Skeletal remains are a vital source of evidence for archaeologists. Their interpretation has tended to take two divergent forms: the scientific and the humanistic. In this innovative study, Joanna Sofaer Derevenski argues that these approaches are unnecessarily polarized and that one should not be pursued without the other. Exploring key themes such as sex, gender, life cycle and diet, she argues that the body is both biological object and cultural site and is not easily detached from the objects, practices and landscapes that surround it.
This is the first book to focus entirely on children and material culture. The contributors ask: * what is the relationship between children and the material world? * how does the material culture of children vary across time and space? * how can we access the actions and identities of children in the material record? The collection spans the Palaeolithic to the late twentieth century, and uses data from across Europe, Scandinavia, the Americas and Asia. The international contributors are from a wide range of disciplines including archaeology, cultural and biological anthropology, psychology and museum studies. All skilfully integrate theory and data to illustrate fully the significance and potential of studying children.
First published in 1999. This groundbreaking volume addresses issues central to the study of prehistoric settlement including group memory, the transmission of ideology and the impact of mobility and seasonality on the construction of social identity. Building on these themes, the contributors point to new ways of understanding the relationship between settlement and landscape by replacing Capitalist models of spatial relations with more intimate histories of place.
The Bronze Age is frequently framed in social evolutionary terms. Viewed as the period which saw the emergence of social differentiation, the development of long-distance trade, and the intensification of agricultural production, it is seen as the precursor and origin-point for significant aspects of the modern world. This book presents a very different image of Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. Drawing on the wealth of material from recent excavations, as well as a long history of research, it explores the impact of the post-Enlightenment 'othering' of the non-human on our understanding of Bronze Age society. There is much to suggest that the conceptual boundary between the active human subject and the passive world of objects, so familiar from our own cultural context, was not drawn in this categorical way in the Bronze Age; the self was constructed in relational rather than individualistic terms, and aspects of the non-human world such as pots, houses, and mountains were considered animate entities with their own spirit or soul. In a series of thematic chapters on the human body, artefacts, settlements, and landscapes, this book considers the character of Bronze Age personhood, the relationship between individual and society, and ideas around agency and social power. The treatment and deposition of things such as querns, axes, and human remains provides insights into the meanings and values ascribed to objects and places, and the ways in which such items acted as social agents in the Bronze Age world.
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