Search results for ""Author David Michael Smith""

Pocket Museum: Ancient Greece presents more than 200 objects currently housed in public collections around the world that offer both context and immediacy to the rich culture of Ancient Greece. From the bifacial hand tools of the Lower Palaeolithic to the Hellenistic Great Altar of Pergamon, the artifacts presented here reveal a complex sociocultural history of shifting priorities, spiritual beliefs, and cultural traditions; the influence on material culture of isolation and internationalism, of technological advance and decline, and of prosperity and adversity. They also reflect the transmission of shared social-cultural ideals across vast distances through relationships maintained for centuries at a time – objects from across the Greek world, valued in life and in death. Pocket Museum: Ancient Greece also offers an insight into the history of collecting and methods of interpretation, examining how the perception of objects has changed over time. Beautifully illustrated with photographs of each featured artifact, this is an absorbing introduction to a culture that has exerted an unparalleled influence on Western civilization.

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The Wider Island of Pelops explores the myriad ways in which pottery was created, utilized, and experienced in the prehistoric Aegean, across a period of more than 4000 years between the Middle Neolithic and the Early Iron Age transition. Pottery is capable both of creating bonds and creating barriers. It serves as a sociocultural call and response, marking similarity and difference, collectivism and individualism, knowledge, and the absence of knowledge. Contextually-bound, it embodies identities, memories and multiple histories. It reflects choice and reinforces orthodoxy; a product of change, and a driver of it, that both creates and curates understanding of the world. Necessity and commodity, at times anachronistic, and at others, avant-garde, it is subversive and slavish, innovative and derivative; visible always, and never without value. The seventeen papers collected here provide a diachronic perspective on the value of pottery in marking and mediating cross-scale sociocultural discourse; in framing and facilitating the transmission of knowledge and meaning; in driving economies; in the preservation of memory, in the practice of cult; and, in more recent times, as a vector in the dialogue of imperialism: at once introducing key themes in the study of Aegean pottery, and providing a snapshot of recent archaeological work in Greece.

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