This volume brings together for the first time the most significant papers on the interpretation of objects and collections and examines how people relate to material culture and why they collect things.

The first section of the book discusses the interpretation of objects, setting the philosophical and historical context of object interpretation. Papers are included which discuss objects variously as historical documents, functioning material, and as semiotic texts, as well as those which examine the politics of objects and the methodology of object study.

The second...

Displaying art in museum galleries is more complex than it used to be. This book aims to canvass past and contemporary problems of cultural representation and of the relationship between the artist, the museum and society. It aims to explore issues relating to audiences for art, and the role of galleries in these and other debates. Topics discussed include: display, cultural representation, the artist and society, museums and the art market.

This fascinating portrait of the Society of Antiquaries of London, founded in 1707, assesses the impact that individual Fellows and the Society as a whole have had in influencing the way we visualise and understand the past. There are, for example, essays on the Society's pioneering role in recording monuments and antiquities for posterity, in establishing the scientific and empirical basis of archaeological studies, in replacing Biblically based timeframes with a clearer understanding of deep time measured in millions of years, in drawing up the first legislation protecting ancient...

Why do some people thrive while others merely survive? It seems that the answer lies not in the circumstances that we each experience, but rather, in our individual brains. The human brain may have evolved over millions of years, but it still uses the same basic survival mechanisms as it did when our earliest ancestors walked the planet. In this modern world, these default threat responses, which were originally designed to protect us, are more likely to sabotage us and hold us back from experiencing all that life has to offer. Wired for Life explains why we think, decide and act the way we...

Here is a lucid thoughtful guide to understanding the structure and organization of three-dimension al space. In 250 captioned drawings this book brilliantly communicates the beauty and geometry of polyhedra. Beginning with polygons and tessellations. It proceeds in a logical sequence to finite polyhedra, dual polyhedra, space filling, and open packings. Important considerations of symmetry, periodic and uniform patterns, and regular and semiregular forms are presented. Because the understanding of polyhedra is enhanced by the manipulation of models, a chapter on both two- and...