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At the Fringe of Human Freedom: The Concept of Space and Time Within Urban Settlements and Among Nomads in Antiquity. ISBN 978-3-030-54417-1
Abstract
The aim of this research is to identify in the early urbanism of the ancient Near East and in the nomadism of the Eurasian steppes the signs of a sociocultural dimension close to our concept of commons, particularly in relation to mobility in space and the control of time, also exploring how contemporary art collective practices are the generators of a new aesthetics of the real, the living commons, through the ongoing artistic researches of Filippo Berta and Julien Bismuth.
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This book surveys an archaeology “in and of the present.” It investigates the challenges and pitfalls of an archaeology of the contemporary world as well as the methodologies for doing it. It consists of a collection of chapters in which authors from within and outside of archaeology reflect on cross-disciplinary concerns. Contributors discuss topics ranging from scale and time to ruins, memory, authenticity, sectarianism, heritage, modernism, and disaster. To extend and complicate the interdisciplinary overviews and archaeological thematics, the book presents in-depth case studies on mobilities, space and place; media and mutabilities; and things and connectivities. Three contributors?representing disciplinary interests in archaeology, geography and photography?produce photo essays in which they reflect on some of the central themes in an archaeology of the contemporary world. The book pursues questions of materiality that appear to owe much to Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project (2002), a distinctively spatial exploration of the ruins and debris of the arcades of Paris. It also looks at spectacular events as sites of material intensity, including protests and riots, sporting mega-events, and festivals.
This article sets out to renew the conceptualisation of anti-Semitism beyond the single sphere of the history of ideas in order to bring attention to situations in which anti-Semitism was in action. To this end, it combines history and political science and draws on the concept of window of opportunity, created in the field of the sociology of public policy, to study housing policies in Nazi-occupied Paris. It is based on ongoing research, both quantitative and qualitative, that seeks to shed light on the active role of the Seine Prefecture in reallocating the dwellings of Jewish families who were absent from their homes.
Third-millennium Mesopotamia has provided an impressive quantity of sources for the study of ancient slavery, among them a collection of standards (the so-called Laws of Ur-Namma ). Despite the volume of documents, Mesopotamian slavery remains elusive in its general traits. This is partly due to the nature of the sources, but also to the approaches and interpretations of modern scholars. Slavery in ancient Mesopotamia has been the focus of several studies in the 1960s and 1970s that interpreted the sources using comparative approaches and Marxist analyses. Since then, the topic has seldom been revisited. In this article, I present the status quaestionis with an overview of the available sources and related studies, together with a sketch of the different types of bonded and forced labor in the Neo-Sumerian period (21st cent. BCE ).
Past human influences on Amazonian forest
The marks of prehistoric human societies on tropical forests can still be detected today. Levis et al. performed a basin-wide comparison of plant distributions, archaeological sites, and environmental data. Plants domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples are much more likely to be dominant in Amazonian forests than other species. Furthermore, forests close to archaeological sites often have a higher abundance and richness of domesticated species. Thus, modern-day Amazonian tree communities across the basin remain largely structured by historical human use.
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In this article I present a new archaeological synthesis concerning the earliest formation of mobile pastoralist economies across central Eurasia. I argue that Eurasian steppe pastoralism developed along distinct local trajectories in the western, central, and (south)eastern steppe, sparking the development of regional networks of interaction in the late fourth and third millennia BC. The “Inner Asian Mountain Corridor” exemplifies the relationship between such incipient regional networks and the process of economic change in the eastern steppe territory. The diverse regional innovations, technologies, and ideologies evident across Eurasia in the mid-third millennium BC are cast as the building blocks of a unique political economy shaped by “nonuniform” institutional alignments among steppe populations throughout the second millennium BC. This theoretical model illustrates how regional channels of interaction between distinct societies positioned Eurasian mobile pastoralists as key players in wide-scale institutional developments among traditionally conceived “core” civilizations while also enabling them to remain strategically independent and small-scale in terms of their own sociopolitical organization. The development of nonuniform institutional complexity among Eurasian pastoralists demonstrates a unique political and economic structure applicable to societies whose variable political and territorial scales are inconsistent with commonly understood evolutionary or corporate sociopolitical typologies such as chiefdoms, states, or empires.
Archaeologists have proposed that quite a number of structures dating to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and B in southwest Asia were nondomestic ritual buildings, sometimes described specifically as temples or shrines, and these figure large in some interpretations of social change in the Near Eastern Neolithic. Yet the evidence supporting the identification of cult buildings is often equivocal or depends on ethnocentric distinctions between sacred and profane spaces. This paper explores the case of Göbekli Tepe, a large Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in Turkey that its excavator claims consisted only of temples, to illustrate weaknesses in some kinds of claims about Neolithic sacred spaces and to explore some of the problems of identifying prehistoric ritual. Consideration of the evidence suggests the alternative hypothesis that the buildings at Göbekli Tepe may actually be houses, albeit ones that are rich in symbolic content.
The Russian (Soviet) archaeology is often positioned by western scholars as the Great Unknown. For a long period of time,
the Soviet archaeology has been hidden behind the Berlin Wall and only few western archaeologists had visited the USSR and
even fewer archaeologists from the USSR traveled abroad. This situation has caused many rumors and false impressions about
the field behind the Iron Curtain. However, due to several striking reviews, especially by Leo Klejn, the curtain has been
lifted. After perestroika, tighter contacts have been established between the Russian and foreign archaeologists. Since then
there were many joint expeditions, organization of international conferences, and publication of books containing articles
by Russian and foreign authors and edited in Russian and English. After the collapse of the USSR, new tendencies in Russian
archaeology were noted, as more articles were devoted to problems of ethnic constructivism and archaeology of nationalism
in Russia. This study aims at reviewing some of those changes and innovations. First, I will discuss general transformation
modern Russian archaeology underwent recently and subsequently I will focus on social archaeology, which is sometimes used
in the West as a synonym for new or processual archaeology.
Uruk is the first fully historical analysis of the origins of the city and of the state in southern Mesopotamia, the region providing the earliest evidence in world history related to these seminal developments. Contrasting his approach—influenced by V. Gordan Childe and by Marxist theory—with the neo-evolutionist ideas of (especially) American anthropological theory, Liverani argues that the innovations that took place during the ‘Uruk period’ (most of the fourth millennium bce) were a ‘true revolution’ that fundamentally changed all aspects of society and culture. This book is unique in its historical approach and its combination of archaeological and textual sources. It develops an argument that weaves together a vast amount of information and places it within a context of contemporary scholarly debates on such questions as the ancient economy and world systems. It explains the roots of these debates briefly without talking down to the reader. The book is accessible to a wider audience, while it also provides a cogent argument about the processes involved to specialists in the field.
Relations between Inner Asian nomads and Chinese are a continuous theme throughout Chinese history. By investigating the formation of nomadic cultures, by analyzing the evolution of patterns of interaction along China's frontiers, and by exploring how this interaction was recorded in historiography, this looks at the origins of the cultural and political tensions between these two civilizations through the first millennium BC. The main purpose of the book is to analyze ethnic, cultural, and political frontiers between nomads and Chinese in the historical contexts that led to their formation, and to look at cultural perceptions of 'others' as a function of the same historical process. Based on both archaeological and textual sources, this 2002 book also introduces a new methodological approach to Chinese frontier history, which combines extensive factual data with a careful scrutiny of the motives, methods, and general conception of history that informed the Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien.
Modern archaeology has amassed considerable evidence for the disposal of the dead through burials, cemeteries and other monuments. Drawing on this body of evidence, this book offers fresh insight into how early human societies conceived of death and the afterlife. The twenty-seven essays in this volume consider the rituals and responses to death in prehistoric societies across the world, from eastern Asia through Europe to the Americas, and from the very earliest times before developed religious beliefs offered scriptural answers to these questions. Compiled and written by leading prehistorians and archaeologists, this volume traces the emergence of death as a concept in early times, as well as a contributing factor to the formation of communities and social hierarchies, and sometimes the creation of divinities.
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the rhizome as being "absolutely different from roots and radicles" 6. The rhizome is explained via principles. 1 and 2: connection and heterogeneity.: "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be". Principle 3: "Principle of multiplicity" "There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines". Principle 4: "Principle of asignifying rupture" "There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome." Principles 5 and 6: Principle of cartography and decalcomania: Where traditional thought is 'tracing', a rhizome is a map. Tracing involves laying onto reality the pattern of structure, itself a construct. "The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious". They take the term plateau from Gregory Bateson, it refers to a sustained intensity. "We call a 'plateau' any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome".
"Write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant!"
The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts: Postcolonial Historical Archaeologies explores the complex interplay of colonial and capital formations throughout the modern world. The authors present a critical approach to this topic, trying to shift discourses in the theoretical framework of historical archaeology of capitalism and colonialism through the use of postcolonial theory. This work does not suggest a new theoretical framework as such, but rather suggests the importance of revising key theoretical terms employed within historical archaeology, arguing for new engagements with postcolonial theory of relevance to all historical archaeologists as the field de-centers from its traditional locations.
Examining case studies from North America, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, and Europe, the chapters offer an unusually broad ranging geography of historical archaeology, with each focused on the interplay between the particularisms of colonial structures and the development of capitalism and wider theoretical discussions. Every author also draws attention to the ramifications of their case studies in the contemporary world. With its cohesive theoretical framework this volume is a key resource for those interested in decolonizing historical archaeology in theory and praxis, and for those interested in the development of modern global dynamics.
This new edition of Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism shows where the study of capitalism leads archaeologists, scholars and activists. Essays cover a range of geographic, colonial, and racist contexts around the Atlantic basin: Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, the North Atlantic, Europe, and Africa. Here historical archaeologists use current capitalist theory to show the results of creating social classes, employing racism, and beginning and expanding the global processes of resource exploitation. Scholars in this volume also do not avoid the present condition of people, discussing the lasting effects of capitalism’s methods, resistance to them, their archaeology, and their point to us now.
Chapters interpret capitalism in the past, the processes that make capitalist expansion possible, and the worldwide sale and reduction of people. Authors discuss how to record and interpret these. This book continues a global historical archaeology, one that is engaged with other disciplines, peoples, and suppressed political and economic histories. Authors in this volume describe how new identities are created, reshaped, and made to appear natural.
Chapters in this second edition also continue to address why historical archaeologists study capitalism and the relevance of this work, expanding on one of the important contributions of historical archaeologies of capitalism: critical archaeology.
In ancient and medieval times, the Silk Road was of great importance to the transport of peoples, goods, and ideas between the East and the West. A vast network of trade routes, it connected the diverse geographies and populations of China, the Eurasian Steppe, Central Asia, India, Western Asia, and Europe. Although its main use was for importing silk from China, traders moving in the opposite direction carried to China jewelry, glassware, and other exotic goods from the Mediterranean, jade from Khotan, and horses and furs from the nomads of the Steppe. In both directions, technology and ideologies were transmitted. The Silk Road brought together the achievements of the different peoples of Eurasia to advance the Old World as a whole. The majority of the Silk Road routes passed through the Eurasian Steppe, whose nomadic people were participants and mediators in its economic and cultural exchanges. Until now, the origins of these routes and relationships have not been examined in great detail. In The Prehistory of the Silk Road, E. E. Kuzmina, renowned Russian archaeologist, looks at the history of this crucial area before the formal establishment of Silk Road trade and diplomacy. From the late Neolithic period to the early Bronze Age, Kuzmina traces the evolution of the material culture of the Steppe and the contact between civilizations that proved critical to the development of the widespread trade that would follow, including nomadic migrations, the domestication and use of the horse and the camel, and the spread of wheeled transport. The Prehistory of the Silk Road combines detailed research in archaeology with evidence from physical anthropology, linguistics, and other fields, incorporating both primary and secondary sources from a range of languages, including a vast accumulation of Russian-language scholarship largely untapped in the West. The book is complemented by an extensive bibliography that will be of great use to scholars.
Although Marxist thoughts were introduced in pre-Revolutionary Russia, my primary focusis on the development of Soviet archaeology. I examine the establishment of the Academy of Material Culture History and the rivalry between the two leading centres: Leningrad and Moscow. I also correlate major changes in the approach to theory with political developments, especially those related to the Great Purge and the cult of Stalin. Subsequently, I discuss the Thaw and loosening of ideological grip during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era. Finally, I ask a significant question: How truly Marxist Soviet archaeology was and it is possible to develop a genuine Marxist archaeology? I conclude that due to perestroika and dissolution of the Soviet Union we may have gained freedom in pursuing academic research, but archaeology as an academic discipline declined.
This book is the first synthesis of the archaeology of the Urals and Western Siberia. It presents a comprehensive overview of the late prehistoric cultures of these regions, which are of key importance for the understanding of long-term changes in Eurasia. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, the Urals and Western Siberia are characterized by great envIronmental and cultural diversity which is reflected in the variety and richness of their archaeological sites. Based on the latest achievements of Russian archaeologists, this study demonstrates the temporal and geographical range of its subjects starting with a survey of the chronological sequence from the late fourth millennium BC to the early first millennium CE. Recent discoveries made in different regions of the area contribute to an understanding of several important issues, such as development of Eurasian metallurgy, technological and ritual innovations, the emergence and development of pastoral nomadism and its role in Eurasian interactions, and major sociocultural fluctuations of the Bronze and Iron Ages. © Ludmila Koryakova and Andrej Vladimirovich Epimakhov 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Based on Deleuze's idea that philosophy is an activity that appeals to anyone who is attuned to the desire for the ethical life, the contributions in this book question how to live the ethical life today in academia, in art but above all in our multiple ecologies of belonging. © 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. All rights reserved.
This article discusses findings from excavations at Göbekli Tepe. Though only partially excavated, it has become increasingly obvious that these findings may contribute significantly to our understanding of the transition from a subsistence pattern based exclusively on hunting and foraging at the end of the Pleistocene to the appearance of agriculture and animal husbandry in the course of the early Holocene. Göbekli Tepe is unique not only in its location on top of a hill and in its monumental architecture, but also its diverse set of objects of art, ranging from small stone figurines, through sculptures and statues of animals, to decorated megaliths, all of which set it apart. The most characteristic feature of the monuments of Göbekli Tepe are the monumental T-shaped pillars. These are arranged in round or oval enclosures, always with a pair of free-standing pillars in the center. It is highly probable that the T-shaped pillars are meant to represent anthropomorphic beings.
Abstract From 1999 to 2007 Japan-Mongol joint archaeological expedition worked in the Ulaan Uushig site near the city Mörön, Northern Mongolia. The purpose of our survey is to determine the date of the beginning of nomadic powers in the Eurasian steppes. In places where early kingship occurred, various sizes of tombs were often built. The tomb size reflected the social status of the dead. And a powerful “king” built a big tumulus as a symbol of power. However, elite tumuli were abandoned along with the maturity of power structures. We consider that such a phenomenon can also be seen in the Eurasian steppes. For this reason we looked for the earliest tumuli in Mongolia, the heartland of rider nomads, and studied the change of size and structure of nomadic elite tombs.
Includes chapters on Siberian, Lapp and Inuit tents, the tents of the North American taiga and the tipi. Gives details of construction and use.
The PPN mound of Göbekli Tepe is situated on top of a mountain north of the Harran plain, near the town of Şanhurfa in Southeastern Turkey. No comparable site is known so far in the Near East in terms of the topographical setting, its megalithic architecture, large scale stone sculptures and several other unusual items. The importance of the religious function of this site can hardly be denied. To the common model of Early Village Farming Communities of the Near East, molded by ecological and economical factors, Göbekli Tepe offers a quite different point of view. Le tell PPN de Göbekli Tepe est situé au sommet d'une montagne de la plaine de Harran, près de la ville de Şanhurfa au Sud-Est de la Turquie. Aucun site comparable sur le plan de sa localisation topographique, de son architecture mégalithique, de ses sculptures sur pierre de grande échelle, et d'autres objets très inhabituels, n'est connu à ce jour au Proche-Orient. L'importance de la fonction religieuse de ce site peut difficilement être niée. Au contraire du modèle habituel des premières communautés villageoises, qui répondent à des facteurs écologiques et économiques, Göbekli Tepe frappe par son aspect très différent.
étienne Balibar has been one of Europe's most important philosophical and political thinkers since the 1960s. His work has been vastly influential on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the humanities and the social sciences. In We, the People of Europe?, he expands on themes raised in his previous works to offer a trenchant and eloquently written analysis of "transnational citizenship" from the perspective of contemporary Europe. Balibar moves deftly from state theory, national sovereignty, and debates on multiculturalism and European racism, toward imagining a more democratic and less state-centered European citizenship.Although European unification has progressively divorced the concepts of citizenship and nationhood, this process has met with formidable obstacles. While Balibar seeks a deep understanding of this critical conjuncture, he goes beyond theoretical issues. For example, he examines the emergence, alongside the formal aspects of European citizenship, of a "European apartheid," or the reduplication of external borders in the form of "internal borders" nurtured by dubious notions of national and racial identity. He argues for the democratization of how immigrants and minorities in general are treated by the modern democratic state, and the need to reinvent what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly multicultural, diversified world. A major new work by a renowned theorist, We, the People of Europe? offers a far-reaching alternative to the usual framing of multicultural debates in the United States while also engaging with these debates.
How do things come to be owned? This is a fundamental puzzle for anyone who thinks about property. One buys things from other owners, to be sure, but how did the other owners get those things? Any chain of ownership or title must have a first link. Someone had to do something to anchor that link. The law tells us what steps we must follow to obtain ownership of things, but we need a theory that tells us why these steps should do the job.
John Locke's view, once described as "the standard bourgeois theory," is probably the one most familiar to American students. Locke argued that an original owner is one who mixes his or her labor with a thing and, by commingling that labor with the thing, establishes ownership of it. This labor theory is appealing because it appears to rest on "desert," but it has some problems. First, without a prior theory of ownership, it is not self-evident that one owns even the labor that is mixed with something else. Second, even if one does own the labor that one performs, the labor theory provides no guidance in determining the scope of the right that one establishes by mixing one's labor with something else. Robert Nozick illustrates this problem with a clever hypothetical. Suppose I pour a can of tomato juice into the ocean: do I now own the seas?
The American Diabetes Association currently recommends that all youth with type 1 diabetes over the age of 7 years follow a plan of intensive management. The purpose of this study was to describe stressors and self-care challenges reported by adolescents with type 1 diabetes who were undergoing initiation of intensive management. Subjects described initiation of intensive management as complicating the dilemmas they faced. The importance of individualized and nonjudgmental care from parents and health care providers was stressed. This study supports development of health care relationships and environments that are teen focused not merely disease-centered and embrace exploring options with the teen that will enhance positive outcomes.
Some scholars have argued that sufis, Muslim mystics, played a decisive role in converting the Mongols in Iran to Islam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, mainly because of the similarity between the extreme sufis (the dervishes) and the shamans of the traditional Mongol religion. This paper maintains that it was primarily some moderate, "institutional" sufis who were close to Mongol ruling circles and thus played a part in their conversion. This, however, had little to so with any resemblance between shamans and sufis, since it is suggested that Muslim mystics, even of the dervish variety, are basically dissimilar to the Inner Asian shamans. If, indeed, both kinds of sufis were successful in influencing the Mongols, it would appear that this is due to other reasons suggested at the end of the paper.
This article presents the study of the famous Scythian monument Arzhan-2 discovered in Central Asia, Tuva Republic, in 2001.
The main focus is the analyses of the different archaeological materials including typology, analogy, burial tradition etc
to determine the chronological place of this monument in the nomadic world. The analyses of the artifacts is primarily concerned
with the horse harness and its comparison with the materials from other monuments located in this region and the neighbouring
territories. It is shown that in spite of the originality of the archaeological materials, they reflect the local culture
and the earlier Scythian tradition. Thus the Arzhan-2 monument can be associated with the so-called aldy-bel culture dated
to the 7th-6th centuries BC.
The themes of the book focus on the origin, development, interactions, and migrations of the Scythians, in Eurasia and their relationships with the environment of 1st millennium BC. Without doubt, the environment played an important role in the life of ancient nomadic populations, forming the basis of their economies and influencing various aspects of their mode of life. The main focus is on the huge landmass of Eurasia where apart from global-scale environmental changes, local environmental change, including the physical landscape of forest, steppe, forest-steppe and so on changed. During the 1st millennium BC, important cultural processes occurred throughout the steppe belt, which eventually resulted in the emergence of "Scythian-type" cultures. The Scythian sites have been investigated since the 18th century, resulting in the discovery of outstanding archaeological assemblages and works of art which are displayed in the best museums of the world. Numerous puzzles relating to the Scythians' origins, interactions, migrations and their detailed chronology are discussed and new data presented.