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This book explores the diverse understandings of the archaeological record in both historical and contemporary perspective, while also serving as a guide to reassessing current views. Gavin Lucas argues that archaeological theory has become both too fragmented and disconnected from the particular nature of archaeological evidence. The book examines three ways of understanding the archaeological record - as historical sources, through formation theory and as material culture - then reveals ways to connect these three domains through a reconsideration of archaeological entities and archaeological practice. Ultimately, Lucas calls for a rethinking of the nature of the archaeological record and the kind of history and narratives written from it.

In 2011, the centennial of Tennessee Williams's birth, events were held around the world honoring America's greatest playwright.There were festivals, conferences, and exhibitions held in places closely associated with Williams's life and career--New Orleans held major celebrations, as did New York, Key West, and Provincetown.

A bold reimagining of the literary history of Decadence through a close examination of the transnational contexts of Oscar Wilde's classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.Building upon a large body of archival and critical work on Oscar Wilde's only novel, Dorian Unbound offers a new account of the importance of transnational contexts in the forging of Wilde's imagination and the wider genealogy of literary Decadence. Sean O'Toole argues that the attention critics have rightly paid to Wilde's backgrounds in Victorian Aestheticism and French Decadence has had the unintended effect of obscuring a much broader network of transnational contexts. Attention to these contexts allows us to reconsider how we read The Picture of Dorian Gray, what we believe we know about Wilde, and how we understand literary Decadence as both a persistent, highly mobile cultural mode and a precursor to global modernism. In developing a transnational framework for reading Dorian Gray, O'Toole recovers a subterranean network of nineteenth-century cultural movements. At the same time, he joins several active and vital conversations about what it might mean to expand the geographical reach of Victorian studies and to trace the globalization of literature over a longer period of time. Dorian Unbound includes chapters on the Irish Gothic, German historical romance, US magic-picture tradition, and experimental English epigrams, as well as a detailed history and a new close reading of the novel, in an effort to understand Wilde's contribution to a more dynamic idea of Decadence than has been previously known. From its rigorous account of the broad archive of texts that Wilde read and the array of cultural movements from which he drew inspiration in writing Dorian Gray to the novel's afterlives and global resonances, O'Toole paints a richer picture of the author and his famously allusive prose. This book makes a compelling case for a comparative reading of the novel in a global context. It will appeal to historians and admirers of Wilde's career as well as to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, queer and narrative theory, Irish studies, and art history.

Documentary sources have become increasingly neglected in education and the social sciences. This book seeks to emphasise their potential value and importance for an understanding of modern societies, while also recognising their limitations, and explores their relationship with other research strategies. This up-to-date examination of how to research and use documents analyzes texts from the past and present, considering sources ranging from personal archives to online documents and including books, reports, official documents, works of fiction and printed media. This comprehensive analysis of the use of documents in research includes sections covering: * analysing documents * legal frameworks and ethical issues * records and archives * printed media and literature * diaries, letters and autobiographies. Gary McCulloch is Brian Simon Professor of History of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa's Deep History explores particular sources of evidence on southern Africa's time before the colonial era. It gathers recent ideas about archives and archiving from scholars in southern Africa and elsewhere, focusing on the question: 'How do we know, or think we know, what happened in the times before European colonialism?' Historians who specialise in researching early history have learnt to use a wide range of materials from the past as source materials. What are these materials? Where can we find them? Who made them? When? Why? What are the problems with using them? The essays by well-known historians, archaeologists and researchers engage these questions from a range of perspectives and in illuminating ways. Written from personal experience, they capture how these experts encountered their archives of knowledge beyond the textbook. The book aims to make us think critically about where ideas about the time before the colonial era originate. It encourages us to think about why people in South Africa often refer to this 'deep history' when arguing about public affairs in the present. The essays are written at a time when public discussion about the history of southern Africa before the colonial era is taking place more openly than at any other time in the last hundred years. They will appeal to students, academics, educationists, teachers, archivists, and heritage, museum practitioners and the general public. Archives of Times Past explores particular sources of evidence on southern Africa's time before the colonial era. It gathers recent ideas about archives and archiving from scholars in southern Africa and elsewhere, focusing on the question: 'How do we know, or think we know, what happened in the times before European colonialism?' The essays by well-known historians, archaeologists and researchers engage these questions from a range of perspectives and in illuminating ways. Written from personal experience, they capture how these experts encountered their archives of knowledge beyond the textbook. The essays are written at a time when public discussion about the history of southern Africa before the colonial era is taking place more openly than at any other time in the last hundred years They will appeal to students, academics, educationists, teachers, archivists, and heritage, museum practitioners and the general public.

The disintegration of the Classic Maya civilization in the Yucatán Peninsula and Central America was a complex process that occurred over an approximately 200-year interval and involved a catastrophic depopulation of the region. Although it is well established that the civilization collapse coincided with widespread episodes of drought, their nature and severity remain enigmatic. We present a quantitative analysis that offers a coherent interpretation of four of the most detailed paleoclimate records of the event. We conclude that the droughts occurring during the disintegration of the Maya civilization represented up to a 40% reduction in annual precipitation, probably due to a reduction in summer season tropical storm frequency and intensity.

Focusing mainly on Asia, this article tracks a link between the collective, inalienable land‐tenure regimes currently associated with indigeneity and attempts to prevent piecemeal dispossession of small‐scale farmers through land sale and debt. Collective landholding is sometimes imposed by local groups on their own members as they act to defend their livelihoods and communities. More often, however, it has been imposed from outside, first by paternalistic officials of the colonial period and now by a new set of experts and advocates who assume responsibility for deciding who should and who should not be exposed to the risks and opportunities of market engagement. From the perspective of their proponents, however, attempts to institutionalize collective landholdings are not impositions at all. They simply confirm a culturally distinct formation naturally present among “tribal” or “indigenous” people. Yet rural populations have repeatedly failed to conform to the assumptions embedded in schemes designed for their protection. They cross social and spatial boundaries. Some demand recognition of individualized land rights as they respond to market opportunities. Others are unable to escape the extractive relations that visions of cultural alterity and harmonious collectivity too often overlook. Meanwhile, dispossessory processes roll on unrecognized or unobserved.

History is the true record of an absent past. The trust between historians and their readers has always been founded upon this traditional claim. In a postmodern world, that claim and that trust have both been challenged as never before, drawing either angry or apologetic responses from historians. Hermeneutics, History and Memory answers differently. It sees the sceptical challenge as an opportunity for reflection on history’s key processes and practices, and draws upon methodological resources that are truly history’s own, but from which it has become estranged. In seeking to restore these resources, to return history to its roots, this book presents a novel contribution to topical academic debate, focusing principally upon: the challenges and detours of historical methodology hermeneutic interpretation in history the work of Paul Ricoeur the relation between history and memory. Hermeneutics, History and Memory will appeal to experienced historical researchers who seek to explore the theoretical and methodological foundations of their empirical investigations. It will also be highly beneficial to research students in history and the social sciences concerned with understanding the principles and practices through which documentary analysis and in-depth interview can be both validated and conducted. Philip Gardner is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK. Selected Contents: Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. History: Challenges and Detours Chapter 2. History and Hermeneutics Chapter 3. History, Hermeneutics and Ricoeur Chapter 4. History and Memory Conclusion

This article seeks to define common ground from which to build a more integrated approach to the persistence of indigenous societies in North America. Three concepts are discussed—identity, practice, and context—that may prove useful for the development of archaeologies of persistence by allowing us to counter terminal narratives and essentialist concepts of cultural identity that are deeply ingrained in scholarly and popular thinking about Native American societies. The use of these concepts is illustrated in an example that shows how current archaeological research is challenging long-held scholarty and popular beliefs about the effects of colonialism in coastal California, where the policies of Spanish colonial missionaries have long been thought to have driven local native peoples to cultural extinction. By exploring how the sometimes dramatic changes of the colonial period were internally structured and are just one part of long and dynamic native histories, archaeologies of persistence may help to bring about a shift in how the archaeology of colonialism presents the histories of native peoples in North America—one that can make archaeology more relevant to descendant communities.

Over the past 11,000 years humans have brought a wide variety of animals under domestication. Domestic animals belong to all Linnaean animal classes—mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, and even, arguably, bacteria. Raised for food, secondary products, labor, and companionship, domestic animals have become intricately woven into human economy, society, and religion. Animal domestication is an on-going process, as humans, with increasingly sophisticated technology for breeding and rearing animals in captivity, continue to bring more and more species under their control. Understanding the process of animal domestication and its reciprocal impacts on humans and animal domesticates requires a multidisciplinary approach. This paper brings together recent research in archaeology, genetics, and animal sciences in a discussion of the process of domestication, its impact on animal domesticates, and the various pathways humans and their animal partners have followed into domestication.