While books on archaeological and anthropological ethics have proliferated in recent years, few attempt to move beyond a conventional discourse on ethics to consider how a discussion of the social and political implications of archaeological practice might be conceptualized differently. The conceptual ideas about ethics posited in this volume make it of interest to readers outside of the discipline; in fact, to anyone interested in contemporary debates around the possibilities and limitations of a discourse on ethics. The authors in this volume set out to do three things. The first is to track the historical development of a discussion around ethics, in tandem with the development and "disciplining" of archaeology. The second is to examine the meanings, consequences and efficacies of a discourse on ethics in contemporary worlds of practice in archaeology. The third is to push beyond the language of ethics to consider other ways of framing a set of concerns around rights, accountabilities and meanings in relation to practitioners, descendent and affected communities, sites, material cultures, the ancestors and so on.

"Ideas of Landscape" discusses the current theory and practice of landscape archaeology and offers an alternative agenda for landscape archaeology that maps more closely onto the established empirical strengths of landscape study and has more contemporary relevance.
The first historical assessment of a critical period in archaeology
Takes as its focus the so-called English landscape tradition -- the ideological underpinnings of which come from English Romanticism, via the influence of the "father of landscape history" W. G. Hoskins
Argues that the strengths and weaknesses of landscape archaeology can be traced back to the underlying theoretical discontents of Romanticism
Offers an alternative agenda for landscape archaeology that maps more closely onto the established empirical strengths of landscape study and has more contemporary relevance

The 1992 publication of Pottery Function brought together the ethnographic study of the Kalinga and developed a method and theory for how pottery was actually used. Since then, there have been considerable advances in understanding how pottery was actually used, particularly in the area of residue analysis, abrasion, and sooting/carbonization. At the 20th anniversary of the book, it is time to assess what has been done and learned. One of the concerns of those working in pottery analysis is that they are unsure how to "do" use-alteration analysis on their collection. Another common concern is understanding intended pottery function-the connections between technical choices and function. This book is designed to answer these questions using case studies from the author and his colleagues for applying use-alteration analysis to infer actual pottery function. The focus of Understanding Pottery Function is on how practicing archaeologists can infer function from their ceramic collection.

In the third millennium B.C.E., the Oman Peninsula was the site of an important kingdom known in Akkadian texts as "Magan," which traded extensively with the Indus Civilization, southern Iran, the Persian Gulf states, and southern Mesopotamia. Excavations have been carried out in this region since the 1970s, although the majority of studies have focused on mortuary monuments at the expense of settlement archaeology. While domestic structures of the Bronze Age have been found and are the focus of current research at Bat, most settlements dating from the third millennium B.C.E. in Oman and the U.A.E. are defined by the presence of large, circular monuments made of mudbrick or stone that are traditionally called "towers." Whether these so-called towers are defensive, agricultural, political, or ritual structures has long been debated, but very few comprehensive studies of these monuments have been attempted. Between 2007 and 2012, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology conducted excavations at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat in the Sultanate of Oman under the direction of the late Gregory L. Possehl. The focus of these years was on the monumental stone towers of the third millennium B.C.E., looking at the when, how, and why of their construction through large-scale excavation, GIS-aided survey, and the application of radiocarbon dates. This has been the most comprehensive study of nonmortuary Bronze Age monuments ever conducted on the Oman Peninsula, and the results provide new insight into the formation and function of these impressive structures that surely formed the social and political nexus of Magan's kingdom.

Since the days of V. Gordon Childe, the study of the emergence of complex societies has been a central question in anthropological archaeology. However, archaeologists working in the Americanist tradition have drawn most of their models for the emergence of social complexity from research in the Middle East and Latin America. Bernard Wailes was a strong advocate for the importance of later prehistoric and early medieval Europe as an alternative model of sociopolitical evolution and trained generations of American archaeologists now active in European research from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. Two centuries of excavation and research in Europe have produced one of the richest bodies of archaeological data anywhere in the world. The abundant data show that technological innovations such as metallurgy appeared very early, but urbanism and state formation are comparatively late developments. Key transformative process such as the spread of agriculture did not happen uniformly but rather at different rates in different regions. The essays in this volume celebrate the legacy of Bernard Wailes by highlighting the contribution of the European archaeological record to our understanding of the emergence of social complexity. They provide case studies in how ancient Europe can inform anthropological archaeology. Not only do they illuminate key research topics, they also invite archaeologists working in other parts of the world to consider comparisons to ancient Europe as they construct models for cultural development for their regions. Although there is a substantial corpus of literature on European prehistoric and medieval archaeology, we do not know of a comparable volume that explicitly focuses on the contribution that the study of ancient Europe can make to anthropological archaeology.

Over the millennia, from stone tools among early foragers to clays to prized metals and mineral pigments used by later groups, mineral resources have had a pronounced role in the Andean world. Archaeologists have used a variety of analytical techniques on the materials that ancient peoples procured from the earth. What these materials all have in common is that they originated in a mine or quarry. Despite their importance, comparative analysis between these archaeological sites and features has been exceptionally rare, and even more so for the Andes. Mining and Quarrying in the Ancient Andes focuses on archaeological research at primary deposits of minerals extracted through mining or quarrying in the Andean region. While mining often begins with an economic need, it has important social, political, and ritual dimensions as well. The contributions in this volume place evidence of primary extraction activities within the larger cultural context in which they occurred. This important contribution to the interdisciplinary literature presents research and analysis on the mining and quarrying of various materials throughout the region and through time. Thus, rather than focusing on one material type or one specific site, Mining and Quarrying in the Ancient Andes incorporates a variety of all the aspects of mining, by focusing on the physical, social, and ritual aspects of procuring materials from the earth in the Andean past.

In the past 35 years our archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the history and culture of ancient Macedon has been transformed. This book brings together the leading Greek archaeologists and historians of the area in a major collaborative survey of the finds and their interpretation, many of them unpublished outside Greece. The recent, immensely significant excavations of the palace of King Philip II are published here for the first time. Major new chapters on the Macedonians' Greek language, civic life, fourth and third century BC kings and court accompany specialist surveys of the region's art and coinage and the royal palace centres of Pella and Vergina, presented here with much new evidence. This book is the essential companion to Macedon, packed with new information and bibliography which no student of the Greek world can now afford to neglect.

There was probably only one past, but there are many different histories. As mental representations of narrow segments of the past, 'histories' reflect different cultural contexts and different historians, although 'history' is a scientific enterprise whenever it processes representative data using rational and controllable methods to work out hypotheses that can be falsified by empirical evidence. A History of Biblical Israel combines experience gained through decades of teaching biblical exegesis and courses on the history of ancient Israel, and of on-going involvement in biblical archaeology. 'Biblical Israel' is understood as a narrative produced primarily in the province of Yehud to forge the collective memory of the elite that operated the temple of Jerusalem under the auspices of the Achaemenid imperial apparatus. The notion of 'Biblical Israel' provides the necessary hindsight to narrate the fate of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as the pre-history of 'Biblical Israel', since the archives of these kingdoms were only mined in the Persian era to produce the grand biblical narrative.The volume covers the history of 'Biblical Israel' through its fragmentation in the Hellenistic and Roman periods until 136 CE, when four Roman legions crushed the revolt of Simeon Bar-Kosiba.

This book covers the prehistory of the Nile Valley from Nubia to the Mediterranean, during the period from the earliest hominid settlement, around 700,000 BC, to the beginnings of dynastic Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BC. The author explores the prehistoric foundations pf many of the cultural traditions of Pharaonic Egypt.

The book focuses primarily on the fifteen millennia from 18,000 to 3,000 BC, when different cultures can be identified and the earliest forms of agriculture traced with some detail. Textile and ceramic production began at the end of the seventh millennium and were deployed with great skill and considerable sophistication by the beginning of the Predynastic Period at around 4,500 BC. By the Early Dynastic Period much that is considered characteristic of Ancient Egypt, such as cosmology and burial rites, was already established tradition.

This account of prehistoric Egypt will be welcomed as an outstanding narrative, combining both scholarship and accessibility.

As an introduction to the ancient history of Iraq, Goodspeed's book has stood the test of time. The reader is given a detailed rendition of the history of the Old Babylonian, Assyrian, and Neo-Babylonian Empires. Although out of print for many years, the book is consistently cited as a helpful introduction to the subject.

The present volume is the result of a team research which gathered biblical scholars, philologists, and historians of religions, on the issue of the multiple «Interpretations of Moses inherited from the ancient mediterranean cultures. The concrete outcome of this comparative inquiry is the common translation and commentary of the fragments from the works of the mysterious Artapanus. The comparative perspective suggested here is not so much methodological, or thematic. It is first of all an invitation to cross disciplinary boundaries and to take account of the contributions of diverse cultures to the formation of a single mythology, in the case, a Moses mythology. With respect to Judea, Greece, Egypt or Rome, and further more an emerging christianity and its «gnostic counterpart, the figure of Moses is at the heart of a cross-cultural dialogue the pieces of which, if they can be seperated for the confort of their specific study, mostly gain by being put together.

This volume is a scholarly tribute to Benjamin R. Foster, Laffan Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature and Curator of the Babylonian Collection at Yale University, from some of his students, colleagues, and companions, in appreciation of his outstanding achievements and in thanks for his friendship. Reflecting on the remarkable breadth of the honoree's research interests, the twenty-six original papers in this Festschrift cover a wide range of topics in ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian literature, economic and social history, as well as art and archaeology.

In the 1970s, in his capacity as government representative from the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Afghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan. The results of his work were published in Farsi as a descriptive ethnographic monograph. The Helmand Baluch is the first English translation of Amiri's extraordinary encounters. This rich ethnography describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people living in the lower Helmand River Valley of Afghanistan. It is an area that has received little study since the early 20th Century, yet is a region with a remarkable history in one of the most volatile territories in the world.

Addressing the relationship between religion and ideology, and drawing on a range of literary, ritual, and visual sources, this book reconstructs the cultural discourse of Assyria from the third through the first millennium BCE. Ideology is delineated here as a subdiscourse of religion rather than as an independent category, anchoring it firmly within the religious world view. Tracing Assur's cultural interaction with the south on the one hand, and with the Syro-Anatolian horizon on the other, this volume articulates a "northern" cultural discourse that, even while interacting with southern Mesopotamian tradition, managed to maintain its own identity. It also follows the development of tropes and iconic images from the first city state of Uruk and their mouvance between myth, image, and royal inscription, historiography and myth, and myth and ritual, suggesting that, with the help of scholars, key royal figures were responsible for introducing new directions for the ideological discourse and for promoting new forms of historiography.

Charles Green tells here the dramatic story of the initial excavation of Sutton Hoo, one of the richest archaeological finds of all time. In the Sutton Hoo burial grounds scientists unearthed a ship containing the treasures of a king who was most likely the last of the pagan rulers of East Anglia. Green guides us through the scientific significance of the Sutton Hoo discovery: the beautiful jewelry indicates the high level of Anglo-Saxon artistic culture, the royal insignia offers clues to the organization of the East Anglican kingdom and its relations with neighboring regimes, while the burial ships themselves inspire new hypotheses regarding Anglo-Saxon immigration routes. Any reader will be irresistibly drawn to learn more of this archaeological dig which has uncovered such intriguing relics of our medieval ancestors. This edition takes into account discoveries that have been made since the publication of the original edition. Barbara Green, an archaeologist in East Anglia and Charles Green's daughter, has revised and updated the original text of her father's book.

Maize is the world's most productive food and industrial crop, grown in more than 160 countries and on every continent except Antarctica. If by some catastrophe maize were to disappear from our food supply chain, vast numbers of people would starve and global economies would rapidly collapse. How did we come to be so dependent on this one plant? Maize for the Gods brings together new research by archaeologists, archaeobotanists, plant geneticists, and a host of other specialists to explore the complex ways that this single plant and the peoples who domesticated it came to be inextricably entangled with one another over the past nine millennia. Tracing maize from its first appearance and domestication in ancient campsites and settlements in Mexico to its intercontinental journey through most of North and South America, this history also tells the story of the artistic creativity, technological prowess, and social, political, and economic resilience of America's first peoples.