The Value of a Human Life

The Value of a Human Life
Author: Karel Innemée
Publisher:
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2022-04-20
Genre:
ISBN: 9789464260571

Experts from different disciplines present new insights into the subject of ritual homicide in various regions of the ancient world.

Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity

Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity
Author: John Salmon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2013-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134841647

Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity shows how today's environmental and ecological concerns can help illuminate our study of the ancient world. The contributors consider how the Greeks and Romans perceived their natural world, and how their perceptions affected society. The effects of human settlement and cultivation on the landscape are considered, as well as the representation of landscape in Attic drama. Various aspects of farming, such as the use of terraces and the significance of olive growing are examined. The uncultivated landscape was also important: hunting was a key social ritual for Greek and hellenistic elites, and 'wild' places were not wastelands but played an essential economic role. The Romans' attempts to control their environment are analyzed. This volume shows how Greeks and Romans worked hand in hand with their natural environment and not against it. It represents an outstanding collaboration between the disciplines of history and archaeology.

Human Antiquity: An Introduction to Physical Anthropology and Archaeology

Human Antiquity: An Introduction to Physical Anthropology and Archaeology
Author: Kenneth Feder
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006-07-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780073041964

Where did we come from? To answer this question, anthropologists reconstruct the human past and study the human present from both biological and cultural perspectives. Human Antiquity offers an absorbing, straightforward explanation of human origins and evolution by thoroughly integrating physical anthropology and archaeology. Co-authors Kenneth Feder and Michael Park combine the ideas, methods, and knowledge from both biological anthropology and archaeology into a unified effort: Feder is an archeologist who conducts surveys, excavations, and analyses to understand the native inhabitants of New England; Park is a biological anthropologist interested in the application of evolutionary theory to the biological history of our species.

Divination and Human Nature

Divination and Human Nature
Author: Peter Struck
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2018-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691183457

Divination and Human Nature casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination—the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. In this book, Peter Struck reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact—that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights—and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, Struck demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, Struck notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, Divination and Human Nature illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.

Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology

Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology
Author: Eleanor Harrison-Buck
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2018-08-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1607327473

Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology explores the benefits and consequences of archaeological theorizing on and interpretation of the social agency of nonhumans as relational beings capable of producing change in the world. The volume cross-examines traditional understanding of agency and personhood, presenting a globally diverse set of case studies that cover a range of cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. Agency (the ability to act) and personhood (the reciprocal qualities of relational beings) have traditionally been strictly assigned to humans. In case studies from Ghana to Australia to the British Isles and Mesoamerica, contributors to this volume demonstrate that objects, animals, locations, and other nonhuman actors also potentially share this ontological status and are capable of instigating events and enacting change. This kind of other-than-human agency is not a one-way transaction of cause to effect but requires an appropriate form of reciprocal engagement indicative of relational personhood, which in these cases, left material traces detectable in the archaeological record. Modern dualist ontologies separating objects from subjects and the animate from the inanimate obscure our understanding of the roles that other-than-human agents played in past societies. Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology challenges this essentialist binary perspective. Contributors in this volume show that intersubjective (inherently social) ways of being are a fundamental and indispensable condition of all personhood and move the debate in posthumanist scholarship beyond the polarizing dichotomies of relational versus bounded types of persons. In this way, the book makes a significant contribution to theory and interpretation of personhood and other-than-human agency in archaeology. Contributors: Susan M. Alt, Joanna Brück, Kaitlyn Chandler, Erica Hill, Meghan C. L. Howey, Andrew Meirion Jones, Matthew Looper, Ian J. McNiven, Wendi Field Murray, Timothy R. Pauketat, Ann B. Stahl, Maria Nieves Zedeño

Forbidden Archeology

Forbidden Archeology
Author: Michael A. Cremo
Publisher: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust
Total Pages: 968
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN:

Over the centuries, researchers have found bones and artifacts proving that humans like us have existed for millions of years. Mainstream science, however, has supppressed these facts. Prejudices based on current scientific theory act as a knowledge filter, giving us a picture of prehistory that is largely incorrect.

Interactions between Animals and Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

Interactions between Animals and Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity
Author: Thorsten Fögen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2017-08-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110545624

The seventeen contributions to this volume, written by leading experts, show that animals and humans in Graeco-Roman antiquity are interconnected on a variety of different levels and that their encounters and interactions often result from their belonging to the same structures, ‘networks’ and communities or at least from finding themselves together in a certain setting, context or environment – wittingly or unwittingly. Papers explore the concrete categories of interaction between animals and humans that can be identified, in what contexts they occur, and what types of evidence can be productively used to examine the concept of interactions. Articles in this volume take into account literary, visual, and other types of evidence. A comprehensive research bibliography is also provided.