Illuminating the impact of archaeology on the culture and politics of Latin America

Since the mid-nineteenth century, archaeology has played a critical role in historicizing space and shaping cultural imaginaries. It has brought modern scientific practices into structured contact with ancient objects and landscapes, on the one hand, and modern Indigenous cultures in their material and historical complexity, on the other. Archaeology has thus served a variety of disciplines and practices, from history and anthropology to literary and social criticism and critical theory, and has actively animated practices quite distinct from itself, such as public policy, tourism, urban planning, art, literature, and nation-building.

This volume provides a unique analysis of a disciplinary formation crucial to the study of cultural history and theory in Latin America. The contributors represent archaeologists and scholars from a variety of disciplines within the humanities, each of whom approaches archaeology as theory and praxis. Collectively, they map the differences and similarities between archaeological interventions and the ways in which the materiality, practice, and discourse of archaeology have been taken up as analytic, metaphor, and discursive strategy.

This book demonstrates how monarchy adjusted to the contours of modernity in remarkably diverse kinds of ways and contexts, preserving a central role in the configuration of the post-revolutionary world. It focuses on three geographically and politically connected frameworks: Spain, Portugal, and the new Latin American countries that emerged from the Iberian colonial territories. It analyses the intense and often conflicting processes and negotiations that characterized the monarchy's adaptation to post-revolutionary modernity and its insertion into a liberal parliamentary and constitutional system. Combining monarchical and post-revolutionary principles was one of the most notable challenges that political regimes faced after 1800. In the Portuguese and Spanish cases, as in others, it was necessary to seek a new place for the crown in constitutional parliamentarism. Liberals managed to do this by uniting king and parliament as elements of national identity and sovereign power respectively. In Latin America, monarchy was seen as a solution to the potential instability of the nascent independent states. In these cases, in addition to crown's adaptation to a constitutional regime, there was also the need to find monarchs and to legitimize them. The cases of Mexico and Brazil were indicative of these challenges and of the difficulties they brought.

From colonial rule to revolution and beyond, this concise history of Nicaragua unpacks the political struggles, economic transformations, and social movements that have shaped the modern nation, offering essential insights into a country defined by resilience and change.

Tracing Nicaragua's past from indigenous civilizations to Spanish conquest, dictatorship, and revolution, the book examines key forces that have shaped its destiny. Discover the rise and fall of the Somoza dynasty, the impact of the agro-export economy, the legacy of the Sandinista revolution, and the country's complex path to a democratic interlude from 1990 to 2007.

This revised edition brings Nicaragua's story into the present, analyzing recent years of political and social change-including President Daniel Ortega's shift toward authoritarianism, the contested elections of 2011, 2016, and 2021, the 2018 protests, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and evolving U.S.-Nicaragua relations. Featuring updated timelines, key figures, and essential terms, this book is an indispensable guide to understanding Nicaragua's past, present, and future.

This accessible, sweeping survey of Mexican history, from pre-Columbian times to the present, introduces critical political and economic processes that have defined the country.

With ample maps and illustrations, along with historiographical inserts, this book is a guide from the earliest beginnings of a great nation down to the present day. This 2nd edition includes the following changes:

- 2 additional chapters, covering contemporary Mexico in the 21st century
- Fresh and substantial content about the cartels, criminal organizations, and the drug war
- The latest updates on pre-Columbian archaeological discoveries
- 20 new illustrations
- 10 inserts addressing historiography and referencing over 100 scholarly books
- An expanded and updated Suggestions for Further Reading section

To understand this complex and diverse land is to study the splendor of its pre-Columbian cultures, learn the legacies of a violent conquest, and appreciate the fluorescence of 3 centuries of viceregal Spanish rule. The struggle for independence, war with the United States, French Intervention, Benito Juarez, dictatorship under Porfirio Diaz, revolutionary upheaval under "Pancho" Villa - all are laid out in crystal clear narrative. Nor does this book shirk from addressing the darker side of history. Examining the corruption of 20th-century presidents, security apparatuses, and the PRI party, it explores the roots of present-day cartels and rising patterns of social violence.

Charles Winstone's letter book offers a rich first-hand account of Caribbean history during the American Revolution, the French invasion, and the occupation of Dominica.

The American Revolution and French presence disrupted the island's economic life. As Dominica's former solicitor and attorney general, Winstone became a central figure to absentee planters and British firms protecting estates and investments. His letters reveal efforts to forge new trading networks through the Dutch West Indies as he worked for British absentees based elsewhere in the Caribbean and Europe. The correspondence also reflects his struggle to establish a West Indian fortune on the backs of enslaved people cultivating coffee and sugar. His letters provide a rare look at the world of a plantation attorney and manager as he oversaw several estates near the colonial capital of Roseau during the most tumultuous years in Dominica's history and reflects on the ineffective and unprepared British response upon the outbreak of the American conflict, particularly noting French military preparations on the nearby islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

This volume honors the scholarly contributions of Kevin Middlebrook, presenting essays that explore Mexican labor history, comparative politics, and U.S.-Latin American relations, with a focus on NAFTA/USMCA.

The first section engages with Middlebrook's work on Mexican labor, featuring dialogues on historical and policy analyses and reflections on Mexico's democratization. The second section examines his impact on comparative politics, including studies of Peru's military regimes and democratic transitions in Latin America. The final section addresses U.S.-Latin American relations, highlighting labor provisions under NAFTA/USMCA and their effects on Mexico's trade unions and economic development.

By bringing together leading experts, the volume demonstrates the enduring relevance of Middlebrook's scholarship for understanding labor, political dynamics, and international trade in Latin America, making it an essential resource for students, researchers, and policymakers interested in the region.

This open access volume is a call to action and a toolbox for educators, administrators, community engagement specialists, and workforce developers who want to make their course content, institutional commitments, and outreach projects relevant to twenty-first century learners. The book demonstrates the impact a higher education institution, its faculty, and community partners can have through education and action for sustainability. By being a sustainability educator and doing sustainability work, individuals can create living and learning labs that make such interdisciplinary activity integral to campus life and regional engagement. This book answers the United Nations' call to universities to step up and address the most urgent crises of our time by marshalling the resources, wisdom and energy of youth and communities to promote active listening, creative expression, greater climate stability, social equity, and, by extension, peace.

This book explores disembodiment, the experience of feeling alienated from one's own body, and shows how it emerges across clinical and social domains. It begins with an account of embodiment as the foundation of lived experience, interpersonal connection, and cultural inscription, before examining how disruptions of body image, body schema, ownership, and agency destabilize this balance.

Clinical cases illustrate different pathways into disembodiment: the alien limb in BIID, the loss of presence in depersonalization and PTSD, the fractured agency and hyper-reflexivity of schizophrenia, and the distorted body image of anorexia. The analysis then turns to racial disembodiment, where systemic racism and the white gaze impose estranging perspectives that reshape subjectivity at multiple levels.

To link these phenomena, the book introduces the uncanny as a framework for understanding how the familiar body becomes strange, and concludes by exploring re-embodiment techniques-from sensory illusions to VR-that open therapeutic and social possibilities.

This book presents a comprehensive account of how archaeology in Africa evolved, was challenged, and reimagined. Moving from nineteenth-century antiquarianism through independence to today, the book dismantles "dark continent" myths, foregrounds African ways of knowing, and argues for a praxis of archaeologies: multivocal, community-engaged, and methodologically rigorous. Case-led chapters demonstrate how trade, mobility, religion, and the environment have produced diverse African pasts, while contemporary sections address restitution, heritage policy, tourism, and climate risk.

The book begins by clarifying what "Africa" signifies in scholarly and public discourse, then dismantles the enduring "dark continent" trope by setting colonial narratives against African intellectual traditions and evidence. Subsequent chapters track the emergence of archaeology, beginning with collections, amateurs, and missionaries, and progressing to professional excavations, surveys, and archaeological science, as well as the discipline's theoretical shifts, from culture history and processualism to post-processual and postcolonial critique, all examined through African case studies. The closing chapters set out why the past matters now: for identity, education, livelihoods, and environmental stewardship.

Clear prose, focused case studies (spanning deep prehistory to the second-millennium trade horizons), and a continent-wide lens make this volume essential for students and researchers, while its emphasis on ethics and engagement resonates with heritage professionals and the broader public. The result is a clear, compelling account of what African archaeology is, how it differs from older traditions, and why it matters-for scholarship, for heritage stewardship, and for public life.

This book develops an ontological approach to understanding existential intelligence and its connections to democracy and education.

Sevket Benhuer Oral examines the concept of existential intelligence-hereafter ExistI-on an ontological level. ExistI is not conceived as a psychological aptitude that one can be good at or not like spatial or bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. Rather, it refers to a unitary experience that is riddled with ambiguity. All human beings are potentially open to such experience since we all have the capacity to experience the extraordinary, or better put, the extraordinariness of the ordinary. Although Howard Gardner later identified existential intelligence among other intelligences, his theory of multiple intelligences, while still widely accepted by educators, did not adequately explore this concept, especially in its political, moral, and philosophical dimensions. It is essential that we do since ExistI is ultimately about our capacity for more peaceful ways of co-existing with others, the extraordinariness of living collectively with human and nonhuman beings.

This monograph delves into the general dynamics, causes, and impact of Venezuelan migration in the Caribbean, with particular emphasis on Trinidad and Tobago, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of this phenomenon.

Migration has been a defining feature of the Caribbean region's history, with its complex interplay of colonial legacies, economic opportunities, and socio-political factors shaping patterns of movement within and beyond the region. The Caribbean has been a hub of migration, marked by both internal and external movements, driven by various factors such as economic disparities, political instability, and the search for better opportunities. However, migration also poses challenges such as brain drain and strains on resources in both sending and receiving countries. As the Caribbean continues to evolve in a globalized world, understanding and addressing the complex causes and impacts of migration remains a critical task for countries, policymakers, academics, and communities alike. This exploration allows for greater insights and understanding of the responses and possible recommendations for tacking and addressing the Venezuelan migrant crisis.

Through an analysis of vernacular metaphors of food and consumption for religious experience and theology in late-fourteenth and early fifteenth century England, Caleb D. Molstad explores what that language reveals about late-medieval religion during a time of swift religious and linguistic change.


In the move from Latin to Middle English, medieval authors gave vibrant expression to religious ideas through the emerging literary language, a phenomenon Nicholas Watson has termed "vernacular theology." Molstad places focus on poetic and prose works including William Langland's Piers Plowman, Nicholas Love's A Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection, Pearl-Poet's Cleanness, and A Ladder of Foure Ronges. Alimentary metaphors not only make religious concepts more accessible to a non-educated, lay audience, the language of food and consumption alters the shape of the religious content communicated through it. This book employs cognitive linguistics and food studies to explore the transcultural, sociological, anthropological, and historical significance of the food and foodways behind the metaphorical language and the theological transformations the metaphors produce.

The overlaps between the digital humanities and textual studies-two major scholarly fields which share common interests and methods-still demand further theoretical reflections. This volume brings together an exciting collection of book historians, textual editors, curators, and new media theorists to provide templates for and methodological reflections on how digital textual studies research can be done.

Featuring contributions from a variety of early career and experienced scholars and practitioners, this volume uses case studies and methodological provocations to open up digital textual studies, as well as taking a step back to consider the broader theoretical and pedagogical implications they raise. In doing so, it sets the agenda for pragmatic, digital text-based scholarship and methods, providing useful tools and frameworks for anyone in need of an introduction to textual studies that is grounded in digital research and new media.

An examination of how comics represent, confront, and sometimes perpetuate gendered violence.

Lee Okan argues that comics, with their hybrid form of image and text, possess an ability to express the unspeakable dimensions of trauma while also raising ethical questions about spectatorship, representation, and storytelling. Through close analysis of contemporary and independent comics, as well as anthology collections, this book shows how artists navigate the tension between testimony and spectacle, visibility and exploitation.

Rather than treating comics as an isolated medium, Okan situates these works within broader cultural and media discourses on sexual violence, arguing that comics shape and are shaped by feminist activism, visual culture, and reader response. Sexual Violence in Comics traces how creators reframe the terms of witness, challenge dominant narratives, and reclaim narrative authority, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement and beyond.

This open access book covers four decades of work by the leading Australian philosopher, mathematician and historian of ideas, James Franklin.

These interlinking essays are connected by a core theme: the necessary structures in reality that allow certain knowledge of absolute truths. Franklin's Aristotelian realist philosophy of mathematics shows how mathematical truths are directly about physical reality, and at the same time certainly and provably true. Ranging from mathematics to evidence evaluation to ethics, his philosophy of probability sees the relation of evidence to hypothesis, such as in science and law, as purely logical, hence necessary.

Across ethics and the philosophy of religion, the theme of necessity is repeated: basic ethical truths (such as the worth of persons and the wrongness of murder) are shown to have the same certainty as mathematics. Focus on the history of ideas connects the philosophical work in the present with the medieval scholastic tradition, which defended similar necessities but is now neglected.

Here is an up-to-date introduction to Franklin's overall perspective. Recalling Western philosophy to its roots, it reveals the way absolute necessities are discoverable across the abstract fields of mathematics, logical evidence and ethics.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Why should classical antiquity matter to Irish migration? Irish Migrations and Classical Antiquity argues that ancient Greece and Rome have shaped Irish migration narratives from the earliest texts to the 21st century. These classical models emerge in response to four key drivers of migration: war, economic need, religious motivation and the pursuit of education. Rather than passive inheritances, Graeco-Roman forms are used both to join and to challenge dominant frameworks, offering tools for cultural participation and strategies of resistance to exclusion.

The book traces classical reception in contexts ranging from early Irish origin legends and medieval Latin learning to 21st-century cultural politics, including Irish-language translation, diaspora literature and gendered experiences. Participation appears in assertions of Irish civilisation, synchronistic histories, literary cosmopolitanism and transnational exchange. Resistance surfaces in critiques of marginalisation, defence of minority languages and challenges to aesthetic or political canons. This book rethinks how Irish identities travel across borders, languages and centuries by showing how the ancient world underwrites both movement and its meanings.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.

This open access book offers a unique and timely investigation of the multifaceted relationship between migration and European cities. Its chapters critically examine the historical, economic, socio-spatial, cultural and policy-political dimensions of the migration-city nexus, bringing together different thematic and disciplinary perspectives that are usually considered separately.

The book engages with the growing theoretical and empirical interest in the urban scale within migration studies, while also drawing on the rich and longstanding body of research on migration and cities across other disciplines. It draws attention to the significant variations both between and within European cities, taking stock not only of the extensive scholarship on north-western Europe - the theoretical heartland of European migration and urban studies - but also of the important contributions made by scholars working in the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent.

In doing so, the book develops a nuanced understanding of the interconnections between migration and cities, while offering readers a guide to navigating the diverse literature that addresses these themes. Written in an accessible style, it is a valuable resource for students, researchers, academics, policymakers, practitioners, and readers who are new to this key area of migration studies.

This book investigates the evolving role of smart cities in the broader context of urban innovation and digital government, identifies what a smart city is in practice and highlights its importance to the welfare of society. The book offers specific, measurable, and action-oriented public sector planning and management principles, technological artifacts, guides and ideas for smart governance in the era of global urbanization and innovation to help with the challenges in maintaining the democratic system of checks and balances as well as the division of powers in a highly interconnected world. Revised for the second edition, this volume includes up-to-date information about smart city progress, as well as new terminology, standards, technologies, and practices. The book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, students, and public sector IT professionals that work within smart cities, innovation management, public administration, urban technologies and urban innovation, and public local administration studies.

This open access book examines climate policy effort among subnational governments participating in the Under2 Coalition. The central research question investigates whether Under2 Coalition founding members demonstrate greater climate policy effort compared to early joiners (2015-2016) and later joiners (post-2016), and whether these performance differences persist over time. The empirical analysis focuses on subnational governments in five countries that played influential roles in founding and developing the Under2 Coalition: Canada, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The study makes three key contributions to climate governance literature. First, it systematically demonstrates how climate policy effort and leadership dynamics evolve within the Under2 Coalition framework. Second, it provides genuinely comparative insights across two dimensions-comparing different membership categories within countries and across nations. Third, it offers a replicable methodological template for expanding this research approach to other contexts.

By examining quantifiable indicators including policies, policy instruments, and greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, the book provides valuable insights into how multilevel climate governance can be strengthened and sustained over time, bridging theory and practice in understanding subnational climate action.

This book explores methods of bringing environmentalist, art-based and Indigenous ways of knowing and being into dialogue to improve relationships with the Earth and Her First Peoples.

Geo Takach argues that two of the greatest crimes committed by humanity - environmental devastation and the continued dishonour, dispossession and attempted eradication of Indigenous peoples - are entwined and need to be addressed together. Rooted in communication and cultural studies, this book explores ways to bring environmental, arts-based, and Indigenous ways of knowing and being into dialogue towards improving relationships with the Earth and Her First Peoples.

Through this multimodal exploration, the book builds an analytical foundation for that alliance by considering causes and challenges common to ecological and human colonization. Joined by a generous array of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge-keepers, artists, scholars and citizens, Takach then demonstrates how we can interweave environmental, arts-based and Indigenous perspectives and collaborative meaning-making in our communications to inspire what he calls environmental conciliation.

The Fundamental Tendency of Our Times (Tendenza) is the Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino's crucial reflection on modern technology and science, in which he articulates his major contribution to the analysis of Western modernity: the claim that, beginning with Greek civilization, a nihilistic spirit of domination informs our conceptual and social systems.

In this book Severino applies his framework to the geopolitical situation before the fall of the Berlin Wall; yet his insights have continuing relevance in light of the current threat of ecological collapse accelerated by an orientation to the world as an object of exploitation.

Significant for its parallels with, and differences from, Heidegger's discussion of technology, this book's explicit discussion of politics gives essential clarification to Severino's notoriously complex philosophical discourse. With a foreword contextualizing the historical moment of its publication, this first English translation will be invaluable for those interested in understanding the thought of one of the most remarkable Italian theorists of the 20th century.

Published with the kind support of SEPS (Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche).