Migrations and Conquest: Easy Pictures for Complicated Backgrounds in Ancient and Medieval Structures
In case that only very few written sources survived this century, what will be known of our social, political, economic, cultural, or intellectual identities in a far future? Archaeologists excavating the ruins of present-day Europe in the distant future could discover structures confusing to them. The remains of our material culture could be interpreted by our future colleagues as those of a unified world in the northern and parts of the southern hemispheres. Or, as another possibility, would Europe be defined as an American colony or vice versa? Would the models generated be sophisticated enough to describe the complex structures of present-day societies? Could archaeologists or historians believe in migrations and decline, conquering westerners, and conquered, decadent easterners and southerners? Could great American invasions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become an explanation if the industrial areas and more modern city structures of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York appear mightier than those in Europe? Or would our future colleagues believe in a massive Chinese takeover at the beginning of the twenty-first century due to the millions of plastic objects with Made in China on them? Or would they have learned from our discussions and intellectual evolutions in this field of study and try to avoid simple explanations? These considerations have been inspired by Chris Wickham. Wickham tried to criticize simple ethnic identifications of archaeological material and put it like this cum grano salis: And indeed, a man or a woman with a Lombard-style brooch is no more necessarily a Lombard than a family in Bradford with a Toyota is Japanese; artefacts are no secure guide to ethnicity (Wickham 1981, 68). The famous German archaeologist Volker Bierbrauer did not like this too much and considered Wickham’s idea as a joke (Bierbrauer 2004: 48 and note 23).
Reallexikon Der Germanischen Altertumskunde
"The Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde" bears the name of its founder, the English scholar and natural scientist Johannes Hoops. A second, completely revised edition of the "Reallexikon" has been appearing since 1972. It is designed as a handbook, and follows the tradition of comprehensive encyclopedias. Its objective is to give an allencompassing and critical account of the state of the art in Old Germanic History. Its interdisciplinary approach includes findings from art history, legal history, ethnology and religious studies.
Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History
List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Mastering Grain Cookery, 20,000--300 B.C.E. 2. The Barley-Wheat Cuisines of the Ancient Empires, 500 B.C.E.--400 C.E. 3. Buddhist Cuisines, 260 B.C.E.--4800 C.E. 4. Islam Transforms the Cuisines of Central and West Asia, 800--1650 C.E. 5. Christianity Transforms the Cuisines of Europe and the Americas, 100--1650 C.E. 6. Prelude to Modern Cuisines: Northern Europe, 1650--1840 7. Modern Cuisines: The Expansion of Middling Cuisines, 1810--1920 8. Modern Cuisines: The Globalization of Middling Cuisines, 1920--2000 Notes Bibliography Index