Besides the persecution and annihilation of the Jewish community, the quest for Lebensraum was a pillar of the Nazi’s ideology. The march east, operation ‘Barbarossa’ (1941), was essentially the final part of the geopolitics of the Third Reich. Historian Pierik takes readers into the world of ideas behind these politics, where cold blooded, rational elements go hand in hand with myths and radical beliefs.

An example of solid and, more importantly, understandable historiography

-Jan Je...

Urbanized sandy shores around the world suffer from coastal erosion due to a lack of sediment input and sea level rise. These dynamics place new demands on coastal spatial planning. To compensate for coastal erosion in a more natural and systemic way, sand nourishments are deployed as a ‘Building with Nature’ technique, restoring the sediment balance and promoting dune formation as coastal defence.

In this research, Building with Nature is reframed as a landscape approach, regenerating t...

The book X Years in Art celebrates the ten year anniversary of the Antwerp based Nadya Kotova Gallery. Studying economics in the early 1990s in St. Petersburg—during the shift from a planned market economy to a free market economy in Russia—she initially didn’t think of becoming a gallerist or an art dealer. The turning point though was when she discovered the work of Igor Kislitsyn, who was—and still is—relatively unknown, partly because he is zealously religious. Kotova was strong...

In 1594, the first Dutch ships sailes to 'the East'. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almost five thousand ships were sent to the Dutch East Indies, attracting a growing number of travellers, with trade as one of the major incentives. In addition to Dutch missionary ambitions, progress and technological innovations not only fed the growing hunger for expansion, but also stirred an appetite for adventure. The hope for a life in welfare is mirrored in the growing numbers of ...

In the 21st century we need a new philosophy as opposed to the old philosophy: a philosophy of man or philosophical anthropology. The importance of a new philosophy of man is that it addresses people all over the world, thus helping us to overcome our differences. And if we look a bit further into the world of the 21st century, we see that the most pressing project will be the search for meaning in the lives of human beings in a globalised world. Following the complete existential deconstruct...

Around 3000 BCE, a turning point occurred in Europe: Long-existing regional societies entered into a process of transformation. The result is a world in which new global communication networks brought different regions closer together. From 3200/3100 BCE, the Globular Amphora phenomenon (GA) was the trailblazer in Eastern and Central Europe. Due to a focus on pastoral subsistence, in comparison to more agrarian economic systems, new ritual practices formed in light of a more flexible form of ...

Across Western Asia, the astonishing increase in the availability of durable ceramic containers in the seventh millennium BCE had significant societal repercussions – so much so that vital social, economic, and symbolic activities became dependent upon the availability of pottery containers. These early ceramic containers, however, established themselves alongside flourishing pre-existing container traditions, with vessels made in a wide range of materials including clay, bitumen, basketry,...

This book is intended to be a groundwork of how to theorise prehistory and archaeology and how to make connectivities between the past and the present. It is divided into four parts. The first part is epistemological. It explains why there must be theoretical investments if past ways of human life are to be understood and explained. This insight is specified to a ladder-model (sensu Hawkes) with conceptual scaffoldings on each step. Stepwise, sets of concepts are introduced. This constitutes ...

This monograph examines a set of questions concerning human and nonhuman primate cognition, spatial memory, foraging behavior, and the ability of monkeys to form mental maps of the location and distribution of feeding and resting sites.

Two primary forms of spatial memory have been hypothesized for primates. First, it has been suggested that primates might represent spatial memory in the form of a coordinate-based (geometric) map in which points in the landscape are stored as true coordinates...