Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies is the first collection of cultural studies from Australia, selected and introduced for an international readership.
Participating in the de-centring' of cultural studies - considering what perspectives other than the European and the American have to offer - the contributors raise important issues about the role of a national tradition of critical theory, and about the cultural specificity of theory itself.
A key theme is the place of the postcolonial nation within contemporary cultural theory - particularly those...

The Yellow River valley of China, during the period ca. 7000-1500, saw the transformation of egalitarian societies into stratified chiefdoms giving rise to early states. This book examines that transformation, emphasizing the interplay of many factors affecting these processes, such as climatic fluctuation, population movements, inter-group competition, warfare, and long-distance exchange of valuables.

Drawing on evidence from several disciplines, Ann Brower Stahl reconstructs the daily lives of Banda villagers of west central Ghana, from the time that they were drawn into the Niger trade (around 1300 AD) until British overrule was established early in the twentieth century. The case study aims to closely integrate perspectives drawn from archaeology, history and anthropology in African studies.

In this study Roland Fletcher argues that the built environment becomes a constraint on long-term settlement development. He reviews worldwide settlement growth over the past 15,000 years in the light of the limits imposed by buildings, layouts and forms of communication, and concludes with a major discussion of the great transformations of human settlements--from mobile to sedentary, sedentary to urban, and urban to industrial. This ambitious contribution to archaeological theory has implications for the future of urban settlement.

This innovative study analyzes the great cultural and economic changes occurring in the Near East between 10,000 and 7,000 BC as Palaeolithic societies of hunter-gatherers gave way to village communities of Neolithic food-producers. Challenging the orthodox, materialist interpretations, and drawing on French theories of mentalities, Jacques Cauvin argues that the Neolithic revolution must be understood as an intellectual transformation, revealing itself above all in symbolic activities. He describes the emergence of the first agricultural villages, pastoralism and nomadism, and the diffusion...

This much-praised book aims to develop a theory of ceramics which will elucidate the complex relationship between ceramics and culture and society. Drawing upon the theoretical perspectives of systems theory, cybernetics and cultural ecology, Dr Arnold develops cross-cultural generalizations to explain the origins and evolution of the craft of pottery making. These processes are organized into a series of feedback mechanisms which limit or stimulate the initial production of pottery and its transition from a part-time to a full-time specialized activity. The author provides extensive...

This is an archaeological perspective on the elaborate system of chiefdoms found in the islands of Polynesia. While the growth and development of complex social and political systems in this region have long interested anthropologists and ethnographers, the islands' rich sources of archaeological data have since been exploited. The author combines this fresh archaeological data with comparative ethnographic and linguistic materials to present an innovative and perceptive account of the processes of culture change in the islands over three millennia. Using comparative ethnography, lexical...

Archaeology has made enormous advances recently, both in volume of discoveries and in its character as an intellectual discipline; new techniques have helped to further the range and rigour of enquiry, and encouraged interdisciplinary communication. The aim of this series is to make available to a wider audience the results of these developments. The coverage will be world-wide and will extend from the earliest period to medieval and industrial archaeology.

Religion and Empire is an innovative and provocative study of the two largest states of the Precolumbian Americas, the Aztec and Inca Empires. By examining the causes of the formation and expansion of these two empires, the authors identify similar patterns and processes underlying their rise and decline. They demonstrate that in both examples among the critical elements in the transition from marginal people to imperial power to disintegrating society were changes in traditional religion, including the elaboration of Aztec human sacrifice and Inca worship of the corpses of their kings. The...

The book deals with the many connections between matrices, graphs, diagraphs and bipartite graphs. The basic theory of network flows is developed in order to obtain existence theorems for matrices with prescribed combinatorical properties and to obtain various matrix decomposition theorems. Other chapters cover the permanent of a matrix and Latin squares. The book ends by considering algebraic characterizations of combinatorical properties and the use of combinatorial arguments in proving classical algebraic theorems, including the Cayley-Hamilton Theorem and the Jorda Canonical Form.