In this book, Philip Zhakevich examines the technology of writing as it existed in the southern Levant during the Iron Age II period, after the alphabetic writing system had fully taken root in the region. Using the Hebrew Bible as its corpus and focusing on a set of Hebrew terms that designated writing surfaces and instruments, this study synthesizes the semantic data of the Bible with the archeological and art-historical evidence for writing in ancient Israel. The bulk of this work comprises an in-depth lexicographical analysis of Biblical Hebrew terms related to Israel's writing technology. Employing comparative Semitics, lexical semantics, and archaeology, Zhakevich provides a thorough analysis of the origins of the relevant terms; their use in the biblical text, Ben Sira, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and ancient Hebrew inscriptions; and their translation in the Septuagint and other ancient versions. The final chapter evaluates Israel's writing practices in light of those of the ancient world, concluding that Israel's most common form of writing (i.e., writing with ink on ostraca and papyrus) is Egyptian in origin and was introduced into Canaan during the New Kingdom. Comprehensive and original in its scope, Scribal Tools in Ancient Israel is a landmark contribution to our knowledge of scribes and scribal practices in ancient Israel. Students and scholars interested in language and literacy in the first-millennium Levant in particular will profit from this volume.

Trends and Turning Points presents sixteen articles, examining the discursive construction of the late antique and Byzantine world, focusing specifically on the utilisation of trends and turning points to make stuff from the past, whether texts, matter, or action, meaningful. Contributions are divided into four complementary strands, Scholarly Constructions, Literary Trends, Constructing Politics, and Turning Points in Religious Landscapes. Each strand cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries and periodisation, placing historical, archaeological, literary, and architectural concerns in discourse, whilst drawing on examples from the full range of the medieval Roman past. While its individual articles offer numerous important insights, together the volume collectively rethinks fundamental assumptions about how late antique and Byzantine studies has and continues to be discursively constructed. Contributors are: David Barritt, Laura Borghetti, Nikolas Churik, Elif Demirtiken, Alasdair C. Grant, Stephen Humphreys, Mirela Ivanova, Hugh Jeffery, Valeria Flavia Lovato, Francesco Lovino, Kosuke Nakada, Jonas Nilsson, Theresia Raum, Maria Rukavichnikova, and Milan Vukasinovic.

In the past few decades, sustained and overwhelming research attention has been given to EAL (English as an Additional Language) scholars’ English writing and publishing. While this line of research has shed important light on the scene of global knowledge production and dissemination, it tends to overlook the less Anglicized and more locally bound disciplines located at the academic periphery. This book aimed to fill the gap by examining the academic enculturation experiences of Chinese archaeologists through the lens of their disciplinary writing. Consisting of a situated genre analysis and a multi-case study, the textographic study disclosed the immense complexity of archaeologists’ texts, practices and identities. Important implications were generated for writing researchers and teachers as well as archaeologists and other HSS (the humanities and social sciences) scholars. This book would make a valuable reading for researchers and students of disciplinary/academic writing, second language writing and literacy studies.

In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches-archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical-to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces. The sites King examines include the region's vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary's City, established as Maryland's first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary's City, for example, early on became the center of Maryland's "founding narrative" of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the area's Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories. As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region's more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research-particularly archaeological research-that produces new stories and "counter-narratives" that challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a complicated past.

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. In Shrines in a Fluid Space: The Shaping of New Holy Sites in the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnese and Crete under Venetian Rule (14th-16th Centuries), Argyri Dermitzaki reconstructs the devotional experiences within the Greek realm of the Venetian Stato da Mar of Western European pilgrims sailing to Jerusalem. The author traces the evolution of the various forms of cultic sites and the perception of them as nodes of a wider network of the pilgrims' 'holy topography'. She scrutinises travelogues in conjunction with archaeological, visual and historical evidence and offers a study of the cultic phenomena and sites invested with exceptional meaning at the main ports of call of the pilgrims' galleys in the Ionian Sea, the Peloponnese and Crete.

Over the last decade, the field of American historical archaeology has seen enormous growth in the study of people of African descent. This edited volume is the first dedicated solely to archaeology and the construction of gender in an African American context. The common thread running through this collection is not a shared definition of gender or an agreed-upon feminist approach, but rather a regional thread, a commitment to understanding ethnicity and gender within the social, political, and ideological structures of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American South. Taken together, these essays represent a departure in historical archaeology, an important foray into the study of the construction of gender within various African American communities that is based in the archaeological record. Those interested in historical archaeology, history, women's studies and African American studies will find this a valuable addition to the literature. Topics range from gendered residential and consumption patterns in colonial Virginia and the construction of identity in Middle Tennessee to midwifery practices in postbellum Louisiana.

The Power of Cities focuses on Iberian cities during the lengthy transition from the late Roman to the early modern period, with a particular interest in the change from early Christianity to the Islamic period, and on to the restoration of Christianity. Drawing on case studies from cities such as Toledo, Cordoba, and Seville, it collects for the first time recent research in urban studies using both archaeological and historical sources. Against the common portrayal of these cities characterized by discontinuities due to decadence, decline and invasions, it is instead continuity - that is, a gradual transformation - which emerges as the defining characteristic. The volume argues for a fresh interpretation of Iberian cities across this period, seen as a continuum of structural changes across time, and proposes a new history of the Iberian Peninsula, written from the perspective of the cities. Contributors are Javier Arce, Maria Asenjo Gonzalez, Antonio Irigoyen Lopez, Alberto Leon Munoz, Matthias Maser, Sabine Panzram, Gisela Ripoll, Torsten dos Santos Arnold, Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Fernando Valdes Fernandez, and Klaus Weber.