The North American Arctic was one of the last regions on Earth to be settled by humans, due to its extreme climate, limited range of resources, and remoteness from populated areas. Despite these factors, it holds a complex and lengthy history relating to Inuit, Inupiat, Inuvialuit, Yup'ik and Aleut peoples and their ancestors. The artifacts, dwellings, and food remains of these ancient peoples are remarkably well-preserved due to cold temperatures and permafrost, allowing archaeologists to reconstruct their lifeways with great accuracy. Furthermore, the combination of modern Elders' traditional knowledge with the region's high resolution ethnographic record allows past peoples' lives to be reconstructed to a level simply not possible elsewhere. Combined, these factors yield an archaeological record of global significance-the Arctic provides ideal case studies relating to issues as diverse as the impacts of climate change on human societies, the complex process of interaction between indigenous peoples and Europeans, and the dynamic relationships between environment, economy, social organization, and ideology in hunter-gatherer societies. In the The Oxford Handbook of the Prehistoric Arctic, each arctic cultural tradition is described in detail, with up-to-date coverage of recent interpretations of all aspects of their lifeways. Additional chapters cover broad themes applicable to the full range of arctic cultures, such as trade, stone tool technology, ancient DNA research, and the relationship between archaeology and modern arctic communities. The resulting volume, written by the region's leading researchers, contains by far the most comprehensive coverage of arctic archaeology ever assembled.

In Pilgrimage and Economy in the Ancient Mediterranean, Anna Collar and Troels Myrup Kristensen bring together diverse scholarship to explore the socioeconomic dynamics of ancient Mediterranean pilgrimage from archaic Greece to Late Antiquity, the Greek mainland to Egypt and the Near East. This broad chronological and geographical canvas demonstrates how our modern concepts of religion and economy were entangled in the ancient world. By taking material culture as a starting point, the volume examines the ways that landscapes, architecture, and objects shaped the pilgrim's experiences, and the manifold ways in which economy, belief and ritual behaviour intertwined, specifically through the processes and practices that were part of ancient Mediterranean pilgrimage over the course of more than 1,500 years.

Ancient clay cooking pots in the southern Levant are unappealing, rough pots that are not easily connected to meals known from ancient writings or iconographic representations. To narrow the gap between excavated sherds and ancient meals, the approach adopted in this study starts by learning how food traditionally was processed, preserved, cooked, stored, and transported in clay containers. This research is based on the cookware and culinary practices in traditional societies in Cyprus and the Levant, where people still make pots by hand.Clay pots were not only to cook or hold foods. Their absorbent and permeable walls stored memories of food residue. Clay jars were automatic yogurt makers and fermentation vats for wine and beer, while jugs were the traditional water coolers and purifiers. Dairy foods, grains, and water lasted longer and/or tasted better when stored or prepared in clay pots. Biblical texts provide numerous terms for cookware without details of how they looked, how they were used, or why there are so many different words.Recent studies of potters for over a century in the southern Levant provide a wealth of names whose diversity helps to delineate the various categories of ancient cookware and names in the text. Ancient Cookware from the Levant begins with a description of five data sources: excavations, ancient and medieval texts, 20th century government reports, early accounts of potters, and ethnoarchaeological studies. The final section focuses on the shape, style, and manufacture of cookware for the past 12,000 years. For archaeologists, changes in cooking pot morphology offer important chronological information for dating entire assemblages, from Neolithic to recent times. The survey of pot shapes in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan presents how different shapes were made and used.

Archaeological Geophysics for Ephemeral Human Occupations: Focusing on the Small-Scale combines technological advances in near-surface geophysics with recent archaeological scholarship and underlying archaeological premises to provide a practical manual for guiding archaeo-geophysical research design. By proposing the amelioration of communication gaps between traditional and geophysical archaeologists, this book will foment dialogue and participate in bringing about new ways of thinking anthropologically about archaeological geophysics, especially in relation to prehistoric open-air ephemeral sites. Offering a way to begin a dialogue between archaeology and geophysics, Archaeological Geophysics for Ephemeral Human Occupations is an important reference for practicing professionals, instructors, and students in geophysics and anthropology/archaeology, as well as geology.

Over the past decades, archaeological field surveys and excavations have greatly enriched our knowledge of the Roman countryside Drawing on such new data, the volume The Economic Integration of Roman Italy, edited by Tymon de Haas and Gijs Tol, presents a series of papers that explore the changes Rome's territorial and economic expansion brought about in the countryside of the Italian peninsula. By drawing on a variety of source materials (e.g. pottery, settlement patterns, environmental data), they shed light on the complexity of rural settlement and economies on the local, regional and supra-regional scales. As such, the volume contributes to a re-assessment of Roman economic history in light of concepts such as globalisation, integration, economic performance and growth.

In The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian H. Bull argues that the treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus reflect the spiritual exercises and ritual practices of loosely organized brotherhoods in Egypt. These small groups were directed by Egyptian priests educated in the traditional lore of the temples, but also conversant with Greek philosophy. Such priests, who were increasingly dispossessed with the gradual demise of the Egyptian temples, could find eager adherents among a Greek-speaking audience seeking for the wisdom of the Egyptian Hermes, who was widely considered to be an important source for the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato. The volume contains a comprehensive analysis of the myths of Hermes Trismegistus, a reevaluation of the Way of Hermes, and a contextualization of this ritual tradition.

Grafton Elliot Smith rose from a colonial Australian background to dizzying heights in the British scientific establishment. He became a world authority on neuroanatomy and human prehistory, holding chairs at Cairo, Manchester and University College, London. He was best known publicly for his challenging theory of cultural diffusion, crossing the boundaries of anthropology, archaeology and history, stemming from his expert knowledge of evolution. Most controversy raged about his "Egyptian" theory, which placed ancient Egypt as the dynamic source from which major elements of civilisation were spread by the migration of peoples and mores. This vision stemmed from his ground-breaking dissection of thousands of mummies in Egypt during the great excavations of the 1900s. His speculations, made in association with thinkers such as W H R Rivers and W J Perry, bore fruit in a spate of publications that sparked global debate, arousing particular anger from American ethnologists opposed to ideas of foreign influence upon Mesoamerican cultures. Elliot Smith's ideas were regarded at the time as authentic, if problematic, approaches to important issues in human history. They were subsequently to be caricatured or ignored in anthropological and archaeological disciplines that had moved on to other paradigms. Paul Crook shows how his ideas were developed in the context of his life and times, examining the debates they aroused, his attempts to incorporate anthropology within a broader interdisciplinary school under his leadership in London, and his opposition to Nazi race theory in the 1930s. There has been no full-scale biography of Elliot Smith and little of substance analysing his works. Despite shortcomings, his theory and reputation deserve rehabilitation. An Afterword brings general readers up to date about the whole "diffusion" debate.

Knossos is one of the most important sites in the ancient Mediterranean. It remained amongst the largest settlements on the island of Crete from the Neolithic until the late Roman times, but aside from its size it held a place of particular significance in the mythological imagination of Greece and Rome as the seat of King Minos, the location of the Labyrinth and the home of the Minotaur. Sir Arthur Evans’ discovery of ‘the Palace of Minos’ has indelibly associated Knossos in the modern mind with the ‘lost’ civilisation of Bronze Age Crete. The allure of this ‘lost civilisation’, together with the considerable achievements of ‘Minoan’ artists and craftspeople, remain a major attraction both to scholars and to others outside the academic world as a bastion of a romantic approach to the past. In this volume, James Whitley provides an up-to-date guide to the site and its function from the Neolithic until the present day. This study includes a re-appraisal Bronze Age palatial society, as well as an exploration of the history of Knossos in the archaeological imagination. In doing so he takes a critical look at the guiding assumptions of Evans and others, reconstructing how and why the received view of this ancient settlement has evolved from the Iron Age up to the modern era.