Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Craft Specialization and Social EvolutionIn Memory of V. Gordon ChildeEdited by Bernard WailesV. Gordon Childe was the first scholar to attempt a broad and sustained socioeconomic analysis of the archaeology of the ancient world in terms that, today, could be called explanatory. To most, he was remembered only as a diligent synthesizer whose whole interpretation collapsed when its chronology was demolished. There was little recognition of his insistence that the emergence of craft specialists, and their very variable roles in the relations of production, were crucial to an understanding of social evolution. The interrelationship between sociopolitical complexity and craft production is a critical one, so critical that one might ask, just how complex would any society have become without craft specialization.This volume derives from the papers presented at a symposium at the American Anthropological Association meetings on the centenary of Childe's birth.University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology1996 | 256 pages | 35 illus.ISBN 978-0-924171-43-7 | Cloth | $49.95s | £32.50 World Rights | Archaeology, Anthropology

Missionary work, arising from a sense of pity, helped convince the British that they were a benevolent people. Stevens relates this to the rise of the cult of sensibility, when philosophers argued that humans were inherently good because they felt sorrow at the sign of suffering.

Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence explores the relationship between the human rights movement emerging after 1945 and the increasing violence of decolonization. Based on material previously inaccessible in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Human Rights Commission, this comparative study uses the Mau Mau War (1952-1956) and the Algerian War (1954-1962) to examine the policies of two major imperial powers, Britain and France. Historian Fabian Klose considers the significance of declared states of emergency, counterinsurgency strategy, and the significance of humanitarian international law in both conflicts.Klose''s findings from these previously confidential archives reveal the escalating violence and oppressive tactics used by the British and French military during these anticolonial conflicts in North and East Africa, where Western powers that promoted human rights in other areas of the world were opposed to the growing global acceptance of freedom, equality, self-determination, and other postwar ideals. Practices such as collective punishment, torture, and extrajudicial killings did lasting damage to international human rights efforts until the end of decolonization.Clearly argued and meticulously researched, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence demonstrates the mutually impacting histories of international human rights and decolonization, expanding our understanding of political violence in human rights discourse.

A New Nation of Goods highlights the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States-chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing-to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture.

Seneca Possessed explores how the Seneca people and their homeland were "possessed"-culturally, spiritually, materially, and legally-in the wake of the American Revolution.

"A real addition to the body of world mythology."-American Anthropologist "No people has contributed more to the culture of mankind than the Sumerians, and yet it has been only in recent years that our knowledge of them has become at all accurate or extensive. [This book is] our first authoritative sketch of the great myths of the Sumerians, their myths of origins, of creation, the nether world, and the deluge. The book ... makes entrancing reading and for the general reader it opens up a whole new vista undreamed of before."-Theophile J. Meek

"A subversive and postmodern work about the town of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The book considers Wyeth country-what kind of place it is and how it is constituted... Dorst asks questions about how the place represents itself to itself and to tourists."-Lingua Franca

Energy Politics provides a broad introduction to the ways in which energy affects domestic and regional political developments.

Stephen A. Mitchell offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia, drawing on extensive sources ranging from the Icelandic sagas to those much less familiar to the nonspecialist: legal cases, church frescoes, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and surviving runic spells.