'The text speaks for itself. It is a vivid, scholarly and sensitive view.' - The Archaeologist

'As a specialist, I found Ancestral Geographies unusually enjoyable as well as stimulating, and I think it will work well for other kinds of readers at different stages and with different interests. For a sense of how life might have been both in daily spheres and at unusual monuments in the Early Neolithic, this is a brilliant introduction.' - Landscape History

'This is a wonderful book, beautifully written, and elegant summary of Edmonds' own views and of the conclusions of an exciting new generation of British prehistorians.' - Ian Hodder, Cambridge Archaeological Journal

My People as Your People provides an in-depth analysis of the chronology, history, and archaeology associated with the reign of Jehoshaphat of Judah. The synthesis of these various elements illuminates a diverse geo-political picture of the southern Levant in the mid-ninth century BCE. In recent years, archaeologists and biblical scholars have dealt quite extensively with the tenth and eighth centuries BCE due to both the controversial aspects of recent interpretations associated with the so-called United Kingdom and the established archaeological data relating to Judah's rise as a significant polity in the eighth century BCE. On the other hand, the ninth century BCE has received considerably less scholarly treatment, despite the fact that many new archaeological strata have been uncovered in recent years that have a direct bearing upon this period. My People as Your People is an attempt to fill this gap in our knowledge. In accomplishing this, it both provides a nuanced understanding of Judah in the mid-ninth century BCE and also demonstrates the significance of this period in the larger setting of the history of the Divided Kingdom.

Drawing on the latest archaeological fieldwork, Caddo Connections looks at the highly dynamic cultural landscape of the Caddo Area and its complex interconnections and exchanges with surrounding regions. The authors employ a multiscalar approach to examine cultural diversity through time and across space within the Caddo Area. They explore how and why this diversity developed, consider what allowed it to stabilize during the Mississippian period, and analyze changes following contact between historic Caddo peoples and Europeans. Looking beyond individual river valleys to the broader macroregion, they also address the linkages connecting the Caddo Area with the Southeast, southern Plains, and Southwest.

This volume, published in honour of Egyptologist Professor Rosalie David OBE, presents the latest research on three of the most important aspects of ancient Egyptian civilisation: mummies, magic and medical practice. Drawing on recent archaeological fieldwork, new research on human remains, reassessments of ancient texts and modern experimental archaeology, it attempts to answer some of Egyptology's biggest questions: how did Tutankhamun die? How were the Pyramids built? How were mummies made? Leading experts in their fields combine traditional Egyptology and innovative scientific approaches to ancient material. The result is a cutting-edge overview of the discipline, showing how it has developed over the last forty years and yet how many of its big questions remain the same. -- .

The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current and comprehensive guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this Handbook also includes coverage of important new work by archaeologists on the Colonial and Republican periods. Unique among recent works, the text brings together in a single volume article-length regional syntheses and topical overviews written by active scholars in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology.
The first section of the Handbook provides an overview of recent history and trends of Mesoamerica and articles on national archaeology programs and practice in Central America and Mexico written by archaeologists from these countries. These are followed by regional syntheses organized by time period, beginning with early hunter-gatherer societies and the first farmers of Mesoamerica and concluding with a discussion of the Spanish Conquest and frontiers and peripheries of Mesoamerica. Topical and comparative articles comprise the remainder of Handbook. They cover important dimensions of prehispanic societies--from ecology, economy, and environment to social and political relations--and discuss significant methodological contributions, such as geo-chemical source studies, as well as new theories and diverse theoretical perspectives. The Handbook concludes with a section on the archaeology of the Spanish conquest and the Colonial and Republican periods to connect the prehispanic, proto-historic, and historic periods. This volume will be a must-read for students and professional archaeologists, as well as other scholars including historians, art historians, geographers, and ethnographers with an interest in Mesoamerica.

The Neolithic of the Near East is a period of human development which saw fundamental changes in the nature of human society. It is traditionally studied for its development of domestication, agriculture, and growing social complexity. In this book Karina Croucher takes a new approach, focusing on the human body and investigating mortuary practices - the treatment and burial of the dead - to discover what these can reveal about the people of the Neolithic Near East. The remarkable evidence relating to mortuary practices and ritual behaviour from the Near Eastern Neolithic provides some of the most breath-taking archaeological evidence excavated from Neolithic contexts. The most enigmatic mortuary practices of the period produced the striking 'plastered skulls', faces modelled onto the crania of the deceased. Archaeological sites also contain evidence for many intriguing mortuary treatments, including decapitated burials and the fragmentation, circulation, curation, and reburial of human and animal remains and material culture. Drawing on recent excavations and earlier archive and published fieldwork, Croucher provides an overview and introduction to the period, presenting new interpretations of the archaeological evidence and in-depth analyses of case studies. The book explores themes such as ancestors, human-animal relationships, food, consumption and cannibalism, personhood, and gender. Offering a unique insight into changing attitudes towards the human body - both in life and during death - this book reveals the identities and experiences of the people of the Neolithic Near East through their interactions with their dead, with animals, and their new material worlds.

Originally published in 1987, Human Evolution looks at theories of the evolution of human behaviour (contemporary at the time of publication). The book reviews competing theories of psychological and social evolution and provides a detailed historical introduction to the subject. A key theoretical concern which emerges in the book includes the psychological significance of the human evolution issue itself. The period of human evolution covered ranges from the demise of the Miocene hominoids, to the emergence of 'civilization'. Topics covered include: functions of 'origin myths', history of the study of human evolution, methods and data-bases, theories of the nature of 'hominisation', origins of bipedalism, language and tool-use, theories of social evolution, theories of cave art and the spread of Homo sapiens to America and Australia.

The Art and Archaeology of Bodily Adornment examines the significance of adornment to the shaping of identity in mortuary contexts within Central and East Asia and brings these perspectives into dialogue with current scholarship in other worldwide regions. Adornment and dress are well-established fields of study for the ancient world, particularly with regard to Europe and the Americas. Often left out of this growing discourse are contributions from scholars of Central and East Asia. The mortuary contexts of focus in this volume represent unique sites and events where identity was visualized, and often manipulated and negotiated, through material objects and their placement on and about the deceased body. The authors examine ornaments, jewelry, clothing, and hairstyles to address questions of identity construction regarding dimensions such as gender and social and political status, and transcultural exchange from burials of prehistoric and early historical archaeological sites in Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan. In both breadth and depth, this book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in the archaeology, art, and history of Central and East Asia, as well as anyone interested in the general study of dress and adornment.

Winner of ASOR's 2022 G. Ernest Wright Award for the most substantial volume dealing with archaeological material, excavation reports and material culture from the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. This is a complete history of Antioch, one of the most significant major cities of the eastern Mediterranean and a crossroads for the Silk Road, from its foundation by the Seleucids, through Roman rule, the rise of Christianity, Islamic and Byzantine conquests, to the Crusades and beyond. Antioch has typically been treated as a city whose classical glory faded permanently amid a series of natural disasters and foreign invasions in the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Such studies have obstructed the view of Antioch's fascinating urban transformations from classical to medieval to modern city and the processes behind these transformations. Through its comprehensive blend of textual sources and new archaeological data reanalyzed from Princeton's 1930s excavations and recent discoveries, this book offers unprecedented insights into the complete history of Antioch, recreating the lives of the people who lived in it and focusing on the factors that affected them during the evolution of its remarkable cityscape. While Antioch's built environment is central, the book also utilizes landscape archaeological work to consider the city in relation to its hinterland, and numismatic evidence to explore its economics. The outmoded portrait of Antioch as a sadly perished classical city par excellence gives way to one in which it shines as brightly in its medieval Islamic, Byzantine, and Crusader incarnations. Antioch: A History offers a new portal to researching this long-lasting city and is also suitable for a wide variety of teaching needs, both undergraduate and graduate, in the fields of classics, history, urban studies, archaeology, Silk Road studies, and Near Eastern/Middle Eastern studies. Just as importantly, its clarity makes it attractive for, and accessible to, a general readership outside the framework of formal instruction.

Since its invention by Renaissance humanists, the myth of the "Middle Ages" has held a uniquely important place in the Western historical imagination. Whether envisioned as an era of lost simplicity or a barbaric nightmare, the medieval past has always served as a mirror for modernity. This book gives an eye-opening account of the ways various political and intellectual projects-from nationalism to the discipline of anthropology-have appropriated the Middle Ages for their own ends. Deploying an interdisciplinary toolkit, author K. Patrick Fazioli grounds his analysis in contemporary struggles over power and identity in the Eastern Alps, while also considering the broader implications for scholarly research and public memory.

This is the first study for more than seventy years to consider the early monasteries of Cornwall through a combination of evidence --written sources (the first hagiography of Brittany and Cornwall, ecclesiastical documents, Anglo-Saxon charters, Domesday Book), place-names and material remains. The main emphasis is on identifying the sites of these monasteries, and tracing their survival to later periods; Dr Olson also considers the origin and progress of monasticism in south-west Britain, and looks at the monasteries' characteristics and, in a broader context, their place in Church and society.

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective on the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight millennia of hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For many decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has been dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships between humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that Archaic people routinely associated with other groups throughout eastern North America and expressed themselves materially in ways that reveal historical links to other places and times. Starting with the colonization of eastern North America by two distinct ancestral lines, the Eastern Archaic was an era of migrations, ethnogenesis, and coalescence-an 8,200-year era of making histories through interactions and expressing them culturally in ritual and performance.

Ritual in Deuteronomy explores the symbolic world of Deuteronomy's ritual covenant and curses through a lens of religious studies and anthropology, drawing on previously unexamined Mesopotamian material. This book focuses on the ritual material in Deuteronomy including commands regarding sacrifice, prayer objects, and especially the dramatic ritual enactment of the covenant including curses. The book's most unique feature is an entirely new comparative study of Deut 27-30 with two ritual texts from Mesopotamia. No studies to date have undertaken a comparison of Deut 27-30 with ancient Near Eastern ritual texts outside of the treaty oath tradition. This fresh comparison illuminates how the ritual life of ancient Israel shaped the literary form of Deuteronomy and concludes that the performance of oaths was a social strategy, addressing contemporary anxieties and reinforcing systems of cultural power. This book offers a fascinating comparative study which will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students in biblical studies, classical Hebrew, theology, and ancient Near Eastern studies. The book's more technical aspects will also appeal to scholars of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, Biblical Law, Ancient Near Eastern History, Mesopotamian Studies, and Classics.

Egyptologists, art historians, philologists, and anthropological archaeologists have long worked side by side in Egypt, but they often fail to understand one another's approaches. This book aims to introduce students to the archaeological side of the study of ancient Egypt and to bridge the gap between disciplines by explaining how archaeologists tackle a variety of problems. Douglas J. Brewer introduces the theoretical reasoning for each approach, as well as the methods and techniques applied to support it. This book is essential reading for any student considering further study of ancient Egypt.

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective on the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight millennia of hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For many decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has been dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships between humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that Archaic people routinely associated with other groups throughout eastern North America and expressed themselves materially in ways that reveal historical links to other places and times. Starting with the colonization of eastern North America by two distinct ancestral lines, the Eastern Archaic was an era of migrations, ethnogenesis, and coalescence-an 8,200-year era of making histories through interactions and expressing them culturally in ritual and performance.

From late fourth century BC Seleucid enclave to capital of the Roman east, Antioch on the Orontes was one of the greatest cities of antiquity and served as a hinge between east and west. This book draws on a century of archaeological fieldwork to offer a new narrative of Antioch's origins and growth, as well as its resilience, civic pride, and economic opportunism. Situating the urban nucleus in the context of the rural landscape, this book integrates hitherto divorced cultural basins, including the Amuq Valley and the Massif Calcaire. It also brings into focus the archaeological data, thus proposing a concrete interpretative framework that, grounded in the monuments of Antioch, enables the reader to move beyond text-based reconstructions of the city's history. Finally, it considers the interaction between the environment and the people of the city who shaped this region and forged a distinct identity within the broader Greco-Roman world.

This volume surveys the 'Syriac world', the culture that grew up among the Syriac-speaking communities from the second century CE and which continues to exist and flourish today, both in its original homeland of Syria and Mesopotamia, and in the worldwide diaspora of Syriac-speaking communities. The five sections examine the religion; the material, visual, and literary cultures; the history and social structures of this diverse community; and Syriac interactions with their neighbours ancient and modern. There are also detailed appendices detailing the patriarchs of the different Syriac denominations, and another appendix listing useful online resources for students. The Syriac World offers the first complete survey of Syriac culture and fills a significant gap in modern scholarship. This volume will be an invaluable resource to undergraduate and postgraduate students of Syriac and Middle Eastern culture from antiquity to the modern era. Chapter 26 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138899018_oachapter26.pdf

This title looks at the excavations of a prehistoric to early medieval site that took place at Killelan Farm on Islay by Colin Burgess and others between 1954 and 1976.

Aelius Aristides' Hieroi Logoi present a unique first-person narrative from the ancient world-a narrative that seems at once public and private, artful and naive. While scholars have embraced the Logoi as a rich source for Imperial-era religion, politics, and elite culture, the style of the text has presented a persistent stumbling block to literary analysis. Setting this dream-memoir of illness and divine healing in the context of Aristides' professional concerns as an orator, this book investigates the text's rhetorical aims and literary aspirations. At the Limits of Art argues that the Hieroi Logoi are an experimental work. Incorporating numerous dream accounts and narratives of divine cure in a multi-layered and open text, Aristides works at the limits of rhetorical convention to fashion an authorial voice that is transparent to the divine. Reading the Logoi in the context of contemporary oratorical practices, and in tandem with Aristides' polemical orations and prose hymns, the book uncovers the professional agendas motivating this unusual self-portrait. Aristides' sober view of oratory as a sacred pursuit was in conflict with a widespread contemporary preference for spectacular public performance. In the Hieroi Logoi, Aristides claims a place in the world of the Second Sophistic on his own terms, offering a vision of his professional inspiration in a style that pushes the limits of literary convention.

In this book, Robert L. Kelly challenges the preconceptions that hunter-gatherers were Paleolithic relics living in a raw state of nature, instead crafting a position that emphasizes their diversity, and downplays attempts to model the original foraging lifeway or to use foragers to depict human nature stripped to its core. Kelly reviews the anthropological literature for variation among living foragers in terms of diet, mobility, sharing, land tenure, technology, exchange, male-female relations, division of labor, marriage, descent and political organization. Using the paradigm of human behavioral ecology, he analyzes the diversity in these areas and seeks to explain rather than explain away variability, and argues for an approach to prehistory that uses archaeological data to test theory rather than one that uses ethnographic analogy to reconstruct the past.

Broadening our understanding of southeastern hunter-gatherers who lived between 4600 and 3500 BP, Zackary Gilmore presents evidence that the Late Archaic community of Silver Glen-one of Florida's most elaborate shell mound complexes-integrated people and places from throughout Florida by staging large-scale feasts and other public events. Gilmore analyzes the composition and style of pottery at the site, revealing that many of the large, elaborately decorated vessels from the shell mounds were imports with nonlocal origins. His findings indicate that the people of Silver Glen frequently hosted large-scale gatherings that helped to create a sense of community among culturally diverse groups with homelands separated by hundreds of kilometers. The history of Florida's Late Archaic hunter-gatherers is shown here to be much more dynamic than traditionally thought.

This book examines the influence of architectural design in the conservation of historic buildings by discussing in detail an important building complex in Rome: the Temple of Venus and Rome, the monastery of Santa Maria Nova and the church of Santa Francesca Romana. As the most complete site in the Roman Forum that has reached our times with a rich architectural stratification almost intact, it is a clear product of continuous preservation and transformation and it has not been studied in its complexity until now. The Temple of Venus and Rome and Santa Francesca Romana at the Roman Forum unravels the original designs and the subsequent interventions, including Giacomo Boni's pioneering conservation of the monastery, carried out while excavating the Roman Forum in the early twentieth century. The projects are discussed in context to show their significance and the relationships between architects and patrons. Through its interdisciplinary focus on architectural design, conservation, archaeology, history and construction, this study is an ideal example for scholars, students and architects of how to carry out research in architectural conservation.

This collection of essays presents a synthesis of current research on the Oxus Civilization, which rose and developed at the turn of the 3rd to 2nd millennia BC in Central Asia. First discovered in the 1970s, the Oxus Civilization, or the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), has engendered many different interpretations, which are explored in this volume by an international group of archaeologists and researchers. Contributors cover all aspects of this fascinating Bronze Age culture: architecture; material culture; grave goods; religion; migrations; and trade and interactions with neighboring civilizations, from Mesopotamia to the Indus, and the Gulf to the northern steppes. Chapters also examine the Oxus Civilization's roots in previous local cultures, explore its environmental and chronological context, or the possibly coveted metal sources, and look into the reasons for its decline. The World of the Oxus Civilization offers a broad and fascinating examination of this society, and provides an invaluable updated resource for anyone working on the culture, history, and archaeology of this region and on the multiple interactions at work at that time in the ancient Near East.

The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory is an interdisciplinary volume that examines the application of cognitive theory to the study of the classical world, across several interrelated areas including linguistics, literary theory, social practices, performance, artificial intelligence and archaeology. With contributions from a diverse group of international scholars working in this exciting new area, the volume explores the processes of the mind drawing from research in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology, and interrogates the implications of these new approaches for the study of the ancient world. Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire. This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.

This book is a first presentation of pottery samples from el-Balu' in the northern Ard el-Kerak, the ancient Moabitis which today is Central Jordan. The forms presented here are dating from the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age down to the Persian periods of occupation of the site of el-Balu'. The book does not discuss the pottery in the wider context of Jordanian or Palestinian ceramics; however, the intention was to present pottery from the hitherto only sparsely published Iron Age pottery of the region. With this documentation scholars of the Archaeology of Jordan are invited to work on the ceramics excavated in the Areas A, B, C, D, E, and G of el-Balu'.