The Archaeology of Politics
The Archaeology of Politics

Author: Andrew M. Bauer

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-05-25

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1443831379

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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.

The Social Life of Coffee
The Social Life of Coffee

Author: Brian Cowan

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0300133502

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What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.

Handbook of Space Engineering, Archaeology, and Heritage
Handbook of Space Engineering, Archaeology, and Heritage

Author: Ann Darrin

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2009-06-26

Total Pages: 1038

ISBN-13: 1420084321

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Some might think that the 27 thousand tons of material launched by earthlings into outer space is nothing more than floating piles of debris. However, when looking at these artifacts through the eyes of historians and anthropologists, instead of celestial pollution, they are seen as links to human history and heritage.Space: The New Frontier for Ar

Technology in Forensic Science
Technology in Forensic Science

Author: Deepak Rawtani

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-11-02

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 3527347623

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The book "Technology in Forensic Science" provides an integrated approach by reviewing the usage of modern forensic tools as well as the methods for interpretation of the results. Starting with best practices on sample taking, the book then reviews analytical methods such as high-resolution microscopy and chromatography, biometric approaches, and advanced sensor technology as well as emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and taggant technology. It concludes with an outlook to emerging methods such as AI-based approaches to forensic investigations.

Human Accomplishment
Human Accomplishment

Author: Charles Murray

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 790

ISBN-13: 0061745677

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A sweeping cultural survey reminiscent of Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence. "At irregular times and in scattered settings, human beings have achieved great things. Human Accomplishment is about those great things, falling in the domains known as the arts and sciences, and the people who did them.' So begins Charles Murray's unique account of human excellence, from the age of Homer to our own time. Employing techniques that historians have developed over the last century but that have rarely been applied to books written for the general public, Murray compiles inventories of the people who have been essential to the stories of literature, music, art, philosophy, and the sciences—a total of 4,002 men and women from around the world, ranked according to their eminence. The heart of Human Accomplishment is a series of enthralling descriptive chapters: on the giants in the arts and what sets them apart from the merely great; on the differences between great achievement in the arts and in the sciences; on the meta-inventions, 14 crucial leaps in human capacity to create great art and science; and on the patterns and trajectories of accomplishment across time and geography. Straightforwardly and undogmatically, Charles Murray takes on some controversial questions. Why has accomplishment been so concentrated in Europe? Among men? Since 1400? He presents evidence that the rate of great accomplishment has been declining in the last century, asks what it means, and offers a rich framework for thinking about the conditions under which the human spirit has expressed itself most gloriously. Eye-opening and humbling, Human Accomplishment is a fascinating work that describes what humans at their best can achieve, provides tools for exploring its wellsprings, and celebrates the continuing common quest of humans everywhere to discover truths, create beauty, and apprehend the good.

Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege
Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege

Author: Bradley D. Phillippi

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2020-11-15

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0826361854

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Violence is rampant in today’s society. From state-sanctioned violence and the brutality of war and genocide to interpersonal fighting and the ways in which social lives are structured and symbolized by and through violence, people enact terrible things on other human beings almost every day. In Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege, archaeologists Christopher N. Matthews and Bradley D. Phillippi bring together a collection of authors who document the ways in which past social formations rested on violent acts and reproduced violent social and cultural structures. The contributors present a series of archaeological case studies that range from the mercury mines of colonial Huancavelica (AD 1564–1824) to the polluted waterways of Indianapolis, Indiana, at the turn of the twentieth century—a problem that disproportionally impacted African American neighborhoods. The individual chapters in this volume collectively argue that positions of power and privilege are fully dependent on forms of violence for their existence and sustenance.