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Historical Materialist Perspectives in Archaeology from America, Europe and the Near East in the 21st Century
Volume Editor:
This volume gathers papers written by archaeologists utilising the methods of historical materialism, attesting not only to what Marxism has contributed to archaeology, but also to what archaeology has contributed, and can contribute, to Marxism as a method for interpreting the history of humanity. The book’s contributors consider the question of what archaeology can contribute to a historical perspective on the overcoming of present-day capitalism, synthesising developments in world archaeology, and supplying concrete case studies of the archaeology of the Americas, Europe and the Near East.

Contributors are: Guillermo Acosta Ochoa, Marcus Bajema, Bernardo Gandulla, Alex Gonzales-Panta, Pablo Jaruf, Vicente Lull, Savas Michael-Matsas, Rafael Micó, Ianir Milevski, Patricia Pérez Martínez, Cristina Rihuete Herrada, Roberto Risch, Steve Roskams, Henry Tantaleán, Marcelo Vitores, and LouAnn Wurst.
A forum for new interdisciplinary studies on the pre-colonial and early colonial period history of indigenous cultures on the American continent.

The indigenous cultures of North, Middle and South America, including the Caribbean, have a diverse and fascinating history, reaching from the early pre-colonial past until the present. Modern multidisciplinary research investigates many social, political, economic and religious aspects, such as the population movements, the original development of agriculture, sedentary communities, chiefdoms and early states, the effects of mobility and exchange, the forms, functions and meanings of writing systems and visual art, the indigenous knowledge, technology and organisation as well as cosmovision, rituals, biology and medicine, but also the process of European colonization, which caused major destruction as well as complex intercultural dynamics and synergies. Given the importance of cultural continuity in the present, this series pays further attention to living traditions and oral literature, as well as to the present-day issues of cultural values and indigenous rights.

The Early Americas: History and Culture provides an international peer-reviewed forum for innovative contributions and synthetic standard works in the fields of archaeology, iconography and epigraphy, history, anthropology, museology, material culture and heritage studies. The editors welcome original monographs, edited volumes, source editions and translations, preferably written in English. Submissions in Spanish and French will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts by email to the series editor, Professor Corinne Hofman or to the publisher, Dr Kate Hammond.

Brill is in full support of Open Access publishing and offers the option to publish your monograph, edited volume, or chapter in Open Access. Our Open Access services are fully compliant with funder requirements. We support Creative Commons licenses. For more information, please visit Brill Open or contact us at openacess@brill.com.
This is the first thorough investigation of the Brummer brothers’ remarkable career as dealers in antiques, curiosities and modernism in Paris and New York over six decades (1906-1964). A dozen specialists aggregate their expertise to explore extant dealer records and museum archives, parse the wide-ranging Brummer stock, and assess how objects were sourced, marketed, labelled, restored, and displayed. The research provides insights into emerging collecting fields as they crystallised, at the crossroads between market and museum. It questions the trope of the tastemaker; the translocation of material culture, and the dealers’ prolific relationships with illustrious collectors, curators, scholars, artists, and fellow dealers.
The Plurality of Historical Worlds from Epicurus to Modern Science
Author:
By digging through the stratigraphy of the history of ideas we can find within and beyond Marxism an ‘aleatory current’ that values the role of chance in history. Using this perspective, the book builds a case for a historical materialism that is stripped of all teleology. Starting in the ancient Mediterranean with Epicurus, it traces the history of conceiving history as plural up to Marxism and modern science. It shows that concrete historical ‘worlds’ such as ancient Mesoamerica and Eurasia cannot be reduced to a single template. Affirming the potentiality of a future non-capitalist ‘world’, it invalidates any ‘end of history’ thesis.
Religion and Power in the Jesuit Missions of Spanish Amazonia
Established in 1638 in a vast Amazonian territory that today encompasses border areas of Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, the missions of Maynas were one of the Society of Jesus’s main enterprises in Spanish America. Jesuit writings provide a unique insight into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples. In effect, they shed light on how native Amazonians appropriated elements of Christian religiosity and Iberian urban culture. This book is not only about how indigenous populations experienced life in missions. It is above all a study of how natives actively engaged with the practices and ideas of settlement and religiosity that the Jesuits transmitted.
The Theology of God’s Power and Its Bearing on the Western Legal Tradition, 1100–1600
With a foreword by Diego Quaglioni

This book attempts to determine the degree to which the modern fate of the Western legal tradition depends on one of the most long-standing debates of the Middle Ages, the distinction between potentia Dei absoluta and ordinata (God’s absolute and ordered power). The mediaeval investigation into God’s attributes was originally concerned with the problem of divine almightiness. It underwent a slow but steady displacement from the territory of theology to the freshly emerging proceedings of legal analysis. Here, based on the distinction, late-mediaeval lawyers worked out a new terminology to define the extent of the power-holder’s authority. This effort would give rise, during the early modern era, to the gradual establishment of the legal-political framework represented by the concepts of the prince and sovereignty.
This study presents a contrasting hypothesis concerning the genesis and development of Islam in Mexico than the one generally held across academic spheres and current historiography. It demonstrates that Colonial and Early Independent Mexico and Islam may have as well known about the existence of each other. However, within the chronological framework in which the Viceroyalty of Nueva España lived and developed there were social hindrance, geopolitical imperatives and theological impediments and cosmovisions – in both sides of the Atlantic – that created the quasi– perfect circumstances for the Islamic tradition and Mexico not to really meet. This book provides new angles of study on the theme, and with it, new historiographical approaches.
This volume presents the up-to-date results of investigations into the Asian origins of the only two language families of North America that are widely acknowledged as having likely genetic links in northern Asia. It brings together all that has been proposed to date under the respective rubrics of the Uralo-Siberian (Eskimo-Yukaghir-Uralic) hypothesis and the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis. The evolution of the two parallel research strategies for fleshing out these linguistic links between North America and Asia are compared and contrasted. Although focusing on stringently controlled linguistic reconstructions, the volume draws upon archaeological and human genetic data where relevant.
The Bourbon monarchs who ascended the Spanish throne in 1700 attempted to reform the colonial system they had inherited, and, in particular, to make administration more efficient and cost-effective. This book analyses one aspect of the Bourbon reforms, which was the efforts to transform frontier missions, to make the missions more cost-effective, and to accelerate the integration of indigenous peoples in northern Mexico to European cultural norms. In some instances, the Crown had funded missions for more than a century, but with minimal results. The book attempts to show how the mission programs changed, and what the consequences – especially demographic – were for the indigenous peoples brought to live on the missions.