Roman cities have rarely been studied from the perspective of women, and studies of Roman women mainly focus on the city of Rome. Studying the civic participation of women in the towns of Italy outside Rome and in the numerous cities of the Latin-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire, this books offers a new view on Roman women and urban society in the Roman Principate. Drawing on epigraphy and archaeology, and to a lesser extent on legal and literary texts, women's civic roles as priestesses, benefactresses and patronesses or 'mothers' of cities and associations (collegia and the Augustales) are brought to the fore. In contrast to the city of Rome, which was dominated by the imperial family, wealthy women in the local Italian and provincial towns had ample opportunity to leave their mark on the city. Their motives to spend their money, time and energy for the benefit of their cities and the rewards their contributions earned them take centre stage. Assessing the meaning and significance of their contributions for themselves and their families and for the cities that enjoyed them, the book presents a new and detailed view of the role of women and gender in Roman urban life.

In (Re)using Ruins, Douglas Underwood presents a new account of the use and reuse of Roman urban public monuments in a crucial period of transition, A.D. 300-600. Commonly seen as a period of uniform decline for public building, especially in the western half of the Mediterranean, (Re)using Ruins shows a vibrant, yet variable, history for these structures. Douglas Underwood establishes a broad catalogue of archaeological evidence (supplemented with epigraphic and literary testimony) for the construction, maintenance, abandonment and reuses of baths, aqueducts, theatres, amphitheatres and circuses in Italy, southern Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, demonstrating that the driving force behind the changes to public buildings was largely a combined shift in urban ideologies and euergetistic practices in Late Antique cities.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Offering a rare look into the lives of enslaved peoples and slave masters in early New England, Slavery in the Age of Reason analyzes the results of extensive archaeological excavations at the Isaac Royall House and Slave Quarters, a National Historic Landmark and museum in Medford, Massachusetts. Isaac Royall (1677-1739) was the largest slave owner in Massachusetts in the mid-eighteenth century, and in this book the Royall family and their slaves become the central characters in a compelling cultural-historical narrative. The family's ties to both Massachusetts and Antigua provide a comparative perspective on the transcontinental development of modern ideologies of individualism, colonialism, slavery, and race. Alexandra A. Chan examines the critical role of material culture in the construction, mediation, and maintenance of social identities and relationships between slaves and masters at the farm. She explores landscapes and artifacts discovered at the site not just as inanimate objects or "cultural leftovers," but rather as physical embodiments of the assumptions, attitudes, and values of the people who built, shaped, or used them. These material things, she argues, provide a portal into the mind-set of people long gone-not just of the Royall family who controlled much of the material world at the farm, but also of the enslaved, who made up the majority of inhabitants at the site, and who left few other records of their experience. Using traditional archaeological techniques and analysis, as well as theoretical perspectives and representational styles of post-processualist schools of thought, Slavery in the Age of Reason is an innovative volume that portrays the Royall family and the people they enslaved "from the inside out." It should put to rest any lingering myth that the peculiar institution was any less harsh or complex when found in the North.

CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions presents case studies on archaeology, objects, texts, and online publishing, digital archiving, and preservation. Edited by Vanessa Bigot Juloux, Amy Rebecca Gansell, and Alessandro Di Ludovico, it emphasizes the significance of the digital humanities to Ancient Near Eastern Studies.

This book is an updated edition of Jefferson Chapman's 1985 account of one of the most productive and significant research efforts in the eastern United States. For fourteen years (1967-1981), archaeologists from the University of Tennessee conducted excavations and surveys in the Little Tennessee River Valley, which was being inundated by the TVA's creation of the Tellico Reservoir. The project produced a wealth of new information about more than 12,000 years of Native American history in the region.
This revision retains the full text and illustrations of the original edition, with its compelling descriptions of ancient ways of life and the archaeological detective work that was done to obtain that knowledge. The new material, contained in a postscript, summarizes the discoveries, research methods, and other developments that have, over the past ten years, further enhanced our knowledge of the Native Americans who occupied the area. Included, for example, are details about some fascinating new techniques for dating human remains, as well as discussions of burial practices, native crops, new archaeological laws, and the "Bat Creek Stone," a controversial artifact that, according to some claims, gives evidence of migrations of Mediterranean peoples to the New World during Roman times.
The Author: Jefferson Chapman is director of the Frank H. McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a research associate professor in the department of anthropology.

This edition of Gilbert Murray's renowned examination of how religion evolved in Ancient Greece, includes all of his original notes. Murray was a renowned scholar of Greek classics, who used his academic background as grounding for this astonishingly detailed book on the topic of the Olympian Gods. How the pantheon of Gods was conceived, and grew to eventually define large aspects of Ancient Greek culture, form the topics at hand. The book begins by examining the earliest surviving religious texts of Greek, identifying the first indications of the Gods in the lore. The increasing prevalence of writing among Greece's educated citizenry sparked a growth in the number of Gods and Goddesses, and the stories relating to them. However, Murray is careful to note that there is no single event or turning point. For a scholarly work, Five Stages of Greek Religion is of modest length. This attribute defines it as a superb introductory primer to aspects of Olympian religion.

The Babylonian Talmud remains the richest source of information regarding the material culture and lifestyle of the Babylonian Jewish community, with additional data now supplied by Babylonian incantation bowls. Although archaeology has yet to excavate any Jewish sites from Babylonia, information from Parthian and Sassanian Babylonia provides relevant background information, which differs substantially from archaeological finds from the Land of Israel. One of the key questions addresses the amount of traffic and general communications between Jewish Babylonia and Israel, considering the great distances and hardships of travel involved.

Alfred Nobel made his name as an inventor and successful entrepreneur and left a legacy as a philanthropist and promoter of learning and social progress. The correspondence between Nobel and his Viennese mistress, Sofie Hess, shines a light on his private life and reveals a personality that differs significantly from his public image. The letters show him as a hypochondriac and workaholic and as a paranoid, jealous, and patriarchal lover. Indeed, the relationship between the aging Alfred Nobel and the carefree, spendthrift Sofie Hess will strike readers as dysfunctional and worthy of Freudian analysis. Erika Rummel's masterful translation and annotations reveal the value of the letters as commentary on 19th century social mores: the concept of honour and reputation, the life of a "kept" woman, the prevalence of antisemitism, the importance of spas as health resorts and entertainment centres, the position of single mothers, and more generally the material culture of a rich bourgeois gentleman. A Nobel Affair is the first translation into English of the complete correspondence between Alfred Nobel and Sofie Hess.

Analysis of the scroll fragments of the Qumran Aramaic scrolls has been plentiful to date. Their shared characteristics of being written in Aramaic, the common language of the region, not focused on the Qumran Community, and dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE have enabled the creation of a shared identity, distinguishing them from other fragments found in the same place at the same time. This classification, however, could yet be too simplistic as here, for the first time, John Starr applies sophisticated statistical analyses to newly available electronic versions of these fragments. In so doing, Starr presents a potential new classification which comprises six different text types which bear distinctive textual features, and thus is able to narrow down the classification both temporally and geographically. Starr's re-visited classification presents fresh insights into the Aramaic texts at Qumran, with important implications for our understanding of the many strands that made up Judaism in the period leading to the writing of the New Testament.

'Western-Pontic Culture Ambience and Pattern: In Memory of Eugen Comsa' is dedicated to the memory of Eugen Comsa, an archaeologist whose work created the foundation of the Northern Balkan prehistory and was essential for the contemporary view of the prehistory of the North-western Pontic region. This edited volume brings together researchers in the field of Circumpontic archaeology from the Neolithic to the Iron Age period. The content of the volume is offered to students and scholars who seek a deeper understanding of the prehistory of the Western Pontic region, in particular the Balkans in their Eurasian context and more broadly to enhance the scholarly collections of academic, educational, public and private libraries throughout the world.