Seeing the first Australians

Sample

Robert Hillenbrand

"Shahnama: The Visual Language of the Persian Book of Kings presents the first comprehensive examination of the interplay between text and image in the celebrated Persian national epic, the Shahnama, written by the poet Firdausi of Tus. The Shahnama is one of the longest poems ever composed and recounts the history of Iran from the dawn of time to the Muslim Arab conquests of the seventh century A.D. There is no Persian text, in prose or poetry, which has been so frequently and lavishly illustrated." "Offering insights through a range of varied art-historical approaches to the Shahnama, the essays in this volume reveal how the subtle alterations in text and image serve to document changes in taste and style and can be understood as reflections of the changing role of the national epic in the imagination of Iranians and the equally changing messages - often political in nature - which the familiar stories were made to convey over the centuries."--Jacket.

Sample

Jay Ruby

"The Cinema of John Marshall explores the life and art of the pioneering ethnographic filmmaker. Its centerpiece is an autobiographical essay in which Marshall assesses his forty-year involvement with the San peoples (Bushmen) of South Africa and his films, from the 1957 award winning "The Hunters" to his current work in progress, "Death by Myth." The book weaves together the political economy of San dispossession, history and ethnography, personal narratives of historical importance, and expositions of film techniques and film language. The first English language study of the man and his work, The Cinema of John Marshall conveys the complex unity of Marshall's life: the filmic, the intellectual, the political, and the human"--Publisher description.

Sample

Russell A. Olsen

Explores the many sites along the famous American east-west artery, including filling stations, main streets, motor courts, cafes, campgrouds, honkytonks, truck stops, and barbecue joints established to serve motorists. All of the sites and structures included here are shown both during their mid-century heydays and as they appear in the present.

Sample

Michael A. Adler

From the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century, the world of the ancestral Pueblo people (Anasazi) was in transition, undergoing changes in settlement patterns and community organization that resulted in what scholars now call the Pueblo III period. This book synthesizes the archaeology of the ancestral Pueblo world during the Pueblo III period, examining twelve regions of the Anasazi world that embrace nearly the entire range of major topographic features, ecological zones, and prehistoric Puebloan settlement patterns found in the northern Southwest. Drawn from the 1990 Crow Canyon Archaeological Center conference "Pueblo Cultures in Transition," the book serves as both a data resource and a summary of ideas about prehistoric changes in Puebloan settlement and in regional interaction across nearly 150,000 square miles of the Southwest. The volume provides a compilation of settlement data for over 800 large sites occupied between A.D. 1100 and 1400 in the Southwest. These data provide new perspectives on the geographic scale of culture change in the Southwest during this period. Twelve chapters analyze the archaeological record for specific districts and provide a detailed picture of settlement size and distribution, community architecture, and population trends during the period. Additional chapters cover warfare and carrying capacity and provide overviews of change in the region. Throughout the chapters, the contributors address the unifying issues of the role of large sites in relation to smaller ones, changes in settlement patterns from the Pueblo II to Pueblo III periods, changes in community organization, and population dynamics.