Historical Archaeologies of Cognition - Explorations into Faith, Hope and Charity - James Symonds

Historical Archaeologies of Cognition - Explorations into Faith, Hope and Charity - James Symonds

Index

Historical Archaeologies of Cognition - Explorations into Faith, Hope and Charity - James Symonds

James Symonds [+-]
University of Amsterdam
James Symonds is Professor of Historical Archaeology (North of the Alps) at the University of Amsterdam. His main research interests include the study of capitalism, colonialism, landscapes of Improvement and Diaspora, urban and industrial archaeology, and the archaeology of poverty. For the last 20 years he has concentrated on the historical archaeology of 18th and 19th century communities, with occasional forays into the 20th century. He is currently working on the archaeology of conflicts in 17th and 20th century Europe.
Anna Badcock [+-]
ArcHeritage
Anna Badcock is Regional Director of Strategy and Development at ArcHeritage in Sheffield. She is interested in landscape approaches to archaeological practice, and is the editor of Ancient Uists: exploring the archaeology of the Outer Hebride (Western Isles Council, in press). Anna also specialises in contemporary archaeology and has published articles on the archaeology of industry, urban regeneration, protest and activism.
Jeff Oliver [+-]
University of Aberdeen
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Jeff Oliver is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast: Colonial Encounters in the Fraser Valley (University of Arizona Press, 2010) and co-editor of Wild Signs: Graffiti in Archaeology and History (BAR, 2010). His research focuses on colonial landscapes in western Canada. More recently he has become involved in a project on the historical archaeology of nineteenth-century rural life in Scotland.

Description

This collection of essays draws inspiration from the late James Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten (1977). Deetz’s seminal work broke new ground by using structuralist theory to show how artefacts reflected the ‘worldviews’ or idealogies of their makers and users, and claimed that the American colonial world had been structured according to a British intellectual blueprint, the so-called ‘Georgian Order’. His central premise, that the systematic study of mundane material objects such as tombstones, architecture, and furniture, can render palpable the intangible aspects of human cognition and belief systems, has become a fundamental tenet of modern historical archaeology. Drawing on James Deetz’s insight that everyday objects from the recent past are ‘freighted with social significance’ and that material culture operates alongside language as a system of communication, this book unravels specific cultural moments in well-documented historical periods across the modern world. These studies range from the early 17th century to the late 20th century and employ theory from archaeology and anthropology to elucidate the complex links between human thought and action. The authors, drawn from North America, Europe, and Australia, make a significant contribution to archaeological knowledge, moving beyond simple materialities to create human stories that transcend purely descriptive show-and-tell accounts of archaeological sites and allow taken-for-granted constructions of race, class and gender to be probed and challenged.

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Citation

Symonds, James; Badcock, Anna; Oliver, Jeff. Index. Historical Archaeologies of Cognition - Explorations into Faith, Hope and Charity. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 191 - 198 Oct 2013. ISBN 9781781796368. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=21648. Date accessed: 29 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.21648. Oct 2013

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