Performances in the premodern communities shaped identities, created meanings, generated and maintained political control. But unlike other social scientists, archaeologists have not worked much with these concepts. Archaeology of Performance shows how the notions of theatricality and spectacle are as important economics and politics in understanding how ancient communities work. Without sacrificing conceptual rigor, the contributors draw on the wide-ranging literature on performance. Without sacrificing material evidence, they try to see how performance creates meaning and ideology. Drawing...

Performances in the premodern communities shaped identities, created meanings, generated and maintained political control. But unlike other social scientists, archaeologists have not worked much with these concepts. Archaeology of Performance shows how the notions of theatricality and spectacle are as important economics and politics in understanding how ancient communities work. Without sacrificing conceptual rigor, the contributors draw on the wide-ranging literature on performance. Without sacrificing material evidence, they try to see how performance creates meaning and ideology. Drawing...

An Archaeology of Resistance: Materiality and Time in an African Borderland studies the tactics of resistance deployed by a variety of indigenous communities in the borderland between Sudan and Ethiopia. The Horn of Africa is an early area of state formation and at the same time the home of many egalitarian, small scale societies, which have lived in the buffer zone between states for the last three thousand years. For this reason, resistance is not something added to their sociopolitical structures: it is an inherent part of those structures--a mode of being. The main objective of the work...

The field of archaeology continues to face a major crisis of interpretation. The traditional view is that the basic business of archaeology is to reconstruct the history of cultures and civilizations through their material productions. Olivier challenges this view with a new approach to archaeological remains based on the works of French theorists such as Foucault, de Certeaux, and Derrida, with insight from Darwin and Freud. His thesis is that archaeology does not study the past itself but rather what materially remains of the past in our present. Olivier also develops an interpretation of...

This book explores the international legal framework developed by UNESCO to identify and protect world heritage and its implementation at the national level. Drawing on close policy analysis of UNESCO's major documents, extensive professional experience at UNESCO, as well as in-depth analyses of case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America, Sophia Labadi offers a nuanced discussion of the constitutive role of national understandings of a universalist framework. The discussion departs from considerations of the World Heritage Convention as Eurocentric and offers a more complex analysis of...

Situated at the intersection of cultural heritage and local community, this book enlarges our understanding of the Indigenous peoples of southern Mexico and northern Central America who became detached from the ancient Maya through colonialism, government actions, and early twentieth-century anthropological and archaeological research. Through grass-roots heritage programs, local communities are reconnecting with a much valorized but distant past. Maya Cultural Heritage explores how community programs conceived and implemented in a collaborative style are changing the relationship among,...