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Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of the Baikal Region Siberia's Lake Baikal region is an archaeologically unique and emerging area of hunter-gatherer research, offering insights into the complexity, variability, and dynamics of long-term culture change. The exceptional quality of archaeological materials recovered there facilitates interdisciplinary studies whose relevance extends far beyond the region. The Baikal Archaeology Project—one of the most comprehensive studies ever conducted in the history of subarctic archaeology—is conducted by an international multidisciplinary team studying Middle Holocene (about 9,000 to 3,000 years B.P.) hunter-gatherers of the region. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the project includes scholars in archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnography, molecular biology, geophysics, geochemistry, and paleoenvironmental studies.

This book presents the current team's research findings on questions about long-term patterns of hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies. Grounded in interdisciplinary approaches to primary research questions of cultural change and continuity over 6,000 years, the project utilizes advanced research methods and integrates diverse lines of evidence in making fundamental and lasting contributions to hunter-gatherer archaeology.

Andrzej Weber is Professor of Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology, University of Alberta, Edmonton. M. Anne Katzenberg, F.R.S.C., is University Professor, University of Calgary. Theodore G. Schurr is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.

Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of the Baikal Region

Landscapes of MovementLandscapes of Movement originates from the premise that trails, paths, and roads are the physical manifestation of human movement through the landscape and are central to an understanding of that movement. The study of these features connects with many intellectual domains, engaging history, geography, environmental studies, and, in particular, anthropology and archaeology. These diverse fields together provide not only a better understanding of infrastructure but also of social, political, and economic organization, cultural expressions of patterned movement, and the ways in which trails, paths, and roads reflect a culture's traditional knowledge, worldview, memory, and identity.

The contributors to Landscapes of Movement document these routes across different times and cultures, from those made by hunter-gatherers in the Great Basin of North America to causeways in the Bolivian Amazon to Bronze Age towns in the Near East, examined through aerial and satellite photography, surface survey, historic records, and archaeological excavation. The essays consider many factors in the development and use of trails, paths, and roads, including labor, technology, terrain characteristics, landscape features, access, and ownership. Diverse scales of movement are also addressed, ranging from paths between home and fields to roads used for long-distance journeying. Overall, the book makes the case for the centrality of paths, trails, and roads as an organizing element of human lives throughout history.

James E. Snead is Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University.

Clark L. Erickson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Associate Curator of the American Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

J. Andrew Darling is Coordinator of the Cultural Resource Management Program at the Gila River Indian Community.

 

Landscapes of Movement

The Sufi Journey of Baba RexhebBaba Rexheb, a Muslim mystic from the Balkans, founded the first Bektashi community in America. This is his life story and the story of his communities: the traditional Bektashi tekke in Albania where he first served, the displaced persons camps to which he escaped after the war, the centuries-old tekke in Cairo where he waited, and the Bektashi community that he founded in Michigan in 1954 and led until his passing in 1995. Baba Rexheb lived through the twentieth century, its wars, disruptions, and dislocations, but still at a profound level was never displaced.

Through Bektashi stories, oral histories, and ethnographic experience, Frances Trix recounts the life and times of this modern Sufi leader. She studied with Baba Rexheb in his community for more than twenty years. As a linguistic anthropologist, she taped twelve years of their weekly meetings in Turkish, Albanian, and Arabic. She draws extensively on Baba's own words, as well as interactions at the Michigan Bektashi center, for a remarkable perspective on our times.

You come to know Baba Rexheb and his gentle way of teaching through example and parable, poetry and humor. The book also documents the history of the 700-year-old Bektashi order in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Balkans and Egypt and its transposition to America. It attests to the role of Sufi centers in Islamic community life and their interaction with people of other faiths.

Frances Trix is an ethnographer of Islam in Balkan immigrant communities. Her books include Spiritual Discourse: Learning with a Muslim Master, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and Muslim Voices and Lives in the Contemporary World. She is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at Indiana University.

The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb

The Thousand and One ChurchesPublished in 1909 and long out of print, The Thousand and One Churches remains a seminal study of the postclassical monuments of Anatolia. Now a new generation of readers can learn of the extensive remains of the sprawling early Christian site known as Binbirkilise ("Thousand and One Churches," near Konya), excavated by Ramsay and Bell in 1907. The book provides extensive analysis of other early Christian and Byzantine sites across Anatolia that Bell visited at that time. Because many of the monuments have long since disappeared, this documentation is now invaluable, and Bell's extensive photographs provide a unique view of travel and archaeology more than a century ago.

For this new edition more than 250 high-quality digitized images from the Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University (UK) replace the original illustrations, and the editors' Foreword lays out the historical and cultural context for the undertaking. Ousterhout and Jackson recount the lives and careers of the two authors and the tale of their collaboration on the excavation and subsequent book.

Publication was supported by a grant from the Joukowsky Family Foundation.

Go to http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14496.html

Master Builders of ByzantiumExamining Byzantine architecture—primarily churches built in the area of Constantinople between the ninth and fifteenth centuries—from the perspective of its masons, its master builders, Robert Ousterhout identifies the problems commonly encountered in the process of design and construction. He analyzes written evidence, the archaeological record, and especially the surviving buildings, concluding that Byzantine architecture was far more innovative than has previously been acknowledged.

Ousterhout explains how masons selected, manufactured, and utilized materials from bricks and mortar to lead roofing tiles, from foundation systems to roof vaultings. He situates richly decorated church interiors, sheathed in marble revetments, mosaics, and frescoes—along with their complex iconographic programs—within the purview of the master builder, referring also to masons in Russia, the Balkans, and Jerusalem.

Robert Ousterhout is Professor of Byzantine Art and Architecture and Director of the Center for Ancient Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

Go to http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14545.html

Himalaya: Land of the Snow Lion by Andrea BaldeckThe Himalaya, Asia's jagged backbone, lured photographer Andrea Baldeck on four journeys covering thousands of miles from northern India to western China, the distillation of which is Himalaya: Land of the Snow Lion. This volume opens a window onto an ancient enduring culture, bound by shared ethnicity and religion and challenged by daunting geography. Portraits, landscapes, architecture, and still-life images convey the texture and rhythm of this mountain life, which is ever more threatened by the forces of geopolitics, migration, and modernization.

In a series of succinct essays accompanying the images, the artist invites the viewer to imagine aspects of life and travel in a region where a remote, starkly beautiful environment test and tempers all who call it home.

Andrea Baldeck is a musician, physician, and photographer. Her photographs have been exhibited widely and are part of the permanent collections of major museums.

Buy Now from the Penn Press

The Tlingit Encounter with PhotographyBeginning in the mid-nineteenth century, shortly after the invention of photography, the Tlingit of southeastern Alaska encountered early Russian and American survey teams, ethnographic investigators, studio photographers, tourists, and resident amateur and commercial photographers.

Why were the Tlingit photographed and how were their images disseminated? How were they portrayed through photography? How active were the Tlingit in shaping the images taken of them and in controlling their representation? Did photography remain an alien technology and activity or did the Tlingit incorporate it into their own culture?

Based on research in thirteen North American archives (including the Penn Museum's Shotridge Collection), a close examination of hundreds of photographs, and extensive oral-history interviews in Sitka and other sites with both Tlingit and non-Native residents, Sharon Bohn Gmelch presents valuable insights on the motivations and reactions of Native subjects to being photographed. She shows the ways the Tlingit incorporated photography and came to use it for their own purposes, expressing a new sense of empowerment as they reclaimed images from public archives for their own purposes. This is the first book to explore the photographic imagery of the Tlingit during a critical period of change, from the 1860s through the 1920s. It also provides the first full treatment of the Tlingit photography of Elbridge W. Merrill, a neglected figure in the history of ethnographic photography.

Sharon Bohn Gmelch is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Union College.

Go to http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14492.html

The Maikop Treasure"Magisterial!"—Michael Vickers, Ashmolean Museum

The Maikop Treasure consists of more than 300 objects ranging in date from the Bronze Age through the Medieval period, currently held in four institutions—the Staatliche Museen, the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin, the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Originally assembled in the 1890s by a wealthy employee of Tsar Nicholas II, these objects have no single provenance but were dug from various sites in the general region of the eastern Pontic.

Publication was supported by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

A. M. Leskov, former head of the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Art at the Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow, is a Research Associate in the Mediterranean Section of the Penn Museum and a Research Associate in the Program for the Archaeology of Ukraine, University of Pennsylvania.

Go to http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14494.html

Tikal Report 27A The Artifacts of Tikal—Ornamental and Ceremonial Artifacts and Unworked MaterialTR27A reports upon goods used as markers of social status and goods used in ritual. It describes the splendid ornaments and insignia of jade, shell, pearls, and inscribed bone shown in representations on monuments and pottery vessels and recovered from the burials of Tikal's elites. Each artifact is described in the text, tabulated, and richly illustrated with drawings and photographs. An accompanying CD-ROM includes updated databases for all recovered objects, enabling the reader to discover detailed relationships between artifact, date, and context. It also includes William R. Coe's drafts of reconstructions of destroyed offerings and typologies for ceremonial lithics and shell "Charlie Chaplin" figurines.

Hattula Moholy-Nagy is a Research Associate of the Penn Museum. William R. Coe was director of the Penn Museum's Tikal Project and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Go to http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14586.html