Places That Count: Traditional Cultural Properties in Cultural Resource Management (Volume 5) (Heritage Resource Managemen...

Places That Count: Traditional Cultural Properties in Cultural Resource Management (Volume 5) (Heritage Resource Managemen...

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Places That Count offers professionals within the field of cultural resource management (CRM) valuable practical advice on dealing with traditional cultural properties (TCPs). Responsible for coining the term to describe places of community-based cultural importance, Thomas King now revisits this subject to instruct readers in TCP site identification, documentation, and management. With more than 30 years of experience at working with communities on such sites, he identifies common issues of contention and methods of resolving them through consultation and other means. Through the extensive use of examples, from urban ghettos to Polynesian ponds to Mount Shasta, TCPs are shown not to be limited simply to American Indian burial and religious sites, but include a wide array of valued locations and landscapes-the United States and worldwide. This is a must-read for anyone involved in historical preservation, cultural resource management, or community development.

 

The Power of Stars

The Power of Stars

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Explores the influence of the sky on both ancient and modern civilization, by providing a overview of the many ways in which humans have used the stars as an ordering principle in their cultures, and which still inspire us intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.

 

The road: An ethnography of (im)mobility, space, and cross-border infrastructures in the Balkans

The road: An ethnography of (im)mobility, space, and cross-border infrastructures in the Balkans

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This book is an ethnographic and historical study of the main Albania-Greece highway. But more than an ethnography on the road, it is an anthropology of the road. Highways are part of an explicit cultural-material nexus that includes houses, urban architecture and vehicles. Complex socio-political phenomena such as EU border security, nationalist politics, post-Cold War capitalism and financial crises all leave their mark in the concrete. This book explores anew classical anthropological and sociological categories of analysis in direct reference to infrastructure, providing unique insights into the political and cultural processes that took place across Europe after the Cold War. More specifically, it sheds light on political and economic relationships in the Balkans during the socialist post-Cold War period, focusing especially on Albania, one of the most under-researched countries in the region.

 

Arrowheads and Spear Points in the Prehistoric Southeast: A Guide to Understanding Cultural Artifacts

Arrowheads and Spear Points in the Prehistoric Southeast: A Guide to Understanding Cultural Artifacts

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The Native American tribes of what is now the southeastern United States left intriguing relics of their ancient cultural life. Arrowheads, spear points, stone tools, and other artifacts are found in newly plowed fields, on hillsides after a fresh rain, or in washed-out creek beds. These are tangible clues to the anthropology of the Paleo-Indians, and the highly developed Mississippian peoples.This indispensable guide to identifying and understanding such finds is for conscientious amateur archeologists who make their discoveries in surface terrain. Many are eager to understand the culture that produced the artifact, what kind of people created it, how it was made, how old it is, and what its purpose was.Here is a handbook that seeks identification through the clues of cultural history. In discussing materials used, the process of manufacture, and the relationship between the artifacts and the environments, it reveals ancient discoveries to be not merely interesting trinkets but by-products from the once vital societies in areas that are now Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, the Carolinas, as well as in southeastern Texas, southern Missouri, southern Illinois, and southern Indiana.The text is documented by more than a hundred drawings in the actual size of the artifacts, as well as by a glossary of archeological terms and a helpful list of state and regional archeological societies.

 

Breve historia del Homo Sapiens (Latin American)

Breve historia del Homo Sapiens (Latin American)

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“Una carrera, con demasiados obstáculos a veces, que nos ha llevado a ser la especie dominante en nuestro planeta la que ha dejado atrás a otros congéneres, también humanos, que no pudieron adaptarse a las condiciones cambiantes de nuestro planeta. Se trata de un libro entretenido y ameno para comprender por qué somos como somos.” (Blog El alfabeto sagrado)“Desde que vivía colgado de los árboles hasta que pisó la luna, el camino de la especie humana para dominar el planeta que le vio crecer no ha sido fácil. Ha habido demasiados callejones sin salida, adaptaciones que terminaron por extinguirse, hasta conseguir los cambios necesarios para dominar a las otras especies. Fernando Diez no sólo se limita a contarnos la historia de la evolución humana, también nos habla del difícil camino que ha seguido en la consecución de su propio conocimiento hasta alcanzar la comprensión de sí misma.” (Web Anika entre libros)La historia de una especie que, luchando contra el clima, los accidentes geográficos y el resto de especies, se ha convertido en la especie hegemónica en la Tierra: la única especie del género Homo que sigue aún con vida.La historia evolutiva del ser humano es relativamente reciente, nace en el S. XIX con la teoría de la evolución de Darwin, además ha tenido que sortear no pocos obstáculos doctrinales, ha tenido que chocar con los más aferrados dogmas religiosos y con las teorías científicas más reaccionarias. Breve Historia del Homo Sapiens nos presenta dos epopeyas paralelas, la aventura de la evolución humana desde los primates hasta la actualidad y la aventura de la investigación paleontológica. La investigación sobre los orígenes del hombre nunca está exenta de controversia e incluso en la actualidad los dogmas más arcaicos de la humanidad siguen pugnando y presentando batalla al origen animal del ser humano.Comienza este completo recorrido Fernando Diez Martín situándonos en medio de la controversia entre la teoría de la evolución y el creacionismo para desde ahí narrarnos de un modo ágil los hitos más importantes en el estudio de la evolución humana: el hallazgo de los primeros fósiles en 1856 en el valle de Neander, la aparición del Australopitecus afarensis, o el famosos fraude de Piltdown. Pero también analizará el autor los elementos que han distinguido a nuestros ancestros de sus parientes los chimpancés desde los rasgos morfológicos hasta los rasgos culturales y, por último, nos narrará la historia de la expansión de la especie Homo por Asia y Europa y nos enseñará unas claves que la paleontología nos da para reflexionar sobre el futuro de la especie: nuestra ligazón con el mundo animal, la delicada dependencia que tiene el hombre con los ciclos de la naturaleza, nuestra particular adaptación cultural con el medio y el hecho de comprender que el ser humano es sólo una especie más de las que han habitado la Tierra.Razones para comprar la obra:El autor logra resumir una disciplina muy compleja, cargada de debates y muy específica y la muestra de un modo muy divulgativo.El estilo de la obra es muy narrativo y el autor ayuda a esa ligereza con numerosas curiosidades y anécdotas.Incluye al final una útil bibliografía comentada que es una guía imprescindible para todo el que quiera profundizar en el tema.Apoya la lectura y la asimilación de conocimientos la cronología final que recoge los momentos más determinantes de la investigación paleontológica y las fotografías y reconstrucciones incluidas en la obra.Un libro que nos ayudará a comprender no sólo de dónde venimos, sino también hacia dónde va la especie y qué necesitamos cambiar para que pueda sobrevivir. El libro, además relata la historia de una investigación viva aún y que nos puede deparar aún muchas sorpresas sobre nuestros orígenes animales.Please note: This audiobook is in Latin American Spanish.

 

Anthropological Approaches to Zooarchaeology: Colonialism, Complexity and Animal Transformations

Anthropological Approaches to Zooarchaeology: Colonialism, Complexity and Animal Transformations

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Animals in complex human societies are often both meal and symbol, related to everyday practice and ritual. People in such societies may be characterized as having unequal access to such resources, or else the meaning of animals may differ for component groups. Here, in this book, 28 peer-reviewed papers that span 4 continents and the Caribbean islands explore in different ways how animals were incorporated into the diets and religions of many unique societies. The temporal range is from the Neolithic to the Spanish colonization of the New World as well as to modern tourist trade in indigenous animal art. The volume explores various themes including the interaction of foodways with complex societies, the interaction between diet and colonialism and the complex role that animals, and parts of animals, play in all human societies as religious, identity markers, or other types of symbols. Organized according to these themes, rather than geographic location or time period, the papers presented here crosscut such divisions. In so doing, this book presents an opportunity for scholars divided by geography especially, but also by temporal period, to explore each other's research and demonstrate that different archaeological settings can address the same problems cross-culturally.

 

Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture

Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture

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Japan was the only non-Western nation to industrialize before 1900 and its leap into the modern era has stimulated vigorous debates among historians and social scientists. In an innovative discussion that posits the importance of physical well-being as a key indicator of living standards, Susan B. Hanley considers daily life in the three centuries leading up to the modern era in Japan. She concludes that people lived much better than has been previously understood—at levels equal or superior to their Western contemporaries. She goes on to illustrate how this high level of physical well-being had important consequences for Japan's ability to industrialize rapidly and for the comparatively smooth transition to a modern, industrial society.While others have used income levels to conclude that the Japanese household was relatively poor in those centuries, Hanley examines the material culture—food, sanitation, housing, and transportation. How did ordinary people conserve the limited resources available in this small island country? What foods made up the daily diet and how were they prepared? How were human wastes disposed of? How long did people live? Hanley answers all these questions and more in an accessible style and with frequent comparisons with Western lifestyles. Her methods allow for cross-cultural comparisons between Japan and the West as well as Japan and the rest of Asia. They will be useful to anyone interested in the effects of modernization on daily life.