This study presents a bioarchaeological analysis of the individuals exhumed from the cemetery of Alghero (Sardinia), which is associated with the plague outbreak that ravaged the city in 1582-83. The results shed light on a population which lived during a period of plague, revealing lifestyles, activity patterns and illnesses.
The first English-language survey of medieval and modern Sardinia, this volume offers access to long-awaited European scholarship on a critical missing link in the Mediterranean. Based on new archaeological fieldwork and current research from a variety of academic perspectives— architecture, colonialism, ecclesiastic history, cartography, demography, law, musicology, politics, trade, and urban planning—the authors provide the foundation to incorporate Sardinia into a broader European history. Among other contributions, archaeology adds critical insight into the relationship between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish inhabitants of Sardinia, through examinations of urban and rural settlement patterns. This volume aims to stimulate further analysis of the critical role Sardinia has played as one of the largest and most strategically located islands in the Mediterranean. Contributors are Laura Biccone, Nathalie Bouloux, Henri Bresc, Marco Cadinu, Roberto Coroneo, Laura Galoppini, Henrike Haug, Michelle Hobart, Rossana Martorelli, Giampaolo Mele, Marco Milanese, Giovanni Murgia, Gian Giacomo Ortu, Daniela Rovina, Olivetta Schena, Cecilia Tasca, Raimondo Turtas, and Corrado Zedda.
In this monograph, the alternative theories to the established bubonic-plague theory as to the microbiological identity of historical plague epidemics are intensively discussed in the light of the historical sources and the medical primary research and standard works.
At the outset of the twentieth century, malaria was Italy’s major public health problem. It was the cause of low productivity, poverty, and economic backwardness, while it also stunted literacy, limited political participation, and undermined the army. In this book Frank Snowden recounts how Italy became the world center for the development of malariology as a medical discipline and launched the first national campaign to eradicate the disease. Snowden traces the early advances, the setbacks of world wars and Fascist dictatorship, and the final victory against malaria after World War II. He shows how the medical and teaching professions helped educate people in their own self-defense and in the process expanded trade unionism, women’s consciousness, and civil liberties. He also discusses the antimalarial effort under Mussolini’s regime and reveals the shocking details of the German army’s intentional release of malaria among Italian civilians—the first and only known example of bioterror in twentieth-century Europe. Comprehensive and enlightening, this history offers important lessons for today’s global malaria emergency.
In this volume Chris Callow provides a critical reading of the evidence for changes in Iceland’s socio-political structures from its colonisation to the 1260s when leading Icelanders swore oaths of loyalty to the Norwegian king.
The Etruscans and the History of Dentistry offers a study of the construction and use of gold dental appliances in ancient Etruscan culture, and their place within the framework of a general history of dentistry, with special emphasis on appliances, from Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Egypt to modern Europe and the Americas. Included are many of the ancient literary sources that refer to dentistry - or the lack thereof - in Greece and Rome, as well as the archaeological evidence of ancient dental health. The book challenges many past works in exposing modern scholars’ fallacies about ancient dentistry, while presenting the incontrovertible evidence of the Etruscans’ seemingly modern attitudes to cosmetic dentistry.
Through Time and the City: Notes on Rome offers a new approach to exploring cities. Using Rome as a guide, the book follows familiar sites, geographies, and characters in search of their role within a larger narrative that includes the environmental processes required to generate enough space and material for the city, the emergent ecologies to which its buildings play host, and the social patterns its various structures help to organize. Through Time and the City argues that Rome is made and unmade by an endlessly evolving chorus that has, for better or worse, gained geological legitimacy; that the city absorbs and emits countless artifacts in its search for collective identity; that the city is a platform for the constant staging of negotiations between agents (humans, buildings, plants, animals, pathogens, goods, waste, water) that drive and are driven by the entanglements of climate and culture. This book provides textual and visual frameworks for identifying the material traces, emergent patterns, or speculated futures that expose a city as inseparable from its capacity to change.
