundaries between the divine and the human, and the limits of human knowledge and control. He also argues that there is more continuity than normally assumed between ancient descriptions of mountains and modern accounts of the picturesque and the sublime. Offering a unique perspective on the history of classical culture, The Folds of Olympus is also a resoundingly original contribution to the literature on mountains.
This book provides an overview of the driving theories, methodologies and main topics that have been addressed to date regarding agrarian archaeology. The text is presented as an introduction for students, a critical reading guide for other scholars, and an informative instrument aimed at a wide audience.
Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains combines history, anthropology, archaeology, and geography to take a closer look at the relationships between land and people in this unique North American region. Focusing on long-term change, this book considers ethnographic literature, archaeological evidence, and environmental data spanning thousands of years of human presence to understand human perception and construction of landscape. The contributors offer cohesive and synthetic studies emphasizing hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers. Using landscape as both reality and metaphor, Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains explores the different and changing ways that people interacted with place in this transitional zone between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern prairies. The contemporary archaeologists working in this small area have chosen diverse approaches to understand the past and its relationship to the present. Through these ten case studies, this variety is highlighted but leads to a common theme - that the High Plains contains important locales to which people, over generations or millennia, return. Providing both data and theory on a region that has not previously received much attention from archaeologists, especially compared with other regions in North America, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature. Contributors: o Paul Burnett o Oskar Burger o Minette C. Church o Philip Duke o Kevin Gilmore o Eileen Johnson o Mark D. Mitchell o Michael R. Peterson o Lawrence Todd
‘The island world of Melanesia—ranging from New Guinea and the Bismarcks through the Solomons, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia—is characterised more than anything by its boundless diversity in geography, language and culture. The deep historical roots of this diversity are only beginning to be uncovered by archaeological investigations, but as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, the exciting discoveries being made across this region are opening windows to our understanding of the historical processes that contributed to such remarkably varied cultures. Archaeologies of Island Melanesia offers a sampling of some of the recent and ongoing research that spans such topics as landscape, exchange systems, culture contact and archaeological practice, authored by some of the leading scholars in Oceanic archaeology.’ — Professor Patrick Vinton Kirch Professor of Anthropology, University of Hawai‘i Island Melanesia is a remarkable region in many respects, from its great ecological and linguistic diversity, to the complex histories of settlement and interaction spanning from the Pleistocene to the present. Archaeological research in Island Melanesia is currently going through a vibrant phase of exciting new discoveries and challenging debates about questions that apply far beyond the region. This volume draws together a variety of current perspectives in regional archaeology for Island Melanesia, focusing on Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea. It features both high-level theoretical approaches and rigorous data-driven case studies covering recent research in landscape archaeology, exchange and material culture, and cultural practices.
Up until now, mountain ecosystems have not been closely studies by social scientists as they do not offer a readily defined set of problems for human exploitation as, do for instance, tropical forests or arctic habitats. But the archaeological evidence had shown that humans have been living in this type of habitat for thousands of year. From this evidence we can also see that mountainous regions are often frontier zones of competing polities and form refuge areas for dissident communities as they often are inherently difficult to control by centralized authorities. As a consequence they fuel or contribute disproportionately to political violence. But we are now witnessing changes and increasing vulnerability of mountain ecosystems caused by human activities. Human adaptability to mountain ecosystems This volume presents an international and interdisciplinary account of the exploitation of--and human adaptation to--mountainous regions over time. The contributions discuss human cultural responses to key physical and cultural stressors associated with mountain ecosystems, such as aridity, quality of soils, steep slopes, low productivity, as well as transient phenomena such as changing weather patterns, deforestation and erosion, and the possible effects of climate change. This volume will be of interest to anthropologists, ecologists and geologists as mountainous landscapes change fast and cultures disappear and they need to be recorded, and mountain regions are of interest for studies on environmental change and cultural responses of mountain populations provide clues for us all. Critical to understanding mountain adaptations is our comprehension of human decision-making and how people view short- and long-term outcomes.
This volume contains thirty-five papers from a 2010 conference on landscape archaeology focusing on the definition of landscape as used by processual archaeologists, earth scientists, and most historical geographers, in contrast to the definition favored by postprocessual archaeologists, cultural geographers, and anthropologists. This tension provides a rich foundation for discussion, and the papers in this collection cover a variety of topics including: how do landscapes change; how to improve temporal, chronological, and transformational frameworks; how to link lowlands with mountainous area.
In Pilgrimage and Economy in the Ancient Mediterranean, Anna Collar and Troels Myrup Kristensen bring together diverse scholarship to explore the socioeconomic dynamics of ancient Mediterranean pilgrimage from archaic Greece to Late Antiquity, the Greek mainland to Egypt and the Near East. This broad chronological and geographical canvas demonstrates how our modern concepts of religion and economy were entangled in the ancient world. By taking material culture as a starting point, the volume examines the ways that landscapes, architecture, and objects shaped the pilgrim’s experiences, and the manifold ways in which economy, belief and ritual behaviour intertwined, specifically through the processes and practices that were part of ancient Mediterranean pilgrimage over the course of more than 1,500 years.
