Archaeology and the Senses

Archaeology and the Senses
Author: Yannis Hamilakis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2014-01-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1107728940

This book is an exciting new look at how archaeology has dealt with the bodily senses and offers an argument for how the discipline can offer a richer glimpse into the human sensory experience. Yannis Hamilakis shows how, despite its intensely physical engagement with the material traces of the past, archaeology has mostly neglected multi-sensory experience, instead prioritising isolated vision and relying on the Western hierarchy of the five senses. In place of this limited view of experience, Hamilakis proposes a sensorial archaeology that can unearth the lost, suppressed, and forgotten sensory and affective modalities of humans. Using Bronze Age Crete as a case study, Hamilakis shows how sensorial memory can help us rethink questions ranging from the production of ancestral heritage to large-scale social change, and the cultural significance of monuments. Hamilakis points the way to reconstituting archaeology as a sensorial and affective multi-temporal practice.

The Routledge Handbook of Sensory Archaeology

The Routledge Handbook of Sensory Archaeology
Author: Robin Skeates
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 564
Release: 2019-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317197461

Edited by two pioneers in the field of sensory archaeology, this Handbook comprises a key point of reference for the ever-expanding field of sensory archaeology: one that surpasses previous books in this field, both in scope and critical intent. This Handbook provides an extensive set of specially commissioned chapters, each of which summarizes and critically reflects on progress made in this dynamic field during the early years of the twenty-first century. The authors identify and discuss the key current concepts and debates of sensory archaeology, providing overviews and commentaries on its methods and its place in interdisciplinary sensual culture studies. Through a set of thematic studies, they explore diverse sensorial practices, contexts and materials, and offer a selection of archaeological case-studies from different parts of the world. In the light of this, the research methods now being brought into the service of sensory archaeology are re-examined. Of interest to scholars, students and others with an interest in archaeology around the world, this book will be invaluable to archaeologists and is also of relevance to scholars working in disciplines contributing to sensory studies: aesthetics, anthropology, architecture, art history, communication studies, history (including history of science), geography, literary and cultural studies, material culture studies, museology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology.

Making Senses of the Past

Making Senses of the Past
Author: Jo Day
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2013-03-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0809332876

Since the nineteenth century, museums have kept their artifacts in glass cases to better preserve them, and drawings and photographs have become standard ways of presenting the past. These practices have led to an archaeology dominated by visual description, even though human interaction with the surrounding world involves the whole body and all of its senses. In the past few years, sensory archaeology has become more prominent, and Making Senses of the Past is one of the first collected volumes on this subject. This book presents cutting-edge research on new theoretical issues. The essays presented here take readers on a multisensory journey around the world and across time. In ancient Peru, a site provides sensory surprises as voices resound beneath the ground and hidden carvings slowly reveal their secrets. In Canada and New Zealand, the flicker of reflected light from a lake dances on the faces of painted rocks and may have influenced when and why the pigment was applied. In Mesopotamia, vessels for foodstuffs build a picture of a past cuisine that encompasses taste and social activity in the building of communities. While perfume and flowers are examined in various cultures, in the chamber tombs of ancient Roman Palestine, we are reminded that not all smells are pleasant. Making Senses of the Past explores alternative ways to perceive past societies and offers a new way of wiring archaeology that incorporates the senses.

Senses of the Empire

Senses of the Empire
Author: Eleanor Betts
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2017-02-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317057287

The Roman empire afforded a kaleidoscope of sensations. Through a series of multisensory case studies centred on people, places, buildings and artefacts, and on specific aspects of human behaviour, this volume develops ground-breaking methods and approaches for sensory studies in Roman archaeology and ancient history. Authors explore questions such as: what it felt like, and symbolised, to be showered with saffron at the amphitheatre; why the shape of a dancer’s body made him immediately recognisable as a social outcast; how the dramatic gestures, loud noises and unforgettable smells of a funeral would have different meanings for members of the family and for bystanders; and why feeling the weight of a signet ring on his finger contributed to a man’s sense of identity. A multisensory approach is taken throughout, with each chapter exploring at least two of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The contributors’ individual approaches vary, reflecting the possibilities and the wide application of sensory studies to the ancient world. Underlying all chapters is a conviction that taking a multisensory approach enriches our understanding of the Roman empire, but also an awareness of the methodological problems encountered when reconstructing past experiences.

The Inner Touch

The Inner Touch
Author: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Publisher: Mit Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781890951771

An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into the sense of being sentient--what it means to feel that one is alive--that draws on philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts from ancient, medieval, and modern cultures.

The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East

The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East
Author: Kiersten Neumann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 770
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 100043642X

This Handbook is a state-of-the-field volume containing diverse approaches to sensory experience, bringing to life in an innovative, remarkably vivid, and visceral way the lives of past humans through contributions that cover the chronological and geographical expanse of the ancient Near East. It comprises thirty-two chapters written by leading international contributors that look at the ways in which humans, through their senses, experienced their lives and the world around them in the ancient Near East, with coverage of Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Persia, from the Neolithic through the Roman period. It is organised into six parts related to sensory contexts: Practice, production, and taskscape; Dress and the body; Ritualised practice and ceremonial spaces; Death and burial; Science, medicine, and aesthetics; and Languages and semantic fields. In addition to exploring what makes each sensory context unique, this organisation facilitates cross-cultural and cross-chronological, as well as cross-sensory and multisensory comparisons and discussions of sensory experiences in the ancient world. In so doing, the volume also enables considerations of senses beyond the five-sense model of Western philosophy (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell), including proprioception and interoception, and the phenomena of synaesthesia and kinaesthesia. The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East provides scholars and students within the field of ancient Near Eastern studies new perspectives on and conceptions of familiar spaces, places, and practices, as well as material culture and texts. It also allows scholars and students from adjacent fields such as Classics and Biblical Studies to engage with this material, and is a must-read for any scholar or student interested in or already engaged with the field of sensory studies in any period.

Thinking through the Body

Thinking through the Body
Author: Yannis Hamilakis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 146150693X

What is the archaeology of the body and how can it change the way we experience the past? This book, one of the first to appear on the subject, records and evaluates the emergence of this new direction of cross-disciplinary research, and examines the potential of incorporating some of its insights into archaeology. It will be of interest to students, researchers, and teachers in archaeology, as well as in cognate disciplines such as anthropology and history.

An Archaeology of the Senses

An Archaeology of the Senses
Author: Robin Skeates
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2010-09-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199216606

In this generously illustrated book Robin Skeates establishes a well-defined methodology for an archaeology of the senses, produces a challenging new interpretative synthesis of Maltese prehistoric archaeology, and provides a rich archaeological case-study for the emergent interdisciplinary field of sensual culture studies.

Taste and the Ancient Senses

Taste and the Ancient Senses
Author: Kelli C. Rudolph
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2017-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317515404

Olives, bread, meat and wine: it is deceptively easy to evoke ancient Greece and Rome through a few items of food and drink. But how were their tastes different from ours? How did they understand the sense of taste itself, in relation to their own bodies and to other modes of sensory experience? This volume, the first of its kind to explore the ancient sense of taste, draws on the literature, philosophy, history and archaeology of Greco-Roman antiquity to provide answers to these central questions. By surveying and probing the literary and material remains from the Archaic period to late antiquity, contributors investigate the cultural and intellectual development towards attitudes and theories about taste. These specially commissioned chapters also open a window onto ancient thinking about perception and the body. Importantly, these authors go beyond exploring the functional significance of taste to uncover its value and meaning in the actions, thoughts and words of the Greeks and Romans. Taste and the Ancient Senses presents a full range of interpretative approaches to the gustatory sense, and provides an indispensable resource for students and scholars of classical antiquity and sensory studies.