Personal Ornaments in Prehistory

Author: Emma L. Baysal
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789252873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Book Description
Beads, bracelets, necklaces, pendants and many other ornaments are familiar objects that play a fundamental role in personal expression and communication. This book considers how and why the human relationship with ornaments developed and continued over tens of thousands of years, from hunter-gatherer life in the cave to urban elites, from expedient use of natural resources to complex technologies. Using evidence from archaeological sites across Turkey, the Near East and the Balkans, it explores the history of personal ornaments from their appearance in the Palaeolithic until the rise of urban centers in the Early Bronze Age and encompassing technologies ranging from stone cutting to early glazing, metallurgy and the roots of glass manufacture. The development of theoretical and practical approaches to ornaments and the current state of research are illustrated with a wide variety of examples. This book shows that far from being objects of display, of little value in archaeological interpretation and often overlooked, these artifacts are key to understanding trade, relationships, values, beliefs and the construction of personal identity in the past. Indeed, more than any other group of artifacts, their variety in material, form, use and distribution opens doors to both wide ranging scientific exploration and consideration of what it is to be human.

Personal Ornaments in Prehistory

Author: Emma L. Baysal
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 178925289X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Not Just for Show

Author: Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1785706934
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 489

Book Description
Beads, beadwork, and personal ornaments are made of diverse materials such as shell, bone, stones, minerals, and composite materials. Their exploration from geographical and chronological settings around the world offers a glimpse at some of the cutting edge research within the fast growing field of personal ornaments in humanities’ past. Recent studies are based on a variety of analytical procedures that highlight humankind’s technological advances, exchange networks, mortuary practices, and symbol-laden beliefs. Papers discuss the social narratives behind bead and beadwork manufacture, use and disposal; the way beads work visually, audibly and even tactilely to cue wearers and audience to their social message(s). Understanding the entangled social and technical aspects of beads require a broad spectrum of technical and methodological approaches including the identification of the sources for the raw material of beads. These scientific approaches are also combined in some instances with experimentation to clarify the manner in which beads were produced and used in past societies.

Prehistoric Art

Author: Randall White
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 9780810942622
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
Drawing on the most up-to-the-minute research on prehistoric art, an anthropologist presents a global survey, starting with the first explosion of imagery that occurred approximately 40,000 years ago but also including the creations of essentially "prehistoric" peoples living as recently as the early 20th century. 226 illustrations.

Ornaments and Other Ambiguous Artifacts from Franchthi

Author: Catherine Perlès
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253067766
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453

Book Description
The famous Franchthi Cave excavations in Greece brought to light an exceptionally long sequence of ornaments, spanning from the earliest Upper Paleolithic to the end of the Neolithic. This volume focuses on the Neolithic, whose assemblages are far more diversified than those of earlier times. The introduction during the Neolithic of entirely artificial shapes, geometric and anthropomorphic, creates a marked departure from earlier periods and shows new directions in creativity by the bead makers. It also denotes a conceptual break in the treatment of shell, no longer solely a natural element barely modified by perforation, but now also a raw material rendered anonymous by workmanship. Due to the systematic sieving of the sediments and its location by the sea, the Franchthi cave and its outdoor settlement, the Paralia, yielded one of the richest collection of ornaments for Neolithic Greece.

Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory

Author: Ian Gilligan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108470084
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
The first book on the origin of clothes shows why climate change was crucial - for the origin of agriculture too.

How Ancient Europeans Saw the World

Author: Peter S. Wells
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400844770
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
A revolutionary approach to how we view Europe's prehistoric culture The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places—and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience. How Ancient Europeans Saw the World offers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe's pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.

The Cambridge World Prehistory

Author: Colin Renfrew
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107647754
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 5256

Book Description
The Cambridge World Prehistory provides a systematic and authoritative examination of the prehistory of every region around the world from the early days of human origins in Africa two million years ago to the beginnings of written history, which in some areas started only two centuries ago. Written by a team of leading international scholars, the volumes include both traditional topics and cutting-edge approaches, such as archaeolinguistics and molecular genetics, and examine the essential questions of human development around the world. The volumes are organised geographically, exploring the evolution of hominins and their expansion from Africa, as well as the formation of states and development in each region of different technologies such as seafaring, metallurgy and food production. The Cambridge World Prehistory reveals a rich and complex history of the world. It will be an invaluable resource for any student or scholar of archaeology and related disciplines looking to research a particular topic, tradition, region or period within prehistory.

Tools, Weapons and Ornaments

Author: Herbert Schutz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004122987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Book Description
The book examines the link between history and archeology derived from funerary and settlement materials in early Medieval Central Europe. The evidence demonstrates that the populations located to the north of the Roman frontiers were culturally aware societies with socio-political structures.

Time and History in Prehistory

Author: Stella Souvatzi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315531836
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
Time and History in Prehistory explores the many processes through which time and history are conceptualized and constructed, challenging the perception of prehistoric societies as ahistorical. Drawing equally on contemporary theory and illustrative case studies, and firmly rooted in material evidence, this book rearticulates concepts of time and history, questions the kind of narratives to be written about the past and underlines the fundamentally historical nature of prehistory. From a range of multi-disciplinary perspectives, the authors of this volume address the scales at which archaeological evidence and narrative are interwoven, from a single day to deep history and from a solitary pot to a complete city. In doing so, they argue the need for a multi-scalar approach to prehistoric data that allows for the interplay between short and long term, and for analytical units that encourage us to move continuously between scales. The growing interest in time and history in archaeology and across a wide range of disciplines concerned with human action and the human past highlights that these are exceptionally active fields. By juxtaposing varied viewpoints, this volume bridges gaps in narrative, finds a place for inclusive histories and makes clear the benefit of integrative and interdisciplinary approaches, including different disciplines and types of data.