The evidential role of matter—when media records trace evidence of violence—explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milošević; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or “disaster film” produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.

How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence takes a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring instances of exemplary practice, key challenges, instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence. Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with cultural significance to the detritus of everyday life and the inadvertent transformation of landscapes over the long term. Each contributor to Material Evidence identifies a particular type of evidence with which they grapple and considers, with reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past. Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars are increasingly interested in working with material things as objects of inquiry and as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer archaeologists and those in related fields.

Input and Evidence: the raw material of second language acquisition is an empirical and theoretical treatment of one of the essential components of SLA: the input to language learning mechanisms. It reviews and adds to the empirical studies showing that negative evidence (correction, feedback, repetitions, reformulations) play a role in language acquisition in addition to that played by ordinary conversation. At the same time, it embeds discussion of input within a framework which includes a serious treatment of language processing, including the problem of modularity and the question of how semantic representations can influence grammatical ones. It lays the foundation for the development of a truly explanatory theory of SLA in the form of the Autonomous Induction Theory which combines a model of induction with an interpretation of Universal Grammar, thereby permitting, for the the first time, a coherent approach to the problem of constraining induction in SLA.

Providing an easily accessible source for students studying the law of evidence, this title fulfils the roles of both textbook and materials book, containing extracts from key cases and published articles.

This is the first systematic attempt to survey in detail the archaeological evidence for the crafts and craftsmanship of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians in ancient Mesopotamia, covering the period ca. 8000-300 B.C.E. As creators of some of the earliest farming and urban communities known to us, these people were among the first pioneers of many crafts and skills that remain fundamental to modern ways of life. Many of the raw materials for crafts had to be imported from outside the river valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, providing an unusually sensitive indicator of the commercial and cultural contacts of Mesopotamia. In this book, Dr. Moorey reviews briefly the textual evidence, and then goes on to examine in detail the material evidence for a wide range of crafts using stones, both common and ornamental, animal products--from hippopotamus ivory to ostrich egg-shells--ceramics, glazed materials and glass, metals, and building materials. With a comprehensive bibliography, this will be a key work of reference for archaeologists and those interested in the early history of crafts and technology, as well as for specialist historians of the ancient Near East.

Art As Evidence celebrates the career of Jules Prown, historian of American art and a pioneer in the study of material culture. It brings together some of his most influential essays along with an introductory chapter, and an intellectual autobiography.

This book is a collected volume that crosses traditional boundaries between methodologies. Each of its sixteen articles is based on imaginative combinations of data provided by excavations, artifacts, monuments, urban topography, rural layouts, historical narratives and/or archival records. The volume as a whole demonstrates the effectiveness of interdisciplinary research applied to historical, cultural and archaeological problems. Its five sections - Economics and Trade, Governmental Authority, Material Culture, Changing Landscapes, and Monuments – bring forth original studies of the medieval, Ottoman and modern Middle East, amongst others, of voiceless and silenced social groups. Contributors are: Nitzan Amitai-Preiss, Jere L. Bacharach, Simonetta Calderini, Delia Cortese, Katia Cytryn-Silverman, Miriam Frenkel, Haim Goldfus, Hani Hamza, Stefan Heidemann, Miriam Kühn, Ayala Lester, Nimrod Luz, Yoram Meital, Daphna Sharef-Davidovich, Oren Shmueli, Yasser Tabbaa, Daniella Talmon-Heller, and Bethany Walker.

This book demonstrates the effectiveness of creative interdisciplinary research, applied to historical, cultural and archaeological problems in the study of the Middle East.