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The large fortifi cation of Corneşti-larcuri is located on the Mureş River in Romania and comprises four rings of defensive ramparts. With the outermost rampart encircling a total area of 17.65 km2, Corneşti-larcuri is thus considered the largest Bronze Age fortification in Europe. New intensive research began in 2007 with the six-year project “Investigations on settlement structures and the chronology of the Late Bronze Age fortification of Corneşti-larcuri in Romanian Banat”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The project terminated in the autumn of 2017. Now the goal is to evaluate the data collected during the last eleven years and to develop the first syntheses. As part of the new excavations, a total of 109 radiocarbon datings from diff erent contexts (ramparts, ditches, pits, house structures, etc.) were obtained. The subsequent phase model based upon these data essentially refers to the dating of ramparts I and II and to pits associated with house contexts. Thus, it enables a site biography for Corneşti-larcuri to be outlined for the first time and four settlement phases to be distinguished.
This study will consider the various aspects of the portrayal of Sultan ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd II that were emphasized in the Arab-Islamist revisionist writings about Islamic history. The focus will be especially on the writings of Anwar al-Ǧundī (1917–2002), an Egyptian Islamist writer as it was he who first adopted the process of an “Islamic revision of Islamic history”. His main academic output consisted in responding to the “Orientalist attack on Islam”, and he wrote a number of books towards this aim as as-Sulṭān ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd wa l-ḫilāfa al-islāmiyya, al-Islām fī maʿrakat at-taġrīb and al-Istiʿmār wa l-Islām.
This will be followed by an analysis of the ideological exploitation of the historical personality, and the consequences of the contemporary historical Islamist vision for the development of religious thought.
As 2021 draws to a close, Covid-19 continues to prevail worldwide. With the proverbial return to normalcy still appearing distant, there is now a tacit acceptance globally that at least for the foreseeable future, we must live with Covid-19. Given that Covid-19 is an infectious disease—which by definition is transmitted from person to person—the continued prevalence of Covid-19 has implications for how local authorities, communities, and individuals around the world will approach public spaces. While it may be premature to assume a so-called coronacene (see Higgins et al. 2020), going into the future our use of public spaces will be overshadowed by the possibility, even if remote, of illness or death by virtue of close proximity to other individuals.
Along with parks and squares, streets and avenues, bazaars constitute ubiquitous public spaces, including in countries of the developing world, such as Armenia and Georgia, our countries of discussion here. Although there is not a clear bifurcation between bazaars and other types of marketplaces, bazaars will usually be comprised of a multitude of nonfranchised, self-owned, small businesses that are variously family-run or rely on family labor. They are usually perceived as chaotic places that lack hygiene (the purportedly unhygienic character of the bazaar was brought to the forefront with the pandemic, given how Covid-19’s origin is widely assumed to be a Wuhan wet market).
In Armenia and Georgia, and indeed, across the former Soviet Union, bazaars are a source of employment for the urban and peri-urban population; they also offer goods at price points attractive to a wide demographic. This working paper builds on the premise that the bazaar is an informal institution. Bazaar traders will typically assemble networks by themselves (with manufacturers and wholesalers, buyers and transporters). These networks will usually vary from one business to another. Also, ownership and rent structures are frequently opaque, and the majority of commercial transactions are in cash, which does not appear in state records. As a consequence, for the state, many small businesses do not exist (Fehlings and Karrar 2016, 2020).
For those of us researching bazaar trading, Covid-19 has given rise to a basic question: How have independent businesses been transformed by the pandemic? This working paper is an attempt to parse this question in light of developments in Armenia and Georgia. In this working paper, we suggest that the Covid-19 pandemic has deepened informality in the bazaar. That being said, we want to underscore that the present discussion is exploratory. Our ethnography remains limited, and we look forward to returning to the field as soon as it is safe to do so.
Conflicts are shaping our life and influencing most of our behaviour. In the recent years, conflict archaeology has developed into a growing sub-discipline. This article tries to go beyond the traditional concepts of conflict archaeology that mainly addressing violence. We advocate widening the view on conflicts by including different levels of conflict escalation as well as of conflict de-escalation. Archaeological indicators for all of these facets of conflicts are discussed. Here, we concentrate on fortifications which are sensitive indicators of historical, social, economic and cultural processes and hence are able to indicate different facets of conflicts and not only violence. In this context, we also consider territoriality as relevant, because it is a kind of regulation, preventing conflicts from further escalation. The article presents a simple scheme of conflict archaeology which extends the traditional approach and provides deeper insights in human behaviour and its rational.
In this contribution the sub-project of the LOEWE initiative which is researching Late Bronze Age hilltop sites between the mountain ranges of the Vogelsberg and Taunus is presented. Special emphasis is placed on the first results from an evaluation of the data from archives and remote sensing as well as from geophysical examinations of particular sites.
Around 400 BC, pottery- and iron-producing populations immigrated into the Inner Congo Basin (ICB) and subsequently spread upstream some major tributaries of the Congo River. Until recently, their subsistence was almost completely unknown. We present an archaeobotanical study of three sites in the ICB covering parts of the Early Iron Age (ca. 400 BC-AD 650) and of the Late Iron Age (LIA) as well as subrecent times (ca. AD 1300–2000). We studied 82 flotated samples of botanical macroremains, and 68 soil phytolith samples, recovered from the terra firme sites Iyonda and Mbandaka, and the floodplain fishing camp site of Bolondo. The EIA assemblage from Iyonda yielded domesticated Cenchrus americanus (pearl millet), Vigna unguiculata (cowpea), Canarium schweinfurthii, Elaeis guineensis (oil palm), several wild plants, and parenchyma fragments tentatively attributed to Dioscorea sp. (yams). The exploitation of these plants originated in the savannas and forest-savanna ecotones of West Africa. The presence of C. americanus in LIA contexts at Bolondo and Mbandaka, dated to ca. AD 1350–1550, indicates that its cultivation is not dependent on a seasonal climate with a distinct dry season, contrary to previous views. The role of C. americanus as a staple is difficult to assess; it might have been used for special purposes, e.g. beer brewing. In spite of extensive screening, we did not detect any banana phytoliths in the EIA samples. Musa phytoliths were only present in LIA contexts after ca. AD 1400, leaving room for the possibility that the introduction and spread of Musa spp. AAB ‘Plantain’ in the ICB was a late phenomenon.
This paper considers archaeological evidence for warfare and conflict in Bronze Age Ireland, with specific reference to the destruction of hillforts during the later second millennium BC. These centres were built at a time of growing militarism, reflected in an increased output of bronze weaponry, including the first use of swords. The indications are of a society obsessed with power and status, with competitive tendencies that on occasion led to open warfare. Recent fieldwork has uncovered evidence of conflict at a number of hillforts across Ireland, the significance of which is considered in relation to the political landscape of the Middle and Late Bronze Age.
Research on Bronze Age weapons from wet contexts in northern Europe often interprets those finds as structured deposits of a symbolic nature, placed in liminal environments that had special significance in social and religious terms. Much less consideration is given to direct or indirect connections with war and conflict in the competitive chiefdom polities of the Bronze Age. As territorial boundaries, rivers were obvious settings for conflict, with confrontations at fording points leading to weapon loss in battle. There may also have been intentional deposition connected to the death of a warrior at or near that location. River deposition may also signify the celebration of a military victory, involving a ritualized destruction of the weapons of the vanquished. They may also represent an assertion of territory or an expression of ritualized violence. Such scenarios illustrate how the use of weapons as funerary or votive offerings does not preclude a close association with warfare. The parallel phenomenon of hoarding in the same period may reflect a political climate in which it was necessary to hide valuables. This paper explores possible connections between the deposition of weapons and valuables in wet contexts and the landscape context of war in Ireland during the later Bronze Age, with implications for research in other parts of Europe.
Thomas Bowrey, who was an employee of the British colonial government, visited the Malay-speaking region at the end of the 17th century and published a dictionary of Malay (1701) which consists of 12,683 headwords. It is one of the oldest and largest collections of data on this language, which was the first language of the people he came into contact with while travelling through the Malay Peninsula, spending most of his time in harbours along its west coast. Malay, which was spoken in the various trading centres of this area (e.g. Penang, Malacca), had long previously begun to develop into a form of lingua franca during Bowrey’s stay there due to the fact that traders, especially those from Arabic countries (beginning in the 12th century), China (from the 15th century onwards), Portugal (since 1511), the Netherlands (since 1641), and less so from England, came into contact with Malays speaking their local dialects in the various trading posts in Malaya and probably began to become acquainted with the trade-language variant. Thus, Bowrey must have observed and recorded elements of both.
The data he collected is not limited to Malay variants spoken in coastal areas, but includes material from dialects which he encountered during his travels throughout the Malay Peninsula, though without, however, describing the locations in which he took notes on the lexicon and clauses. Not all of his material was written into manuscript form during his stay in Southeast Asia. A large part of his notes taken in situ were prepared for publication during his long journey home. His notes, which were used to print his dictionary, are in part kept in British libraries. Most of the material accessible to the public was studied during the preparation of this thesis.
Earlier works on this dictionary are quite limited in scope. They deal with very specific aspects such as the meanings of headwords found between the letters A and C (Rahim Aman, 1997 & 1998), and the work of Nor Azizah, who deals with the lexical change found in Bowrey’s dictionary between D and F, and syntactic and sociolinguistic aspects (Mashudi Kader, 2009), and collective nouns by Tarmizi Hasrah (2010). This study will discuss Bowrey’s dictionary as a whole in order to describe its contribution to our knowledge of linguistic and non-linguistic facts in 17th century Malaya. Besides analysing Malay synchronically, this thesis also deals with historical-comparative questions and asks whether Bowrey contributes to our knowledge of the changes to the Malay language between the 17th and 21st centuries.
In order to answer the research questions, this study not only relies on the dictionary in its entirety, but also on the notes found in British libraries as well as other material on early Malay, such as the Pigafetta list (1523), Houtman (1598–1603), and the Wilkinson dictionary (1901) as a complement to Bowrey’s dictionary; at the same time, the Malay Concordance Project (online), the SEAlang Project (online), Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (online), and Kamus Dewan Edisi Keempat (2007) will represent modern Malay. It should be borne in mind that in contrast to the Thomas Bowrey dictionary (TBD), Kamus Dewan Edisi Keempat (KDE4) does not hold information on colloquial forms of Malay, many of which reflect features of lingua franca Malay. This study is divided into two different branches, namely the consideration of synchronic aspects and historical comparative aspects.
Finally, this study concludes that the Malay language in Thomas Bowrey’s dictionary is heavily influenced by both external and internal factors prevalent to the 17th century. The Malay language recorded in the Thomas Bowrey dictionary is very similar to modern Malay. The similarities between the Malay language of the 17th century and the Malay language of today are considerable, even though there are, of course, still some notable variances.
Korean immigrants have migrated to New Zealand over the past three decades in search of a happier and more balanced life. While they anticipated that their children would be integrated into New Zealand society, they have primarily settled in Korean ethnic enclaves. In this context, younger Korean New Zealanders have been exposed to and influenced by New Zealand’s national and Korean ethnic cultures. This study examined success beliefs and well-being among Korean youth in New Zealand with a Third Culture Kid background (TCK K-NZ) in comparison to Korean youth in Korea (K-Korean) and European New Zealand youth (Pākehā). Results indicated that TCK K-NZ youth endorsed extrinsic success similarly to K-Korean youth, but that valuing extrinsic success predicted lowered well-being only for K-Korean youth. Conversely, valuing intrinsic success predicted higher well-being across the three groups. Results also revealed that TCK K-NZ youth's well-being levels were between those of K-Korean and Pākehā youth, potentially influenced by different structural relations between success beliefs and well-being, as well as their position as “third culture kids” in New Zealand. This study contributes to understanding cultures' roles in formulating success beliefs and the relationship between success beliefs and well-being for Korean New Zealander youth.
The research focuses on magic - the practice of performing tricks and illusions on stage aiming at entertaining the audience. In the late XIX-early XX century magic achieved an outstanding social recognition and became an important artistic phenomenon. This study aims to analyze the work of the most prominent magicians of the late XIX-early XX centuries and to define the historical role of magicians in the history of culture and art.
Using methods of art history and cultural studies, I analyze the autobiographies of magicians, the literature on magic published during the period in question, and contemporary press. I approach the history of magic from three different perspectives: magic as a branch of show business, magic as a cultural phenomenon, and magic as a type of performing art. It allowed me to create a detailed account of magic as a social, cultural and artistic phenomenon.
I argue that magic became a highly influential cultural phenomenon of the late 19th- early 20th centuries in Great Britain that represented the idea of real magic on stage. Magic shows reflected a complex relationship between rational and magical thinking that existed in society and produced narratives about science and the supernatural.
Moreover, very few studies have focused on the question of defining magic as an art form. In the thesis, I analyzed the theoretical works on magic written by magicians and developed a framework for further research on magic from the perspective of the history of art.
The merchant language of the Georgian Jews deserves scholarly attention for several reasons. The political and social developments of the last fifty years have caused the extinction of this very interesting form of communication, as most Georgian Jews have emigrated to Israel. In a natural interaction, the type of language described in this article can be found very rarely, if at all. Records of this communication have been preserved in various contexts and received different levels of scholarly attention. Our interest concerns the linguistic aspects as well as the classification.
In the following paper we argue that the specific merchant language of Georgian Jews belongs to the pragmatic phenomenon of “very indirect language.” The use of mostly Hebrew lexemes in Georgian conversation leads to an unfounded assumption that the speakers are equally competent in Hebrew and Georgian. It is reported that a high level of linguistic competence in Hebrew does not guarantee understanding of the Jewish merchant language. In the Georgian context, the decisive factors are membership in the professional interest group of merchants and residential membership in the Jewish community. These factors seem to be equivalent, because Jewish members of other professional groups (and those from outside the particular urban residential area) have difficulties in following the language that are similar to those of the Georgian majority. We describe the pragmatic structure of interactions conducted with the help of the merchant language and take into account the purpose of the language’s use or the intention of the speakers. Relevant linguistic examples are analysed and their sociocultural contexts explained.
From 1945 to the early 1960s, the US government undertook numerous atomic and hydrogen bomb tests. These full-scale explosions were recorded on film from various angles, and at different speeds. Indeed, it soon became required to obtain images of the very first milli-seconds of the expanding phase of the atomic fireball. Ultrahigh-speed cameras able to produce such images were specifically developed for that purpose. This article explores the different “media-temporalities” that intersect in those images. I focus on the “micro-processes happening on a technical level that are very fast,” and more specifically the ones that go into the “Rapatronic camera” designed by Harold Edgerton (head of the US national defense contractor company EG&G) to record the atomic fireball early formation. The scientific slow-motion films and high-speed photographic images operate at the junction of the micro-scale temporality of the atomic explosions’ early phases, and the macro-scale temporality of the political and ecological implications of these explosions. I argue that these films are the objects and inscriptions of micro-temporalities, macro-history and geological times.
The paper presents a reconsideration of settlement pattern and defensive systems in south-eastern Italy during the Bronze Age, on the ground of the archaeological data coming from the excavations at Coppa Nevigata. In particular, the transformations of the defensive lines of the settlement are discussed, which were strictly linked to both defensive and offensive strategies and their changes. Moreover, the paper seeks to examine some related problems, such as the possible origin for the model of complex fortification lines in southern Italy, the pattern(s) of fortified settlement in the Eastern Adriatic and matters related to the social organisation of the Bronze Age southern Italian communities that built the fortification lines.
Movies are brilliant choices to be subjects of discourse analysis since they bear resemblance to real-life phenomena. Lion of The Desert is one of the movies that actualizes the use of the English language as the dialogue and presents Islamic historical values as its content. Among a myriad of sub-disciplines of discourse analysis, this paper attempts to investigate speech act phenomena in the utterances of Omar Mukhtar, the main character of the movie. The discourse analysis is conducted on his utterances in order to extract the types of speech acts he employs. Primary data sources include the movie video file and its script. We execute several procedural steps of extracting the data, commencing with watching the movie while reading its script; re-watching it to identify the aspects like voice, intonation, and mimics; interpreting, and classifying the types of speech acts in accordance with the classification procedure of John R. Searle’s speech act theory. The findings revealed four types of speech acts, namely, representative, directive, commissive, and expressive, being identified and classified in Mukhtar’s utterances. The most frequently used type of speech act was representative, which is performed in 56 utterances, followed by a directive act which appears in 53 utterances. Commissive and expressive speech acts emerge in 9 and 7 utterances respectively.
This article explores the liturgical functions of cross-shaped staurothekes, reliquaries of the True Cross, in twelfth-century Sicily. These luxurious objects were once at the centre of the devotion of the growing Christian communities on an island undergoing dramatic social changes. This contribution examines the figuration of these crosses and the messages they conveyed to their audiences, focusing on documented processions as displays of public piety. To this end, the contents of two liturgical manuscripts from Palermo, evidence in contemporary pictorial arts and coinage, and the urban layout of the Norman capital will shed light on the reception of the symbol of the cross in the cosmopolitan, yet increasingly intolerant Sicilian kingdom.
Despite the fact that the fortification in Sântana-Cetatea Veche has been known since the 18th century and various local scholars have taken a direct interest in the site, the first excavations only started much later. The fortification was correctly attributed to the Bronze Age only in the second half of the 20th century. Until then, those interested in the issue of the great fortifications in Banat believed that the ramparts had been constructed during the Avar Period. New research on the fortification in Sântana was initiated in 2008. The northern side of the third fortification system was tested in 2009, and its construction system was documented on that occasion. The fortification system in question consisted of an earthen rampart, a wall made of wood and clay built upon the crest of the rampart, and a defense ditch. At the same time we noted that the erection of the earthen rampart had disturbed a cemetery in use in that area. The present article focuses on the dating of the third system of fortification excavated in 2009 and on the presentation of the contexts from which radiocarbon data have been collected. The results indicate that the cemetery disturbed by the construction of the fortification was used at the end of the 15th century BC and that the fortification was certainly in use during the 14th century BC.
Highlights
• The Munich Procedure, developed for p-XRF data, standardises coefficient corrections.
• It ensures consistent, reproducible data, benefiting specialists in various industries.
• The protocol, documented as R-Skript, enhances accuracy and transparency of p-XRF data.
• Establishing a common baseline fosters discussion and improves the overall understanding of p-XRF.
Abstract
The Munich Procedure, a protocol presented as R code and initially developed on the basis of archaeometric portable X-ray fluorescence (p-XRF) data, offers adaptability and standardisation to evaluate coefficient corrections. These corrections are derived from linear regressions calculated by comparing p-XRF values with laboratory chemical analyses of the same sample set. The versatility of this procedure allows collaboration and ensures consistent data structure. Not tied to specific instrumentation, this approach helps to universally improve the accuracy of p-XRF data, benefiting specialists in a variety of industries. By providing a common baseline for performance evaluation, it enables discussion across different applications.
The Nok Culture of Central Nigeria is known for its sophisticated terracotta figurines initially described in the 1950s by the British archaeologist Bernard Fagg. Since 2009, the Nok Culture has been the subject of research at the Goethe University Frankfurt within the scope of a long-term project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). This book is the outcome of a PhD thesis that involved pXRF analysis of features associated with the Nok Culture, namely stone-pot-arrangements and pit features.
Stone-pot-arrangements are considered to be burials, indicated by arranged and modified stones associated with complete pots and, in a few cases, a necklace made of stone beads. However, the absence of bones and other skeletal remains meant that their interpretation as burials was unresolved. The interpretation of pits or pit-like structures, of various shapes and sizes, also remained inconclusive.
Employing pXRF analysis succeeded in revealing traces of a decomposed body, supporting the hypothesis of stone-pot-arrangements being interments. Together with the analysis of pits, new ideas about the formation and use of Nok sites were advanced. These culminated in a 'patchwork model' that assumes a repetitive cycle of utilising land for farming, settlements and burials, followed by abandonment and subsequent re-visiting and re-use of the formerly abandoned land.
This study examines the political contestation among Malay Professional Satirists (MPS) through their selected political satire works between 2011-2018. Political satire challenges those in power and is often regarded as fake news and libel. Therefore, political satirists tend to be frequently subject to legal action and are accused of disrupting national harmony. However, there is another group within the social and cultural community, which I call Social and Cultural Professionals (SCP), who also use satire but are supported by the government. This group frequently received financial benefits from the state and are at lower risk of suffering legal consequences. These contrasting conditions raise several important questions: who are the Malaysian Professional Satirists? Who are the targets of MPS in their satirical work? Why do MPS satirise them? And why do the MPS still produce political satire despite the potential legal consequences? Therefore, this study attempts to identify the characters, themes, and issues the MPS highlight; it also considers the reasons and motivations that political satirists have for creating such allegedly controversial works. Malaysia’s Reformasi movement and the booming use of the internet in 1998 mobilised multiple alternative social movements, mainly through art-related activities. Art workers, NGOs, as well as musical and cultural groups, protested creatively against the UMNO-BN ruling regime. Creative protests that employed satire and humour somehow succeeded in attracting a significant proportion of the public to follow political and current issues, especially youths in universities who had been depoliticised with the inception of the University and University College Act (AUKU 1979). This study establishes a point of view that political satire is a fun, loose, free form of resistance, contrasting with formal procedural democracy. The previous literature proposes that the study of Malaysia’s political system should focus on formal political procedures, especially election and representation. However, the study of political satire vis-à-vis democratisation is often neglected and thus such studies are scarce, which might have resulted from how satire is strictly discussed in terms of language and media. There has been a growing interest in how satirist and satirical works are regarded; hence, this study attempts to fill a gap in research on political satire in Malaysia. In contrast, democratisation is often discussed in terms of history, politics, anthropology, sociology, and economics. This qualitative study presents a comprehensive account of interviews with four (4) art workers identified as MPS, as based on appropriate criteria. Each informant had either partaken in alternative social movements or faced legal action from authorities or, indeed, both. In this study, the Theory of Contestation and Two-Social Reality serves as a primary framework to lead to an understanding of the contestation of power in Malaysia through political satire. This study further intends to broaden the knowledge of political satire and humour in the study of democratisation, adding to the existing literature, particularly outside formal political procedures.