Search results for ""university of pennsylvania press""
University of Pennsylvania Press Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650-1950
Moss, stone, trees, and sand arranged in striking or natural-looking compositions: the tradition of establishing and refining the landscape has been the work of Japanese gardeners and designers for centuries. In Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650-1950 Wybe Kuitert presents a richly illustrated survey of the gardens and the people who commissioned, created, and used them and chronicles the modernization of traditional aesthetics in the context of economic, political, and environmental transformation. Kuitert begins in the Edo period (1603-1868), when feudal lords recreated the landscape of the countryside as private space. During this same period, and following Chinese literary models, scholars and men of letters viewed the countryside itself, without any contrivance, as the ideal space in which to meet with friends and have a cup of tea. Stewards of inns, teahouses, and temples, on the other hand, followed increasingly clichéd garden designs prescribed in popular, mass-produced pattern books. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the newly wealthy captains of industry in Tokyo adopted the aesthetic of the feudal lords, finding great appeal in naturalistic landscapes and deciduous forests. Confronted with modernization and the West, tradition inevitably took on different meanings. Westerners, seeking to understand Japanese garden culture, found their answers in the pattern-book clichés, while in Japan, private landscapes became public and were designed in environmentally supportable ways, all sponsored by the government. An ancient, esoteric, and elite art extended its reach to every quarter of society, most notably with the extensive rebuilding that occurred in the aftermath of the Tokyo earthquake of 1923 and the end of World War II. In the wake of destruction came a new model for sustainable public parks and a heightened awareness of ecological issues, rooted above all in the natural landscape of Japan. Featuring more than 180 color photographs and reproductions, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650-1950 illustrates a history of changes and continuities across a span of three centuries and makes an eloquent case for the lessons to be learned from the Japanese tradition as we face the challenges of a rapidly changing human habitat.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature
In Medieval Boundaries, Sharon Kinoshita examines the role of cross-cultural contact in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century French literature. Starting from the observation that many of the earliest and best-known works of the French literary tradition are set on or beyond the borders of the French-speaking world, she reads the Chanson de Roland, the lais of Marie de France, and a variety of other texts in an expanded geographical frame that includes the Iberian peninsula, the Welsh marches, and the eastern Mediterranean. In Kinoshita's reconceptualization of the geographical and cultural boundaries of the medieval West, such places become significant not only as sites of conflict but also as spaces of intense political, economic, and cultural negotiation. An important contribution to the emerging field of medieval postcolonialism, Kinoshita's work explores the limitations of reading the literature of the French Middle Ages as an inevitable link in the historical construction of modern discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, race, and Christian-Muslim conflict. Rather, drawing on recent historical and art historical scholarship, Kinoshita uncovers a vernacular culture at odds with official discourses of crusade and conquest. Situating each work in its specific context, she brings to light the lived experiences of the knights and nobles for whom this literature was first composed and—in a series of close readings informed by postcolonial and feminist theory—demonstrates that literary representations of cultural encounters often provided the pretext for questioning the most basic categories of medieval identity. Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies
£67.00
University of Pennsylvania Press European Archaeology as Anthropology: Essays in Memory of Bernard Wailes
Since the days of V. Gordon Childe, the study of the emergence of complex societies has been a central question in anthropological archaeology. However, archaeologists working in the Americanist tradition have drawn most of their models for the emergence of social complexity from research in the Middle East and Latin America. Bernard Wailes was a strong advocate for the importance of later prehistoric and early medieval Europe as an alternative model of sociopolitical evolution and trained generations of American archaeologists now active in European research from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. Two centuries of excavation and research in Europe have produced one of the richest bodies of archaeological data anywhere in the world. The abundant data show that technological innovations such as metallurgy appeared very early, but urbanism and state formation are comparatively late developments. Key transformative process such as the spread of agriculture did not happen uniformly but rather at different rates in different regions. The essays in this volume celebrate the legacy of Bernard Wailes by highlighting the contribution of the European archaeological record to our understanding of the emergence of social complexity. They provide case studies in how ancient Europe can inform anthropological archaeology. Not only do they illuminate key research topics, they also invite archaeologists working in other parts of the world to consider comparisons to ancient Europe as they construct models for cultural development for their regions. Although there is a substantial corpus of literature on European prehistoric and medieval archaeology, we do not know of a comparable volume that explicitly focuses on the contribution that the study of ancient Europe can make to anthropological archaeology.
£54.70
University of Pennsylvania Press Excavations in Residential Areas of Tikal--Nonelite Groups Without Shrines: Tikal Report 20B
Excavations in Residential Areas of Tikal—Nonelite Groups Without Shrines is a two-volume presentation of the excavations carried out in and near small residential structures at Tikal, Guatemala, beginning in 1961. These reports show that Tikal was more than a ceremonial center; in addition to its numerous temples, the great Maya city was home to a large population of people. These volumes look at the residential structures themselves as well as domestic artifacts such as burials, ceramic test pits, chultuns. Tikal Report 20B is primarily analytical in nature, reviewing and interpreting the data from Report 20A to draw new conclusions about settlement, demography, and society at Tikal. Together, Tikal Reports 20A and 20B augment the data presented in Tikal Reports 19 and 21. University Museum Monograph, 140
£80.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Excavations in Residential Areas of Tikal--Nonelite Groups Without Shrines: Tikal Report 20A
Excavations in Residential Areas of Tikal—Nonelite Groups Without Shrines is a two-volume presentation of the excavations carried out in and near small residential structures at Tikal, Guatemala, beginning in 1961. These reports show that Tikal was more than a ceremonial center; in addition to its numerous temples, the great Maya city was home to a large population of people. These volumes look at the residential structures themselves as well as domestic artifacts such as burials, ceramic test pits, chultuns. Tikal Report 20A is a descriptive presentation of the excavation data and includes nearly two hundred illustrations. Together with Tikal Report 20B, which reviews and interprets this data, this report augments the data presented in Tikal Reports 19 and 21. University Museum Monograph, 139
£96.80
University of Pennsylvania Press The New Chronology of Iron Age Gordion
The New Chronology of Iron Age Gordion argues that the history and archaeology of the site of Gordion, in central Turkey, have been misunderstood since the beginning of its excavation in the 1950s. The first excavation director, Rodney Young, found evidence for substantial destruction during the first decade of fieldwork; this was interpreted as proof that Gordion had been destroyed ca. 700 B.C. by the Kimmerians, a group of invaders from the Caucusus/Black Sea region, as attested in several ancient literary sources. During the last decade, however, renewed research on the archaeological evidence, within, above, and below the destruction level indicated that the catastrophe that destroyed much of Gordion occurred 100 years earlier, in 800 B.C., and was the result of a fire that quickly got out of control rather than a foreign invasion. This discovery requires a reassessment of Anatolian history during the entire first millennium B.C. and has serious implications for our understanding of the surrounding regions, such as Assyria, Syria, Greece, and Urartu, among others. The New Chronology of Iron Age Gordion is the product of a multidisciplinary research program, with dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating working hand in hand with textual and artifact analysis, each of which is treated in a separate chapter in this volume. All of these categories of evidence point to the same conclusion and demonstrate that we need to look at Gordion, and much of the ancient Near East, in a completely new way. University Museum Monograph, 133
£58.90
University of Pennsylvania Press Origins of Agriculture in Western Central Asia: An Environmental-Archaeological Study
In Origins of Agriculture in Western Central Asia, archaeologist David R. Harris addresses questions of when, how, and why agriculture and settled village life began east of the Caspian Sea. The book describes and assesses evidence from archaeological investigations in Turkmenistan and adjacent parts of Iran, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan in relation to present and past environmental conditions and genetic and archaeological data on the ancestry of the crops and domestic animals of the Neolithic period. It includes accounts of previous research on the prehistoric archaeology of the region and reports the results of a recent environmental-archaeological project undertaken by British, Russian, and Turkmen archaeologists in Turkmenistan, principally at the early Neolithic site of Jeitun (Djeitun) on the southern edge of the Karakum desert. This project has demonstrated unequivocally that agropastoralists who cultivated barley and wheat, raised goats and sheep, hunted wild animals, made stone tools and pottery, and lived in small mudbrick settlements were present in southern Turkmenistan by 7,000 years ago (c. 6,000 BCE calibrated), where they came into contact with hunter-gatherers of the "Keltiminar Culture." It is possible that barley and goats were domesticated locally, but the available archaeological and genetic evidence leads to the conclusion that all or most of the elements of the Neolithic "Jeitun Culture" spread to the region from farther west by a process of demic or cultural diffusion that broadly parallels the spread of Neolithic agropastoralism from southwest Asia into Europe. By synthesizing for the first time what is currently known about the origins of agriculture in a large part of Central Asia, between the more fully investigated regions of southwest Asia and China, this book makes a unique contribution to the worldwide literature on transitions from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
£54.70
University of Pennsylvania Press A Central Asian Village at the Dawn of Civilization: Excavations at Anau, Turkmenistan
This integration of earlier and new scholarship reconceptualizes the origins of civilization, challenging the received view that the ancient Near East spawned the spread of civilization outward from Mesopotamia to all other neighboring cultures. Central Asia is here shown to have been a major player in the development of cities. Skillfully documenting the different phases of both Soviet and earlier Western external analyses along with recent excavation results, this new interpretation reveals Central Asia's role in the socioeconomic and political processes linked to both the Iranian Plateau and the Indus Valley, showing how it contributed substantively to the origins of urbanism in the Old World. Hiebert's research at Anau and his focus on the Chalcolithic levels provide an essential starting point for understanding both the nature of village life and the historical trajectories that resulted in Bronze Age urbanism. University Museum Monograph, 116
£63.10
University of Pennsylvania Press Santa Cruz Island Figure Sculpture and Its Social and Ritual Contexts
In this ethnographic study of traditional sculpture from Santa Cruz Island, near the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific the late anthropologist William H. Davenport presents a distinctive genre of figure sculpture produced for and used in traditional religious rituals and ceremonies. The body of the book discusses the history of Santa Cruz Island society since the first Europeans came to the area in 1595, the cultural meanings of its most conspicuous features, and descriptions of the main components of worship, the rituals. The book includes discoveries about the making and use of the figurines, as well as the iconography of the pieces. The latter information is derived from general ethnographic data collected in the course of field research between 1958 and 1976 on Santa Cruz Island and the adjacent islands of the Santa Cruz Group, where Davenport's many close friends included both his informants in the villages and officers of the British Colonial Service. A dual study of a tradition of so-called tribal art in its context and a study of Santa Cruz Island society, the book includes meticulous descriptions of the sacred objects, currency, dances, and social interactions. Davenport's records of 55 specimens of Santa Cruz sculpture from both private collections and museums—initial acquisition, subsequent ownership, and other detailed physical information—constitute the catalogue section of the book. An engaging and previously unrecorded transcription of information distilled from local informants of the oral myths, rituals, and ceremonies reveals how Santa Cruz believers distinguished, celebrated, and communicated with their deities. Davenport's own unique photographs—both black and white and color—illustrate rituals on the island and life as it was lived before independence in 1978. His work here is a record of a culture which is barely now either lived or remembered by the descendants of those who created it, and all figural sculpture discovered in the future must be judged against this corpus of authenticated originals. Audiences will include anthropologists interested in the tribal arts of Pacific peoples, libraries with Melanesian collections, art historians, contemporary historians interested in the difference between description and comparison, and the special political and economic situation of colonialism. Content of this book's CD-ROM may be found online at this location: http://core.tdar.org/project/376537.
£33.86
University of Pennsylvania Press Gordion Wooden Furniture: The Study, Conservation, and Reconstruction of the Furniture and Wooden Objects from Gordion, 1881-1998
This book details 18 years of research and conservation work on the wooden furniture and small objects excavated at the site of Gordion, Turkey, by the University of Pennsylvania Museum between 1950 and 1973, uncovering what is now considered to be the most important collection of well-preserved wooden objects surviving from the ancient Near East. Forty-seven pieces of fine furniture and more than 70 wooden sculptures and household objects were recovered from the three largest tombs at Gordion, once considered to be the tombs of King Midas, who ruled the kingdom of Phrygia from Gordion in the eighth century B.C.
£26.06
University of Pennsylvania Press Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum
The Penn Museum has a long and storied history of research and archaeological exploration in the ancient Middle East. This book highlights this rich depth of knowledge while also serving as a companion volume to the Museum's signature Middle East Galleries opening in April 2018. This edited volume includes chapters and integrated short, focused pieces from Museum curators and staff actively involved in the detailed planning of the new galleries. In addition to highlighting the most remarkable and interesting objects in the Museum's extraordinary Middle East collections, this volume illuminates the primary themes within these galleries (make, settle, connect, organize, and believe) and provides a larger context within which to understand them. The ancient Middle East is home to the first urban settlements in human history, dating to the fourth millennium BCE; therefore, tracing this move toward city life figures prominently in the book. The topic of urbanization, how it came about and how these early steps still impact our daily lives, is explored from regional and localized perspectives, bringing us from Mesopotamia (Ur, Uruk, and Nippur) to Islamic and Persianate cites (Rayy and Isfahan) and, finally, connecting back to life in modern Philadelphia. Through examination of topics such as landscape, resources, trade, religious belief and burial practices, daily life, and nomads, this very important human journey is investigated both broadly and with specific case studies.
£26.24
University of Pennsylvania Press Lost Scents: Investigations of Corinthian "Plastic" Vases by Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry
"Plastic" vases, or small vases molded in the shape of animals, mythological creatures, or human busts and body parts, dating from the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. have been found throughout the Mediterranean. Scholars assumed that these held ancient perfumes. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia used gas chromatography linked with mass spectrometry to analyze 24 vases to determine their original contents. This publication provides the archaeological and historical background, and summarizes the findings of their investigation. MASCA Vol. 11
£33.31
University of Pennsylvania Press Tepe Gawra: The Evolution of a Small, Prehistoric Center in Northern Iraq
This volume presents the complex evolutionary history of an ancient town, Tepe Gawra, located in present-day northeastern Iraq, over a thousand-year period, from the Terminal Ubaid period to the Late Chalcolithic or Uruk period, during the fourth millennium B.C. The site itself is a linchpin for the chronology and study of evolutionary trends. In examining Gawra's transformation, Mitchell S. Rothman analyzes local processes of change and the connection between changes at this small town and transformations of the general Mesopotamian region—southwestern Iran, the western Zagros, the northern Jazirah, and the upper Euphrates. He also carefully documents the raw data from the site and includes previously unpublished excavation records in the University of Pennsylvania Museum's archives (the excavation began in 1927 in cooperation with the Baghdad School of the American School of Oriental Studies), making major additions to our understanding of the stratigraphy of the site and the findspots of artifacts. Using this newly collated data and newly discovered stratigraphic notes from the original excavators, Rothman analyzes the economic, social, and political activities of the ancient residents by mapping artifact distributions onto the architectural and open spaces of each of the living towns and the graves of the dead, presenting an unusually complete picture. Anthropologists and historians will find these analyses of great interest because the levels analyzed here represent the beginning of a process that led to the formation of the earliest states in the world. An appendix by Brian Peasnall, on burials from Tepe Gawra, completes the analysis. University Museum Monograph, 112
£62.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Lists of Personal Names from the Temple School of Nippur: A Syllabary of Personal Names
Publications of the Babylonian Section, XI, no. 1
£63.10
University of Pennsylvania Press The City of Rainbows: A Tale from Ancient Sumer
Written over four thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, The City of Rainbows is one of the world's oldest folktales, featuring a wise king, a foolish king, magic deeds, talking animals, and a good witch who triumphs over a wicked sorcerer. This book offers the first modern retelling of the story, together with colour cut-paper illustrations based on actual works of Sumerian mosaic art. The City of Rainbows will delight audiences young and old with its vivid characters and timeless humour. Karen Foster teaches ancient art and archaeology at Yale University.
£8.11
University of Pennsylvania Press The Extramural Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at Cyrene, Libya, Final Reports, Volume VI: Part I: The Coins; Part II: Attic Pottery
Coins, for reasons that do not always make sense, are often treated by field excavators as more reliable chronological indexes than other classes of artifacts. This always makes their discovery a welcome event, especially when they are silver or gold, which tend to survive in the ground in a more recognizable state than their bronze counterparts. The Red Figure pottery does not have quite the same chronological relevance as the coins but does on occasion contribute to the dating of archaeological contexts. Its often high quality and interesting variety of shapes has already generated commentary elsewhere in addition to what is presented here. University Museum Monograph, 97
£42.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Richard Berry Seager: Archaeologist and Proper Gentleman
An examination of the life of Richard Seager is important for two reasons. First, it provides a glimpse of a character of a member of the second generation of researchers to work in Cretan archaeology and, second, Seager and his generation helped form our own preconceptions about the early history of Greece. His underlying thesis, that the Early Minoan society was the first European civilization, thus the foundation of Greek and later Western history, is considered valid today.
£29.69
University of Pennsylvania Press Hasanlu Special Studies, Volume III: Emblems of Identity and Prestige--The Seals and Sealings from Hasanlu, Iran
The 105 seals and seal impressions in this catalog greatly expand the corpus of glyptic materials from northwestern Iran. The importance of this assemblage is enhanced by its discovery in a controlled stratified context. The distribution of the material in different buildings allows a unique look at the functioning of the glyptic system. In addition to detailed catalog entries, the author's insights and wide knowledge of iconography enrich the text. There are drawings and photographs for each entry. University Museum Monograph, 84
£42.10
University of Pennsylvania Press Gordion Special Studies, Volume II: The Terracotta Figurines and Related Vessels
This book contains a detailed analytical catalogue of 171 terracotta figurines and figural vessels. These are represented in every period at Gordion from the Early Bronze Age. The majority dates from the Late Phrygian/Hellenistic period when there was a proliferation of imports from Greece. Gordion's long and rich history, from a Bronze Age center to a Phrygian capital to a market town and Graeco-Celtic center, makes it unique in the archaeological and historical record of central Turkey. University Museum Monograph, 86
£46.10
University of Pennsylvania Press Excavations at Anshan (Tal-e Malyan): The Middle Elamite Period
This volume provides us with the first detailed view of the functioning of the Middle Elamite Empire outside Susiana. The excavation encompassed a segment of a larger building that must have served as a focus for the servants of the Elamite state in Anshan. Even though the function of the excavated area changed over time—from monumental building (level IV), to ceramic production area (level IIIB), to domestic structure (level IIIA)—the strong cultural ties to the lowlands continued until level IIIA was abandoned. Malyan Excavation Reports, II
£41.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Dreams for a Decade: International Nuclear Abolitionism and the End of the Cold War
During the 1980s, millions of ordinary individuals around the world mobilized in support of nuclear disarmament. Although U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev were not part of these grassroots movements, they too wanted to eliminate nuclear weapons. Nuclear abolitionism was a diverse and global phenomenon. In Dreams for a Decade, Stephanie L. Freeman draws on newly declassified material from multiple continents to examine nuclear abolitionists’ influence on the trajectory of the Cold War’s last decade. Freeman reveals that nuclear abolitionism played a significant yet unappreciated role in ending the Cold War. Grassroots and government nuclear abolitionists shifted U.S. and Soviet nuclear arms control paradigms from arms limitation to arms reduction. This paved the way for the reversal of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, which began with the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. European peace activists also influenced Gorbachev’s “common European home” initiative and support for freedom of choice in Europe, which prevented the Soviet leader from intervening to stop the 1989 East European revolutions. These revolutions ripped the fabric of the Iron Curtain, which had divided Europe for more than four decades. Despite their inability to eliminate nuclear weapons, grassroots and government nuclear abolitionists deserve credit for playing a pivotal role in the Cold War’s endgame. They also provide a model for enacting dramatic, positive change in a peaceful manner.
£40.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Friendship
In this book, renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson draws on philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the meanings and affordances of friendship—a relationship just as significant as, yet somehow different from, kinship and love. Beginning with Aristotle’s accounts of friendship as a political virtue and Montaigne’s famous essay on friendship as a form of love, Jackson examines the tension between the political and personal resonances of friendship in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the biography of the Indian historian Brijen Gupta, and the oral narratives of a Kuranko storyteller, Keti Ferenke Koroma. He offers reflections on childhood friends, imaginary friends, lifelong friendships, and friendships with animals. He ruminates particularly on the complications of friendship in the context of anthropological fieldwork, exploring the contradiction between the egalitarian spirit of friendship on the one hand and, on the other, the power imbalance between ethnographers and their interlocutors. Through these stories, Jackson explores the unpredictable interplay of mutability and mutuality in intimate human relationships, and the critical importance of choice in forming friendship—what it means to be loyal to friends through good times and bad, and even in the face of danger. Through a blend of memoir, theory, ethnography, and fiction, Jackson shows us how the elective affinities of friendship transcend culture, gender, and age, and offer us perennial means of taking stock of our lives and getting a measure of our own self-worth.
£25.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Natural Designs: Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and the Invention of New World Nature
Natural Designs chronicles the life and work of the earliest and most influential Spanish historian of the New World, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557). Through a combination of biography and visual and textual analysis, Elizabeth Gansen explores how Oviedo, in his writings, brought the European Renaissance to bear on his understanding of New World nature. Oviedo learned much from the humanists with whom he came into contact in the courtly circles of Spain and Italy, including Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Pietro Bembo, and witnessed Christopher Columbus regaling Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand with news from his inaugural voyage to the Indies. Fascinated by the Caribbean flora and fauna Oviedo encountered on his arrival to the Caribbean in 1514, he made them the protagonists of his writings on the Indies. From his consumption of the prickly pear cactus, which led him to believe his death was imminent, to the behavior of the iguana, which defied his efforts to determine if the lizard was fish or flesh, his works reveal the challenges at the heart of Spain’s encounter with the biological wonders of the Americas. Natural Designs foregrounds Oviedo’s role as a writer, illustrator, and editor of New World nature. As much as Oviedo is credited as a pioneer in the literary genre of American natural history, his contributions to early modern conceptions of the flora and fauna of the Indies are still not widely understood and appreciated. Gansen situates us in the early sixteenth century to reappraise the works of the Spanish historian who first shaped these realities.
£44.10
University of Pennsylvania Press The Fallen Veil: A Literary and Cultural History of the Photographic Nude in Nineteenth-Century France
Between 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, millions of nude photographs of the female form—artistic, pornographic, and everything in-between—were produced in France, the birthplace of photography. Drawing upon government records, legal decisions, newspaper accounts, and contemporary literature, Raisa Rexer recounts the history of these illicit and ubiquitous images and elucidates their immense cultural and artistic reach. Rexer focuses in particular on the ways that nude photographic imagery influenced some of the greatest authors of the period, including Charles Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, and Émile Zola, and sets their work against historical records and nonfiction print sources to tell the story of evolving perceptions of nude photography. In the period immediately after photography's invention, nude photographs were vitally connected to the questions of art and artistry, particularly with regard to photography's aspirations to high cultural status. By the end of the century, however, as production and sales expanded internationally and as photographs of nudes flooded the streets and shops, proliferation of these pictures was increasingly viewed as one of a host of social problems plaguing France. Illustrated with nearly ninety period images, The Fallen Veil offers the first full treatment of the photographic nude in the nineteenth century and considers how this history continues to influence many of the same questions we ask today about art, pornography, and the relation between the two.
£48.60
University of Pennsylvania Press Human Rights as Human Independence: A Philosophical and Legal Interpretation
Can human rights be claimed against agents other than states, such as transnational corporations and global governance institutions? Does the authority of human rights depend on international law-making, or do they have a moral status that must be honored even in the absence of legal structures? What obligations do human rights impose on states acting across borders? What does it mean that the international community must work together to bring about their universal realization? Do we have human rights to abortion, same-sex marriage, and fully democratic government? What must individuals do for the human rights of others? Although these questions may be essential for the future of global politics and international relations, human rights doctrine offers no conclusive answers for them. In Human Rights as Human Independence, Julio Montero develops an original theory of human rights that helps us think about these and similar issues. Montero argues that human rights regulate the conduct of sovereign political agents both within and beyond borders, and that the aim of human rights norms is to protect everyone's fundamental moral claim to enjoy an equal sphere of agency to develop their personality. Human Rights as Human Independence offers a comprehensive, systematic, and complete account of the nature, sources, and scope of human rights that can be used to interpret international documents and make informed decisions about how human rights practice must be continued in the years to come. The book is thus of interest for a wide audience, ranging from philosophers and political theorists to lawyers, human rights scholars, and activists.
£40.00
University of Pennsylvania Press The Business of Sports Agents
Successful sports agents are comfortable with high finance and intense competition for the right to represent talented players, and the most respected agents are those who can deal with the pressures of high-stakes negotiations in an honest fashion. But whereas rules and penalties govern the playing field, there are far fewer restrictions on agents. In The Business of Sports Agents, Kenneth L. Shropshire, Timothy Davis, and N. Jeremi Duru, experts in the fields of sports business and law, examine the history of the sports agent business and the rules and laws developed to regulate the profession. They also consider recommendations for reform, including uniform laws that would apply to all agents, redefining amateurism in college sports, and stiffening requirements for licensing agents. This revised and expanded third edition brings the volume up to date on recent changes in the industry, including: —the emergence and dominance of companies such as Creative Artists Agency and Wasserman Media Group —high-profile cases of agent misconduct, principally Josh Luchs, whose agent certification was revoked by the NFLPA —legal challenges against the NCAA that may fundamentally change the definition of amateurism —changes to agent regulations resulting from new collective bargaining agreements in all of the major professional sports —evaluation of the effectiveness of the Uniform Athlete Agents Act (2000) to regulate agent conduct —issues faced by the increasing number of agents representing athletes who work abroad as well as athletes from abroad who work in the United States. Whether aspiring sports agent, lawyer, athlete seeking an agent, or simply interested in understanding the world of sports representation, the reader will find in The Business of Sports Agents the most comprehensive overview of the industry as well as a straightforward analysis of its problems and proposed solutions.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press The Invention of Rivers: Alexander's Eye and Ganga's Descent
Dilip da Cunha integrates history, art, cultural studies, hydrology, and geography to tell the story of how rivers have been culturally constructed as lines granted a special role in defining human habitation and everyday practice. What we take to be natural features of the earth's surface, according to da Cunha, are products of human design and a particular way of seeing that has roots stretching as far back as ancient Greek cartography. Although Alexander the Great never saw the Ganges, he conceived of it as a flowing body of water, with sources, destinations, and banks that marked the separation of land from water. This Alexandrine view of the river, da Cunha argues, has been pursued and adopted across time and around the world. With ever more sophisticated mappings of its form and characteristics, the river's essential features are refined and standardized: its source identified by a point; its course depicted as a stroke; and its propensity to flood imagined as the erasure of the boundary between water and land. While da Cunha's vision of rivers is a global one, he takes an especially close look at the Ganges, as he traces the ways in which it has been pictured, mapped, surveyed, explored, and measured across the millennia. He argues that the articulation of the river Ganges has placed it at odds with Ganga, a "rain terrain" that does not conform to the line of separation, containment, and calibration that are the formalities of a river landscape. By calling rivers into question, da Cunha depicts an ecosystem that is neither land nor water but one of ubiquitous wetness in which rain is held in soil, aquifers, glaciers, snowfields, building materials, agricultural fields, air, and even plants and animals. Printed in full color and featuring more than 150 illustrations, The Invention of Rivers proposes rain, or "the rainscape," as an alternative starting point for imagining, understanding, and designing human habitation.
£81.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom
In Blazing the Neoliberal Trail, Timothy Weaver asks how and why urban policy and politics have become dominated, over the past three decades, by promarket thinking. He argues that politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher targeted urban areas as part of their far broader effort to remake the relationship between markets, states, and citizens. But while neoliberal policies were enacted in both the United States and the United Kingdom, Weaver shows that there was significant variation in the ways in which neoliberal ideas were brought to bear on institutional frameworks and organized interests. Moreover, these developments were not limited to a 1980s right-wing effort but were also advanced by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, whose own agendas ultimately reinforced neoliberal ideas and practices, though often by default rather than design. The enduring impact of these shifts is evidenced today by the reintroduction of enterprise zones in the United Kingdom by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and by President Obama's announcement of Promise Zones, which, despite appearances, are cast in the neoliberal mold. By highlighting the bipartisan nature of the neoliberal turn, Weaver challenges the dominant narrative that the revival of promarket policies was primarily driven by the American GOP and the United Kingdom's Conservative Party. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with key political actors, Weaver examines national-level policies, such as enterprise zones—place-based articulations of neoliberal ideas—in case studies of Philadelphia and London. Through an investigation of national urban policy and local city politics, Blazing the Neoliberal Trail shows how elites became persuaded by neoliberal ideas and remade political institutions in their image.
£72.90
University of Pennsylvania Press "The Planetary Garden" and Other Writings
Celebrated landscape architect Gilles Clément may be best known for his public parks in Paris, including the Parc André Citroën and the garden of the Musée du Quai Branly, but he describes himself as a gardener. To care for and cultivate a plot of land, a capable gardener must observe in order to act and work with, rather than against, the natural ecosystem of the garden. In this sense, he suggests, we should think of the entire planet as a garden, and ourselves as its keepers, responsible for the care of its complexity and diversity of life. "The Planetary Garden" is an environmental manifesto that outlines Clément's interpretation of the laws that govern the natural world and the principles that should guide our stewardship of the global garden of Earth. These are among the tenets of a humanist ecology, which posits that the natural world and humankind cannot be understood as separate from one another. This philosophy forms a thread that is woven through the accompanying essays of this volume: "Life, Constantly Inventive: Reflections of a Humanist Ecologist" and "The Wisdom of the Gardener." Brought together and translated into English for the first time, these three texts make a powerful statement about the nature of the world and humanity's place within it.
£36.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Demonic Desires: "Yetzer Hara" and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity
In Demonic Desires, Ishay Rosen-Zvi examines the concept of yetzer hara, or evil inclination, and its evolution in biblical and rabbinic literature. Contrary to existing scholarship, which reads the term under the rubric of destructive sexual desire, Rosen-Zvi contends that in late antiquity the yetzer represents a general tendency toward evil. Rather than the lower bodily part of a human, the rabbinic yetzer is a wicked, sophisticated inciter, attempting to snare humans to sin. The rabbinic yetzer should therefore not be read in the tradition of the Hellenistic quest for control over the lower parts of the psyche, writes Rosen-Zvi, but rather in the tradition of ancient Jewish and Christian demonology. Rosen-Zvi conducts a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the some one hundred and fifty appearances of the evil yetzer in classical rabbinic literature to explore the biblical and postbiblical search for the sources of human sinfulness. By examining the yetzer within a specific demonological tradition, Demonic Desires places the yetzer discourse in the larger context of a move toward psychologization in late antiquity, in which evil—and even demons—became internalized within the human psyche. The book discusses various manifestations of this move in patristic and monastic material, from Clement and Origin to Antony, Athanasius, and Evagrius. It concludes with a consideration of the broader implications of the yetzer discourse in rabbinic anthropology.
£64.80
University of Pennsylvania Press Critical Disaster Studies
This book announces the new, interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies. Unlike most existing approaches to disaster, critical disaster studies begins with the idea that disasters are not objective facts, but rather are interpretive fictions—and they shape the way people see the world. By questioning the concept of disaster itself, critical disaster studies reveals the stakes of defining people or places as vulnerable, resilient, or at risk. As social constructs, disaster, vulnerability, resilience, and risk shape and are shaped by contests over power. Managers and technocrats often herald the goals of disaster response and recovery as objective, quantifiable, or self-evident. In reality, the goals are subjective, and usually contested. Critical disaster studies attends to the ways powerful people often use claims of technocratic expertise to maintain power. Moreover, rather than existing as isolated events, disasters take place over time. People commonly imagine disasters to be unexpected and sudden, making structural conditions appear contingent, widespread conditions appear local, and chronic conditions appear acute. By placing disasters in broader contexts, critical disaster studies peels away that veneer. With chapters by scholars of five continents and seven disciplines, Critical Disaster Studies asks how disasters come to be known as disasters, how disasters are used as tools of governance and politics, and how people imagine and anticipate disasters. The volume will be of interest to scholars of disaster in any discipline and especially to those teaching the growing number of courses on disaster studies.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory
Unlike the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Armenia, scant attention has been paid to the human tragedies analyzed in this book. From German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Burundi, and eastern Congo to Tasmania, Tibet, and Kurdistan, from the mass killings of the Roms by the Nazis to the extermination of the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey, the mind reels when confronted with the inhuman acts that have been consigned to oblivion. Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory gathers eight essays about genocidal conflicts that are unremembered and, as a consequence, understudied. The contributors, scholars in political science, anthropology, history, and other fields, seek to restore these mass killings to the place they deserve in the public consciousness. Remembrance of long forgotten crimes is not the volume's only purpose—equally significant are the rich quarry of empirical data offered in each chapter, the theoretical insights provided, and the comparative perspectives suggested for the analysis of genocidal phenomena. While each genocide is unique in its circumstances and motives, the essays in this volume explain that deliberate concealment and manipulation of the facts by the perpetrators are more often the rule than the exception, and that memory often tends to distort the past and blame the victims while exonerating the killers. Although the cases discussed here are but a sample of a litany going back to biblical times, Forgotten Genocides offers an important examination of the diversity of contexts out of which repeatedly emerge the same hideous realities.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China's Architectural Past
Wilma Fairbank documents, from both a historical and a uniquely personal perspective, the professional and personal achievements of Lin Whei-yin and Liang Sicheng. Liang and Lin were born in early twentieth-century China, a time when the influences of modernism were slowly bearing down on the traditional culture. In the 1920s, they traveled together to the Beaux Arts universe of Philadelphia, where they both graduated with honors from the architecture department of the University of Pennsylvania. Married in 1928, they returned to their native land and became the first two professors at the newly founded school of architecture in Shenyang's Tung Pei University. Wilma Fairbank and her husband, John King Fairbank, Harvard University's eminent historian of modern China, were lifelong friends of Liang and Lin. This relationship allows the author, herself a noted researcher of art and architecture, to paint a vivid picture of the couple within the context of China's turbulent past. Fairbank recounts how Liang and Lin used their Western training to initiate the study of China's architectural evolution. She also documents—as seen through the eyes of Liang and Lin—the tragic events that ravaged the Chinese homeland and its people: the 1937 invasion and bombings by the Japanese military and the ensuing illness and poverty; World War II and the civil war; the rise to power of the Communist government in 1949; and the victimization of the scholar class during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Fairbank provides a highly readable, emotionally charged personal account of the couple's lives, and the numerous and sometimes horrific torments and humiliations they suffered. And, finally, when it was all too late, the posthumous praise and recognition.
£25.99
University of Pennsylvania Press The Battle of the Huertgen Forest
In September 1944, three months after the invasion of Normandy, the Allied armies prepared to push the German forces back into their homeland. Just south of the city of Aachen, elements of the U.S. First Army began an advance through the imposing Huertgen Forest. Instead of retreating, as the Allied command anticipated, the German troops prepared an elaborate defense of Huertgen, resulting in a struggle where tanks, infantry, and artillery dueled at close range. The battle for the forest ended abruptly in December, when a sudden German offensive through the Ardennes to the south forced the Allied armies to fall back, regroup, and start their attack again, this time culminating in the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945. In The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, Charles B. MacDonald assesses this major American operation, discussing the opposing forces on the eve of the battle and offering a clearly written and well-documented history of the battle and the bitter consequences of the American move into the forest. Drawing on his own combat experience, MacDonald portrays both the American and the German troops with empathy and convincingly demonstrates the flaws in the American strategy. The book provides an insight into command decisions at both local and staff levels and the lessons that can be drawn from one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.
£21.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Plain Style: A Guide to Written English
Plain Style is an amusing and instructive guide to written English by the late Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism, The True and Only Heaven, and many other memorable works of American history and social criticism. Written for the benefit of the students at the University of Rochester, where Lasch taught from 1970 until his death in 1994, it quickly established itself in typescript as a local classic—a lively, witty, and historically minded alternative to the famous volume by William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style. Now available for the first time in published form, Plain Style is fundamentally a clear, readable, practical guide to the timeless principles of effective composition. At the same time, however, in ways that Stewart Weaver explains in his critical introduction, it is a distinctive and revealing addition to the published work of an eminent American thinker. No mere primer, Plain Style is an essay in cultural criticism, a political treatise even, by one for whom directness, clarity, and honesty of expression were essential to the living spirit of democracy. As the teachers and students who have for years benefited from its succinct wisdom will testify, Plain Style is an indispensable guide to writing and, indeed, Christopher Lasch's least-expected but perhaps most serviceable work.
£16.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies
Books and Readers in Early Modern England examines readers, reading, and publication practices from the Renaissance to the Restoration. The essays draw on an array of documentary evidence—from library catalogs, prefaces, title pages and dedications, marginalia, commonplace books, and letters to ink, paper, and bindings—to explore individual reading habits and experiences in a period of religious dissent, political instability, and cultural transformation. Chapters in the volume cover oral, scribal, and print cultures, examining the emergence of the "public spheres" of reading practices. Contributors, who include Christopher Grose, Ann Hughes, David Scott Kastan, Kathleen Lynch, William Sherman, and Peter Stallybrass, investigate interactions among publishers, texts, authors, and audience. They discuss the continuity of the written word and habits of mind in the world of print, the formation and differentiation of readerships, and the increasing influence of public opinion. The work demonstrates that early modern publications appeared in a wide variety of forms—from periodical literature to polemical pamphlets—and reflected the radical transformations occurring at the time in the dissemination of knowledge through the written word. These forms were far more ephemeral, and far more widely available, than modern stereotypes of writing from this period suggest.
£29.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Philosophy of Existence
Philosophy of Existence was first presented to the public as a series of lectures invited by The German Academy of Frankfurt. In preparing these lectures Jaspers, whom the Nazis had already dismissed from his professorship at Heidelberg, knew that he was speaking in Germany for the last time. Jaspers used the occasion to offer an account of the cultural and intellectual situation from which existentialism emerged as well as a summary of his own philosophy. The book serves three purposes today: it brings the many strands of the existential movement into focus; it provides an overview of Jaspers's own philosophical position; and it demonstrates by example that philosophy need not be irrational, antiscientific, journalistic, or homiletic in order to be existential and engagé. In this short book Jaspers provides a corrective for the popular view of existentialism as a pessimistic, irrationalist philosophy. He maintains that it is, rather part of mainstream of Western philosophy—the form that philosophy has taken in our day.
£25.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Out of Sight: An Art Collector, a Discovery, and Andy Warhol
£40.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in "Frankenstein"
From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against this background, Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. In the two centuries since, her masterpiece has been celebrated as a Gothic classic and its symbolic resonance has driven the global success of its publication, translation, and adaptation in theater, film, art, and literature. However, in Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Frankenstein is more than an original and paradigmatic work of science fiction—it is a profound reflection on a radical moral and political question: do children have rights? Botting contends that Frankenstein invites its readers to reason through the ethical consequences of a counterfactual premise: what if a man had used science to create a human life without a woman? Immediately after the Creature's "birth," his scientist-father abandons him and the unjust and tragic consequences that follow form the basis of Frankenstein's plot. Botting finds in the novel's narrative structure a series of interconnected thought experiments that reveal how Shelley viewed Frankenstein's Creature for what he really was—a stateless orphan abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by law. The novel, therefore, compels readers to consider whether children have the right to the fundamental means for their development as humans—namely, rights to food, clothing, shelter, care, love, education, and community. In Botting's analysis, Frankenstein emerges as a conceptual resource for exploring the rights of children today, especially those who are disabled, stateless, or genetically modified by medical technologies such as three-parent in vitro fertilization and, perhaps in the near future, gene editing. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child concludes that the right to share love and community, especially with parents or fitting substitutes, belongs to all children, regardless of their genesis, membership, or social status.
£36.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Creative Urbanity: An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization
In the 1970s, the city of Genoa in northern Italy was suffering the economic decline and the despondency common to industrial centers of the Western world at that time. Deindustrialization made Genoa a bleak, dangerous, angry city, where the unemployment rate rose alongside increasing political violence and crime and led to a massive population loss as residents fled to find jobs and a safer life elsewhere. But by the 1990s a revitalization was under way. Many Genoese came to believe their city was poised for a renaissance as a cultural tourism destination and again began to appreciate the sensory, aesthetic, and cultural facets of Genoa, refining practices of a cultured urbanity that had long been missing. Some of those people—educated, middle class—seeking to escape intellectual unemployment, transformed urbanity into a source of income, becoming purveyors of symbolic goods and cultural services, as walking tour guides, street antiques dealers, artisans, festival organizers, small business owners, and more, thereby burnishing Genoa's image as a city of culture and contributing to its continued revival. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, Creative Urbanity argues for an understanding of contemporary cities through an analysis of urban life that refuses the prevailing scholarly condemnation of urban lifestyles and consumption, even as it casts a fresh light on a social group often neglected by anthropologists. The creative urbanites profiled by Emanuela Guano are members of a struggling middle class who, unwilling or unable to leave Genoa, are attempting to come to terms with the loss of stable white-collar jobs that accompanied the economic and demographic crisis that began in the 1970s by finding creative ways to make do with whatever they have.
£56.70
University of Pennsylvania Press Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages
Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able—and who in some instances thought themselves able—to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and runic spells. Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout Scandinavia, even as some pre-Christian practices and beliefs persisted in various forms. The book's endpoint coincides with the coming of the Reformation and the onset of the early modern Scandinavian witch hunts. The terrain covered is complex, home to the Germanic Scandinavians as well as their non-Indo-European neighbors, the Sámi and Finns, and it encompasses such diverse areas as the important trade cities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Stockholm, with their large foreign populations; the rural hinterlands; and the insular outposts of Iceland and Greenland. By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance. With an understanding of mythology as a living system of cultural signs (not just ancient sacred narratives), this study also focuses on such powerful evolving myths as those of "the milk-stealing witch," the diabolical pact, and the witches' journey to Blåkulla. Court cases involving witchcraft, charm magic, and apostasy demonstrate that witchcraft ideologies played a key role in conceptualizing gender and were themselves an important means of exercising social control.
£40.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Miscellaneous Investigations in Central Tikal--Great Temples III, IV, V, and VI: Tikal Report 23B
The Maya center of Tikal, in Guatemala, is famous for its well-preserved architecture. This book presents detailed descriptions of four of the six Great Temples that dominate Tikal's city center. Whereas Great Temples I and II were published in 1990 in Tikal Report 14, the four structures presented here are Great Temples III, IV, V, and VI. All but Great Temple V represent Late Classic construction and can be associated with known rulers. It is tempting to think of these structures as funerary monuments, but this is only a supposition. Their relationship with rulers may have been much more complex. This report is the primary record of these important buildings in Tikal's urban landscape. It provides clear, precise, and usable architectural analyses for Mayanists, archaeologists, art historians, architectural historians, urbanists, and those interested in construction techniques and in the uses of Maya buildings. University Museum Monograph, 146
£50.50
University of Pennsylvania Press Miscellaneous Investigations in Central Tikal--The Plaza of the Seven Temples: Tikal Report 23C
The Great Maya center of Tikal, in Guatemala, is famous for its well-preserved architecture. This book presents descriptions of nine structures that line the Plaza of the Seven Temples, which sits immediately west of the South Acropolis of Central Tikal. These structures were surveyed with little or no excavation as part of the Tikal Project Standing Architecture Survey. This report is the primary record of these structures in Tikal's urban landscape, and it provides clear, precise, and usable architectural analyses for Mayanists, archaeologists, art historians, architectural historians, urbanists, and those interested in construction techniques and in the uses of Maya buildings. University Museum monograph, 147
£50.50
University of Pennsylvania Press Agricultural Sustainability and Environmental Change at Ancient Gordion: Gordion Special Studies 8
This book publishes the results of 220 botanical samples from the 1993-2002 Gordion excavations directed by Mary Voigt. Together with Naomi Miller's 2010 volume (Gordion Special Studies 5), this book completes the publication of botanical samples from Voigt's excavations. The book aims to reconstruct agricultural decision making using archaeological and paleoenvironmental data from Gordion to describe environmental and agricultural changes at the site. John M. Marston argues that different political and economic systems implemented over time at Gordion resulted in patterns of agricultural decision making that were well adapted to the social setting of farmers in each period, but that these practices had divergent environmental impacts, with some regimes sponsoring sustainable agricultural practices and others leading to significant environmental change. The implications of this book are twofold: Gordion will now be one of the best published agricultural datasets from the entire Near East and, thus, serve as a valuable comparable dataset for regional synthesis of agricultural and environmental change, and the methods the author developed to reconstruct agricultural change at Gordion serves as tools to engage questions about the relationship between social and environmental change at sites worldwide. Other books address similar themes but none in the Near East address these themes in diachronic perspective such as we have at Gordion. University Museum Monograph, 145
£50.50
University of Pennsylvania Press The Origins of Maya States
The Pre-Columbian Maya were organized into a series of independent kingdoms or polities rather than unified into a single state. The vast majority of studies of Maya states focus on the apogee of their development in the classic period, ca. 250-850 C.E. As a result, Maya states are defined according to the specific political structures that characterized classic period lowland Maya society. The Origins of Maya States is the first study in over 30 years to examine the origins and development of these states specifically during the preceding preclassic period, ca. 1000 B.C.E. to 250 C.E. Attempts to understand the origins of Maya states cannot escape the limitations of archaeological data, and this is complicated by both the variability of Maya states in time and space and the interplay between internal development and external impacts. To mitigate these factors, editors Loa P. Traxler and Robert J. Sharer assemble a collection of essays that combines an examination of topical issues with regional perspectives from both the Maya area and neighboring Mesoamerican regions to highlight the role of interregional interaction in the evolution of Maya states. Topics covered include material signatures for the development of Maya states, evaluations of extant models for the emergence of Maya states, and advancement of new models based on recent archaeological data. Contributors address the development of complexity during the preclassic era within the Maya regions of the Pacific coast, highlands, and lowlands and explore preclassic economic, social, political, and ideological systems that provide a developmental context for the origins of Maya states. Contributors: Marcello A. Canuto, John E. Clark, Ann Cyphers, Francisco Estrada-Belli, David C. Grove, Norman Hammond, Richard D. Hansen, Eleanor King, Michael Love, Simon Martin, Astrid Runggaldier, Robert Sharer, Loa Traxler.
£96.80
University of Pennsylvania Press Peoples and Crafts in Period IVB at Hasanlu, Iran
The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has had a long-standing interest in the archaeology of Iran. In 1956, Robert H. Dyson, Jr., began excavations south of Lake Urmia at the large mounded site of Hasanlu. Although the results of these excavations await final publication, the Hasanlu Special Studies series—of which this monograph is the fourth volume—describes and analyzes specific aspects of technology, style, and iconography. This volume describes a group of ongoing research projects, most of which provide new information on Iron Age technology. A theme that runs through these studies is the degree to which ancient workers varied the composition of their products to create desirable colors and textures. The book begins with a description of the wooden furniture fragments along with fittings and decorative elements for furniture. It presents the first detailed description of the charred textiles, and places these textiles in their archaeological contexts, suggesting the roles that textiles may have played in daily life. Later chapters assess the significance of Hasanlu in the history of glassmaking, describe the archaeometallurgy of the Hasanlu IVB bronzes, and present a catalog of the bladed weapons. Also, the book presents the evidence for deliberate violence against individuals as indicated by their skeletal injuries and the results of a project undertaken to determine whether DNA could be used to obtain a better understanding of the population history at Hasanlu. Content of the book's DVD-ROM may be found online at this location: http://core.tdar.org/project/375174. University Museum Monograph, 132
£58.90
University of Pennsylvania Press Time and Temporality in the Ancient World
Considering the topic of time in antiquity, juxtaposing cultures and societies, yields remarkable intersections, continuities, and discontinuities in the ways people have engaged with temporality. One of the most persistent dichotomies we find across many premodern societies is that between cyclical and teleological time—time marching inexorably forward, toward a goal, and the markers of nature that seem repetitive, cyclical, and fundamentally stable. Over the millennia much ingenuity has been directed at these models. Specific examinations range from the construction of time and space in prehistory, Roman Britain, quantifications of time in Assyria and Babylonia, through aspects of time in classical India, the Hebrew Bible, China, Greece, and the Roman Empire. With contributions by John C. Barrett (University of Sheffield), Marc Brettler (Brandeis University), Chris Gosden (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford), Astrid Möller (University of Freiburg), David Pankenier (Lehigh University), Alex Purves (University of California, Los Angeles), Eleanor Robson (University of Cambridge), Ludo Rocher (University of Pennsylvania), and Michele Renee Salzman (University of California, Riverside).
£28.24
University of Pennsylvania Press Subsistence and Settlement in a Marginal Environment: Tell Es-Sweyhat, 1989-1995
The volume reports the results of four seasons of excavation at Tell es-Sweyhat, an Early Bronze Age urban center located on the margins of the dry-farming zone in Syria. A goal of the project has been to integrate traditional archaeological methods and the applied sciences. Results to date suggest that the site, though several kilometers from the Euphrates River, was well-situated for exploiting upland pastures. Geomagnetic mapping reveals details about the internal site structure. Archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, and geomagnetic mapping, complemented by a substantial pottery study, regional survey, stratigraphic analysis, and discussion of the newly discovered cemetery provide the basis for understanding this inhospitable area. MASCA Vol. 14
£30.05