Coming to Terms with the Future: Concepts of Resilience for the Study of Early Iranian Societies
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★★★★★
English
The collection of essays in this book focuses on the highlands of Iran in pre-modern times, reaching from the Paleolithic to the medieval period. What holds the diverse contributions together is an issue that is closely related to debates in our own times: crises and how societies in the past dealt with them. We start from the premise that general circumstances in the fractured topographic structure of the Iranian highlands led to unique relations between ecological, social, economic and political conditions.In three sections entitled Climate and palaeoenvironment, Settlement, subsistence and mobility und Political and economic institutions, the authors ask what sorts of crises afflicted past societies in the Iranian highlands, to what extent they proved resilient, and especially what strategies they developed for enhancing the resilience of their ways of life. Looking for answers in paleoenvironmental proxy data, archaeological findings and written sources, the authors examine subsistence economies, political institutions, religious beliefs, everyday routines and economic specialization in different temporal, spatial and organizational scales.This book is the first volume of a series published by the German-Iranian research cooperation The Iranian Highlands: Resiliences and Integration in Premodern Societies. The goal of the research project is to shine a new light on communities and societies that populated the Iranian highlands and their more or less successful strategies to cope with the many vagaries, the constant changes and risks of their natural and humanly shaped environments.
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Product Details
Dimensions: 210 x 280mm
Publication Date: 22 Mar 2023
Publisher: Sidestone Press
Publication City/Country: Netherlands
Language: English
ISBN13: 9789464261455
About
Reinhard Bernbeck is Professor of Western Asian archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin and professor emeritus of Anthropology at Binghamton University. His interests include the prehistory of Iran archaeological manifestations of social and material inequality economic exploitation and ideological dimensions of archaeological practice. Susan Pollock is professor of Western Asian Archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin and professor emerita of Anthropology at Binghamton University. She has long-standing research interests in village early state and urban societies in Western Asia and has conducted fieldwork in Iraq Iran Turkey and Turkmenistan. Her recent work has involved much more recent periods with field projects on sites of the 20th century in and around Berlin. Her work draws on feminist and political economic approaches to the study of the past with specific attention to processes of subjectivation and the place of commensality in social life. She is the author of Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was editor of Between Feasts and Daily Meals. Toward an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces and co-editor (with Reinhard Bernbeck and Kamyar Abdi) of The 2003 Excavations at Tol-e Bai Iran: Social Life in a Neolithic Village and (with Reinhard Bernbeck and Birgül Ögüt) of Looking Closely. Excavations at Monjukli Depe Turkmenistan 2010 2014 Volume I. Gisela Eberhardt is a project manager for the joint research project The Iranian Highlands. Resiliences and Integration in Premodern Societies at Freie Universität Berlin and an editor in the editorial department at the German Archaeological Institutes (DAI) head office. She holds a PhD in archaeology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and was one of the managing editors of Edition Topoi. She is the author of the book Deutsche Ausgrabung im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Eine problemorientierte Untersuchung zur archäologischen Praxis (2011) and of the forthcoming chapter From Deep Holes to the Bigger Picture. A History of Methods in Archaeological Excavation in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Archaeology as well as co-editor (with Fabian Link) of Historiographical Approaches to Past Archaeological Research (2015).