Embodied Experience shows how literature reveals and heals binary structures which debase women and matter. Its ethical materialism affirms that literary belongings matter, and that it matters when characters sensuously connect to these things and to the knowledge they harbor. Delving into literature’s thing-life archaeologically, it finds characters digging deep into things, finding them radiant and baffling – only to begin again: this is the fluid story of belonging with. In quarrying things, the book benefits from Spinoza’s Ethics, especially his idea that there is joy in activity and that, in striving to live, one lives virtuously. Thus, female characters who embrace their bodies and mind as one also claim the right to vitality and ethics without having to sacrifice energy and volition. These archaeological journeys highlight how the authors discussed themselves initiate a theory and praxis of human–nonhuman camaraderie that embodies belonging with, and Embodied Experience suggests that readers should emulate them in discovering these prismatic interrelations.

This chapter introduces how the study of the Merovingian kingdoms has developed since the sixteenth century. Merovingian history is not easily or self-evidently presented in the source material; it has had to be recovered and reconstructed. The historiographical survey is therefore important to understanding how writers and scholars have put that history together. It highlights some of the key political, confessional, theoretical, and methodological issues that have shaped how the period is interpreted, from the Magdeburg Centuriators of the Reformation to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica’s self-consciously ‘scientific’ approach to editing sources.

In his chapter on “Art” in Roman Britain and the English Settlements, Collingwood attempts to explain the revival of Celtic art that occurred in Britain after a period of Roman art of almost four hundred years. In his Autobiography he declared this was “a chapter which I would gladly leave as the sole memorial of my Romano-British studies, and the best example I can give to posterity of how to solve a much-debated problem in history, not by discovering fresh evidence, but by reconsidering questions of principle.” This chapter has received little attention from archaeologists and historians (and even less from philosophers), exception from Martin Henig in his book The Art of Roman Britain. I defend Collingwood from Henig’s criticisms and try to make his explanation more understandable by placing it in his own historical context. Here I follow Collingwood’s advice that we may better understand an explanation when we understand the context from which it originates. This is not to say Collingwood’s explanation is without shortcomings. I demonstrate how these are brought to light when his explanation for the revival of Celtic art is compared to more recent treatments of this phenomenon.

This chapter explores the debates over human origins in the popular media to show how the topic influenced the ways in which Darwin’s theory was perceived (and misunderstood). The impact of the public’s fascination with the gorilla as a possible human ancestor helped to sustain the image of evolution as the ascent of a ladder. The cultural evolutionism promoted by archaeologists and anthropologists also adopted the linear model of development. Physical anthropologists saw the allegedly ‘lower’ races as intermediate steps in the ascent from the apes, in effect as ‘living fossils’ filling the gap created by the lack of genuinely ancient remains at the time. The impact of Darwin’s Descent of Man is explored in the context of the existing preconceptions generated in the 1860s. The relationship between general models of evolution and emerging ideas of social evolution, not all Darwinian in form, is explained.

Contrary to some accounts, particularly older ones, which portray Clare as a lonely, isolated, and somewhat misanthropic figure, he was a man with a rich social life who had many friends, including literary figures, antiquarians, ornithologists, entomologists, botanists, and artists. Through these friendships, he was abreast of contemporary thought and techniques, and, if only at second hand, he was in touch with the activities of some of the leading naturalists in this country and abroad. This obviously led to an increased knowledge and sophistication in Clare’s understanding of nature, as well as leading to subtle changes in his attitude to the natural world. In particular, it meant that he no longer regarded a love of nature as something to be rather ashamed of, but instead as something which he was able to celebrate.

Exploration of Aeolian foundation traditions and the localizing of such traditions in both the eastern Aegean and Magna Graecia, and of the reflexivity and reciprocality of Aeolian ethnic identity that these mythic traditions entail.

An examination of recent work on the archaeology of a Greek presence in Late-Bronze-Age Asia Minor and typological investigation of linguistic exclaves, remote language communities characterized by linguistic persistence.

Recent research is demonstrating that other women and children, besides those in senior officers’ families, lived inside Roman military bases during the Principate; however, such women are rarely discussed in written sources. Also, the archaeological remains of military bases essentially lack the types of evidence for sexed bodies and gendered practices that can be found in burial contexts and figurative representations. This chapter discusses how more material-cultural approaches to artifactual remains from such sites can be used to investigate gendered identities and lived socio-spatial practices, and to develop better understanding of the place of such women in these hypermasculine spaces. This chapter is concerned with developing approaches to the artifactual remains from these sites, and the potential range of people and activities they represent, to investigate the presence of women within the fortification walls of these bases, and the roles that they may have played here. It demonstrates how an integrated approach to “gendering” artifacts can be used to explore the probabilities, rather than the certainties, of artifacts as gender attributes and how analyses of artifact distribution patterns can be used to identify women who often are not identified through other media, and so seeks solutions to identifying gendered behaviors.

This chapter probes the relation of both science and Indigeneity to nationalism – and of all of these to gender. Rosemblatt focuses on a controversy that began in 1949–1950, when remains said to have belonged to Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor, were found buried in Ixcateopan, Guerrero. Two official commissions denied the authenticity of the burial, but local officials, along with the broader public, found the story expedient, and anthropologist Eulalia Guzmán lent support to their view. Intellectuals who grounded Mexican greatness in their own cosmopolitan scientific neutrality faced off against those who stressed the Indigenous roots of Mexican national identity. The episode reveals differing views of what constituted scientific proof and how science and indigeneity were related to nationalism and politics more generally. Because the pro-authenticity group was led by a woman, it provides a window onto the gendering of scientific authority. The village of Ixcateopan, the chapter argues, actively engaged science along with Guzmán and her allies.

The topic of women in Roman military communities (i.e., military women) did not suddenly appear in the late twentieth century. One could say its emergence is the result of the novel idea that women were present in most aspects of life in the ancient world. Women have been around the military much longer than the general or professional reader might realize. As a topic, military women have not generally been a group to which anyone paid sustained attention until the last decades of the twentieth century. The topic gained interest as social and cultural history became welcome components of historians’ toolboxes and as archaeological fieldwork has yielded new evidence and innovative methodologies have led to updated analyses of old artifacts. This chapter reviews the historiography of the debate over the long duration of Roman studies. In particular, the authors focus on how research into these military women and their families has slowly diversified and grown over the last three decades. The field is strong and growing to provide a more complete understanding of the Roman military.