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This book explores how human population genetics has emerged as a means of imagining and enacting belonging in contemporary society. Venla Oikkonen approaches population genetics as an evolving set of technological, material, narrative and affective practices, arguing that these practices are engaged in multiple forms of belonging that are often mutually contradictory. Considering scientific, popular and fictional texts, with several carefully selected case studies spanning three decades, the author traces shifts in the affective, material and gendered preconditions of population genetic visions of belonging. Topics encompass the debate about Mitochondrial Eve, ancient human DNA, temporality and nostalgia, commercial genetic ancestry tests, and tensions between continental and national genetic inheritance. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of science and technology studies, cultural studies, sociology, and gender studies.
Sean Harvey explores the morally entangled territory of language and race in this intellectual history of encounters between whites and Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Misunderstandings about the differences between European and indigenous American languages strongly influenced whites’ beliefs about the descent and capabilities of Native Americans, he shows. These beliefs would play an important role in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States pursued its “manifest destiny” of westward expansion. Over time, the attempts of whites to communicate with Indians gave rise to theories linking language and race. Scholars maintained that language was ...
The Greater Plains tells a new story of a region, stretching from the state of Texas to the province of Alberta, where the environments are as varied as the myriad ways people have inhabited them. These innovative essays document a complicated history of human interactions with a sometimes plentiful and sometimes foreboding landscape, from the Native Americans who first shaped the prairies with fire to twentieth-century oil regimes whose pipelines linked the region to the world. The Greater Plains moves beyond the narrative of ecological desperation that too often defines the region in scholarly works and in popular imagination. Using the lenses of grasses, animals, water, and energy, the co...
The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas brings together scholars from across the hemisphere to examine how archaeology can highlight the myriad ways that Indigenous people have negotiated colonial systems from the fifteenth century through to today. The contributions offer a comprehensive look at where the archaeology of colonialism has been and where it is heading. Geographically diverse case studies highlight longstanding theoretical and methodological issues as well as emerging topics in the field. The organization of chapters by key issues and topics, rather than by geography, fosters exploration of the commonalities and contrasts betw...
This compilation of original research articles highlight the important cross-regional, cross-chronological, and comparative approaches to political and economic landscapes in ancient South Asia and its neighbors. Focusing on the Indus Valley period and Iron Age India, this volume incorporates new research in South Asia within the broader universe of archaeological scholarship. Contributions focus on four major themes: reinterpreting material culture; identifying domains and regional boundaries; articulating complexity; and modeling interregional interaction. These studies develop theoretical models that may be applicable researchers studying cultural complexity elsewhere in the world.
Popular culture is rife with movies, books, and television shows that address our collective curiosity about what the world was like long ago. From historical dramas to science fiction tales of time travel, audiences love stories that reimagine the world before our time. But what if there were a field that, through the advancements in technology, could bring us closer to the past than ever before? Written by a preeminent expert in geospatial archaeology, Maps for Time Travelers is a guide to how technology is revolutionizing the way archaeologists study and reconstruct humanity's distant past. From satellite imagery to 3D modeling, today archaeologists are answering questions about human history that could previously only be imagined. As archaeologists create a better and more complete picture of the past, they sometimes find that truth is stranger than fiction.
Pictures from the Bronze Age are numerous, vivid and complex. There is no other prehistoric period that has produced such a wide range of images spanning from rock art to figurines to decoration on bronzes and gold. Fourteen papers, with a geographical coverage from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, examine a wide range of topics reflecting the many forms and expressions of Bronze Age imagery encompassing important themes including religion, materiality, mobility, interaction, power and gender. Contributors explore specific elements of rock art in some detail such as the representation of the human form; images of manslaughter; and gender identities. The relationship between rock art imagery and its location on the one hand, and metalwork and networks of trade and exchange of both materials and ideas on the other, are considered. Modern and ancient perceptions of rock art are discussed, in particular the changing perceptions that have developed during almost 150 years of documented research. Picturing the Bronze Age is based on an international workshop with the same title held in Tanum, Sweden in October 2012.
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...
In this theory-rich study, Shelby Johnson analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World, examining how their literary production informs "modes of being" that confronted violent colonial times. Johnson particularly assesses how these authors connected to places—whether real or imagined—and how those connections enabled them to make worlds in spite of the violence of slavery and settler colonialism. Johnson engages with works written in a period engulfed by the extraordinary political and social upheavals of the Age of Revolution and Indian Removal, and these texts—which include not only sermons, life writing, and periodicals but also descriptions of embodied and oral knowledge, as well as material objects—register defiance to land removal and other forms of violence. In studying writers of color during this era, Johnson probes the histories of their lived environment and of the earth itself—its limits, its finite resources, and its metaphoric mortality—in a way that offers new insights on what it means to imagine sustainable connections to the ground on which we walk.
By bringing together in one place specific objects, materials, and features indicating ritual, religious, or magical belief used by people around the world and through time, this tool will assist archaeologists in identifying evidence of belief-related behaviors and broadening their understanding of how those behaviors may also be seen through less obvious evidential lines. Instruction and templates for recording, typologizing, classifying, and analyzing ritual or magico-religious material culture are also provided to guide researchers in the survey, collection, and cataloging processes. The bulleted formatting and topical range make this a highly accessible work, while providing an incredible wealth of information in a single volume.