Archaeology often struggles in envisioning real people behind the world of material objects it studies. Even when dealing with skeletal remains archaeologists routinely reduce them to long lists of figures and attributes. Such a fragmentation of past subjects and their bodies, if analytically necessary, is hardly satisfactory. While material culture is the main archaeological proxy to real people in the past, the absence of past bodies has been chronic in archaeological writings. At the same time, these past bodies in archaeology are omnipresent. Bodily matters are tangible in the archaeological record in a way most other theoretical centralities never appear to be. Ancient bodies surround us, in representations, in burials, in the remains of food preparation, cooking and consumption, in hands holding tools, in joint efforts of many individual bodies who built architecture and monuments. This collection of papers is a reaction to decades of the body's invisibility. It raises the body as the central topic in the study of past societies, researching its appearance in a wide variety of regional contexts and across vast spans of archaeological time. Contributions in this volume range from the deep Epi-Palaeolithic past of the Near East, through the European Neolithic and Bronze Age, Classical Greece and Late Medieval England, to pre-Columbian Central America, post-contact North America, and the most recent conflicts in the Balkans. In all these case studies, the materiality of the body is centre stage. Possibilities are highlighted for future study: by putting the body at the forefront of these archaeological studies an attempt is made to provoke the imagination and map out new territories.

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. In her debut short collection, poet Kristin Chang bursts onto the page and into our consciousness like a dazzling, dizzying uproar: "I suck / until my teeth riot / with rot & I have nothing / left in my mouth to keep / quiet." Quiet Chang's speakers are not. In these nineteen poems, the body is personal and communal, hunter and hunted: "My mother says / women who sleep with women / are redundant: the body symmetrical / to its crime. Between your knees / I mistake need for belief / in a father figure: once, we renamed / our fathers by burning them / out of our bodies, smoking the sky / into meat." PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES is a knife-sharp and nimble examination of migration, motherhood, and the malignant legacies of racism. In this collection, family forms both a unit of survival and a framework for history, agency, and recovery. Chang undertakes a visceral exploration of the historical and unfolding paths of lineage and what it means to haunt body and country. These poems traverse not only the circularity of trauma but the promise of regeneration--what grows from violence and hatches from healing--as Chang embodies each of her ghosts and invites the specter to speak. "Kristin Chang wields the line break like a sword cutting through dimensions of reality and language. Each break offers another surprise gut-punch or gutting grace on the other side as these fiercely sharp poems turn and turn, Chang never faltering to rise to the occasion of these blood-filled verses. Chang, quite simply, can write her ass off. I read these poems and I feel like I'm discovering poetry all over again. Chang makes a spell rise from every wound, and I'm caught all the way up in this magic. Kristin Chang is one of the best emerging writers out there, and this chapbook is one step into a career we will all be transformed by. PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES couldn't be a better way to be introduced to your new favorite poet. It's Kristin's world, thank God we're reading in it."--Danez Smith "Kristin Chang's PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES is full of mouths swallowing food, language, home, memory, and bodily desires to finally arrive at explosive demonstrations of what happens when the unspeakable is uttered and shouted. Each poem shows the process of turning a painful reflection on history, sexuality, race, family, and nation into a prismatic object of beauty. We are lucky to witness Chang's use of silence as a productive narrative frame."--Emily Jungmin Yoon "In PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES, Kristin Chang's knotty examination into the complexities of intergenerational relationships, we come to understand the fraught nature of both the known and the unknown. These meditations on family, pain, and the ways we communicate untangle the threads of what it means to love those who have hurt us. Chang writes, 'Every language has different / words for the same want,' and the poems in this collection stunningly reveal those words and leave us wanting for more."--Eloisa Amezcua

This book explores the role of material culture in the formation of corporeal aesthetics and beauty ideals in different past societies and thus contributes to the cultural relativization of bodily aesthetics and related gender norms. The volume does not explore beauty for the sake of beauty, but extensively explores how it serves to form and keep gender norms in place. The concept of beauty has been a topic of interest for some time, yet it is only in recent times that archaeologists have begun to approach beauty as a culturally contingent and socially constructed phenomenon. Although archaeologists and ancient historians extensively dealt with gender, they dealt less with it in relation to beauty. The contributions in this volume deal with different intersections of gender and corporeal aesthetics by turning to rich archaeological, textual and iconographic data from ancient Sumer, Aegean Bronze Age, ancient Egypt, ancient Athens, Roman provinces, the Viking world and the Qajar Iran. Beauty thus moves away from a curiosity and surface of the body to an analytic concept for a better understanding of past and present societies.

The author of "Bodies from the Ash" and "Bodies from the Bog" takes readers on a captivating and creepy journey to learn about glaciers, hulking masses of moving ice that are now offering up many secrets of the past. Full color.

A new class of frequency-selective shock absorbers called band-pass shock absorbers which were conceived as a means of overcoming some of the limitations of conventional shock absorbers is described. These shock absorber designs are introduced, special emphasis being given to their use in landing and taxiing problems of high-speed aircraft. For such aircraft operated on rough land or water runways, conventional oleo struts approach a rigid condition for bum[s with steep slopes and thereby develop and transmit severe shock loads to the aircraft fuselage. The operation of the band-pass shock absorbers in the reduction of loads in certain selected frequency ranges is described. Theoretical equations are derived and solutions are made for several cases for the purpose of comparing the low-pass and conventional shock-absorber actions. The results indicate that the band-pass shock absorbers should alleviate high-frequency or rapidly applied impact loads but should retain the characteristics of conventional oleo struts when taxiing and design landing loads are slowly applied. A number of variations in design are presented for low-pass shock absorbers and reference is made to double-acting band-pass vibration absorbers for other applications.