Animals have always been integral to culture. Their interaction with humans has intensified since the onset of domestication resulting in higher incidences of animal disease due to human intervention. At the same time, human care has counterbalanced pressures of natural selection, reducing morbidity among wild animals. Prior to the emergence of a veterinary record, animal disease can only be traced by analyzing pathological symptoms on excavated animal remains. This volume presents a colle...

The analysis of animal bone assemblages from archaeological sites provides much valuable data concerning economic and husbandry practices in the past, as well as insights into cultural and symbolic or ritual activity. Animal palaeopathology can identify diseases in archaeozoological assemblages but little interest has been expressed in investigating and understanding the cultural aspects of the diseases identified. Such assemblages represent the cumulative effects of human attitudes, decis...

This book presents new research into social networks and the various networking modes that formed during the history of archaeology in distinct geographical settings in Europe, North America, and South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The diverse range of international experts in this edited collection demonstrate that networks can be found everywhere in archaeology, making it a highly interconnected research field.Using a wide array of examples from diverse geopolit...

This book investigates relations between humans and animals over several centuries with a focus on the Middle Ages, since important features of our perceptions regarding animals have been rooted in that period. Elucidating various aspects of medieval human-animal relationships requires transdisciplinary discourse, and so this book aims to reconcile the materiality of animals with complex cultural systems illustrating their subtle transitions 'between body and mind'.

From 1974 to the present, the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin has carried out archaeological excavations in the ancient territory (chora) of Metaponto, now located in the modern province of Basilicata on the southern coast of Italy. This wide-ranging investigation, which covers a number of sites and a time period ranging from prehistory to the Roman Empire, has unearthed a wealth of new information about the ancient rural economy in southern Italy. T...

The story of how East Asians became "yellow" in the Western imagination—and what it reveals about the problematic history of racial thinkingIn their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the cat...

A rich, wide-ranging history of ignorance in all its forms, from antiquity to the present dayA Seminary Coop Notable Book of 2023“Ignorance: A Global History explores the myriad ways in which ‘not-knowing’ affects our lives, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.”—Michael Dirda, Washington PostThroughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the M...

“Powerful, rich with details, moving, humane, and full of important lessons for an age when weapons of mass destruction are loose among us.” — Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic BombThe Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history—even more so now, when the notion of plague has never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern.The plague that devastated Asia and Europe...

A global perspective on the nature and evolution of nationalism, from the early modern era to the presentThe current rise of nationalism across the globe is a reminder that we are not, after all, living in a borderless world of virtual connectivity. In Nationalism, historian Eric Storm sheds light on contemporary nationalist movements by exploring the global evolution of nationalism, beginning with the rise of the nation-state in the eighteenth century thr...

Using modern biology and history to investigate a series of grisly deaths in the countryside of 18th-century France.Something unimaginable occurred from 1764 to 1767 in the remote highlands of south-central France. For three years, a real-life monster, or monsters, ravaged the region, slaughtering by some accounts more than 100 people, mostly women and children, and inflicting severe injuries upon many others. Alarmed rural communities-and their economies-were virt...

Peter Burke follows up his magisterial Social History of Knowledge, picking up where the first volume left off around 1750 at the publication of the French Encyclopédie and following the story through to Wikipedia. Like the previous volume, it offers a social history (or a retrospective sociology of knowledge) in the sense that it focuses not on individuals but on groups, institutions, collective practices and general trends.The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argu...

Coinage--it is one of the most successful and consistent technologies ever invented. Nothing else we still use in everyday life has a history quite like it. Look around at all the things that would bewilder a Greek, Roman, or Renaissance ancestor; then, dig into your purse or pocket for that one artifact that they would immediately recognize as part of their world. Historian Frank L. Holt takes us on a lively journey through the history of numismatics, the study of coins--one of the oldest...