The Archaeology of the Colonized

ISBN-13: 9780415369923 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 200 str.

Michael Given

Opis

This archaeological approach to colonialism focuses on the experience of the people who were colonized. How did farmers, artisans and labourers support their families and maintain their self-respect and identity, in the face of oppressive taxation and ideological control? How did new bureaucratic procedures, taxation regimes and forced labour schemes affect their lives? The activities of the colonized are expressed in a wide range of artefacts, structures and landscapes. Tax in kind is extracted on the peasant's threshing floor; people are controlled as they travel on imperial roads; avoiding the taxman requires a hidden economy of secret fields. It is in locations such as these that we can reconstruct how the colonized gave meaning and pride to their lives in the face of imposed ideology and control. This book investigates the experience of the colonized in their landscape setting, and proposes an 'archaeology of taxation' to investigate the relationship between local community and central control. of Old Kingdom Egypt to illicit whisky distilling in nineteenth-century Scotland, and from the Roman roads of Turkey to the threshing floors of Cyprus under British colonial rule.

Recenzje

"A commendable and exciting work...the author's interest in imperialism is bold and timely, as is his interest in promoting a bottom-up approach....A great opportunity to advance archaeological thought about imperialism." - Charles E. Orser Jr, Illinois State University

Spis treści

1. Introduction  2. Resistance - Agency - Landscape - Narrative  3. The Archaeology of Taxation  4. The Settlement of Empire  5. Living between Lines  6. The Dominated Body  7. The Patron Saint of Tax Evaders  8. Landscapes of Resistance  9. Conclusion: Archaeologists and the Colonized

O autorze

Michael Given is a Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology, University of Glasgow, and co-director of the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project in Cyprus. His research interests include archaeological survey, landscape archaeology, imperialism and historical archaeology. He is co-author with A. Bernard Knapp of The Sydney Cyprus Survey Project: social approaches to regional archaeological survey (2003).