Australia's human prehistory through more than 40,000 years is the challenging theme of this masterly survey. John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga bring together the discoveries and often controversial interpretations of six decades of archaeological research to reveal that across this island continent, in the face of contrasting environments and changing climates, human responses produced many cultures, languages and life styles. The Old World is usually credited with the origins of art and spirituality. Recent discoveries, however, prove that symbolic rock art and complex burial rites also existed in Australia at challengingly early times. The authors evaluate the dating evidence upon which Australia's human story before 1788 is reconstructed. They review diverse topics, such as the controversy about the time people first arrived on the continent's northern coast, the extinction of marsupial megafauna and the diversity of Aboriginal rock art. Prehistory of Australia explains why Aboriginal Australia is recognised today for its significance in global prehistory and why so many of its archaeological places have merited World Heritage listing.

This book focuses on the formative period of Church reform in the Middle Ages in Northern Europe, when the Church paved the way for the development of money economy on its own doorstep. Church archaeology provides evidence for patterns of monetary use related to liturgy, church architecture and devotional culture through the centuries. This volume encompasses Alpine European evidence, with emphasis on Gotland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland, which opens up a new field of research on religion and money for an international audience. Based on 100,000 single finds of coins from the 11th to 18th centuries from 650 Scandinavian churches, the volume offers an in-depth discussion of the concepts of ritual, liturgy and devotional uses of money, monetary space and spiritual economy within the framework of Christendom, the medieval church and church architecture. Written by international scholars, Coins in Churches will be a valuable resource for readers interested in the history of religion, money, the economy, and church architecture in Northern Europe in the Middle Ages.

Iron Age Myth and Materiality: an Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400-1000 considers the relationship between myth and materiality in Scandinavia from the beginning of the post-Roman era and the European Migrations up until the coming of Christianity. It pursues an interdisciplinary interpretation of text and material culture and examines how the documentation of an oral past relates to its material embodiment.

While the material evidence is from the Iron Age, most Old Norse texts were written down in the thirteenth century or even later. With a time lag of 300 to 900 years from the archaeological evidence, the textual material has until recently been ruled out as a usable source for any study of the pagan past. However, Hedeager argues that this is true regarding any study of a society 's short-term history, but it should not be the crucial requirement for defining the sources relevant for studying long-term structures of the longue dur e, or their potential contributions to a theoretical understanding of cultural changes and transformation. In Iron Age Scandinavia we are dealing with persistent and slow-changing structures of worldviews and ideologies over a wavelength of nearly a millennium. Furthermore, iconography can often date the arrival of new mythical themes anchoring written narratives in a much older archaeological context.

Old Norse myths are explored with particular attention to one of the central mythical narratives of the Old Norse canon, the mythic cycle of Odin, king of the Norse pantheon. In addition, contemporaneous historical sources from late Antiquity and the early European Middle Age - the narratives of Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, and Paul the Deacon in particular - will be explored. No other study provides such a broad ranging and authoritative study of the relationship of myth to the archaeology of Scandinavia.

Preceramic Mesoamerica delivers cutting-edge research on the Mesoamerican Paleoindian and Archaic periods. The chapters address a series of fundamental questions in American archaeology including the peopling of the Americas, human adaptations to late glacial landscapes, the Neolithic transition, and the origins of sedentism and early village life. This volume presents innovative and previously unpublished research on the Paleoindian and Archaic periods and evaluates current models in light of new findings. Examples include breakthroughs in dating Mesoamerica's earliest sites and their implications for models of hemispheric colonization; the transition to postglacial patterns of settlement and subsistence; divergent pathways to initial sedentism; the possibility of Archaic-period monumentality; changing patterns of interregional exchange and interaction; and debates surrounding the origins of agriculture, ceramics, and full-time village life. The volume provides a new perspective on the Mesoamerican Preceramic for students and scholars in archaeology, anthropology, and history. Readers will come to understand how the Preceramic contributed to the emergence of the cultural traditions that anthropologists recognize as Mesoamerica.

Resurrecting Pompeii provides an in-depth study of a unique site from antiquity with information about a population who all died from the same known cause within a short period of time.

Pompeii has been continuously excavated and studied since 1748. Early scholars working in Pompeii and other sites associated with the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius were seduced by the wealth of artefacts and wall paintings yielded by the site. This meant that the less visually attractive evidence, such as human skeletal remains, were largely ignored.

Recognizing the important contribution of the human skeletal evidence to the archaeology of Pompeii, Resurrecting Pompeii remedies that misdemeanour, and provides students of archaeology and history with an essential resource in the study of this fascinating historical event.

The Roads of Roman Italy offers a complete re-evaluation of both the evidence and the interpretation of Roman land transport. The book utilises archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence for Roman communications, drawing on recent approaches to the human landscape developed by geographers. Among the topics considered are: * the relationship between the road and the human landscape * the administration and maintenance of the road system * the role of roads as imperial monuments * the economics of road construction and urban development.

The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age is a wide-ranging survey of a crucial period in prehistory during which many social, economic, and technological changes took place. Written by expert specialists in the field, the book provides coverage both of the themes that characterize the period, and of the specific developments that took place in the various countries of Europe. After an introduction and a discussion of chronology, successive chapters deal with settlement studies, burial analysis, hoards and hoarding, monumentality, rock art, cosmology, gender, and trade, as well as a series of articles on specific technologies and crafts (such as transport, metals, glass, salt, textiles, and weighing). The second half of the book covers each country in turn. From Ireland to Russia, Scandinavia to Sicily, every area is considered, and up to date information on important recent finds is discussed in detail. The book is the first to consider the whole of the European Bronze Age in both geographical and thematic terms, and will be the standard book on the subject for the foreseeable future.

Roman Villas explores the social structures of the Roman world by analysing the plans of buildings of all sizes from slightly Romanized farms to palaces. The ways in which the rooms are grouped together; how they intercommunicate; and the ways in which individual rooms and the house are approached, reveal various social patterns, which question traditional ideas about the Roman family and household. J. T. Smith argues that virtually all houses were occupied by groups of varying composition, challenging the received wisdom that they were single family houses whose size reflected only the owner's wealth and number of servants. Roman Villas provides a meticulously documented and scholarly examination of the relationship between the living quarters of the Roman and their social and economic development which introduces a new area in Roman studies and a corpus of material for further analysis. The inclusion of almost 500 ground plans, drawn to a uniform scale, allows the reader to compare the similarities and differences between house structure as well as effectively illustrating the arguments.

The streets of Roman cities have received surprisingly little attention until recently. Traditionally the main interest archaeologists and classicists had in streets was in tracing the origins and development of the orthogonal layout used in Roman colonial cities. Roman Urban Street Networks is the first volume to sift through the ancient literature to determine how authors used the Latin vocabulary for streets, and determine what that tells us about how the Romans perceived their streets. Author Alan Kaiser offers a methodology for describing the role of a street within the broader urban transportation network in such a way that one can compare both individual streets and street networks from one site to another.

This work is more than simply an exploration of Roman urban streets, however. It addresses one of the central problems in current scholarship on Roman urbanism: Kaiser suggests that streets provided the organizing principle for ancient Roman cities, offering an exciting new way of describing and comparing Roman street networks. This book will certainly lead to an expanded discussion of approaches to and understandings of Roman streetscapes and urbanism.

Ancient Civilizations offers a comprehensive and straightforward account of the world's first civilizations and how they were discovered, drawing on many avenues of inquiry including archaeological excavations, surveys, laboratory work, highly specialized scientific investigations, and both historical and ethnohistorical records. This book covers the earliest civilizations in Eurasia and the Americas, from Egypt and the Sumerians to the Indus Valley, Shang China, and the Maya. It also addresses subsequent developments in Southwest Asia, moving on to the first Aegean civilizations, Greece and Rome, the first states of sub-Saharan Africa, divine kings and empires in East and Southeast Asia, and the Aztec and Inka empires of Mesoamerica and the Andes. It includes a number of features to support student learning: a wealth of images, including several new illustrations; feature boxes which expand on key sites, finds, and written sources; and an extensive guide to further reading. With new perceptions of the origin and collapse of states, including a review of the issue of sustainability, this fifth edition has been extensively updated in the light of spectacular new discoveries and the latest theoretical advances. Examining the world's pre-industrial civilizations from a multidisciplinary perspective and offering a comparative analysis of the field which explores the connections between all civilizations around the world, this volume provides a unique introduction to pre-industrial civilizations in all their brilliant diversity. It will prove invaluable to students of Archaeology.

Preceramic Mesoamerica delivers cutting-edge research on the Mesoamerican Paleoindian and Archaic periods. The chapters address a series of fundamental questions in American archaeology including the peopling of the Americas, human adaptations to late glacial landscapes, the Neolithic transition, and the origins of sedentism and early village life. This volume presents innovative and previously unpublished research on the Paleoindian and Archaic periods and evaluates current models in light of new findings. Examples include breakthroughs in dating Mesoamerica's earliest sites and their implications for models of hemispheric colonization; the transition to postglacial patterns of settlement and subsistence; divergent pathways to initial sedentism; the possibility of Archaic-period monumentality; changing patterns of interregional exchange and interaction; and debates surrounding the origins of agriculture, ceramics, and full-time village life. The volume provides a new perspective on the Mesoamerican Preceramic for students and scholars in archaeology, anthropology, and history. Readers will come to understand how the Preceramic contributed to the emergence of the cultural traditions that anthropologists recognize as Mesoamerica.

A History of Mobility in New Mexico uses the often-enigmatic chipped stone assemblages of the Taos Plateau to chart patterns of historical mobility in northern New Mexico. Drawing on evidence of spatial patterning and geochemical analyses of stone tools across archaeological landscapes, the book examines the distinctive mobile modalities of different human communities, documenting evolving logics of mobility-residential, logistical, pastoral, and settler colonial. In particular, it focuses on the diversity of ways that Indigenous peoples have used and moved across the Plateau landscape from deep time into the present. The analysis of Indigenous movement patterns is grounded in critical Indigenous philosophy, which applies core principles within Indigenous thought to the archaeological record in order to challenge conventional understandings of occupation, use, and abandonment. Providing an Indigenizing approach to archaeological research and new evidence for the long-term use of specific landscape features, A History of Mobility in New Mexico presents an innovative approach to human-environment interaction for readers and scholars of North American history.

The Hunter, the Stag, and the Mother of Animals offers an in-depth exploration of the changing traditions of belief in pre-Bronze and Bronze Age North Asia. Esther Jacobson-Tepfer centers her argument on a female deity and her evolution up until the early Iron Age, across a 2,000 year period. Through the art historical and archaeological evidence of the symbolic systems left behind, she traces the progression of the deity from an originating animal mother through her incarnation as the mother of animals, her late embodiment as the guardian of the road to the land of the dead, the transformation of her essential liminality into the structures of predation and, in the form of a predated stag, her subsequent destruction. In detailed commentaries on rock art structures and monuments, Jacobson-Tepfer reconstructs and explores how the deity's power was embedded in the Janus-faced concept of life/death: how, in all her forms, the deity occupied the threshold between the worlds of humans and ancestors, humans and animals. More broadly, this study details how her fate was directly related to the sociological evolution at the onset of the Iron age: the transition of the cultures in South Siberia and Mongolia from hunting-based settlement to horse-dependent semi-nomadism, and with that the rise of a heroic narrative tradition. Jacobson-Tepfer has had unparalleled access to regional data still unavailable in the West, and the collection of this data in English as well as her extensive collection of color photographs and drawings will fill a gaping hole in the literature and prove invaluable to both archaeologists and art historians.The Hunter, the Stag, and the Mother of Animals will surely become a standard reference for both disciplines as well as a guide to those interested in rock art and beliefs systems more generally.

The Maya center of Tikal, in Guatemala, is famous for its well-preserved architecture. This book presents detailed descriptions of four of the six Great Temples that dominate Tikal's city center. Whereas Great Temples I and II were published in 1990 in Tikal Report 14, the four structures presented here are Great Temples III, IV, V, and VI. All but Great Temple V represent Late Classic construction and can be associated with known rulers. It is tempting to think of these structures as funerary monuments, but this is only a supposition. Their relationship with rulers may have been much more complex. This report is the primary record of these important buildings in Tikal's urban landscape. It provides clear, precise, and usable architectural analyses for Mayanists, archaeologists, art historians, architectural historians, urbanists, and those interested in construction techniques and in the uses of Maya buildings. University Museum Monograph, 146

Daily life and living conditions in the Byzantine world are relatively underexplored subjects, often neglected in comparison with more visible aspects of Byzantine culture, such as works of art. The book is among the few publications on Greek Byzantine populations and helps pioneer a new approach to the subject, opening a window on health status and dietary patterns through the lens of bioarchaeological research. Drawing on a diversity of disciplines (biology, chemistry, archaeology and history), the author focuses on the complex interaction between physiology, culture and the environment in Byzantine populations from Crete in the 7th to 12th centuries. The systematic analysis and interpretation of the mortality profiles, the observed pathological conditions, and of the chemical data, all set in the cultural context of the era, brings new evidence to bear on the reconstruction of living conditions in Byzantine Crete. Individual chapters look at the demographic profiles and mortality patterns of adult and non-adult populations, and study dietary habits and breastfeeding and weaning patterns. In addition, this book provides an indispensable body of primary data for future research in these fields, and so furthers an interdisciplinary approach in tracing the health of the past populations.

Although long considered to be a barren region on the periphery of ancient Chinese civilization, the southwest massif was once the political heartland of numerous Bronze Age kingdoms. Their distinctive material tradition-intricately cast bronze kettle drums and cowrie shell containers-have given archaeologists and historians a glimpse of the extraordinary wealth, artistry, and power exercised by highland leaders in prehistory. After a millennium of rule however, imperial conquest under the Han state reduced local power, leading to the disappearance of Bronze Age traditions and a fraught process of assimilation. Instead of a clash between center and periphery or barbarism and civilization, The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China examines the classic study of imperial conquest as a confrontation of different political times. Alice Yao grounds an archaeological account of the region where local landscape histories and funerary traditions bring to light a history of competing elite lineages, warrior cultures, and of kingly genealogies. In particular, this book illustrates how buried precious material objects-drums, ornate weaponry, and cowries-enabled the transmission and memorialization of biographies and lineage wealth across successive generations. A provocative picture emerges of imperial absorption and change as a problem entangling the generational time of highland leadership and its political cycles and the penetration of Chinese dynastic history as well as time of bureaucracy and state economy. Yao extends conventional approaches to empires to show how prehistoric forms of temporal experience can complicate imperial efforts to incorporate and unify time.

In this book, Sabine R. Huebner explores the world of the protagonists of the New Testament and the early Christians using the rich papyrological evidence from Roman Egypt. This gives us unparalleled insights into the everyday lives of the non-elite population in an area quite similar to neighboring Judaea-Palestine. What were the daily concerns and difficulties experienced by a carpenter's family or by a shepherd looking after his flocks? How did the average man or woman experience a Roman census? What obstacles did women living in a patriarchal society face in private, in public, and in the early Church? Given the flight of Jesus' family into Egypt, how mobile were the lower classes, what was their understanding of geography, and what costs and dangers were associated with travel? This volume gives a better understanding of the structural, social, and cultural conditions under which figures from the New Testament lived.

Humans are unique in that they expend considerable effort and ingenuity in disposing of the dead. Some of the recognisable ways we do this are visible in the Palaeolithic archaeology of the Ice Age. The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial takes a novel approach to the long-term development of human mortuary activity ? the various ways we deal with the dead and with dead bodies. It is the first comprehensive survey of Palaeolithic mortuary activity in the English language.

Observations in the modern world as to how chimpanzees behave towards their dead allow us to identify ?core? areas of behaviour towards the dead that probably have very deep evolutionary antiquity. From that point, the palaeontological and archaeological records of the Pliocene and Pleistocene are surveyed. The core chapters of the book survey the mortuary activities of early hominins, archaic members of the genus Homo, early Homo sapiens, the Neanderthals, the Early and Mid Upper Palaeolithic, and the Late Upper Palaeolithic world.

Burial is a striking component of Palaeolithic mortuary activity, although existing examples are odd and this probably does not reflect what modern societies believe burial to be, and modern ways of thinking of the dead probably arose only at the very end of the Pleistocene. When did symbolic aspects of mortuary ritual evolve? When did the dead themselves become symbols? In discussing such questions, The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial offers an engaging contribution to the debate on modern human origins. It is illustrated throughout, includes up-to-date examples from the Lower to Late Upper Palaeolithic, including information hitherto unpublished.

Everyday Life in the Ice Age is the first attempt to present a truly complete, balanced and realistic picture of life during the last Ice Age, with its many problems and challenges, while dispelling many of the myths and inaccuracies about our early ancestors. One of the most common questions asked by visitors to Europe's decorated caves is 'What was life like for these people?' No previous book has ever managed to answer this question, and most studies of the period are aimed entirely at academics, tending to focus on tool-types rather than what the tools were used for. Women and children are almost invisible in these studies. The book examines all aspects of the lives of biologically modern humans in Europe from about 40,000 to 12,000 years ago, the period known as the Last Ice Age, a time of radical change in climate and environment. It explores how people were able to cope with and adapt to the often rapid alterations in their circumstances. Elle Clifford's background in Social Psychology brings important insights into aspects of the past which are never normally discussed - domestic and family life, pregnancy and child-rearing, and care of the sick and elderly. The book is aimed not only at students and specialists, but also and especially the interested public, for whom the most interesting questions are: How were they like us? and what behaviours do we share?

How were space and movement in Roman cities affected by economic life? What can the study of Roman urban landscapes tell us about the nature of the Roman economy? These are the central questions addressed in this volume. While there exist many studies of Roman urban space and of the Roman economy, rarely have the two topics been investigated together in a sustained fashion. In this volume, an international team of archaeologists and historians focuses explicitly on the economics of space and mobility in Roman Imperial cities, in both Italy and the provinces, east and west. Employing many kinds of material and written evidence and a wide range of methodologies, the contributors cast new light both on well-known and on less-explored sites. With their direct focus on the everyday economic uses of urban spaces and the movements through them, the contributors offer a fresh and innovative perspective on the workings of Roman urban economies and on the debates concerning space in the Roman world. This volume will be of interest to archaeologists and historians, both those studying the Greco-Roman world and those focusing on urban economic space in other periods and places as well as to other scholars studying premodern urbanism and urban economies.

Graffiti are ubiquitous within the ancient world, but remain underexploited as a form of archaeological or historical evidence. They include a great variety of texts and images written or drawn inside and outside buildings, in public and private places, on monuments in the city, on objects used in daily life, and on mountains in the countryside. In each case they can be seen as actively engaging with their environment in a variety of ways. Ancient Graffiti in Context interrogates this cultural phenomenon and by doing so, brings it into the mainstream of ancient history and archaeology. Focusing on different approaches to and interpretations of graffiti from a variety of sites and chronological contexts, Baird and Taylor pose a series of questions not previously asked of this evidence, such as: What are graffiti, and how can we interpret them? In what ways, and with whom, do graffiti communicate? To what extent do graffiti represent or subvert the cultural values of the society in which they occur? By comparing themes across time and space, and viewing graffiti in context, this book provides a series of interpretative strategies for scholars and students of the ancient world. As such it will be essential reading for Classical archaeologists and historians alike.

Humans are unique in that they expend considerable effort and ingenuity in disposing of the dead. Some of the recognisable ways we do this are visible in the Palaeolithic archaeology of the Ice Age. The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial takes a novel approach to the long-term development of human mortuary activity -- the various ways we deal with the dead and with dead bodies. It is the first comprehensive survey of Palaeolithic mortuary activity in the English language. Observations in the modern world as to how chimpanzees behave towards their dead allow us to identify core' areas of behaviour towards the dead that probably have very deep evolutionary antiquity. From that point, the palaeontological and archaeological records of the Pliocene and Pleistocene are surveyed. The core chapters of the book survey the mortuary activities of early hominins, archaic members of the genus Homo, early Homo sapiens, the Neanderthals, the Early and Mid Upper Palaeolithic, and the Late Upper Palaeolithic world. Burial is a striking component of Palaeolithic mortuary activity, although existing examples are odd and this probably does not reflect what modern societies believe burial to be, and modern ways of thinking of the dead probably arose only at the very end of the Pleistocene. When did symbolic aspects of mortuary ritual evolve? When did the dead themselves become symbols? In discussing such questions, The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial offers an engaging contribution to the debate on modern human origins. It is illustrated throughout, includes up-to-date examples from the Lower to Late Upper Palaeolithic, including information hitherto unpublished.

Through the close study of texts, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era examines the overlapping emphases and themes of two cosmopolitan and multiethnic cultural identities emerging in the early centuries CE - a trans-empire alliance of the Elite and the "Christians." Exploring the cultural representations of these social identities, Judith Perkins shows that they converge around an array of shared themes: violence, the body, prisons, courts, and time. Locating Christian representations within their historical context and in dialogue with other contemporary representations, it asks why do Christian representations share certain emphases? To what do they respond, and to whom might they appeal? For example, does the increasing Christian emphasis on a fully material human resurrection in the early centuries, respond to the evolution of a harsher and more status based judicial system? Judith Perkins argues that Christians were so successful in suppressing their social identity as inhabitants of the Roman Empire, that historical documents and testimony have been sequestered as "Christian" rather than recognized as evidence for the social dynamics enacted during the period, Her discussion offers a stimulating survey of interest to students of ancient narrative, cultural studies and gender.

During much of the twelfth century the Crusaders dominated the military scene in the Levant. The unification of Egypt and Syria by Saladin gradually changed the balance of power, which slowly begun to tilt in favour of the Muslims. This book examines the development and role of Muslim fortresses in the Levant at the time of the Crusaders and the Mongol invasion, situating the study within a broad historical, political and military context. Exploring the unification of Egypt with a large part of Syria and its effect on the balance of power in the region, Raphael gives a historical overview of the resulting military strategies and construction of fortresses. A detailed architectural analysis is based on a survey of four Ayyubid and eight Mamluk fortresses situated in what are today the modern states of Jordan, Israel, Southern Turkey and Egypt (the Sinai Peninsula). The author then explores the connection between strongholds or military architecture, and the development of siege warfare and technology, and examines the influence of architecture and methods of rule on the concept of defence and the development of fortifications. Drawing upon excavation reports, field surveys and contemporary Arabic sources, the book provides the Arabic architectural terminology and touches on the difficulties of reading the sources. Detailed maps of the fortresses in the region, the Mongol invasion routs, plans of sites and photographs assist the reader throughout the book, providing an important addition to existing literature in the areas of Medieval Archaeology, Medieval military history and Middle Eastern studies.

This book contributes to the growing body of research on the ontology of images by focusing on five main topics: ontology as a theoretical framework; the development of new concepts and methods for an ontological approach to rock art; the examination of the relationships between ontology, images and Indigenous knowledges; the development of relational models for the analysis of rock images; and the impact of ontological approaches on different rock art traditions across the world. Generating new avenues of research in ontological theory, political ontology and rock art research, this collection will be relevant to archaeologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.