PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Kiersten Neumann is Curator and Research Associate at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, USA, and has published numerous articles on topics pertaining to sensory experience, ritualised practice, and visual culture of the first millennium BCE, as well as museum practice, collections histories, and the reception of Assyrian and Achaemenid art. Allison Thomason is Professor of History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA. Her book, Luxury and Legitimation: Royal Collecting in Ancient Mesopotamia (2005), and her subsequent publications explore portable objects, dress, and sensory experiences in the ancient Near East.
"""As our world is continuously forced by technological development to inhabit digiscapes of mono-sensory confinement, advances in archaeological science and field methods, as the Routledge Handbook of the Senses makes all too clear, enable scholars to empathetically probe the role of the senses in the lives of past humans. As an academic enterprise, this probing is indeed fascinating, provided that one does not forget that our own sensorium and phenomenological immersion can take us that far in understanding the role of the senses in antiquity. Both editors and contributors to this volume seem to be very careful about using the sensory as an analytical framework while basing their research on rigorously understood archaeological evidence... This hefty volume is masterfully edited... The volume is a veritable feast of valuable contributions all of which are worth reading."" - Bryn Mawr Classical Review ""The Handbook of the Senses shows how incorporating the study of the senses in research opens up new pathways of approaching and understanding people in past societies. It offers an excellent, inspirational overview of the current state of the field."" - Bibliotheca Orientalis"
