Tag: Anthropology

Articles

Family matters, Economy, culture and biology: fertility and its constraints in Roman Italy

However, the theory concerning fertility behaviour during the Late Roman Republic that has been put forward by Brunt depends largely on such viewpoints as have become controversial in the discipline of demography. Rather than purely economic and rational in scope, decision making processes – such as those concerning marriage and procreation – are embedded in specific cultural and social settings that affect outcomes through the creation or upholding of practical, structural, normative or perceived constraints.

Articles

Tomb and social status: The textual evidence

In archaeological theoretical literature it has been stressed that tombs might rather show the status of the living persons who organized the burial than the status of the buried person. This is of course an important argument but in Ancient Egypt we have the anthropologically quite exceptional situation that the tomb-owner already began the construction of his tomb and the organisation of his burial equipment when he was still alive.

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Hierarchy of Women within Elite Families. Iconographic Data from the Old Kingdom

When the hierarchy of women is concerned, the range of data is limited, since women were virtually excluded from the bureaucracy, and the number of their own tombs is relatively low. In spite of this, over recent decades the studies focusing on women have been steadily increasing our knowledge on the position and roles of women in the Egyptian society of the Old Kingdom

Articles

Housekeeping, Neandertal-Style: Hearth Placement and Midden Formation in Kebara Cave (Israel)

The interpretation of Neandertal life ways has probably never been as polarized as it is today. At one extreme are many archaeologists and biological anthropologists, and quite a few geneticists, who see Neandertals as belonging to a species other than our own, most often a decidedly inferior one in terms of both behavior and cognitive wherewithal