Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Societies (MaTAS)

Publisher: Oxbow Books
Series editors: Gianluca Miniaci and Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia

This new series from Oxbow Books promotes a completely innovative series of studies on ancient societies with special, but by no means exclusive, reference to Egypt. Its main goal is generating interdisciplinary and comparative research as well as making aspects of the ancient world accessible and comprehensible to other disciplines. Founded on the methodologies developed mainly by anthropology and archaeology, the series approaches problems and questions relating to ancient societies from a radically idiosyncratic perspective: scholars from different disciplines are invited to tackle and discuss targeted problems according to their own points of view and methodologies, promoting an holistic approach to sometimes familiar themes more usually tackled on an individual, regional or close chronological basis.

Space and Communal Agency in Pre-Modern Societies Cover

Format: Hardback

Pages: 352

ISBN: 9798888571934

Pub Date: 15 Apr 2025

Imprint: Oxbow Books

Series: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Societies (MAtAS)

Illustrations: 70 b/w illustrations

Description:

Monumental spaces were fundamental in the construction of power, political order and community identities in the ancient and pre-modern world. It was for this reason that authorities invested heavily in the construction of ideal landscapes of power that embodied the basic representation about what a harmonious society and an ordered world under the inspired guidance of the ruler(s) was. Such landscapes conveyed thus powerful cultural values and ideals about the social order that had produced them, not to speak about the authorities’ ability –who designed and built them – to lead their societies. However, far from being fixed over time, those spaces underwent changes to accommodate new values, to express a new balance of power resulting in transformations, rebuilding, integration of selected aspects of the past or, simply, utter destruction of landscapes no longer functional.In some societies, ceremonies were open, addressed to the whole society―at least as witnesses―in which their rulers performed the construction of social order and received divine support. The Maya cities, for example, with their loose urban density and open spaces dominated by autonomous neighbourhoods, epitomize the ideological need to gather society as spectators. Plazas became thus essential to negotiate consent and social consensus. In other cases the absence of open spaces – including cult ones – in which the community may gather and participate in collective performances points to oligarchical and somewhat secluded configurations of power, as in pharaonic Egypt, while, in the Classical world, agoras, forums and open spaces were intended to facilitate collective political deliberation.Urban layouts may bear traces of rival uses of space, for instance between “official” ceremonial areas, reserved to pageantry displays, and areas that were more organic, difficult to control but which favoured the concentration of crafts and guilds, alternative circulation of news and construction of counterpowers, like bazaars. The archaeological focus put on ceremonial spaces and prestige buildings may thus conceal the political importance of those other spaces and the counter-power issued there, with the lack specifically-designed buildings significant in itself.The aim of this book is to explore the relation between built environments, collective identities and political agency and the potential conflicts arising from competing or alternative social uses of the space, be it public, ritual, civic or a mix of all of them. A selection of historical case-studies from different regions of the world may help rethink current concepts and views about the traces that communal political agency left in the organization of settlements and in planning monumental areas. Such cases may also cast some light over the limits of rulers’ authority and the existence of collective institutions―formal or informal―rarely evoked in official sources. In the end, this book explores the importance of comparative research to address collective decision-making and communal identities in the pre-modern world.

RRP: £60.00

Format: Hardback

Pages: 240

ISBN: 9798888571149

Pub Date: 17 Oct 2024

Imprint: Oxbow Books

Series: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Societies (MAtAS)

Illustrations: 100 B/W illustrations

Description:

Forsaken Relics is the result of an interdisciplinary dialogue between history, archaeology, and ethnography on the topic of the appropriation of disputed goods and places. Scholars with diverse backgrounds convened to address this common challenge: how different societies in time and space managed to claim and re-appropriate alleged ‘abandoned’ or ‘ownerless’ goods or things ‘in ruin’.The volume includes a diverse range of case studies – from Neolithic sites in Eastern Europe to ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean, encompassing early modern and present-day Europe – reflecting on the ways in which actions can be used to legitimise appropriation, with a particular focus on ritual actions and practices.

Format: Hardback

Pages: 328

ISBN: 9781789259148

Pub Date: 15 Dec 2022

Imprint: Oxbow Books

Series: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Societies (MAtAS)

Illustrations: B/W

Description:

Archaeological remains are ‘fragmented by definition’: apart from exceptional cases, the study of the human past takes into account mainly traces, ruins, discards, and debris of past civilisations. It is rare that things have been preserved as they were originally made and conceived in the past. However, not all the ancient fragmentary objects were the ‘leftovers’ from the past.

Format: Hardback

Pages: 312

ISBN: 9781789258622

Pub Date: 15 Oct 2022

Imprint: Oxbow Books

Series: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Societies (MAtAS)

Illustrations: B/w

Description:

The organisation and characteristics of early and ancient states have become the focus of a renewed interest from archaeologists, ancient historians and anthropologists in recent years. On the one hand, neo-evolutionary schemas of political transformation find it difficult to define some of their most basic concepts, such as ‘chiefdom’, ‘complex chiefdom’ and ‘state’, not to mention the transition between them. On the other hand, teleological interpretations based on linear dynamics, from less to increasingly more complex political structures, in successive steps, impose biased and too rigid views on the available evidence.

Markets and Exchanges in Pre-Modern and Traditional Societies Cover

Format: Hardback

Pages: 240

ISBN: 9781789256116

Pub Date: 15 May 2021

Imprint: Oxbow Books

Series: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Societies (MAtAS)

Illustrations: b/w

Description:

Markets emerge in recent historical research as important spheres of economic interaction in ancient societies. In the case of ancient Egypt, traditional models imagined an all-encompassing centralized, bureaucratic economy that left practically no place for market transactions, as many surviving documents only described the activities of the royal palace and of huge institutions, mainly temples. Yet scattered references in the sources reveal that markets and traders were crucial actors in the economic life of ancient Egypt.

RRP: £45.00