Here are 100 books that Archaeology, Nation, and Race fans have personally recommended if you like
Archaeology, Nation, and Race.
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Since 2008, I have conducted research on themes related to International Political Economy. I am currently the co-chair of the research committee on this topic at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and am passionate about making sense of the interplay between material and symbolic factors that shape capitalism and globalisation. Being based in Brazil, I was stuck when the country—which did not have salient identity cleavages in politics—came to be, after 2008, a hotspot of religious-based right-wing populism associated with the defence of trade liberalisation as globalisation started to face meaningful backlash from White-majority constituencies who are relatively losers of the post-Cold War order in the advanced industrialised democracies.
I love Anderson’s narrative about the formation of nations in the 19th Century and what he calls print capitalism, promoted through books and newspapers. A market organised around the same language fosters both the economy and the very much-needed feeling of community required to organise the state and foster industrial capitalism.
More than four decades after its publication, the book remains thought-provoking as it makes me ask whether a single language suffices to hold nations and markets together.
What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I love stories, and as a child I found that some of the best and most powerful stories I ever heard were those that people told about the past. When I grew up, I pursued a career as an academic archaeologist and historian, and I am now Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. But while I am of course interested in the past, in recent years I have been increasingly thinking about the politics of the past as well. Why do we choose to celebrate some stories about the past and not others? I have found these books all useful in helping me to think through this.
This collection of essays offers a broad set of different examples of history and ideas about the past have been pressed into the service of nationalism – often resulting, as the title has it, in the invention of tradition.
I also love the quality of the writing in this book. Hobsbawm has such elegant prose, and as an editor he seems to have influenced the style of the other authors in the volume.
Many of the traditions which we think of as very ancient in their origins were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were invented comparatively recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention - the creation of Welsh and Scottish 'national culture'; the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the origins of imperial rituals in British India and Africa; and the attempts by radical movements to develop counter-traditions of their own. It addresses the complex interaction of past and present, bringing together historians and anthropologists in a fascinating study…
I love stories, and as a child I found that some of the best and most powerful stories I ever heard were those that people told about the past. When I grew up, I pursued a career as an academic archaeologist and historian, and I am now Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. But while I am of course interested in the past, in recent years I have been increasingly thinking about the politics of the past as well. Why do we choose to celebrate some stories about the past and not others? I have found these books all useful in helping me to think through this.
This book really brought it home to me how classics (that is, the study of ancient Greece and Rome) was implicated in the politics of the past, and specifically in the ideology of the British Empire. It has been quite influential within the discipline of classics, and there is now a whole subfield that considers the political uses of classics.
This extraordinary book provides a detailed account of the relationship between classical antiquity and the British colonial presence in India. It examines some of the great figures of the colonial period such as Gandhi, Nehru, Macaulay, Jowett, and William Jones, and covers a range of different disciplines as it sweeps from the eighteenth century to the end of the British Raj in the twentieth.
Using a variety of materials, including archival documents and familiar texts, Vasunia shows how classical culture pervaded the thoughts and minds of the British colonizers. His book highlights the many Indian receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity and…
Mia Lark is running out of options. There is only one way to change the score: the fantasy planet Revivium.
Armed with the powerful magic in the helm and the friendly AI, Hex that goes with it, Mia throws caution out the window. It’s time to find the main guildhall…
I love stories, and as a child I found that some of the best and most powerful stories I ever heard were those that people told about the past. When I grew up, I pursued a career as an academic archaeologist and historian, and I am now Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. But while I am of course interested in the past, in recent years I have been increasingly thinking about the politics of the past as well. Why do we choose to celebrate some stories about the past and not others? I have found these books all useful in helping me to think through this.
This is an absolutely stonker of a book. Elegant and erudite, and yet tackling one of the hottest and most debated questions surrounding history right now.
It doesn’t only consider how we remember the British Empire (this issue is a bit of a political hot potato right now), but also reflects more broadly on the role of the historian. I am still digesting it!
CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NEW STATESMAN AND BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE
'In this searing book, Priya Satia demonstrates, yet again, that she is one of our most brilliant and original historians' Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters
For generations, the history of the British empire was written by its victors. British historians' accounts of conquest guided the consolidation of imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. Their narratives of the development of imperial governance licensed the brutal suppression of colonial rebellion. Their reimagining of empire during the two world wars compromised the force…
I study culture. Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by what people think, feel, believe, have, and do. I’ve always wondered why people need things to be meaningful. Why do people need an explanation for why things happen that puts the meaning outside their own minds? I wanted to get beyond the need for things to be meaningful by themselves, so I began looking into meaning-making as a thing we do. Once I realized the process was infinitely more interesting and valuable, I read books like those on my list. I hope they spark you as much as they have me.
I love that Ingold uses the concept of design to explore how people make meaning and things meaningful. By bringing me through lenses such as architecture, archaeology, and art, he shows me that design is not a process of doing but of making.
When we design, we do so by constructing meaning and knowledge. The artifacts that come from my design thinking are secondary effects of the thinking and meaning-making. I love being brought into a larger point of view on the everyday activities of my own life.
Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making, and all are dedicated to exploring the conditions and potentials of human life. In this exciting book, Tim Ingold ties the four disciplines together in a way that has never been attempted before. In a radical departure from conventional studies that treat art and architecture as compendia of objects for analysis, Ingold proposes an anthropology and archaeology not of but with art and architecture. He advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to,…
I first became intrigued by secret societies when a student who I worked with suggested that the French Upper Paleolithic painted caves might have been decorated and used by secret societies. I subsequently enlisted another student to study the spatial use of the paintings from this perspective. Combined with the observations of Robert Hare on the motivations of psychopaths and sociopaths to control others, I realized that secret societies plausibly constituted powerful forces promoting certain cultural changes that appeared later and continued into our own modern societies. I found the prospects for understanding our own cultures fascinating and wanted to document how this all came about in my own book.
This is a bit more of a technical archaeology book dealing with the ethnographic and archaeological Pueblo communities of the American Southwest. For those interested in secret societies, it deals extensively with the nature of Pueblo ritual organizations (sodalities) and deftly provides critiques of views that these were egalitarian communities and ritual organizations. In fact, he argues that some were among the most non-egalitarian societies in North America, beginning with the Chacoan culture about 1,000 years ago. Puebloan ritual organizations are prime examples of secret societies.
In A Pueblo Social History, John Ware challenges modern anthropologists to break down the walls between archaeology and ethnography in order to obtain a more complete understanding of Pueblo prehistory in the American Southwest. This book stands or falls on two arguments. The first is Pueblo ethnographies by early scholars - including Cushing, Bandelier, and Fewkes who were simultaneously ethnographers and archaeologists and therefore incorporated origin stories, migration narratives, and other oral traditions along with lines of evidence such as artifacts and architecture - are more than speculative analogies. Pueblo ethnographies are end points on trajectories that preserve important information…
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
When at 13, I declared that I’d become an Egyptologist, quite a lot of people thought it would pass. Fast forward 10 years, and I was starting a PhD on Egyptian mummies in museums – it did not pass. I journeyed from the Louvre where I was a gallery attendant trying to uncover the story of bodies buried in their garden, to England where I relocated with little English to pursue an Egyptology degree… and then two more! The ethics of human remains in museums is a complex topic: that’s why I like to make it more approachable to the public, from running my project Mummy Stories, to giving talks in pubs!
This was the first book to introduce me to the relation between race studies, eugenics, and archaeology.
It was quite a revelation: I was volunteering at the Petrie Museum at the time, and the book uncovers the dodgy relationship between Petrie and Francis Galton.
It was pivotal in transforming the ways I looked at familiar places: it reminded me that places I called home, like the Petrie Museum but also the Louvre, have been very exclusionary to many. It taught me to look differently at places I navigate on a regular basis, to look for the otherstory.
You’ll then have to listen to the Bricks + Mortals podcast on the history of UCL buildings, and your wanders in Bloomsbury won’t be the same again.
How much was archaeology founded on prejudice? The Archaeology of Race explores the application of racial theory to interpret the past in Britain during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. It investigates how material culture from ancient Egypt and Greece was used to validate the construction of racial hierarchies. Specifically focusing on Francis Galton's ideas around inheritance and race, it explores how the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie applied these in his work in Egypt and in his political beliefs. It examines the professional networks formed by societies, such as the Anthropological Institute, and their widespread use of eugenic ideas in analysing…
For longer than I can remember I have been fascinated by ancient civilizations, earth mysteries, cave art, magic, mythology, and shamanism. As an author, my research and writing continues to be inspired by these interests. I specialise in the ethnography of sacred landscapes and rituals; and more generally in esotericism, consciousness, and healing. My non-fiction is published by Inner Traditions and Scarlet Imprint; literary prose and poetry by Corbel Stone Press and Paralibrum. My essays on energy healing have appeared in the peer-reviewed Paranthropology Journal and the Journal of Exceptional Experiences and Psychology as well as on my academia.edu page.
Greek Mysteries brings together a collection of essays on a variety of specialist topics related to the ancient mystery cults. Written by some of the world’s leading scholars, many of these essays were originally published in academic journals and are therefore appropriate for a more scholarly readership. That said, this important work provides the perfect entry into contemporary academic scholarship on the mysteries.
Written by an international team of acknowledged experts, this excellent book studies a wide range of contributions and showcases new research on the archaeology, ritual and history of Greek mystery cults.
With a lack of written evidence that exists for the mysteries, archaeology has proved central to explaining their significance and this volume is key to understanding a phenomenon central to Greek religion and society.
When I applied to college, I thought I’d study science and pursue my passions for art and justice separately. Then, I went to Kenya for my first excavation and found that archaeology combined my love for storytelling, data analysis, and making the world a better, safer, more inclusive place. As much as I love movies like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, I never saw myself in them. They just don’t capture what I love about archaeology! Now, my research—like this list—is dedicated to really understanding what makes archaeology so compelling, so rewarding, and most capable of telling nuanced stories that make us think differently about our past.
This book is one of my absolute favorites for expressing how archaeology really works on a macro level. As a student, I learned that archaeology has often been co-opted to serve political and nationalist purposes.
But the hows and whys of that process weren’t clear until I started doing archaeology. I love how Nadia Abu El Haj makes extremely clear why archaeology as a science lends itself so well to solidifying claims about identity, history, and land. I really admire how Abu El Haj captures what happens between the direct, tangible encounter of a person with an artifact and the abstract, national level of narrative construction and policymaking.
Archaeology in Israel is truly a national obsession, a practice through which national identity-and national rights-have long been asserted. But how and why did archaeology emerge as such a pervasive force there? How can the practices of archaeology help answer those questions? In this stirring book, Nadia Abu El-Haj addresses these questions and specifies for the first time the relationship between national ideology, colonial settlement, and the production of historical knowledge. She analyzes particular instances of history, artifacts, and landscapes in the making to show how archaeology helped not only to legitimize cultural and political visions but, far more powerfully,…
Ramon Ramirez’s Dog is a collection of essays written over the years about the adventures and misadventures, mostly outside but occasionally inside the diplomatic career of a U.S. ambassador. Common threads weaving the stories together are a desire for a life well-lived, balancing career with family and friends, keeping physically…
As an author of 50+ books of historical fiction and non-fiction for kids, teens, and adults I am handicapped by being unable to travel in time or go to the places I set my stories. I have long used photography as an attempt to capture a sense of places and the people who inhabit them, but I gradually realized that my images were not simply an adjunct to the stories I was telling but that the best of them had their own tales to tell. Through photographs, jumbled piles of stone became a gateway to a lost, magical past and a trigger for my imagination.
Many, many years ago, Rose Macauley’s classic book, The Pleasure of Ruins, went a long way to inspiring my sense of wonder at the remnants of past worlds.
In this book, Roloff Beny interprets Macauley’s words in the same way that I attempt to encapsulate and share some of the feelings of awe I get when I visit these magical places.
