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.

Format: Hardback

Pages: 352

ISBN: 9798888571149

Pub Date: 15 Oct 2024

Imprint: Oxbow Books

Series: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Societies (MAtAS)

Illustrations: 100 B/W illustrations

Description:

Forsaken Relics examines the intricate mechanisms of ritualistic appropriation of ruined and/or abandoned assets and artifacts. It explores how this process occurs in situations where there is legislation to regulate the appropriation of ownerless property, as well as in cases where such rules are either absent or contested, leading to disputes and conflicts.Every society has developed its unique ways of managing the re-appropriation of ‘ownerless things’, such as places and houses abandoned after conflicts, crises, or natural disasters, forsaken cemeteries, tombs, and forgotten goods.

RRP: £50.00

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 It is rare that things have been preserved as they were originally made and conceived in the past.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.

RRP: £60.00

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.

RRP: £55.00

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