Ceramics And Civilization Volume Vii

A collection of 14 papers presented in a one day symposia held at the 98th Annual Meeting of the American Ceramic Society, Indianapolis, Indiana, April 1996. The contributors explore the variability of kilns both chronologically and geographically, stressing new data to emerge from recent archeological excavations at sites in North, Central, and South America. Topics in firing structures, brick and tile making and glass production are explored in the areas of neolithic Greece, the third millennium Indus valley, imperial China, the US Southwest, coastal Peru, during the Classic period of Mesoamerica, and in Renaissance Italy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book is primarily an introduction to the vast family of ceramic materials. The first part is devoted to the basics of ceramics and processes: raw materials, powders synthesis, shaping and sintering. It discusses traditional ceramics as well as “technical” ceramics – both oxide and non-oxide – which have multiple developments. The second part focuses on properties and applications, and discusses both structural and functional ceramics, including bioceramics. The fields of abrasion, cutting and tribology illustrate the importance of mechanical properties. It also deals with the questions/answers of a ceramicist regarding electronuclear technology. As chemistry is an essential discipline for ceramicists, the book shows, in particular, what soft chemistry can contribute as a result of sol-gel methods.

Scientific techniques developed in materials science offer invaluable information to archaeology, art history, and conservation. A rapidly growing number of innovative methods, as well as many established techniques, are constantly being improved and optimised for the analysis of cultural heritage materials. The result is that on the one hand more complex problems and questions can be confronted, but on the other hand the required level of technical competence is widening the existing cultural gap between scientists and end users, such as archaeologists, museum curators, art historians, and many managers of cultural heritage who have a purely humanistic background. The book is intended as an entry-level introduction to the methods and rationales of scientific investigation of cultural heritage materials, with emphasis placed on the analytical strategies, modes of operation, and resulting information rather than on technicalities. The extensive and updated reference list should be a useful starting point for further reading. Students and researchers from the humanities approaching scientific investigations should find it useful, as well as scientists applying familiar techniques and methods to unfamiliar problems related to cultural heritage.

Papers from a session of the 32nd International Geological Congress.

Hot Pursuit is about glass-blowing in antiquity and today. It shows how using a variety of anthropological methods to answer an archaeological question yields an intriguing glimpse into the lives of glass-blowers in antiquity.

A brief introduction to the history, archaeology, art, language, and culture of the Indus Valley civilization, written by the leading North American Indus archaeologist.

This volume reports on the initial settlement of Ban Non Wat and represents a further step towards illuminating the prehistoric societies of the upper Mun Valley during the two millennia of cultural changes that led ultimately to the swift transition to the state as represented at Phimai and beyond, to the civilisation of Angkor. It begins by describing the mortuary sequence. One of the many surprises encountered during the excavations was the presence of burials laid out in a flexed position. This was a widespread practice of hunter-gatherers in Southeast Asia, and it is likely that a group of hunters and gatherers occupied the area and used the mound of Ban Non Wat as a cemetery. Paradoxically, the radiocarbon determinations for these are contemporary with those of the Neolithic occupation. There are two phases of Neolithic occupation, which began in the 17th century BC and ended about six centuries later. These differ on the basis of the orientation of the human graves and the nature of the mortuary offerings placed with the dead. It proceeds with a consideration of the economy and the material culture of the Neolithic inhabitants who occupied the site from the 17th to the 11th centuries BC. This is the first complete report on a Neolithic site in Southeast Asia.

Volume 7 of the Posen Library captures unprecedented transformations of Jewish culture amid mass migration, global capitalism, nationalism, revolution, and the birth of the secular self Between 1880 and 1918, traditions and regimes collapsed around the world, migration and imperialism remade the lives of millions, nationalism and secularization transformed selves and collectives, utopias beckoned, and new kinds of social conflict threatened as never before. Few communities experienced the pressures and possibilities of the era more profoundly than the world's Jews. This volume, seventh in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, recaptures the vibrant Jewish cultural creativity, political striving, social experimentation, and fractious religious and secular thought that burst forth in the face of these challenges. Editors Israel Bartal and Kenneth B. Moss capture the full range of Jewish expression in a centrifugal age--from mystical visions to unabashedly antitraditional Jewish political thought, from cookbooks to literary criticism, from modernist poetry to vaudeville. They also highlight the most remarkable dimension of the 1880-1918 era: an audacious effort by newly secular Jews to replace Judaism itself with a new kind of Jewish culture centering on this-worldly, aesthetic creativity by a posited "Jewish nation" and the secular, modern, and "free" individuals who composed it. This volume is an essential starting point for anyone who wishes to understand the divided Jewish present.