Methods in Ancient Wine Archaeology

Methods in Ancient Wine Archaeology
Author: Emlyn Dodd
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2024-02-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1350346667

Bringing together a wide array of modern scientific techniques and interdisciplinary approaches, this book provides an accessible guide to the methods that form the current bedrock of research into Roman, and more broadly ancient, wine. Chapters are arranged into thematic sections, covering biomolecular archaeology and chemical analysis, archaeobotany and palynology, vineyard and landscape archaeology and computational and experimental archaeology. These include discussions of some of the most recent techniques, such as ancient DNA and organic residue analyses, geophysical prospection, multispectral imaging and spatial and climatic modelling. While most of the content is of direct relevance to the Roman Mediterranean, the assortment of detailed case studies, methodological outlines and broader 'state of the field' reflections is of equal use to researchers working across disparate disciplines, geographies, and chronologies. The study of ancient Roman wine has been dominated until recently by traditional archaeological analyses focused upon production facilities and ceramic evidence related to transport. While such architecture and artefact-focussed approaches provide a fundamental foundation for our understanding of this topic, they fail to provide the requisite nuance to answer other questions regarding grape cultivation and wine production, consumption, use and trade. As the first compendium of its kind, this book supports the embedding of modern scientific and experimental techniques into archaeological fieldwork, research and laboratory analysis, pushing the boundaries of what questions can be explored, and serving as a launching point for future avenues of interdisciplinary research.

Technical Ekphrasis in Greek and Roman Science and Literature

Technical Ekphrasis in Greek and Roman Science and Literature
Author: Courtney Roby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2016-02-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1316531244

Ekphrasis is familiar as a rhetorical tool for inducing enargeia, the vivid sense that a reader or listener is actually in the presence of the objects described. This book focuses on the ekphrastic techniques used in ancient Greek and Roman literature to describe technological artifacts. Since the literary discourse on technology extended beyond technical texts, this book explores 'technical ekphrasis' in a wide range of genres, including history, poetry, and philosophy as well as mechanical, scientific, and mathematical works. Technical authors like Philo of Byzantium, Vitruvius, Hero of Alexandria, and Claudius Ptolemy are put into dialogue with close contemporaries in other genres, like Diodorus Siculus, Cicero, Ovid, and Aelius Theon. The treatment of 'technical ekphrasis' here covers the techniques of description, the interaction of verbal and visual elements, the role of instructions, and the balance between describing the artifact's material qualities and the other bodies of knowledge it evokes.

Coming to Terms

Coming to Terms
Author: Markus Asper
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2023-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 3111314537

Terminologies present various challenges to their inventors and to their users, ranging from epistemic adequacy over linguistic concerns to matters of strategy and group construction. With respect to historical terminologies, however, research has been dominated by linguistic approaches. Breaking new ground, Coming to Terms collects eleven articles that combine an interest in the history of knowledge, mostly ancient Greek, with research on scientific terminologies. They all share an interest in terminological practices, that is, questions such as how and when to coin a term and then what to do with it. Among the fields discussed are astronomy, the Roman surveyors, Aristotelian science, Renaissance and modern biology, contemporary medicine, ancient Chinese philosophy, 20th-century physics, and colonial linguistics. Confronting ancient with modern terminologies, the collection intends to test integrative interpretive approaches. Thus, the collection documents how rich ancient (and modern) terminologies are and shows that they are, beyond lexicography, worth being studied per se.

Theory as History

Theory as History
Author: Jairus Banaji
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2010-03-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9004183728

Winner of the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. The essays collected here straddle four decades of work in both historiography and Marxist theory, combining source-based historical work in a wide range of languages with sophisticated discussion of Marx's categories. Key themes include the distinctions that are crucial to restoring complexity to the Marxist notion of a 'mode of production'; the emergence of medieval relations of production; the origins of capitalism; the dichotomy between free and unfree labour; and essays in agrarian history that range widely from Byzantine Egypt to 19th-century colonialism. The essays demonstrate the importance of reintegrating theory with history and of bringing history back into historical materialism. An introductory chapter ties the collection together and shows how historical materialists can develop an alternative to Marx's 'Asiatic mode of production'.

Exploring the Economy of Late Antiquity

Exploring the Economy of Late Antiquity
Author: Jairus Banaji
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2016
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107101948

This book contributes to a new economic history of late antiquity, with tightly argued, stimulating studies of class, money and exchange.

A Companion to Medieval Art

A Companion to Medieval Art
Author: Conrad Rudolph
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 1040
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1119077729

A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.

Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
Author: Ingrid Baumgärtner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2019-03-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110588773

The volume discusses the world as it was known in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, focusing on projects concerned with mapping as a conceptual and artistic practice, with visual representations of space, and with destinations of real and fictive travel. Maps were often taken as straightforward, objective configurations. However, they expose deeply subjective frameworks with social, political, and economic significance. Travel narratives, whether illustrated or not, can address similar frameworks. Whereas travelled space is often adventurous, and speaking of hardship, strange encounters and danger, city portraits tell a tale of civilized life and civic pride. The book seeks to address the multiple ways in which maps and travel literature conceive of the world, communicate a 'Weltbild', depict space, and/or define knowledge. The volume challenges academic boundaries in the study of cartography by exploring the links between mapmaking and artistic practices. The contributions discuss individual mapmakers, authors of travelogues, mapmaking as an artistic practice, the relationship between travel literature and mapmaking, illustration in travel literature, and imagination in depictions of newly explored worlds.

Fear of slaves, fear of enslavement in the ancient Mediterranean

Fear of slaves, fear of enslavement in the ancient Mediterranean
Author: Anastasia Serghidou
Publisher: Presses Univ. Franche-Comté
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9782848671697

Les intervenants analysent le couple du maître et de l'esclave au regard des schémas d'autorité et d'obéissance, de liberté et de servitude, de suprématie et de soumission, et les incidences de ces problématiques sur les mouvements du corps social dans l'Antiquité.