This thesis examines Andrea Mantegna's painting of Judith and Holofernes in the context of attitudes towards women, material culture, and the Middle East during the Italian Renaissance.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis I examine the extent to which interpretations of African material culture play a role in the creation and visualisation of an ‘African aesthetic style’ in South African contemporary jewellery practices. My investigation of an ‘African aesthetic style’ in this thesis is informed by the production, display and writings on African cultural objects. I demonstrate contemporary jewellery design to derive from a critical methodology, particularly as it facilitates a renegotiation of the relationship and dialogue between the producer and viewer of contemporary jewellery objects. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie tesis ondersoek ek die wyse waarop interpretasies van Afrika materiële kultuur 'n rol speel in die skepping en die visualisering van 'n 'Afrika estetiese styl' in Suid- Afrikaanse kontemporêre juwelierspraktyke. My ondersoek van so 'n styl is ingelig deur die produksie en uitstalling van, sowel as diskoerse rondom Afrika kulturele objekte. Ek ondersoek kontemporêre juweliersontwerp as 'n kritiese metodologie, veral ten opsigte van die wyse waarop dit 'n nuwe verhouding tussen die vervaardiger en toeskouer van kontemporêre juweliersobjekte fasiliteer.

1999 Dozier Award Winner / This paper examines critically several key assumptions that have guided many archaeological interpretations of prehistoric mortuary assemblages. It is argued that more sophisticated models of mortuary deposition need to be incorporated into research that attempts to reconstruct community structure and other sociological variables from variation in grave assemblages. To illustrate this point, and to begin to build such models, a study of artifacts deposited in mortuary contexts was conducted by the author in a major urban center in Arizona in 1996. Several different behavioral pathways through which objects enter mortuary contexts are identified in this study, and some general material correlates for each are specified. This study also provides a vehicle for exploring preliminarily how, and to what extent, various forms of mortuary depostion are related to the social identities of the deceased. Finally, a synthetic model is developed which seeks to explain variation in mortuary deposition in terms of behavioral interactions between the living, on the one hand, and the deceased and various classes of material culture, on the other. It is hoped that the general models and material correlates developed through this study can be elaborated by prehistorians to bolster inferences drawn from specific mortuary populations and to explore previously-uncharted realms of mortuary behavior in the past.

Arthur Ingram and Lionel Cranfield were part of the early modern phenomenon of social mobility, rising from humble merchants to titled gentlemen in one generation. Cranfield, especially, reached significant heights in a matter of years. Despite the fact both men have merited biographies which chart their commercial and political careers, little attention has been paid to their lives outside of the political sphere leaving room for an analysis of their family and personal estates and the extent to which they utilised their houses in their self-projection. The originality of this thesis lies in its comparison of the two men which not only highlights their dependency on each other and mutual advertisement of each other’s image, but also opens up the question of regional disparity in house building as Ingram’s country estates were situated in Yorkshire whereas Cranfield’s were mainly close to London. The first chapter introduces the issues of social mobility, self-fashioning, and regionality, provides a literature review and explains the methodology employed. Chapter 2 looks at the careers and families of Ingram and Cranfield before examining the ways in which they furthered their ascent through the fashioning of their attire, education and learning, and social networks. The thesis then focuses on the houses of both men, with Chapters 3 and 4 considering how they built and styled their houses. Chapter 5 examines the craftsmen and materials employed by Ingram and Cranfield on their building programmes and in particular the geographical location of their houses. Chapter 6 discusses the way Ingram and Cranfield furnished their residences and how their households were related to the local community, particularly in terms of hospitality. The gardens and grounds that surrounded their houses are the subject of Chapter 7. The thesis concludes with an evaluation of the significance of Ingram’s and Cranfield’s houses in the self-projection of their image and how far the geographical location of their residences affected how successful this was.

Our interactions with objects build cultural codes, reflecting lifestyles, values, and identities beyond functional expectations. With open connectivity in the contemporary consumer environments, we have access to homogenized material cultures not only for daily activities but also for ceremonies and rituals to mark important events, such as birth, marriage, and death. What will happen to our cultural codes and diverse traditions when various cultural norms meet, exchange, clash, hybridize, and evolve? In this research, globalized material cultures were investigated to discover metaphoric comparisons, to formulate conceptual frameworks, and to develop informed design, which can address evolving cultural conditions appropriately, in comparison with commercialized goods. Considering we often ritualize sequential stages of life course or challenging events, but rarely divorce, I explored the socio-cultural norms of marriage and divorce in the current social construct to anticipate globally evolving divorce phenomena. My thesis focused on relatively unknown material cultures in ritualizing divorce by combining speculative design with semiotic, hybrid, idiosyncratic approaches to communicate desirable future scenarios for the emerging multi-cultural context. This research aims to explore how artifacts and rituals can help people cope with transitional events and how design practices can provide meaningful and reflective material cultures.

<p>The Senses of Fundamentalism: A Material History of Sensing Bodies in Early Twentieth-Century American Fundamentalism offers a new historical narrative about the rise of fundamentalism. I argue that sensing bodies laid the foundation of fundamentalism. New kinds of Christian sensory practices around the turn of the twentieth century established the shared frames of reference that allowed a broad fundamentalist coalition to emerge. Fundamentalists felt their faith in their guts. </p><p>Each chapter of this work explores the role of one of the senses in fundamentalist life: sight, hearing, touch, and the spiritual senses. Using visual and material evidence, I explore how fundamentalists trained their eyes to see truth from dispensationalist charts, how they taught their ears to hear the voice of God on radios and phonograph records, how they regulated and controlled contact between gendered bodies through clothing, and how they honed their bodies to sense spiritual presences. </p><p>Using the methods of visual and material culture studies of religion, I examine the how specific sensory practices structured the everyday realities of fundamentalist life. I examine the specifics of how sensation operated in fundamentalist religious practice. Current studies of fundamentalism tend to treat the movement as primarily concerned with intellectual matters. My material and visual history of fundamentalism intervenes in the historiography to show that efforts to describe fundamentalism as an intellectual movement have excluded important bodies of data. By studying ideas and doctrines, scholars have too long presumed that fundamentalists forbade material forms of religious devotion or disregarded bodies altogether. My work materializes the study of early fundamentalism, exploring how material objects and sensory practices undergird traditional concepts like “belief,” “theology,” or “literalism.” This project recovers sensing bodies as the cornerstone of fundamentalism.</p> / Dissertation

An ethnographic approach is used to produce a nuanced investigation of the efforts of the Haida First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, to repatriate the human remains of their ancestors from collections around the world. The result is a contextualisation of Haida repatriation within values and structures of kinship—a position that stands in contrast to the frequent use of political or legalistic frameworks to understand repatriation issues. Incorporating Haida sensibilities toward kinship relations is necessary as analyses based in colonial or post-colonial encounters fail to account for the full range of motivating factors, which include the Haida value of yahgudangang (‘to pay respect’ and ‘to be fit for respect’) and the agency of ancestors after death. Furthermore, it is argued that kinship is the predominant structure through which Haidas experience identity, history and memory. Repatriation is therefore approached as a collective space in which kinship and memories are created, as well as a collective space in which remembering occurs. In order to understand how the individual elements comprising the repatriation process reflect and foster the construction of kinship, the expectations and obligations that exist within matrilineages and between moieties are traced, as is their material manifestation in objects, as well as tangible and ephemeral property. The sharing of embodied experiences between generations as a consequence of Haidas’ participation in the process of repatriation is shown to augment collective memory and family histories. The ways in which repatriation is incorporated within individual and collective narratives are explored as a further means of understanding the dynamic between the production of kinship, memory and identity. Avenues for expanding the current findings on repatriation, the connections between memory and kinship, and Northwest Coast scholarship more generally are presented.

This thesis is centered on the roles of wooden chamber tombs in defining, negotiating and reinforcing status and identity of their owners in early imperial China. The archaeological materials under discussion are wooden chamber burials in the mid-Yangzi region, including the modern provinces of Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan and north Anhui. The first reason why I have chosen this area is because these tombs are well-preserved and provide excellent examples to examine the different material expressions of rank and status at each rank in mortuary contexts. They are complemented by some extensive contemporary texts written on bamboo strips recently discovered in the same general area. The waterlogged burial environment in the mid-Yangzi region allows organic materials, such as textiles, lacquers and bamboo manuscripts, to survive while in other regions, such as the Central Plain, they often perished. Secondly, these tombs are also of a traditional form—constructed as a wooden chamber dug into a vertical pit, and can therefore be considered in relation to earlier Zhou practices. Wooden chamber tombs started to flourish from the eleventh century and became more elaborate from the sixth to the first century B.C. From the first century onward, such a burial type still prevailed in the mid-Yangzi region, while they were replaced by horizontal tombs built with bricks or stones in other areas. Many scholars have, therefore, regarded the prevailing timber structure in the area as a cultural continuity from Zhou system. They interpret them in terms of funeral regulations, especially linking them to archaic ranks and ritual norms drawn from transmitted texts. However, many of these texts that archaeologists consult and cite were written long after the burials and sites were constructed and used. These later texts were modified and passed through many editorial hands over the centuries, and there are considerable inconsistencies between different textual sources. Therefore the second reason why I have chosen this area is because it provides data demonstrating that the text-centered assumptions with respect to archaeological material do not contribute to a better understanding of social relationships in early Han society. Thirdly, there is a strong connection with local Chu tombs. The Jianghan Plain was the heartland of the Chu state before the Qin unification. The tomb construction of the Chu state incorporates a striking preference for timber structures. The timber structure tombs grew more widespread and dominant in this area during the early Han dynasty. In using multiple burial chambers and nested coffins, the local Han elites in the mid-Yangzi region seem to have followed the Chu mortuary practice, as well as in burying a large number of lacquers and bamboo manuscripts. The abundant material evidence of Chu tombs in the area sheds light on understanding of changes in funerary beliefs, showing that the tombs were arranged to meet specific needs of tomb owners. Rather than simply seeing a wooden chamber burial as a passive reflection of written regulation, I consider it as a medium for conveying the different thoughts of its owner and their associates. The material evidence manifested the status and identities of the deceased in concrete physical form. The burial assemblages belong to carefully planned contexts, and serve to constitute idealized social relations, rather than necessarily mirroring day to day reality. As such, burial evidence not only exhibited a part of the biography of the dead, but also expressed identity and socio-political claims of the living. This thesis will show that rank is not the only and major determinant, but is accompanied or outperformed by status and identity. The period covered by this thesis is the initial stage of early imperial China. The Western Han Empire (206 B.C.--A.D. 25) is traditionally regarded as a period when a unified social, political, and ideological framework was initially established. In 202 B.C., Liu Bang (256--195 B.C.) from the former Chu state in eastern China, defeated Xiang Yu (232--202 B.C.) and set up the Western Han imperial court, with its capital in Chang'an (modern Xi'an, Shaanxi province). The Han Empire was briefly interrupted by the Xin Dynasty (A.D. 9--23), established by Wang Mang (45 B.C.--A.D.23), a Confucian official from the Liu family. This interregnum divides the Han dynasty into two periods: the Western Han (206 B.C.--A.D.9) and the Eastern Han (A.D.25--220).

The objective of this thesis is to enhance the archaeological visibility of mobile pastoralists in the southern Levant, accomplished through an ethnoarchaeological study of Bedouin mortuary practices in Jordan. Qualitative data, collected via 136 ethnographic interviews, and quantitative data, collected from 20 Bedouin cemeteries, are analyzed to distinguish the material residues of Bedouin funerary practices. Patterns in these data are investigated using a multi-scalar spatial model, to improve archaeological interpretations and produce a predictive model for locating the material signatures of mobile pastoralist mortuary practices in the southern Levant. This research yields results of high archaeological visibility, demonstrating that Bedouin mortuary practices leave behind a detectable material signature on the landscape. / February 2017

This thesis attempts to explore the understanding of borders of ancient Israel and their extent based on biblical account. The starting point is exploring the very term "border" and its meaning in the Old Testament. This thesis operates with both geographic and cultural or ethnic boundary based on archeological finds and material culture. In comparing biblical and non-biblical material it attempts to discover how closely do various texts describing Israel's boundary reflect possible historical reality. In the cases where the boundary delineated by the text seems to be rather symbolic this thesis considers various possible reasons for such a delineation of ancient Israel and attempts to find likely influences of political or religious agenda, historical situation or myth on respective delineations.