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"Kohl, Philip L."
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The making of bronze age Eurasia
This book provides an overview of Bronze Age societies of western Eurasia through an investigation of the archaeological record. Philip Kohl outlines the long-term processes and patterns of interaction that link these groups together in a shared historical trajectory of development.
Book
The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia
This book provides an overview of Bronze Age societies of Western Eurasia through an investigation of the archaeological record. The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia outlines the long-term processes and patterns of interaction that link these groups together in a shared historical trajectory of development. Interactions took the form of the exchange of raw materials and finished goods, the spread and sharing of technologies, and the movements of peoples from one region to another. Kohl reconstructs economic activities from subsistence practices to the production and exchange of metals and other materials. Kohl also argues forcefully that the main task of the archaeologist should be to write culture-history on a spatially and temporally grand scale in an effort to detect large, macrohistorical processes of interaction and shared development.
eBook
Nature and antiquities : the making of archaeology in the Americas
\"Nature and Antiquities examines the relation between the natural sciences, anthropology, and archaeology in the Americas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the reader across the Americas from the Southern Cone to Canada, across the Andes, the Brazilian Amazon, Mesoamerica, and the United States, the book explores the early history of archaeology from a Pan-American perspective. The volume breaks new ground by entreating archaeologists to acknowledge the importance of ways of knowing that resulted from the study of nature in the history of archaeology. Some of the contributions to this volume trace the part conventions, practices, and concepts from natural history and the natural sciences played in the history and making of the discipline. Others set out to uncover, reassemble, or adjust our vision of collections that research historians of archaeology have disregarded or misrepresented--because their nineteenth-century makers would refuse to comply with today's disciplinary borders and study natural specimens and antiquities in conjunction, under the rubric of the territorial, the curious or the universal. Other contributions trace the sociopolitical implications of studying nature in conjunction with 'indigenous peoples' in the Americas--inquiring into what it meant and entailed to comprehend the inhabitants of the American continent in and through a state of nature\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Shared Social Fields: Evolutionary Convergence in Prehistory and Contemporary Practice
In this article, I distinguish between evolutionary and historical perspectives on the past, adopting the concept of \"social fields\" to argue for a macrohistorical interpretation of the archaeological record. The unit of analysis is not an archaeological culture or civilization but social groups inextricably involved with other groups in weblike interconnections in which technologies are diffused and modified by other groups caught up in these same processes. Such interconnections can best be traced archaeologically by examining the spread of technologies and subsistence practices. Other macrohistorical perspectives on the past, such as world systems analysis, often demand too much of the archaeological record and are used anachronistically. Prehistory documents the ever-increasing participation of groups in social fields that ultimately converge. I conclude by emphasizing the need for a perspective on the past that emphasizes its shared nature in which all peoples have contributed and benefited from interactions with their neighbors.
Journal Article
NATIONALISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote Past
Nationalism requires the elaboration of a real or invented remote past. This
review considers how archaeological data are manipulated for nationalist
purposes, and it discusses the development of archaeology during the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and the relationship of archaeology to
nation-building, particularly in Europe. Contrastive conceptions of nationality
and ethnicity are presented, and it is argued that adoption of modern
constructivist perspectives is incompatible with attempting to identify
ethnic/national groups solely on the basis of archaeological evidence. The
political uses of archaeology are also reviewed for the construction of
national identities in immigrant and postcolonial states. The problematic
nature of nationalistic interpretations of the archaeological record is
discussed, and the essay concludes with a consideration of the professional and
ethical responsibilities of archaeologists confronted with such
interpretations.
Journal Article
Philippe Beaujard, Les mondes de l'océan Indien
A review essay covering books by: 1) Philippe Beaujard, Les mondes de l'ocean Indien/Tome 1, De la formation de l'Etat au premier systeme-monde afro-eurasien (4e millenaire av J-C-6e siecle apr. J.-C.) (2012); 2) Philippe Beaujard, Les mondes de l'ocean Indien/Tome 2, Les mondes de l'ocean Indien: L'ocean Indien, au coeur des globalisations de l'Ancien Monde (7e-15e siecles) (2012).
Journal Article
European archaeology. An inclusive or exclusive discipline?
Let me begin with an anecdote: in summer 1985 Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky and I participated in Bronze Age excavations at the site of Sarazm along the middle Zeravshan river in what was then Soviet Tajikistan. I remember one of the Russian artists on the dig complaining ruefully (and patronizingly) about her Tajik colleagues. ‘When will they [that is, her Tajik colleagues] ever become like us Russians and Americans, you know, Europeans?’ Karl, who is very proud of his mixed Czech, Slovak, and Austrian heritage, snorted disdainfully: ‘Since when have Americans and Russians ever been European?’
Journal Article
Early Bronze developments on the West Caspian Coastal Plain
Cet article passe en revue les recherches menées sur le Complexe du Bronze ancien de Velikent et sur les sites liés à la culture de Velikent, établis sur la plaine côtière de la rive ouest de la mer Caspienne, au Daghestan (Russie) et, plus au sud, dans le nord-est de l’Azerbaïdjan. Des prospections ont montré que cette plaine littorale fut occupée de façon dense pour la première fois au milieu du 4e millénaire, par une population qui utilisait déjà le tour de potier pour façonner des céramiques cuites à haute température et qui était capable de fondre, couler, et vraisemblablement de créer des alliages de bronze pour des outils, des armes et des parures. Les analyses techniques du mobilier de Velikent et des sites apparentés sont présentées brièvement, tout comme les descriptions et illustrations du mobilier des tombes collectives et des établissements de Velikent. L’article définit une ‘ Culture de Velikent’ spécifi que, qui est reliée à la Communauté culturelle et historique Kura-Araxe, mais qui en diffère suffi samment pour justifier sa propre appellation en tant que culture archéologique. This article reviews investigations of the Velikent Early Bronze Age Complex and related sites on the West Caspian Coastal Plain of Daghestan, Russia, extending south into Northeastern Azerbaijan. Survey work has determined that this littoral plain was fi rst densely occupied in the middle of the 4th millennium by peoples who already used a potter’s wheel to finish highly fired wares and who were able to melt, cast, and possibly alloy bronze tools, weapons, and ornaments. Technical analyses of materials from Velikent and Velikent related sites are briefly presented, as are the descriptions and illustrations of materials from the Velikent collective tombs and settlements. The article defines a distinct ‘ Velikent Culture’ that is related to the Kura-Araxes Cultural-Historical Community but sufficiently different from it to warrant its own designation as an archaeological culture.
Journal Article
Religion, Politics, and Prehistory
This article illustrates the dangers of mixing religious certitudes & political activities with the study of the remote prehistoric past by critically reviewing the works of one of the 20th century's most prolific & (once) influential prehistorians, Oswald Menghin. Menghin's reconstructions of the past were inspired by a moral crusade against the perceived evils of materialist evolutionism, an agenda that during the 1930s assumed an explicitly political dimension consistent with Nazi ideology. His subsequent exile to Argentina was not a simple retreat to a safe haven but an opportunity for him to confirm a universal world history extending back into the Palaeolithic that purported to link major cultural developments in the New World with earlier developments in the Old. Menghin's theories that today appear dated & mistaken, were once widely accepted & developed by scholars of the Vienna culture-historical school of ethnography, one of the main theoretical sources for culture-historical archaeology. The latter approach, the dominant archaeological practice in many European & Latin American countries, is here reevaluated in the light of this mistaken legacy, & it is argued that \"peoples without prehistory\" deserve to have theirs rediscovered & reconstructed through archaeological research. The paper concludes by discussing the constraints of archaeological evidence for identifying correct readings of the past & by calling attention to the difference between religious & political convictions & scientific theories that are openly subjected to testing & empirical refutation. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article
Comments on Adam T. Smith's ‘The end of the essential archaeological subject’
As expected, Adam Smith has written a provocative, intellectually stimulating and demanding article critiquing the re-inscription of ‘an essential archaeological subject’ as archaeology becomes more explicitly aware of its inevitable political dimensions. I find myself in broad, though not perfect, agreement with his overall argument and concur completely with his concluding sentiments that archaeologists should become ‘analysts of the naturalizers rather than analytical naturalizers’ and that they should expose the strategic practices at play in the assertion of all such essentialist claims, past and present. My concern is that his prescription for achieving this result may be too mild (i.e. indirect and subtle, if not opaque) to cure the ills of the nationalists who habitually distort archaeological evidence to achieve their often dubious political agendas. In a certain sense, his laudable insistence on focusing on change and the plasticity of markers of identity in relation to specific and always shifting sociopolitical contexts eviscerates the political nature of archaeological enquiry. His recommendation is to go back to interpreting the past on its own terms, void of ‘essential subjects’. All right, but not many people will listen and those interested in using the past for contemporary purposes will not be directly confronted. As critical ‘analysts of the naturalizers’ we perform an essentially negative, though indispensable, role; we point out why the accounts of the naturalizers are ambiguous, distort the record, are untenable and dangerous, and so on. This admittedly negative role is extremely important and should not now be abandoned after so many years of denying it or not recognizing it. It is necessary to add that there is also a positive political approach for interpreting archaeological evidence that Childe (1933) long ago recognized: demonstrate the continuous intercourse and diffusion of ideas and technologies from one culture and people to another throughout prehistoric times and insist that no single group was responsible for this constantly growing and shared history of cultural development.
Journal Article