Humans, represented by members of genus Homo, have been living in Europe for around 1.5 million years. But who were they? How did they survive? In short, what kinds of ‘humans’ were these? These are the fundamental questions addressed, though the lens of the changing seasons, in the pages that follow. But why ask these questions and why should we be interested…
What if we were actually able to smell out the mixture of things that composed the olfactory past? What if historians were to bury their noses in the past instead of merely resorting to ocular inspection?This short book provides some answers to these questions. It is an exploration of what it means to study smell in the past, smell and the past and the smell of the pas…
The evidence proves that since the remote past religion has been a part of our mental emotional make up. Even non believers usually agree that the term homo religiosus aptly describes the human experience. Men and women by their nature are religious, and efforts to eliminate religion as many social and political movements have done since the eighteenth century, come up short. They ultimately fa…
From the mid-nineteenth-century Hui rebellions, which challenged centralised state control, to the early-twentieth-century revolutions, which led to Yunnan’s decades-long independence, local actors shaped the history of Yunnan through their extensive cross-border networks and contradictory roles in the attempted state consolidation of this contested area. Among the local elites, the state age…
Two decades before the war against Ukraine, a “special operation” was launched against Russian historical memory, aggressively reshaping the nation’s understanding of its history and identity. The Kremlin’s militarization of Russia through World War II propaganda is well documented, but the glorification of Russian medieval society and its warlords as a source of support for Putinism ha…
Cities, Monuments and Objects in the Roman and Byzantine Levant celebrates Gabriel Mazor and his lifetime of work at the monumental city of Nysa-Scythopolis, Bet She?an Bays?n. This metropolis, part of the storied Decapolis, or league of ten cities, that flourished during the Hellenistic, Roman-Byzantine and very early Islamic periods until the devastating earthquake of AD 748, has been the sin…
Perhaps unexpectedly, English travel writing during the long eighteenth century reveals a discourse of global civility. By bringing together representations of the then already familiar Ottoman Empire and the largely unknown South Pacific, Sascha Klement adopts a uniquely global perspective and demonstrates how cross-cultural encounters were framed by Enlightenment philosophy, global interconne…
This volume, covering the period 1666–1800, considers the archaeology of the port of London on a wide scale, from the City down the Thames to Deptford. During this period, with the waterfront at its centre, London became the hub of the new British empire, contributing to the exploitation of people from other lands known as slavery.
In 2007, a Smithsonian Magazine article declared, “Singapore Swing: Peaceful and Prosperous, Southeast Asia’s Famously Uptight Nation Has Let Its Hair Down.” Remarking on his return trip to Singapore, David Lamb, former Southeast Asia bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times,marveled, “This tiny nation—whose ascendancy from malariainfested colonial …
The Romanov family ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917. They ascended the throne at the end of one of the most critical periods of Russian history, known as the Time of Troubles (1589 Ü 1613). The last tsar of the previous dynasty, a weak son of Ivan the Terrible, died in 1589.