A visual structure and hierarchy is created by the spatial-architectural location of the decorative elements and their relationship to one another. Traditional research drawing on Immanuel Kant’s reflections on aesthetics describes such hierarchies by referring to a particular notion of ‘image’ and ‘ornament’: the image becomes the central (research) object, the ornament…
Saint Birgitta of Sweden (d. 1373), one of the most famous visionary women of the late Middle Ages, lived in Rome for the last 23 years of her life. Much of her extensive literary work was penned there. Her Celestial Revelations circulated widely from the late 14th century to the 17th century, copied in Italian scriptoria, translated into vernacular, and printed in several Latin and Italian edi…
In Architecture and Asceticism Loosley Leeming explores the links between Syria and Georgia in late antiquity. The book takes an inter-disciplinary approach and examines the question from archaeological, art historical, historical, literary and theological viewpoints. Readership: This work is aimed at specialists in Oriental and Eastern Christianity, Late Antique material culture, Syrian (and S…
The Cis-Baikal is a vast region in Northeast Asia encompassing the western part of Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia. During the middle Holocene (c.8200–3700 cal BP1), the Cis-Baikal was inhabited by many individuals who left behind a rich archaeological and mortuary record. Archaeological research in the Cis-Baikal has been ongoing since the 19th century …
I identify as an anthropologist, with a slight undercoating of archaeology, which was triggered f ifty years ago by seeing pots with unusual designs in a Bangkok market. In a grade seven project on choosing a career, I wrote that I wanted to be an archaeologist; much later I learned that anthropology was the best route to that career. I received my BA in anthropology from the University of Toro…
Ancient Southeast Asia provides readers with a much needed synthesis of the latest discoveries and research in the archaeology of the region, presenting the evolution of complex societies in Southeast Asia from the protohistoric period, beginning around 500BC, to the arrival of British and Dutch colonists in 1600. Well-illustrated throughout, this comprehensive account explores the factors whic…
In the recent cultural heritage boom, community-based and national identity projects are intertwined with interest in cultural tourism and sites of the memory of enslavement. Questions of historical guilt and present responsibility have become a source of social conflict, particularly in multicultural societies with an enslaving past. This became apparent in the context of the Black Lives Matte…
A combination of all three aspects is also feasible. For example, the cult of a protective saint against the plague spreads in a European region hardly affected by the Black Death, even as the pandemic itself was sparked in part by changing precipitation pat-terns in Central Asia.Perhaps it is more useful to think of the multi-level impacts of a meteorological extreme event on a s…
How Divine Images Became Art tells the story of the parallel ‘discovery’ of Russian medieval art and of the Italian ‘primitives’ at the beginning of the twentieth century. While these two developments are well-known, they are usually studied in isolation. Tarasov’s study has the great merit of showing the connection between the art world in Russia and the West, and its impact in the c…
From the earliest Near Eastern urban civilizations to modern times, rulers and their retinues have disseminated ideological information with regard to the legitimacy of their status, their obligations, and their rights. The visual expressions of these royal statements were the subject of our research group, under the auspices of the Mandel Scholion In…