The Reuse of Tombs in Eastern Arabia

The Reuse of Tombs in Eastern Arabia
Author: Stephanie Döpper
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2023-10-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1803274980

This book investigate reuse of tombs in Eastern Arabia from the beginning of the Early Bronze Age until the end of the Sasanian period in order to understand the underlying purposes and social context of this practice.

Beyond Barrows

Beyond Barrows
Author: David R. Fontijn
Publisher: Sidestone Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 9088901082

Europe is dotted with tens of thousands of prehistoric barrows. In spite of their ubiquity, little is known on the role they had in pre- and protohistoric landscapes. In 2010, an international group of archaeologists came together at the conference of the European Association of Archaeologists in The Hague to discuss and review current research on this topic. This book presents the proceedings of that session. The focus is on the prehistory of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, but also includes an excursion to huge prehistoric mounds in the southeast of North America. One contribution presents new evidence on how the immediate environment of Neolithic Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture megaliths was ordered, another one discusses the role of remarkable single and double post alignments around Bronze and Iron Age burial mounds. Zooming out, several chapters deal with the place of barrows in the broader landscape. The significance of humanly-managed heath in relation to barrow groups is discussed, and one contribution emphasizes how barrow orderings not only reflect spatial organization, but are also important as conceptual anchors structuring prehistoric perception. Other authors, dealing with Early Neolithic persistent places and with Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age urnfields, argue that we should also look beyond monumentality in order to understand long-term use of "ritual landscapes". The book contains an important contribution by the well-known Swedish archaeologist Tore Artelius on how Bronze Age barrows were structurally re-used by pre-Christian Vikings. This is his last article, written briefly before his death. This book is dedicated to his memory. This publication is part of the Ancestral Mounds Research Project of the University of Leiden.

Reset in Stone

Reset in Stone
Author: Sarah A. Rous
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0299322807

Ancient Athenians were known to reuse stone artifacts, architectural blocks, and public statuary in the creation of new buildings and monuments. However, these construction decisions went beyond mere pragmatics: they were often a visible mechanism for shaping communal memory, especially in periods of profound and challenging social or political transformation. Sarah Rous develops the concept of upcycling to refer to this meaningful reclamation, the intentionality of reemploying each particular object for its specific new context. The upcycling approach drives innovative reinterpretations of diverse cases, including column drums built into fortification walls, recut inscriptions, monument renovations, and the wholesale relocation of buildings. Using archaeological, literary, and epigraphic evidence from more than eight centuries of Athenian history, Rous's investigation connects seemingly disparate instances of the reuse of building materials. She focuses on agency, offering an alternative to the traditional discourse on spolia. Reset in Stone illuminates a vital practice through which Athenians shaped social memory in the physical realm, literally building their past into their city.

Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives

Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives
Author: Anders Andrén
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 918911681X

The study of Old Norse Religion is a truly multidisciplinary and international field of research. The rituals, myths and narratives of pre-Christian Scandinavia are investigated and interpreted by archaeologists, historians, art historians, historians of religion as well as scholars of literature, onomastics and Scandinavian studies. For obvious reasons, these studies belong to the main curricula in Scandinavia but are also carried out at many other universities in Europe, the United States and Australia a fact that is evident to any reader of this book. In order to bring this broad and varied field of research together, an international conference on Old Norse religion was held in Lund in June 2004. About two hundred delegates from more than fifteen countries took part. The intention was to gather researchers to encourage and improve scholarly exchange and dialogue, and Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives presents a selection of the proceedings from that conference. The 75 contributions elucidate topics such as worldview and cosmology, ritual and religious practice, myth and memory as well as the reception and present-day use of Old Norse religion. The main editors of this volume have directed the multidisciplinary research project Roads to Midgard since 2000. The project is based at Lund University and funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.

Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages

Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages
Author: Mayke de Jong
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 630
Release: 2001-06-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9047404041

The 19 papers presented in this volume by North American and European historians and archaeologists discuss how early medieval political and religious elites constructed ‘places of power’, and how such places, in turn, created powerful people. They also examine how the ‘high-level’ power exercised by elites was transformed in the post-Roman kingdoms of Europe, as Roman cities gave way as central stages for rituals of power to a multitude of places and spaces where political and religious power were represented. Although the Frankish kingdoms receive a large share of attention, contributions also focus on the changing topography of power in the old centres of the Roman world, Rome and Constantinople, to what ‘centres of power’ may have meant in the steppes of Inner Asia, Scandinavia or the lower Vistula, where political power was even more mobile and decentralised than in the post-Roman kingdoms, as well as to monasteries and their integration into early medieval topographies of power.

Interdisciplinary Explorations of Postmortem Interaction

Interdisciplinary Explorations of Postmortem Interaction
Author: Estella Weiss-Krejci
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2022-06-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3031039564

In the present as in the past, the dead have been deployed to promote visions of identity, as well as ostensibly wider human values. Through a series of case studies from ancient Egypt through prehistoric, historic, and present-day Europe, this book discusses what is constant and what is locally and historically specific in our ways of interacting with the remains of the dead, their objects, and monuments. Postmortem interaction encompasses not only funerary rituals and intergenerational engagement with forebears, but also concerns encounters with the dead who died centuries and millennia ago. Drawing from a variety of disciplines such as archaeology, bioarchaeology, literary studies, ancient Egyptian philology, and sociocultural anthropology, this volume provides an interdisciplinary account of the ways in which the dead are able to transcend temporal distances and engender social relationships. Until quite recently, literary sciences and archaeology were generally regarded as incommensurable in their aims, methodologies, and source material. Although archaeologists and literary critics have been increasingly willing to borrow concepts and terminology from the other discipline, this book is one examples of a genuinely collaborative endeavor. This is an open access book.

Archaeologies of Remembrance

Archaeologies of Remembrance
Author: Howard Williams
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1441992227

How did past communities and individuals remember through social and ritual practices? How important were mortuary practices in processes of remembering and forgetting the past? This innovative new research work focuses upon identifying strategies of remembrance. Evidence can be found in a range of archaeological remains including the adornment and alteration of the body in life and death, the production, exchange, consumption and destruction of material culture, the construction, use and reuse of monuments, and the social ordering of architectural space and the landscape. This book shows how in the past, as today, shared memories are important and defining aspects of social and ritual traditions, and the practical actions of dealing with and disposing of the dead can form a central focus for the definition of social memory.

Marble Past, Monumental Present

Marble Past, Monumental Present
Author: Michael Greenhalgh
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 653
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004170839

This survey and synthesis of the structural and decorative uses of Roman remains, particularly marble, throughout the mediaeval Mediterranean, deals with the Christian West - but also Byzantium and Islam, each the inheritor of much Roman territory. It includes a 5000-image DVD.

CERDIC

CERDIC
Author: Paul Harper
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2024-07-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1399037323

The potential burial site of the mysterious Dark Age king Cerdic who founded Wessex which grew into England is revealed in a new book. Fascinating research based on an ancient land charter from the son of Alfred the Great leads to a former Bronze Age mound on the edge of a Hampshire town. This huge barrow was located near a historic trackway, a Wansdyke-style earthwork and an old Roman Road as a very public statement of power and warning to enemies. Author Paul Harper said: “The exciting discovery has brought the story of Cerdic from a lost period of British history to life. This could be overwhelming proof that Cerdic was not just a product of fantasy in the chaotic aftermath of post-Roman Britain but a real warlord who forged a powerful realm which evolved into the nation of England.” The book reveals how Cerdic emerged from the ashes of Rome in the 6th century, with a warband known as the Gewisse which offered protection to civilians from barbarians roaming the land and then fought for territory with rival kingdoms before evolving into the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. During an unprecedented climate disaster, which blocked out normal sunlight and led to a plague pandemic which killed millions, Cerdic carved out a new domain that shapes Britain up to the present day. One-by-one mysteries are solved including the identity of his shadowy son, the location of every bloody battle against enemy warlords, the links to an iconic medieval poem and the King Arthur legend.