Rock Art and Regional Identity


Book Description

Why did the ancient artists create paintings and engravings? What did the images mean? This careful study of rock art motifs in the Trans-Pecos area of Texas and a small area in South Africa demonstrates that there are archaeological and anthropological ways of accessing the past in order to investigate and explain the significance of rock art motifs. Using two disparate regions shows the possibility of comparative rock art studies and highlights the importance of regional studies and regional variations. This is an ideal resource for students and researchers.




Inscribed Landscapes


Book Description

Annotation. Inscribed Landscapes explores the role of inscription in the social construction of place, power, and identity. Bringing together twenty-one scholars across a range of fields-primarily archaeology, anthropology, and geography-it examines how social codes and hegemonic practices have resulted in the production of particular senses of place, exploring the physical and metaphysical marking of place as a means of accessing social history.




African Rock Art


Book Description

Contains more than two hundred photographs of Africa's rock art, coupled with historical and interpretive analyses, compiled to raise public awareness of the variety, importance, and frailty of these works.




Zambia Safari Guide


Book Description

For over 25 years Bradt’s Zambia Safari Guide has been widely acknowledged as the best guidebook to this African country, and it is now the only dedicated guide to Zambia’s world-renowned safari destinations. Combining in-depth reviews of lodges, camps and other accommodation (from a stately home to a contemporary woven treehouse), detailed descriptions of safari locations and operators, extensive practical details, local insights, a brand new 48-page colour wildlife guide and curated coverage of the main access points of Lusaka and Livingstone, this is the ‘must-have’ guidebook to travel planning and exploring the country’s wildlife-rich safari regions. Lying in the heart of the continent, Zambia is deepest, darkest Africa at its most appealing. Many visitors are drawn initially to the majestic Victoria Falls. Others come for the glory of Zambia’s stellar national parks: the South Luangwa, the Lower Zambezi and Kafue. For seasoned safari goers, Zambia is the home of the walking safari; for adventurous travellers, it is about canoeing past hippos on the Lower Zambezi – or diving into a whole new world of freshwater fish in Lake Tanganyika. Experienced travel writers Chris and Susie McIntyre – both Africa experts, with Susie having grown up in Zambia – use their decades of safari experience and in-depth knowledge of the Zambian safari scene to provide accurate, honest and upbeat descriptions, anecdotes and advice. To help readers make informed choices, the authors explain where to find top-quality guiding and detail Zambia’s top spots for wildlife and wilderness (including GPS co-ordinates for those who prefer self-drive holidays). They advise on the best walking safaris plus the ‘silent safaris’ available in electric vehicles and boats, and suggest how best to combine different safari experiences into a fulfilling itinerary in a country where nearly one-third of the land area is reserved for wildlife. Whether you are a wildlife enthusiast or Africa addict, an escapist seeking wilderness or a family craving adventure; and whether you prefer a local operator to make your arrangements or independent travel, Bradt’s Zambia Safari Guide is the perfect travel companion.




San Rock Art


Book Description

San rock paintings, scattered over the range of southern Africa, are considered by many to be the very earliest examples of representational art. There are as many as 15,000 known rock art sites, created over the course of thousands of years up until the nineteenth century. There are possibly just as many still awaiting discovery. Taking as his starting point the magnificent Linton panel in the Iziko-South African Museum in Cape Town, J. D. Lewis-Williams examines the artistic and cultural significance of rock art and how this art sheds light on how San image-makers conceived their world. It also details the European encounter with rock art as well as the contentious European interaction with the artists’ descendants, the contemporary San people.




The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology


Book Description

Africa has the longest and arguably the most diverse archaeological record of any of the continents. It is where the human lineage first evolved and from where Homo sapiens spread across the rest of the world. Later, it witnessed novel experiments in food-production and unique trajectories to urbanism and the organisation of large communities that were not always structured along strictly hierarchical lines. Millennia of engagement with societies in other parts of the world confirm Africa's active participation in the construction of the modern world, while the richness of its history, ethnography, and linguistics provide unusually powerful opportunities for constructing interdisciplinary narratives of Africa's past. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. As well as covering almost all periods and regions of the continent, it includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates, and situates the subject's contemporary practice within the discipline's history and the infrastructural challenges now facing its practitioners. Bringing together essays on all these themes from over seventy contributors, many of them living and working in Africa, it offers a highly accessible, contemporary account of the subject for use by scholars and students of not only archaeology, but also history, anthropology, and other disciplines.




An Engraved Landscape: Rock carvings in the Wadi al-Ajal, Libya


Book Description

An Engraved Landscape is a contextual analysis of a substantial new corpus of engravings from the Wadi al-Ajal, situated in the Central Saharan region of south west Libya. The wadi is renowned as the heartland of the Garamantian civilization, which emerged from local mobile Pastoral communities in the 1st millennium BC, and dominated trans-Saharan trade and politics for over a thousand years. Extensive archaeological and palaeoenvironmental investigations in recent years have provided detailed insight into the later prehistory and protohistory of the wadi and surrounding areas. However, prior to the fieldwork detailed in this work, only a handful of carvings had been recorded in the wadi. This work is based on systematic survey, conducted between 2004 and 2009, which recorded around 2,500 previously unknown or unpublished engraved and inscribed rock surfaces. All forms of engraving, whether figurative or surface markings, were viewed as significant residues of human interaction with the rock surface and were recorded. The resulting database provides an opportunity to analyze the engravings in relation to their changing physical and cultural contexts, and the discussion offers a fresh interpretation of Saharan rock art based on this substantial new evidence. An Engraved Landscape also captures in detail a unique heritage resource that is currently inaccessible and threatened. This record of the fragile engravings provides an important source of information for researchers and students.




Indian Rock Art of the Southwest


Book Description

The comprehensive book on Indian petroglyphs in the Southwest.




Rock Art and Sacred Landscapes


Book Description

Social and behavioral scientists study religion or spirituality in various ways and have defined and approached the subject from different perspectives. In cultural anthropology and archaeology the understanding of what constitutes religion involves beliefs, oral traditions, practices and rituals, as well as the related material culture including artifacts, landscapes, structural features and visual representations like rock art. Researchers work to understand religious thoughts and actions that prompted their creation distinct from those created for economic, political, or social purposes. Rock art landscapes convey knowledge about sacred and spiritual ecology from generation to generation. Contributors to this global view detail how rock art can be employed to address issues regarding past dynamic interplays of religions and spiritual elements. Studies from a number of different cultural areas and time periods explore how rock art engages the emotions, materializes thoughts and actions and reflects religious organization as it intersects with sociopolitical cultural systems.