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The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City
The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortés and his followers conquered the city. Cortés boasted to King Charles V of Spain that Tenochtitlan was \"destroyed and razed to the ground.\" But was it?Drawing on period representations of the city in sculptures, texts, and maps, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City builds a convincing case that this global capital remained, through the sixteenth century, very much an Amerindian city. Barbara E. Mundy foregrounds the role the city's indigenous peoples, the Nahua, played in shaping Mexico City through the construction of permanent architecture and engagement in ceremonial actions. She demonstrates that the Aztec ruling elites, who retained power even after the conquest, were instrumental in building and then rebuilding the city. Mundy shows how the Nahua entered into mutually advantageous alliances with the Franciscans to maintain the city's sacred nodes. She also focuses on the practical and symbolic role of the city's extraordinary waterworks—the product of a massive ecological manipulation begun in the fifteenth century—to reveal how the Nahua struggled to maintain control of water resources in early Mexico City.
eBook
Sepphoris II
Sepphoris was an important Galilean site from Hellenistic to early Islamic times. This multicultural city is described by Flavius Josephus as the \"ornament of all Galilee,\" and Rabbi Judah the Prince (ha-Nasi) codified the Mishnah there around 200 CE. The Duke University excavations of the 1980s and 1990s uncovered a large corpus of clay oil lamps in the domestic area of the western summit, and this volume presents these vessels. Richly illustrated with photos and drawings, it describes the various shape-types and includes a detailed catalog of 219 lamps.
The volume also explores the origins of the Sepphoris lamps and establishes patterns of their trade, transport, and sale in the lower city's marketplace. A unique contribution is the use of a combined petrographic and direct current plasma-optical emission spectrometric (dcp-oes) analysis of selected lamp fabrics from sites in Israel and Jordan. This process provided valuable information, indicating that lamps found in Sepphoris came from Judea, the Decapolis, and even Greece, suggesting an urban community fully engaged with other regional centers. Lamp decorations also provide information about the cosmopolitan culture of Sepphoris in antiquity. Discus lamps with erotic scenes and mythological characters suggest Greco-Roman influences, and menorahs portrayed on lamps indicate a vibrant Jewish identity.
eBook
The Sacrificial Economy
In the mid-first millennium B.C., the Eanna temple at Uruk sacrificed a minimum of nine lambs every day in its basic routine of offerings to its gods; in addition to these, special occasions and festivals demanded the sacrifice of as many as 90 lambs in a single day. All told, the Eanna sacrificed about 4,300 lambs per year. There were more than 120 herdsmen connected to the Eanna at any given time, and the temple expected there to be tens of thousands of sheep and goats under their responsibility. These herdsmen delivered male lambs to the Eanna for sacrifice, and the temple had an internal infrastructure for the care, maintenance, and ritual expenditure of these lambs; they also delivered wool, which the Eanna sold mostly in bulk quantities. This book aims to analyze the economic organization of this entire system of sheep and goat maintenance and utilization, to explore the economic and social relationships between the Eanna and its herdsmen, and to integrate the study of the Eanna's animal economy into the developing picture of the Neo-Babylonian temple economy as a whole. Kozuh's careful examination of the bookkeeping records, the management records, and legal documents connected with this substantial enterprise sheds new light on an arcane area of first-millennium Mesopotamian life that will be sure to enlighten our understanding of the daily life, economy, and social structure of this region.
eBook
20/20 visions : collaborative planning and placemaking
Community involvement in planning and placemaking through early, inclusive participatory methods can build consensus, speed up planning and add social, economic and environmental value to projects, leading to healthier, happier and more0sustainable places. '20/20 Visions' is an inspiring and visually stimulating introduction to the practice of participatory planning. 20 worldwide case studies, spanning 1960's projects in USA to present day UK, explore the context, 0implementation and follow up of the participative design process to illustrate its effectiveness in engaging all stakeholders/communities and tackling difficult regeneration issues.
Book
The traffic systems of Pompeii
The Traffic Systems of Pompeii is the first sustained examination of the evidence for a regulated circulation of wheeled traffic in the ancient world. The setting to this system is the six-hundred-year evolution of Pompeii’s street network, the focus of which telescopes from the city’s urban grid to the shape of the streets, the treatment of their surfaces, and finally the individual elements of construction—the curbstones, stepping stones, and guard stones—where the evidence for traffic was inscribed. Although ruts are the most evocative evidence of ancient traffic, it is the wearing patterns on the vertical faces of street features that permit the determination of the directions that ancient carts were traveling and undergird the argument for their systematic regulation. Distilled from over five hundred locations recording multiple categories of evidence, all wholly new to archaeology and unique to this research, this book reveals the basic rules of the road and at the same time opens larger historical questions. What does the existence of a traffic system mean for our understanding of ancient urbanism? What other social forces are uncovered in the search for it? To explore these questions, the traffic system at Pompeii is set in its broader contexts as one infrastructural and administrative artifact of the Roman empire, an epiphenomenon of a deeply urban culture.
eBook
Urban planning and development in China and other East Asian countries
\"This book examines urban development and its role in planning in China and other Asian cities. Starting with a substantial narrative on the history, development philosophy, and urban form of ancient Asian cities, it then identifies the characteristics of urban society and different phases of development history. It then discusses urbanization patterns in China with a focus on spatial layout of the city clusters in the Yangtze River Delta since the 20th Century. Lastly, it explores institutional design and the legal system of urban planning in China and other Asian cities. As a textbook for the \"Model Course in English\" for international students listed by the Ministry of Education in China, it helps international researchers and students to understand urban development and planning in Asian cities.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Chora of Metaponto 4
This volume in the Institute of Classical Archaeology's series on rural settlements in the countryside (chora) of Metaponto presents the excavation of the Late Roman farmhouse at San Biagio. Located near the site of an earlier Greek sanctuary, this modest but well-appointed structure was an unexpected find from a period generally marked by large landholdings and monumental villas. Description of earlier periods of occupation (Neolithic and Greek) is followed by a detailed discussion of the farmhouse itself and its historical and socioeconomic context. The catalogs and analyses of finds include impressive deposits of coins from the late third and early fourth centuries AD. Use of virtual reality CAD software has yielded a deeper understanding of the architectural structure and its reconstruction. A remarkable feature is the small bath complex, with its examples of window glass. This study reveals the existence of a small but viable rural social and economic entity and alternative to the traditional image of crisis and decline during the Late Imperial period.
eBook