The Prehistory of Hawai‘i

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick V. Kirch
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Environmental Gradients ◽  
Hawaiian Islands ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Sociopolitical Complexity ◽  
Monumental Architecture ◽  
Specialized Production ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Kingship

The Hawaiian Islands are the most isolated inhabited archipelago in the world. Initially colonized around A.D. 1000, the environmental gradients of rainfall and island-age have influenced subsequent cultural variation and differentiation in the islands. Settlements are typically dispersed hamlets and integrated within agricultural facilities such as irrigated pondfields and dryland field systems. Populations were politically organized in idealized pie-shaped units or ahupua`a that typically encompass a cross-section of island resources. Material culture , including fishhooks, stone tools, and religious temples, is broadly similar within these units, but there is also much evidence for elite control of specialized production in some areas. The Hawaiian Islands are the archetypal chiefdom society, although based on changes in demography, monumental architecture (heiau) and royal centers, intensive agriculture, and divine kingship, the population had likely crossed the threshold of sociopolitical complexity to that of an archaic state prior to the arrival of Europeans in 1778.

Alcohol as Embodied Material Culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-129
Author(s):  
Michael Dietler
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Chemical Substance ◽  
Alcoholic Beverages ◽  
Physiological Effects ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Alcoholic Drinks

Alcohol is the most widely used psychoactive agent in the world, and it has a very deep history. Human beings have demonstrated remarkable creativity in producing alcoholic beverages from a diverse array of substances. Many varieties of alcoholic drinks have substantial nutritional value and they often form a significant component of the diet of many peoples. Like other foods, alcohol is a form of ‘embodied material culture’; that is, a substance created to be destroyed through ingestion into the human body. Hence, it has close relationship to the inculcation and symbolization of concepts of identity. Alcoholic drinks are not reducible to a chemical substance with physiological effects: they are a form of material culture with almost unlimited possibilities for cultural variation and are a versatile symbolic medium and social tool crucial to ritual, politics, and the construction of social and economic relations.

scholarly journals Group-specific archaeological signatures of stone tool use in wild macaques

eLife ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia V Luncz ◽  
Mike Gill ◽  
Tomos Proffitt ◽  
Magdalena S Svensson ◽  
Lars Kulik ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Tool Use ◽  
Macaca Fascicularis ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Old World Monkeys ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Stone Age ◽  
Ecological Diversity ◽  
Early Stone Age

Stone tools in the prehistoric record are the most abundant source of evidence for understanding early hominin technological and cultural variation. The field of primate archaeology is well placed to improve our scientific knowledge by using the tool behaviours of living primates as models to test hypotheses related to the adoption of tools by early stone-age hominins. Previously we have shown that diversity in stone tool behaviour between neighbouring groups of long-tailed macaques (Macaca-fascicularis) could be explained by ecological and environmental circumstances (Luncz et al., 2017b). Here however, we report archaeological evidence, which shows that the selection and reuse of tools cannot entirely be explained by ecological diversity. These results suggest that tool-use may develop differently within species of old-world monkeys, and that the evidence of material culture can differ within the same timeframe at local geographic scales and in spite of shared environmental and ecological settings.

scholarly journals Monumental landscapes of the Holocene humid period in Northern Arabia: The mustatil phenomenon

The Holocene ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (12) ◽  
pp. 1767-1779 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huw S Groucutt ◽  
Paul S Breeze ◽  
Maria Guagnin ◽  
Mathew Stewart ◽  
Nick Drake ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Arid Region ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Radiocarbon Date ◽  
Faunal Remains ◽  
Monumental Architecture ◽  
The World ◽  
Humid Period ◽  
Stone Structures

Between 10 and six thousand years ago the Arabian Peninsula saw the most recent of the ‘Green Arabia’ periods, when increased rainfall transformed this generally arid region. The transition to the Neolithic in Arabia occurred during this period of climatic amelioration. Various forms of stone structures are abundant in northern Arabia, and it has been speculated that some of these dated to the Neolithic, but there has been little research on their character and chronology. Here we report a study of 104 ‘mustatil’ stone structures from the southern margins of the Nefud Desert in northern Arabia. We provide the first chronometric age estimate for this type of structure – a radiocarbon date of ca. 5000 BC – and describe their landscape positions, architecture and associated material culture and faunal remains. The structure we have dated is the oldest large-scale stone structure known from the Arabian Peninsula. The mustatil phenomenon represents a remarkable development of monumental architecture, as hundreds of these structures were built in northwest Arabia. This ‘monumental landscape’ represents one of the earliest large-scale forms of monumental stone structure construction anywhere in the world. Further research is needed to understand the function of these structures, but we hypothesise that they were related to rituals in the context of the adoption of pastoralism and resulting territoriality in the challenging environments of northern Arabia.

“These Shall Come from Far”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New England ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Global Network ◽  
The World ◽  
Basket Maker

Chapter 3 analyzes English claims to a central role in a global network of indigenous and English people connected by faith around the world, claims made manifest in Of the Conversion of Five Thousand Nine Hundred Indians on the Island of Formosa, a 1650 publication by Baptist minister Henry Jessey, printed by radical bookseller Hannah Allen. It reports on Dutch missions in Taiwan, comparing them with evangelism efforts in New England. The coda considers the experiences of an Algonquian woman who is unnamed in Jessey’s tract but is identified as a basket maker, speculating on the meaning she may have encoded in her basket designs. Though we cannot “read” them directly, the fact that she made them, coupled with the provocative arguments offered by recent scholars about Native material culture in the colonial period, enables us to reconsider the print archive in which she appears.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fearn
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Valuable Resource ◽  
The World

The introduction sets the following discussions in their scholarly context, with particular attention to other contemporary approaches to lyric both within Classics and in comparative literature and critical theory, as well as to art-historical approaches. Literary approaches to lyric deixis are brought together with art-historical and other literary approaches to visuality, subjectivity, and ecphrasis. Pindar’s immersion in a world of material culture and attention to the world as perceived visually fosters a special poetic creativity. The upshot is a poetics of referentiality, according to which Pindar’s consumers are invited to consider the distance between their own situatedness and the worlds being creatively referred to, through the complex mediation of poetic voices. The sensibilities, attitudes, and experiences being constructed also contribute to a new understanding of the importance of lyric as a culturally valuable resource in fifth-century Greece.

The Opera and the Omnibus: Material Culture, Urbanism and Boieldieu's La dame blanche

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-114
Author(s):  
Nicole Vilkner
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Business Model ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Transportation Systems ◽  
Mass Transportation ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

AbstractIn the summer of 1828, the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches launched a fleet of white omnibuses onto the streets of Paris. These public transportation vehicles were named and fashioned after Boieldieu's opéra comique La dame blanche (1825): their rear doors were decorated with scenes of Scotland, their flanks painted with gesturing opera characters, and their mechanical horns trumpeted fanfares through the streets. The omnibuses offered one of the first mass transportation systems in the world and were an innovation that transformed urban circulation. During their thirty years of circulation, the omnibuses also had a profound effect on the reception history of Boieldieu's opera. When the omnibuses improved the quality of working- and middle-class life, bourgeois Parisians applauded the vehicles’ egalitarian business model, and Boieldieu's opera became unexpectedly entwined in the populist rhetoric surrounding the omnibus. Viewing opera through the lens of the Dames Blanches, Parisians conflated the sounds of opera and street, as demonstrated by Charles Valentin Alkan's piano piece Les omnibus, Op. 2 (1829), which combines operatic idioms and horn calls. Through these examples and others, this study examines the complex ways that material culture affects the dissemination and reception of a musical work.

Рукопись Д. С. Бембеева-Сальмина «Ойратские триады»

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-121
Author(s):  
Larisa Badmaevna Mandzhikova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Full Text ◽  
Scientific Center ◽  
Biographical Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Kinship Relations ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
First Time ◽  
Political Figure

Introduction.Dorje Soktunovich Bembeyev-Salmin is one of the famous representatives of the old Kalmyk intelligentsia, a linguist, orientalist, public and political figure. His scientific works and biographical information are preserved in the private archive of D. S. Bembeev-Salmin in the Scientific Archive of the Kalmyk Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (F. 10). This archive contains 12 items of storage for 1959. Among them are translations of works by Russian writers to the Kalmyk language, manuscripts of the text «The Orthography of the Oirat-Mongolian writing», Kalmyk folk proverbs and sayings, triads, pentastichesrecorded by D. S. Bembeev-Salmin. Of particular interest are the triads ― «orchlngingurvnts»(‘that there are three in the world’), recorded by him in 1931, they are one of the varieties of Kalmyk riddles. The themes of the riddles of the triads are diverse: everyday life, house hold activities, material culture, nature, family and kinship relations, ethics. D. S. Bembeyev-Salmin translated some of the three verses himself. This determines the value of the materials collected by him and their introduction into scientific circulation. The full text of the manuscript materials is published for the first time in this article.

The Excavation of Khok Phanom Di. A Prehistoric Site in Central Thailand : Volume III: The Material Culture (Part 1)

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.F.W. Higham ◽  
R. Bannanurag
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
The Third ◽  
Central Thailand

Khok Phanom Di is a prehistoric site located in Central Thailand. Excavations there were undertaken in 1985, and this the third of a series of volumes reporting the results of these investigations. This volume considers the non-ceramic artefacts, including fishing implements, weaving equipment and stone tools.

scholarly journals Merging the Human and the Nonhuman: The Object Narrator in The Adventures of a Black Coat

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-159
Author(s):  
Ivana Dragoș ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
The World ◽  
Pedagogical Function

Rooted in the tradition of eighteenth-century circulation novels recounted by an object narrator, The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760) epitomizes the features of this experimental novelistic subgenre by foregrounding a coat which, acting as a homodiegetic narrator, lambastes the world of commodities prompted by the rise of early capitalism. As an object endowed with moral conscience, the coat epistemologically proves to be a reliable narrator that is able to render authentic experience and feelings by getting empirically involved in the world it describes. Worn by a few owners, the coat becomes a sharp observer of society and, most importantly, it foreshadows what Karl Marx has termed “commodity fetishism.” According to Marx, commodities and humans become part of a process that is economically endorsed by exchange. Read in this light, I argue that the text reveals the Marxist process of reification whereby social relations between humans turn into social relations between things. Despite being an object narrator, the coat fulfils a typically eighteenth-century pedagogical function, in that it warns the reader against the degrading morals of a society addicted to material culture.

Stone Tools

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Old World ◽  
Material Culture Studies ◽  
History Of

The focus of this article is stone tools. The history of stone tool research is linked integrally to the history of archaeology and the study of the human past, and many of the early developments in archaeology were connected with the study of stone artefacts. The identification of stone tools as objects of prehistoric human manufacture was central to the development of nineteenth-century models of prehistoric change, and especially the Three Age system for Old World prehistory. This article draws on concepts derived from interdisciplinary material culture studies to consider the role of the artefact after being discarded. It suggests that it is impossible to understand the meaning or efficacy of stone tools without understanding their ‘afterlives’ following abandonment. This article aims to complement contemporary metrical studies of the identification of stone tools and the description of their production. A brief history of the stone tools is explained and this concludes the article.

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