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Agency in Archaeology

Agency in Archaeology
Author: Marcia-Anne Dobres
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131795940X

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Agency in Archaeology is the first critical volume to scrutinise the concept of agency and to examine in-depth its potential to inform our understanding of the past. Theories of agency recognise that human beings make choices, hold intentions and take action. This offers archaeologists scope to move beyond looking at broad structural or environmental change and instead to consider the individual and the group Agency in Archaeology brings together nineteen internationally renowned scholars who have very different, and often conflicting, stances on the meaning and use of agency theory to archaeology. The volume is composed of five theoretically-based discussions and nine case studies, drawing on regions from North America and Mesoamerica to Western and central Europe, and ranging in subject from the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers to the restructuring of gender relations in the north-eastern US.


Agency Uncovered

Agency Uncovered
Author: Andrew Gardner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2016-06-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315435195

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This book questions the value of the concept of 'agency', a term used in sociological and philosophical literature to refer to individual free will in archaeology. On the one hand it has been argued that previous generations of archaeologists, in explaining social change in terms of structural or environmental conditions, have lost sight of the 'real people' and reduced them to passive cultural pawns, on the other, introducing the concept of agency to counteract this can be said to perpetuate a modern, Western view of the autonomous individual who is free from social constraints. This book discusses the balance between these two opposites, using a range of archaeological and historical case studies, including European and Asian prehistory, classical Greece and Rome, the Inka and other Andean cultures. While focusing on the relevance of 'agency' theory to archaeological interpretation and using it to create more diverse and open-ended accounts of ancient cultures, the authors also address the contemporary political and ethical implications of what is essentially a debate about the definition of human nature.


Agency and Identity in the Ancient Near East

Agency and Identity in the Ancient Near East
Author: Sharon R. Steadman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134945442

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Agency theory examines the relationship between individuals or groups when one party is doing work on behalf of another. 'Agency and Identity in the Ancient Near East' offers a theoretical study of agency and identity in Near Eastern archaeology, an area which until now has been largely ignored by archaeologists. The book explores how agency theory can be employed in reconstructing the meaning of spaces and material culture, how agency and identity intersect, and how the availability of a textual corpus may impact on the agency approach. Ranging from the Neolithic to the Islamic period, 'Agency and Identity in the Ancient Near East' covers sites located in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. The volume includes contributions from philology, art, history, computer simulation studies, materials science, and the archaeology of settlement and architecture.


Agency in Archaeology

Agency in Archaeology
Author: Marcia-Anne Dobres
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317959396

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Agency in Archaeology is the first critical volume to scrutinise the concept of agency and to examine in-depth its potential to inform our understanding of the past. Theories of agency recognise that human beings make choices, hold intentions and take action. This offers archaeologists scope to move beyond looking at broad structural or environmental change and instead to consider the individual and the group Agency in Archaeology brings together nineteen internationally renowned scholars who have very different, and often conflicting, stances on the meaning and use of agency theory to archaeology. The volume is composed of five theoretically-based discussions and nine case studies, drawing on regions from North America and Mesoamerica to Western and central Europe, and ranging in subject from the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers to the restructuring of gender relations in the north-eastern US.


Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology

Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology
Author: Eleanor Harrison-Buck
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2018-08-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1607327473

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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 demonstrate that objects, animals, locations, and other nonhuman actors also potentially share this ontological status and are capable of instigating events and enacting change. This kind of other-than-human agency is not a one-way transaction of cause to effect but requires an appropriate form of reciprocal engagement indicative of relational personhood, which in these cases, left material traces detectable in the archaeological record. Modern dualist ontologies separating objects from subjects and the animate from the inanimate obscure our understanding of the roles that other-than-human agents played in past societies. Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology challenges this essentialist binary perspective. Contributors in this volume show that intersubjective (inherently social) ways of being are a fundamental and indispensable condition of all personhood and move the debate in posthumanist scholarship beyond the polarizing dichotomies of relational versus bounded types of persons. In this way, the book makes a significant contribution to theory and interpretation of personhood and other-than-human agency in archaeology. Contributors: Susan M. Alt, Joanna Brück, Kaitlyn Chandler, Erica Hill, Meghan C. L. Howey, Andrew Meirion Jones, Matthew Looper, Ian J. McNiven, Wendi Field Murray, Timothy R. Pauketat, Ann B. Stahl, Maria Nieves Zedeño


Handbook of Archaeological Theories

Handbook of Archaeological Theories
Author: R. Alexander Bentley
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 604
Release: 2008
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780759100336

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This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the latest thinking about archaeological theory. The authors provide a comprehensive picture of the theoretical foundations by which archaeologists contextualize and analyze their archaeological data. Student readers will also gain a sense of the immense power that theory has for building interpretations of the past, while recognizing the wonderful archaeological traditions that created it. An extensive bibliography is included. This volume is the single most important reference for current information on contemporary archaeological theories.


Agency in Ancient Writing

Agency in Ancient Writing
Author: Joshua Englehardt
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2012-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1457174022

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"Through the lens of agency, contributors successfully rethink the nature of ancient texts. In so doing they ably demonstrate that when a new theoretical orientation is applied to a taken-for-granted category of data it invigorates both the data and our understanding of the past." —Marcia-Anne Dobres, University of Main Individual agents are frequently evident in early writing and notational systems, yet these systems have rarely been subjected to the concept of agency as it is traceable in archeology. Agency in Ancient Writing addresses this oversight, allowing archeologists to identify and discuss real, observable actors and actions in the archaeological record. Embracing myriad ways in which agency can be interpreted, ancient writing systems from Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, China, and Greece are examined from a textual perspective as both archaeological objects and nascent historical documents. This allows for distinction among intentions, consequences, meanings, and motivations, increasing understanding and aiding interpretation of the subjectivity of social actors. Chapters focusing on acts of writing and public recitation overlap with those addressing the materiality of texts, interweaving archaeology, epigraphy, and the study of visual symbol systems. Agency in Ancient Writing leads to a more thorough and meaningful discussion of agency as an archaeological concept and will be of interest to anyone interested in ancient texts, including archaeologists, historians, linguists, epigraphers, and art historians, as well as scholars studying agency and structuration theory.


People and Things

People and Things
Author: James M. Skibo
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2008-03-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0387765247

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The study of the human-made world, whether it is called artifacts, material culture, or technology, has burgeoned across the academy. Archaeologists have for cen- ries led the way, and today offer investigators myriad programs and conceptual frameworks for engaging the things, ordinary and extraordinary, of everyday life. This book is an attempt by practitioners of one program – Behavioral Archaeology – to furnish between two covers some of our basic principles, heuristic tools, and illustrative case studies. Our greater purpose, however, is to engage the ideas of two competing programs – agency/practice and evolution – in hopes of initiating a dialog. We are convinced that there is enough overlap in goals, interests, and conceptions among these programs to warrant guarded optimism that a more encompassing, more coherent framework for studying the material world can result from a concerted effort to forge a higher-level synthesis. However, in engaging agency/ practice and evolution in Chap. 2, we are not reticent to point out conflicts between Behavioral Archaeology and these programs. This book will appeal to archaeologists and anthropologists as well as historians, sociologists, and philosophers of technology. Those who study science–technology– society interactions may also encounter useful ideas. Finally, this book is suitable for upper-division and graduate courses on anthropological theory, archaeological theory, and the study of technology.


The Archaeology of Traditions

The Archaeology of Traditions
Author: Timothy R. Pauketat
Publisher: Orange Grove Texts Plus
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009-09-24
Genre:
ISBN: 9781616101299

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"At last, southeastern archaeology as history of people, not just 'cultures'."--Patricia Galloway, Mississippi Department of Archives and History Rich with the objects of the day-to-day lives of illiterate or common people in the southeastern United States, this book offers an archaeological reevaluation of history itself: where it is, what it is, and how it came to be. Through clothing, cooking, eating, tool making, and other mundane forms of social expression and production, traditions were altered daily in encounters between missionaries and natives, between planters and slaves, and between native leaders and native followers. As this work demonstrates, these "unwritten texts" proved to be potent ingredients in the larger-scale social and political events that shaped how peoples, cultures, and institutions came into being. These developments point to a common social process whereby men and women negotiated about their views of the world and--whether slaves, natives, or Europeans--created history. Bridging the pre-Columbian and colonial past, this book incorporates current theories that cut across disciplines to appeal to anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists. CONTENTS 1. A New Tradition in Archaeology, by Timothy R. Pauketat 2. African-American Tradition and Community in the Antebellum South, by Brian W. Thomas 3. Resistance and Accommodation in Apalachee Province, by John F. Scarry 4. Manipulating Bodies and Emerging Traditions at the Los Adaes Presidio, by Diana DiPaolo Loren 5. Negotiated Tradition? Native American Pottery in the Mission Period in La Florida, by Rebecca Saunders 6. Creek and Pre-Creek Revisited, by Cameron B. Wesson 7. Gender, Tradition, and the Negotiation of Power Relationships in Southern Appalachian Chiefdoms, by Lynne P. Sullivan and Christopher B. Rodning 8. Historical Science or Silence? Toward a Historical Anthropology of Mississippian Political Culture, by Mark A. Rees 9. Cahokian Change and the Authority of Tradition, by Susan M. Alt 10. The Historical-Processual Development of Late Woodland Societies, by Michael S. Nassaney 11. A Tradition of Discontinuity: American Bottom Early and Middle Woodland Culture History Reexamined, by Andrew C. Fortier 12. Interpreting Discontinuity and Historical Process in Midcontinental Late Archaic and Early Woodland Societies, by Thomas E. Emerson and Dale L. McElrath 13. Hunter-Gatherers and Traditions of Resistance, by Kenneth E. Sassaman 14. Traditions as Cultural Production: Implications for Contemporary Archaeological Research, by Kent G. Lightfoot 15. Concluding Thoughts on Tradition, History, and Archaeology, by Timothy R. Pauketat Timothy R. Pauketat, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana, is the author of The Ascent of Chiefs and coeditor of Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World.


Agency in Ancient Writing

Agency in Ancient Writing
Author: Joshua Englehardt
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2012-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1607322099

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Individual agents are frequently evident in early writing and notational systems, yet these systems have rarely been subjected to the concept of agency as it is traceable in archeology. Agency in Ancient Writing addresses this oversight, allowing archeologists to identify and discuss real, observable actors and actions in the archaeological record. Embracing myriad ways in which agency can be interpreted, ancient writing systems from Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, China, and Greece are examined from a textual perspective as both archaeological objects and nascent historical documents. This allows for distinction among intentions, consequences, meanings, and motivations, increasing understanding and aiding interpretation of the subjectivity of social actors. Chapters focusing on acts of writing and public recitation overlap with those addressing the materiality of texts, interweaving archaeology, epigraphy, and the study of visual symbol systems. Agency in Ancient Writing leads to a more thorough and meaningful discussion of agency as an archaeological concept and will be of interest to anyone interested in ancient texts, including archaeologists, historians, linguists, epigraphers, and art historians, as well as scholars studying agency and structuration theory.