Meredith S. Chesson

How do people transform a house or flat into a home that nourishes both body and soul? How do they engage in the alchemy of homemaking? This book focuses a scholarly lens on one homemaking practice, dresser- and delph-keeping in western Connemara, where people utilise these everyday belongings and heirlooms to evoke a powerful sense of welcome and emotional wellbeing. Written for a broad, non-specialist audience, this richly illustrated book presents the results of an anthropological and archaeological study, describing the ways that residents of the island communities of Inishbofin, Inishark, Inishturk and nearby mainland towns of Clifden and Cashel today and in the past used dressers to store and display delph and other heirlooms to convert an architectural space into a meaningful homeplace. At first blush, a dresser's fundamental job is simple: to store possessions, including ceramic table- and teawares, glass vessels, photographs, vials of holy water, letters, travel souvenirs, eyeglasses, heirlooms, money, and even wills. Dressers accomplish this task ably, but their work also encompasses the spiritual and historical realms of people's lives. Dressers and delph anchor homes, protecting and embracing memories of loved ones lost to death or emigration, as well as important milestones like births, christenings, graduations, pilgrimages, and marriages. Dressers and delph connect people across space and through time by telling stories of personal histories and social memories, and they act as symbols of hospitality, family history, and community identity. By furnishing homes with old dressers and delph, dresser- and delph-keepers today create a welcoming place to nourish families, celebrate the resiliency of their ancestors, and craft a more sustainable future for themselves and their descendants. Enthusiasts of Irish history, archaeology, anthropology, vernacular architecture, folklore, antiques, and material culture studies will find connections with their own heritage and homemaking practices.

The emergence of ancient urbanism has long held the interest of archaeologists attempting to understand the origins of inequality and its links to early urban life. This volume presents the results of archeological research at the Early Bronze Age sites of Numayra and Ras an-Numayra, conducted to investigate the rise of Early Bronze Age urban society, with a distinctive focus on links between environmental and social systems.The Dead Sea Plain excavations at Numayra and Ras an-Numayra uncovered extraordinarily well-preserved architecture, artifacts, and faunal and paleoethnobotanical remains that offer exciting and profound insights that enhance our understanding of life in these walled settlements. Under the codirection of R. Thomas Schaub and Walter E. Rast, the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain team designed their research with an explicitly anthropological focus, based on the New Archaeology’s principles for archaeological knowledge production. Their excavations at these sites in the mid-1970s and early 1980s heralded the now-common approach combining archaeology, paleoethnobotany, palynology, bioarchaeology, zooarchaeology, geology, and ethnoarchaeology into the research project, with a multidisciplinary team in the field to systematize collection and sampling procedures.These excavations at Numayra and Ras an-Numayra represent a watershed moment in the history of archaeological research in the southern Levant, setting new standards for scientific methods and a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the past.

Part I presents the results from the 2001 research project combining surface surveys and limited test excavations at eight Early Bronze Age (c. 3600-2000 BC) settlement sites identified in a previous survey by Miller (1991) on the Kerak Plateau. The team collected data to determine the suitability of these sites for a future, multi-year research project, and to assess the applicability of an alternative perspective for reconstructing the nature of the earliest walled towns in the southern Levant. Aside from documenting the state of preservation of these sites, the proposed research sought to evaluate propositions about (1) the nature of the chronological development of urbanism within the region, and (2) the relationship between environmental and ecological zones and the scale of urban settlements in the region. Includes 27 figures. Part II is the editio princeps of two early alphabetic inscriptions discovered by John and Deborah Darnell along the Farshut Road, Wadi el-Hol, near Luxor, Egypt. The work includes photographs, drawings and discussions of the inscriptions, together with a discussion of the source of the signs and significance of the find. The authors argue that the discovery of these inscriptions points to the origins of the alphabet in an Egyptian context as long ago as 2000 BC. Includes 22 figures and 13 plates.