Anthropology

North American larping (live-action roleplaying) is a collaborative performance that encourages critical and creative engagement with cooperative, improvisational narratives. Nevertheless, larping often relies on problematic engagements with race and racial stereotypes. Like many gaming hobbies, larp uses the idea of a “playable race”. Unlike other gaming arenas, however, larping necessitates that players physically embody a character in order to participate in the collaborative narrative: larpers embody fictional races and engage in a complex form of “race play”. Within this context, non-Indigenous players frequently appropriate Indigenous cultural practices and mobilize racist stereotypes. This paper explores this phenomenon and its ramifications. Based on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork and community participation in New England larping communities, I examine how concepts of Indigenous identity manifest in New England larp. I explore both Indigenous and non-Indigenous persp...

West of the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khufu laid out scores of mastaba tombs for the elite members of ancient Egyptian society. Specific clusters of tombs seem to form architectural and archaeological units, prompting the modern division of the Giza Necropolis into discrete nucleus cemeteries. This book interprets the complete archaeological record of the mastabas of Cemetery G 2100, one of the six nucleus cemeteries at Giza. As a key to understanding Old Kingdom mortuary development at Giza, it explores the distinguishing features of such a grouping of tombs and tomb owners: relative chronology and individual artistic styles; common administrative titles, possible familial connections to the king; and the relationship of the earlier, major mastabas to the subsequent, minor burials surrounding them.

More than a century has elapsed since the fourteen major mastabas and about sixty-two smaller subsidiary tombs of Cemetery G 2100 were first excavated by the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition at Giza under George A. Reisner (1867-1942). In addition, the southern edge of Cemetery G 2100 fell within the excavation concession granted to the German/Austrian expedition under Georg Steindorff and then Hermann Junker, on behalf of institutions in Leipzig, Hildesheim, and Vienna. The author has undertaken a re-examination of this cemetery. The results incorporate excavations between 1845 and 1940, and include objects from museums in Berlin, Birmingham, Boston, Cairo, Copenhagen, Hildesheim, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome, and Vienna. Art-historical treasures, significant artifacts, and unique architectural elements unattested anywhere else at Giza are set in their proper archaeological context, often for the first time. Examples include the Boston reserve head of Nefer (mastaba G 2110); Nefer's chapel reliefs spread today across three continents; one of the best-preserved and oldest female mummies (G 2220); and two complete chapels removed to Europe-Merib in Berlin (G 2100-I), and Kaninisut I in Vienna (G 2155). The chapel of Merib, long known only from C.R. Lepsius's illustrations from the 1840s, is represented in new color photography prepared especially for this volume.

The book contains historical and interpretive remarks, followed by individual chapters on the major mastabas. Several detailed 3D computer illustrations reconstruct unique views of the tombs from above and below ground. Part 2 of Giza Mastabas 8 will describe the later, subsidiary structures in Cemetery G 2100. Both volumes enhance the much larger corpus of information available, in undigested form, on the Museum of Fine Arts's Giza Archives Project Web site (www.gizapyramids.org). The work should prove useful to those investigating Old Kingdom history and chronology, mortuary architecture, ceramic and faunal remains, inscriptional material, and art-historical style. 530p, full-color illus. (Department of the Ancient World, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2009)

http://www.oxbowbooks.com/bookinfo.cfm/ID/54964

Fifteen "slab stelae" and stela fragments were found set into the exterior walls of the Giza mastaba tombs from the reign of Khufu and his successors. Taken as a group, they provide one of the most important sources of Egyptian artistic and historical documents of the early Old Kingdom. This publication presents a fresh interpretation of the Giza stelae, with new colour photography, "digital epigraphy" facsimile drawings, new translations, original discovery photographs and recent colour images taken at Giza. The book is published in full colour, with numerous charts and catalogues, gathering information on all Giza tombs with slab stelae emplacements, the history of their excavation, previous scholarly research, and comparative and interpretive chapters. Appendices include both colour and line drawing palaeographies of all hieroglyphs appearing on the stelae, and a collection of the enigmatic "linen lists" that adorn the Giza stelae and many other Archaic and Old Kingdom monuments. Indexes complete the volume. 278p, 314 col illus., 30 col. plates, (Publications of the Pennsylvania-Yale Expedition to Egypt Number 7, 2004)

"Hieroglyphs from A to Z is the first book published by PomegranateKids, an imprint of Pomegranate Communications, in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Originally published in 1991, this popular best-seller has been out of print for many years. With bold graphics, charming, rhyming text, and solid educational content, it explains the hieroglyphic code while imparting important facts about ancient Egypt. As an added bonus, a separate sheet of stencils is provided, slipped inside the back cover, so that kids can easily draw their own hieroglyphs. All told, this is the perfect book for any small visitor to a museum with Egyptian artifacts, or for any child who simply loves words and pictures."

In: Egypt and Beyond. Essays Presented to Leonard H. Lesko upon his Retirement from the Wilbour Chair of Egyptology at Brown University, June 2005, pp. 227–36. Edited by Stephen E. Thompson and Peter Der Manuelian. Providence: Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies, 2008.