Carmel Schrire

Bio: Carmel Schrire is an academic researcher from Rutgers University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Colonialism & Historical archaeology. The author has an hindex of 15, co-authored 38 publications receiving 1244 citations. Previous affiliations of Carmel Schrire include Binghamton University.

Beyond lifetime averages: tracing life histories through isotopic analysis of different calcified tissues from archaeological human skeletons

Abstract: Stable-isotopic analyses of human bone, now an established aid to dietary reconstruction in archaeology, represent the diet as averaged over many years. Separate analysis of different skeletal components enables changes in diet and place of residence to be tracked, giving a fuller life-history for long-dead individuals.

An Inquiry into the Evolutionary Status and Apparent Identity of San Hunter-Gatherers

Abstract: An attempt is made to reconcile a popular view of the Bushmen or San of southern Africa with reality. Following an analysis of the assumed relationships of living hunter-gatherers with their Pleistocene forebears and modern neighbors, the identity of the San is explored using archaeological and historical evidence. Finally an alternative view of modern San, consistent with this evidence, is proposed.

Past and Present in Hunter Gatherer Studies

Abstract: This volume shows how hunter gatherer societies maintain their traditional lifeways in the face of interaction with neighboring herders, farmers, and traders. Using historical, anthropological and archaeological data and cases from Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia, the authors examine hunter gatherer people - both past and present - to assess these relationships and the mechanisms by which hunter gatherers adapt and maintain elements of their culture in the wider world around them.

Digging Through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist

Abstract: In Digging Through Darknes, Carmel Schrire interweaves art and fact to recreate a distant world. Tracking the broad sweep of European expansion into Africa, Australia, and the Pacific, Schrire focuses on the evidence unearthed in archaeological sites, leading the reader through a wealth of strata and artifacts, to see how inferences may be drawn from heaps of broken bones and stones. This interweaving gives voice not only to the literate colonists but also to illiterate native people who endured dispossession in silence.

Europe and the People without History

Abstract: The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.

A History of Archaeological Thought

Abstract: List of illustrations Preface 1. The relevance of archaeological history 2. Classical archaeology and antiquarianism 3. The beginnings of scientific archaeology 4. The imperial synthesis 5. Culture-historical archaeology 6. Soviet archaeology 7. Functionalism in Western archaeology 8. Neo-evolutionism and the New Archaeology 9. The explanation of diversity 10. Archaeology and its social context Bibliographical essay References Index.

Strontium Isotopes from the Earth to the Archaeological Skeleton: A Review

Abstract: Strontium isotope analysis of archaeological skeletons has provided useful and exciting results in archaeology in the last 20 years, particularly by characterizing past human migration and mobility. This review covers the biogeochemical background, including the origin of strontium isotope compositions in rocks, weathering and hydrologic cycles that transport strontium, and biopurification of strontium from to soils, to plants, to animals and finally into the human skeleton, which is subject to diagenesis after burial. Spatial heterogeneity and mixing relations must often be accounted for, rather than simply ``matching'' a measured strontium isotope value to a presumed single-valued geologic source. The successes, limitations and future potential of the strontium isotope technique are illustrated through case studies from geochemistry, biogeochemistry, ecology and archaeology.

Reading the past : current approaches to interpretation in archaeology

Abstract: Preface to the first edition Preface to the second edition 1. The problem 2. The systems approach 3. Structuralist archaeology 4. Marxist archaeology, ideology and practice 5. Archaeology and history 6. An ethnohistoric example: reconsideration of ethnoarchaeology and middle range theory 7. Contextual archaeology 8. Post-processual archaeology 9. Conclusion: archaeology as archaeology Bibliography Index.

Putting Hierarchy in Its Place

Abstract: On the face of it, an exploration of the idea of the "native" in anthropological discourse may not appear to have much to do with the genealogy of the idea of hierarchy. But I wish to argue that hierarchy is one of an anthology of images in and through which anthropologists have frozen the contribution of specific cultures to our understanding of the human condition. Such metonymic freezing has its roots in a deeper assumption of anthropological thought regarding the boundedness of cultural units and the confinement of the varieties of human consciousness within these boundaries. The idea of the "native" is the principal expression of this assumption, and thus the genealogy of hierarchy needs to be seen as one local instance of the dynamics of the construction of natives. Although the term native has a respectable antiquity in Western thought and has often been used in positive and self-referential ways, it has gradually become the technical preserve of anthropologists. Although some other words taken from the vocabulary of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators have been expunged from anthropological usage, the term native has retained its currency, serving as a respectable substitute for terms like primitive, about which we now feel some embarrassment. Yet the term native, whether we speak of "native categories," or "native belief-systems" or "native agriculture," conceals certain ambiguities. We sense this ambiguity, for example, in the restricted use of the adjective nativistic, which is typically used not only for one sort of revivalism, but for revivalism among certain kinds of population. Who is a "native" (henceforth without quotation marks) in the anthropological usage? The quick answer to this question is that the native is a person who is born in (and thus belongs to) the place the anthropologist is observing or writing about. This sense of the word native is fairly narrowly, and neutrally, tied to its Latin etymology. But do we use the term native uniformly to refer to people who are born in certain places and, thus, belong to them? We do not. We have tended