Materiality and Social Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters

Large-format hardcover, iv + 220 pages, numerous b&w figures in text, NOT ex-library. Shipping weight over 1kg. Book shows limited gentle wear, in clean and bright condition with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Short creases to board edges. Issued without a dust jacket. -- "Materiality and Social Practice investigates the transformative potential arising from the interplay between material forms, social practices and intercultural relations. Such a focus necessitates an approach that takes a transcultural perspective as a fundamental methodology and, then a broader understanding of the inter-relationship between humans and objects. Adopting a transcultural approach forces us to change archaeology's approach towards items coming from the outside. By using them mostly for reconstructing systems of exchange or for chronology, archaeology has for a long time reduced them to their properties as objects and as being foreign. This volume explores the notion that the significance of such items does not derive from the transfer from one place to another as such but, rather, from the ways in which they were used and contextualised. The main question is how, through their integration into discourses and practices, new frameworks of meaning were created conforming neither with what had existed in the receiving society nor in the area of origin of the objects." -- Contents: 1. Introduction / J. Maran & P.W. Stockhammer; 2. Words and things: reflections on people's interaction with the material world / Hans P. Hahn; 3. Magic, materials and matter: understanding different ontologies / Chris Gosden; 4. Material concerns and colonial encounters / Peter van Dommelen & Michael Rowlands; 5. Matter of fact: transcultural contacts in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean / A. Bernard Knapp; 6. Encountering the foreign: (De-)constructing alterity in the archaeologies of the Bronze Age Mediterranean / Diamantis Panagiotopoulos; 7. Trade goods reproducing merchants? The materiality of Mediterranean Late Bronze Age exchange / Gert Jan van Wijngaarden; 8. Migrant drinking assemblages in Aegean Bronze Age settings / Jeremy B. Rutter; 9. Entangled pottery: phenomena of appropriation in the late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean / P.W. Stockhammer; 10. Can we say, what's behind all those sherds? Ceramic innovations in the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the second millennium / Reinhard Jung; 11. Ceremonial feasting equipment, social space and interculturality in Post-Palatial Tiryns / Joseph Maran; 12. From Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece and beyond: the dissemination of ritual practices and their material correlates in ceremonial architecture / Elisabetta Borgna; 13. The intercultural transformative capacities or irregularly appropriated goods / Susan Sherratt; 14. Lasting impressions: The appropriation of sealing practices in Minoan Crete / Sarah Cappel; 15. Hyperculture, tradition and identity: how to communicate with seals in times of global action. A Middle Bronze Age seal impression from Kamid el-Loz / Marlies Heinz and Julia Linke; 16. The role of the Canaanite population in the Aegean migration to the Southern Levant in the late second Millennium BCE / Assaf Yasur-Landau; 17. The practical logic of style and memory in early first millennium Levantine ivories / Marian H. Feldman; 18. An introduction to the divine statues of, and the objects belonging to, the gods in Mesopotamia during the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000-1595 BCE) / Michele Maggio.…