Dura-Europos, founded by the Greeks in 300 BCE, became a remote outpost of the Roman Empire in western Asia until it was finally destroyed by a Persian army in the third century CE. It lay buried until it was rediscovered by British troops in the aftermath of World War I, at which time its intact religious sites, military equipment, tombs, and wall decorations were all excavated. In My Dura-Europos: The Letters of Susan M. Hopkins, 1927-1935, authors Bernard M. Goldman and Norma W. Goldman collect and contextualize the correspondence of Susan Hopkins, who accompanied her husband, Clark Hopkins, to the archaeological dig at Dura-Europos, which was one of the most significant of the twentieth century. From a very personal female viewpoint, My Dura-Europos describes life at the remote excavation from the first season in 1928, when Susan and Clark were neophyte archaeologists, to 1935 when the project concluded. Susan writes of cataloging the finds, mending pottery, and acting as epigrapher by translating the inscriptions and dating the coins. In addition to these roles, Susan was assigned responsibility for organizing many of the day-to-day aspects of life in the camp, and later letters even describe her life as a mother in 1933-35, when she brought her young daughter along to the excavations. Susan's lively, personal letters are organized and annotated by Bernard Goldman, whose deep knowledge of the sites and general history of archaeology and the region allows for a vivid and helpful commentary. After Bernard Goldman's death, his wife, Norma Goldman, completed the manuscript and added over two hundred rare illustrations of the site and the archaeologists involved. Readers interested in archaeology and the history of the classical world will enjoy this fascinating inside look at life on the Dura-Europos site.

'A beautiful, beautiful book . . . archaeology is changing so much about the way we view the so-called Dark Ages … [Williams] is just brilliant at bringing them to light' Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics From the bestselling author of Viking Britain, a new epic history of our forgotten past. This is the world of Arthur and Urien; of the Picts and Britons and Saxon migration; of magic and war, myth and miracle. In Lost Realms Thomas Williams uncovers the forgotten origins and untimely demise of Britain’s ancient kingdoms: lands that hover in the twilight between history and fable, whose stories hum with gods and miracles, with giants and battles and ruin. Why did some realms – like Wessex, Northumbria and Gwynedd – prosper while others fell? And how did their communities adapt to the catastrophic changes of their age? Drawing on Britain ’ s ancient landscape and bringing together new archaeological revelations with the few precious fragments of surviving written sources, Williams spectacularly rebuilds a lost past.

From the presenter of BBC One's Scotland from the Sky You scramble up over the dunes of an isolated beach. You climb to the summit of a lonely hill. You pick your way through the eerie hush of a forest. And then you find them. The traces of the past. Perhaps they are marked by a tiny symbol on your map, perhaps not. There are no plaques to explain their fading presence before you, nothing to account for what they once were - who made them, lived in them or abandoned them. Now they are merged with the landscape. They are being reclaimed by nature. They are wild history. In this book acclaimed author and presenter James Crawford introduces many such places all over the country, from the ruins of prehistoric forts and ancient, arcane burial sites, to abandoned bothies and boathouses, and the derelict traces of old, faded industry.

This impressive and inspiring volume has as its modest origins the documentation of a contemporary collecting project for the British Museum. Informed by curators' critiques of uneven collections accompanied by highly variable information, Sillitoe set out with the ambition of recording the totality of the material culture of the Wola of the southern highlands of Papua New Guinea, at a time when the study of artefacts was neglected in university anthropology departments. His achievements, presented in this second edition of Made in Nuigini with a new contextualizing preface and foreword, brought a new standard of ethnography to the incipient revival of material culture studies, and opened up the importance of close attention to technology and material assemblages for anthropology. The `economy' fundamentally concerns the material aspects of life, and as Sillitoe makes clear, Wola attitudes and behaviour in this regard are radically different to those of the West, with emphasis on `maker users' and egalitarian access to resources going hand in hand with their stateless and libertarian principles. The project begun in Made in Niugini, which necessarily restricted itself to moveable artefacts, is continued and extended by the newly published companion volume Built in Niugini, which deals with immoveable structures and buildings. It argues that the study of material constructions offers an unparalleled opportunity to address fundamental philosophical questions about tacit knowledge and the human condition.