EBooks
Advancement in Ancient Civilizations by
Traditional scholarship on how ancient civilizations emerged is outmoded and new insights call for revision. According to the well-established paradigm, Mesopotamia is considered the cradle of civilization. Following the cliche of ex oriente lux ("light from the East") all major achievements of humankind spread from the Middle East. Modern archaeology, cultural science and historical linguistics indicate civilizations did not originate from a single prototype. Several models produced divergent patterns of advanced culture, developing both hierarchical and egalitarian societies. This study outlines a panorama of ancient civilizations, including the still little-known Danube civilization, now identified as the oldest advanced culture in Europe. In a comparative view, a new paradigm of research and a new cultural chronology of civilizations in the Old and New Worlds emerges, with climate change shown to be a continual influence on human lifeways.
ISBN: 9781476679891Publication Date: 2020-09-18
Cave Art, Perception and Knowledge by
Using the example of prehistoric paintings discovered in the late 19th century in Spain and France Cave Art, Perception and Knowledge inquires into epistemic questions related to images, depicting and perception that this rich material has given rise to. The book traces the outline of the doxa of cave art studies.
ISBN: 1349444731Publication Date: 2012-01-01
The Idea of Order : The Circular Archetype in Prehistoric Europe by
Although their distinctive character has engaged the interest of alternative archaeologists, the significance of circular structures has rarely been discussed in a rigorous manner. 'The Idea of Order' uses archaeological evidence, combined with insights from anthropology, to investigate the creation, use and ultimate demise of circular architecture in prehistoric Europe.
Publication Date: 2020
Making a mark: image and process in Neolithic Britain and Ireland by
The visual imagery of Neolithic Britain and Ireland is spectacular. While the imagery of passage tombs, such as Knowth and Newgrange, are well known the rich imagery on decorated portable artefacts is less well understood. How does the visual imagery found on decorated portable artefacts compare with other Neolithic imagery, such as passage tomb art and rock art? How do decorated portable artefacts relate chronologically to other examples of Neolithic imagery?Using cutting edge digital imaging techniques, the Making a Mark project examined Neolithic decorated portable artefacts of chalk, stone, bone, antler, and wood from three key regions: southern England and East Anglia; the Irish Sea region (Wales, the Isle of Man and eastern Ireland); and Northeast Scotland and Orkney. Digital analysis revealed, for the first time, the prevalence of practices of erasure and reworking amongst a host of decorated portable artefacts, changing our understanding of these enigmatic artefacts. Rather than mark making being a peripheral activity, we can now appreciate the central importance of mark making to the formation of Neolithic communities across Britain and Ireland.The volume visually documents and discusses the contexts of the decorated portable artefacts from each region, discusses the significance and chronology of practices of erasure and reworking, and compares these practices with those found in other Neolithic contexts, such as passage tomb art, rock art and pottery decoration. A contribution from Antonia Thomas also discusses the settlement art and mortuary art of Orkney, while Ian Dawson and Louisa Minkin contribute with a discussion of the collaborative fine art practices established during the project.
Publication Date: 2019
Rock Art in an Indigenous Landscape by
Examines a host of rock art sites from Nova Scotia to Maryland Rock art, petroglyphs, and pictographs have been made by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Images have been found on bedrock, cliff faces, ridge tops, and boulders and in rock shelters. Some rock surfaces are covered with abstract and geometric designs such as concentric circles, zigzag lines, grids, and cross-hatched and ladder-like patterns. Others depict humans, footprints and handprints, mammals, serpents, and mythic creatures. All were meticulously pecked, incised or painted. This ancient art form connects us to Native Americans' past, traditions, world views, and sacred places. Rock Art in an Indigenous Landscape: From Atlantic Canada to Chesapeake Bay is the culmination of the research of preeminent rock art scholar Edward J. Lenik. Here, he profiles more than 64 examples of rock art in varied locations from Nova Scotia to Maryland. Chapters are organized geographically and lead the reader through coastal sites, rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, and upland sites. Lenik discusses the rock art examples in the context of the indigenous landscape, noting the significance of the place of discovery. Coverage includes a meticulous description of the design or motif and suggestions of time frame, artist-makers, and interpretations. Where possible, indigenous views on the artifacts enrich the narrative. Other invaluable elements are a discussion of how to identify indigenous rock art; a glossary of rock art terms and features and archaeological culture periods; an up-to-date bibliography; and an appendix of a number of reported but unconfirmed petroglyph sites in the regions.
ISBN: 9780817393625Publication Date: 2021-06-29
Standing on the Walls of Time by
In western culture, rock art has traditionally been viewed as "primitive" and properly belonging in the purview of anthropologists rather than art scholars and critics. This volume, featuring previously unpublished photographs of Utah's magnificent rock art by long-time rock art researcher Layne Miller and essays by former Utah state archaeologist Kevin Jones, views rock art through a different lens. Miller's photographs include many rare and relatively unknown panels and represent a lifetime of work by someone intimately familiar with the Colorado Plateau. The photos highlight the astonishing variety of rock art as well as the variability within traditions and time periods. Jones's essays furnish general information about previous Colorado Plateau cultures and shine a light on rock art as art. The book emphasizes the exquisite artistry of these ancient works and their capacity to reach through the ages to envelop and inspire viewers.
Publication Date: 2019-05-31
A Companion to Ancient near Eastern Art by
Provides a broad view of the history and current state of scholarship on the art of the ancient Near East This book covers the aesthetic traditions of Mesopotamia, Iran, Anatolia, and the Levant, from Neolithic times to the end of the Achaemenid Persian Empire around 330 BCE. It describes and examines the field from a variety of critical perspectives: across approaches and interpretive frameworks, key explanatory concepts, materials and selected media and formats, and zones of interaction. This important work also addresses both traditional and emerging categories of material, intellectual perspectives, and research priorities. The book covers geography and chronology, context and setting, medium and scale, while acknowledging the diversity of regional and cultural traditions and the uneven survival of evidence. Part One of the book considers the methodologies and approaches that the field has drawn on and refined. Part Two addresses terms and concepts critical to understanding the subjects and formal characteristics of the Near Eastern material record, including the intellectual frameworks within which monuments have been approached and interpreted. Part Three surveys the field's most distinctive and characteristic genres, with special reference to Mesopotamian art and architecture. Part Four considers involvement with artistic traditions across a broader reach, examining connections with Egypt, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean. And finally, Part Five addresses intersections with the closely allied discipline of archaeology and the institutional stewardship of cultural heritage in the modern Middle East. Told from multiple perspectives, A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Art is an enlightening, must-have book for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of ancient Near East art and Near East history as well as those interested in history and art history.
ISBN: 9781118336731Publication Date: 2018-09-07
The Zoomorphic Arts of Ancient Central Eurasia by
The volume focuses on the zoomorphic art and design systems of ancient China and Central Asia. It offers a glimpse into convergent and shifting concepts of zoomorphism across political and cultural boundaries, and places special emphasis on nomadic cultural spheres. The papers explore the role of animals in one’s creative process and the factors that might have contributed to the formation of a zoomorphic image system across different parts of ancient Central Eurasia.
ISBN: 9783036568256Publication Date: 2023
Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya by
This nuanced account explores Maya mythology through the lens of art, text, and culture. It offers an important reexamination of the mid-16th-century Popol Vuh, long considered an authoritative text, which is better understood as one among many crucial sources for the interpretation of ancient Maya art and myth. Using materials gathered across Mesoamerica, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos bridges the gap between written texts and artistic representations, identifying key mythical subjects and uncovering their variations in narratives and visual depictions. Central characters—including a secluded young goddess, a malevolent grandmother, a dead father, and the young gods who became the sun and the moon—are identified in pottery, sculpture, mural painting, and hieroglyphic inscriptions. Highlighting such previously overlooked topics as sexuality and generational struggles, this beautifully illustrated book paves the way for a new understanding of Maya myths and their lavish expression in ancient art.
Publication Date: 2017
Buddhism illuminated : manuscript art from Southeast Asia by ISBN: 9780295744490Publication Date: 2018
MORE EBOOKS
Poggio Civitate (Murlo) by
Poggio Civitate in Murlo, Tuscany, is home to one of the best-preserved Etruscan communities of the eighth through the sixth centuries BCE. In this book, Anthony Tuck, the director of excavations, provides a broad synthesis of decades of data from the site. The results of many years of excavation at Poggio Civitate tell a story of growth, urbanization, ancient industrialization, and dissolution. The site preserves traces of aristocratic domestic buildings, including some of the most evocative and enigmatic architectural sculpture in the region, along with remnants of non-elite domestic spaces, enabling illuminating comparisons across social strata. The settlement also features evidence of large-scale production systems, including tools and other objects that reflect the daily experiences of laborers. Finally, the site contains the story of its own destruction. Tuck finds in the data clear indications that Poggio Civitate was methodically dismantled, and he posits hypotheses concerning the circumstances around this violent social and political act.
ISBN: 1477322965Publication Date: 2021
Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome by
Visual culture was an essential part of ancient social, religious, and political life. Appearance and experience of beings and things was of paramount importance. In Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome, Tonio Hölscher explores the fundamental phenomena of Greek and Roman visual culture and their enormous impact on the ancient world, considering memory over time, personal appearance, conceptualization and representation of reality, and significant decoration as fundamental categories of art as well as of social practice. With an emphasis on public spaces such as sanctuaries, agora and forum, Hölscher investigates the ways in which these spaces were used, viewed, and experienced in religious rituals, political manifestations, and social interaction.
ISBN: 0520967887Publication Date: 2018-06-22
Ancient Egypt in the Modern Imagination by
Ancient Egypt has always been a source of fascination to writers, artists and architects in the West. This book is the first study to address representations of Ancient Egypt in the modern imagination, breaking down conventional disciplinary boundaries between fields such as History, Classics, Art History, Fashion, Film, Archaeology, Egyptology, and Literature to further a nuanced understanding of ancient Egypt in cultures stretching from the eighteenth century to the present day, emphasising how some of the various meanings of ancient Egypt to modern people have traversed time and media. Divided into three themes, the chapters scrutinise different aspects of the use of ancient Egypt in a variety of media, looking in particular at the ways in which Egyptology as a discipline has influenced representations of Egypt, ancient Egypt's associations with death and mysticism, as well as connections between ancient Egypt and gendered power. The diversity of this study aims to emphasise both the multiplicity and the patterning of popular responses to ancient Egypt, as well as the longevity of this phenomenon and its relevance today.
Publication Date: 2020-01-23
Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography, and the Making of Machu Picchu by
When Hiram Bingham, a historian from Yale University, first saw Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a ruin obscured by overgrowth whose terraces were farmed a by few families. A century later, Machu Picchu is a UNESCO world heritage site visited by more than a million tourists annually. This remarkable transformation began with the photographs that accompanied Bingham's article published in National Geographic magazine, which depicted Machu Picchu as a lost city discovered. Focusing on the practices, technologies, and materializations of Bingham's three expeditions to Peru (1911, 1912, 1914-1915), this book makes a convincing case that visualization, particularly through the camera, played a decisive role in positioning Machu Picchu as both a scientific discovery and a Peruvian heritage site. Amy Cox Hall argues that while Bingham's expeditions relied on the labor, knowledge, and support of Peruvian elites, intellectuals, and peasants, the practice of scientific witnessing, and photography specifically, converted Machu Picchu into a cultural artifact fashioned from a distinct way of seeing. Drawing on science and technology studies, she situates letter writing, artifact collecting, and photography as important expeditionary practices that helped shape the way we understand Machu Picchu today. Cox Hall also demonstrates that the photographic evidence was unstable, and, as images circulated worldwide, the "lost city" took on different meanings, especially in Peru, which came to view the site as one of national patrimony in need of protection from expeditions such as Bingham's.
Publication Date: 2017-11-22
Rethinking Zapotec time : Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexic by
In Time and the Ancestors: Aztec and Mixtec Ritual Art, Maarten Jansen and Aurora P rez present new interpretations of enigmatic masterpieces from ancient Mexico. Combining iconographical analysis with the study of archaeological contexts, historical sources and living cultural traditions, they shed light on central symbols and values of the religious heritage of indigenous peoples, paying special attention to precolonial perceptions of time and the importance of ancestor worship. They decipher the meaning of the treasure deposited in Tomb 7 at Monte Alb n (Oaxaca) and of artworks such as the Roll of the New Fire (Selden Roll), the Aztec religious sculptures and, last but not least, the mysterious chapter of temple scenes from the Book of Night and Wind (Codex Borgia).
Publication Date: 2022
The Lost World of Byzantium by
The acclaimed author of Byzantium and the Crusades "offers a fresh take on this fabled but hidden civilization" across 11 centuries of history (Colin Wells, author of Sailing from Byzantium). For more than a millennium, the Byzantine Empire presided over the juncture between East and West, as well as the transition from the classical to the modern world. Rather than recounting the standard chronology of emperors and battles, leading Byzantium scholar Jonathan Harris focuses each chapter of this engaging history on a succession of archetypal figures, families, places, and events. Harris's introduction presents a civilization rich in contrasts, combining orthodox Christianity with paganism, and classical Greek learning with Roman power. Though frequently assailed by numerous armies, Byzantium survived by dint of its unorthodox foreign policy. Over time, its sumptuous art and architecture flourished, helping to establish a deep sense of Byzantine identity in its people. Synthesizing a wealth of sources to cover all major aspects of the empire's social, political, military, religious, cultural, and artistic history, Harris's study illuminates the heart of Byzantine civilization and explores its remarkable and lasting influence on the modern world.
ISBN: 0300216092Publication Date: 2015-08-15
Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art by
In the rapidly changing world of the early Middle Ages, depictions of the cosmos represented a consistent point of reference across the three dominant states--the Frankish, Byzantine, and Islamic Empires. As these empires diverged from their Greco-Roman roots between 700 and 1000 A.D. and established distinctive medieval artistic traditions, cosmic imagery created a web of visual continuity, though local meanings of these images varied greatly. Benjamin Anderson uses thrones, tables, mantles, frescoes, and manuscripts to show how cosmological motifs informed relationships between individuals, especially the ruling elite, and communities, demonstrating how domestic and global politics informed the production and reception of these depictions. The first book to consider such imagery across the dramatically diverse cultures of Western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic Middle East, Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art illuminates the distinctions between the cosmological art of these three cultural spheres, and reasserts the centrality of astronomical imagery to the study of art history.
ISBN: 9780300219166Publication Date: 2017-02-28
A Medieval Woman's Companion: Women's Lives in the European Middle Ages by
What have a deaf nun, the mother of the first baby born to Europeans in North America, and a condemned heretic to do with one another? They are among the virtuous virgins, marvellous maidens, and fierce feminists of the Middle Ages who trail-blazed paths for women today. Without those first courageous souls who worked in fields dominated by men, women might not have the presence they currently do in professions such as education, the law, and literature. Focusing on women from Western Europe between c. 300 and 1500 CE in the medieval period and richly carpeted with detail, A Medieval Woman's Companion offers a wealth of information about real medieval women who are now considered vital for understanding the Middle Ages in a full and nuanced way. Short biographies of 20 medieval women illustrate how they have anticipated and shaped current concerns, including access to education; creative emotional outlets such as art, theatre, romantic fiction, and music; marriage and marital rights; fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, contraception and gynecology; sex trafficing and sexual violence; the balance of work and family; faith; and disability. Their legacy abides until today in attitudes to contemporary women that have their roots in the medieval period. The final chapter suggests how 20th and 21st century feminist and gender theories can be applied to and complicated by medieval women's lives and writings.Doubly marginalised due to gender and the remoteness of the time period, medieval women's accomplishments are acknowledged and presented in a way that readers can appreciate and find inspiring. Ideal for high school and college classroom use in courses ranging from history and literature to women's and gender studies, an accompanying website with educational links, images, downloadable curriculum guide, and interactive blog will be made available at the time of publication.
Publication Date: 2015-11-30
Gothic Art by
Gothic art finds its roots in the powerful architecture of the cathedrals of northern France. It is a medieval art movement that evolved throughout Europe over more than 200 years.Leaving curved Roman forms behind, the architects started using flying buttresses and pointed arches to open up cathedrals to daylight. A period of great economic and social change, the Gothic era also saw the development of a new iconography celebrating the Holy Mary - in drastic contrast to the fearful themes of dark Roman times. Full of rich changes in all of the various art forms (architecture, sculpture, painting, etc.), Gothic art paved the way for the Italian Renaissance and International Gothic movement.
ISBN: 1781602247Publication Date: 2016-03-09
Out of the Stream: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Mural Painting by
The subject of this book arises from recent developments in the inventory, preservation and study of mural paintings from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, particularly those from what can be considered the periphery of Europe. The aim of this book is to demonstrate the vitality that the study of wall painting in peripheral regions can bring to the discipline of Art History. The articles collected in this book are overwhelmingly about wall paintings that would be hard pressed to be considered part of the master narrative of Art History. They are studies regarding regions and themes that are rarely present in the mainstream of the discipline, but their common thread is their focus on the functional dimension of mural paintings and on the complex interrelation between image, audience, social context and everyday life. From Denmark to Portugal, from graffiti to secular painting, from the orthodox monasteries of Moldavia to the noble residences of Tirol, from Giotto to anonymous and sometimes almost amateur painters, the studies gathered in this book place very distinct artistic realities side by side offering complementary perspectives and insights. The book will make a valuable contribution to the literature on Medieval and Renaissance mural painting, combining theoretical essays with others more descriptive. As the eighteen studies collected in this book deal with paintings from a range of European regions, from Denmark to Portugal and Romania, the book will find its way in Europe and abroad, both in the field of art history and that of Medieval and Early Modern history. The wealth of plates and figures will make the book also accessible to a broad audience interested in the history of painting, architecture and cultural heritage.
Publication Date: 2007-08-01
