Robin Skeates

Museums and Archaeology brings together a wide, but carefully chosen, selection of literature from around the world that connects museums and archaeology. Part of the successful Leicester Readers in Museum Studies series, it provides a combination of issue- and practice-based perspectives. As such, it is a volume not only for students and researchers from a range of disciplines interested in museum, gallery and heritage studies, including public archaeology and cultural resource management (CRM), but also the wide range of professionals and volunteers in the museum and heritage sector who work with archaeological collections. The volume’s balance of theory and practice and its thematic and geographical breadth is explored and explained in an extended introduction, which situates the readings in the context of the extensive literature on museum archaeology, highlighting the many tensions that exist between idealistic ‘principles’ and real-life ‘practice’ and the debates that surround these. In addition to this, section introductions and the seminal pieces themselves provide a comprehensive and contextualised resource on the interplay of museums and archaeology.

Museums and Archaeology

John Carman

Carol McDavid

The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology seeks to reappraise the place of archaeology in the contemporary world by providing a series of essays that critically engage with both old and current debates in the field of public archaeology. Divided into four distinct sections and drawing across disciplines in this dynamic field, the volume aims to evaluate the range of research strategies and methods used in archaeological heritage and museum studies, identify and contribute to key contemporary debates, critically explore the history of archaeological resource management, and question the fundamental principles and practices through which the archaeological past is understood and used today.

The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology

This introduction to contemporary debates surrounding their rival claims deals with defining, owning, protecting, managing, interpreting, and experiencing the archaeological heritage. How should the archaeological heritage be presented to the public?

Debating the Archaeological Heritage

Divided into four distinct sections and drawing across various disciplines, this volume seeks to reappraise the place of archaeology in the contemporary world by providing a series of essays that critically engage with both old and current debates in the field of public archaeology.

This book draws on the complementary fields of visual cultural studies and interpretative archaeology to examine how successive generations transformed their visual culture to construct themselves. It explores this process through an extended case-study of art and social life in prehistoric south-east Italy, between the Upper Palaeolithic and the Bronze Age. A central argument of the book is that a wide range of visually communicative artworks were consumed and produced in the cultural process. Such objects range from portable artefacts, to installations within sites, to monumental structures in the landscape - all of which were interwoven with people's bodies in the experiences of daily life and special performances. More specifically, it is argued that these powerful aesthetic objects were actively used by people across space and time to perceive the world around them and to reproduce their social lives. They helped people to establish personal and collective boundaries, identities and relationships, to acquire and exercise power, to promote ideologies, and to contest them, especially at time of social tension.

Art and Social Life in Prehistoric South-East Italy

Visual Culture and Archaeology

Knut Andreas Bergsvik

Caves in Context provides the thriving inter-disciplinary field of cave studies with a European-scale survey of current research in cave archaeology. It is unified by a contemporary theoretical emphasis on the cultural significance and diversity of caves over space and time. Caves and rockshelters are found all over Europe, and have frequently been occupied by human groups, from prehistory right up to the present day. Some appear to have only traces of short occupations, while others contain deep cultural deposits, indicating longer and multiple occupations. Above all, there is great variability in their human use, both secular and sacred. The aim of this book is to explore the multiple significances of these natural places in a range of chronological, spatial, and cultural contexts across Europe. The volume demonstrates, through a diversity of archaeological approaches and examples, that cave studies, whist necessarily focussed, can also be of significance to wider, contemporary, archaeological research agendas, particularly when a contextual approach is adopted. The book is also of relevance to other scholars working in the related fields of speleology, earth sciences, landscape studies, and anthropology, which together comprise the inter-disciplinary field of cave studies.

Robin Skeates

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