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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region > European archaeology > Classical Greek & Roman archaeology
Tabernae were ubiquitous in all Roman cities, lining the busiest streets and dominating their most crowded intersections in numbers far exceeding those of any other form of building. That they played a vital role in the operation of the city, and indeed in the very definition of urbanization in ancient Rome, is a point too often under-appreciated in Roman studies, and one which bears fruitful further exploration. The Roman Retail Revolution offers a thorough investigation into the social and economic worlds of the Roman shop, focusing on food and drink outlets in particular. Combining critical analysis of both archaeological material and textual sources, it challenges many of the conventional ideas about the place of retailing in the Roman city and unravels the historical development of tabernae to identify three major waves or revolutions in the shaping of retail landscapes. The volume is underpinned by two new and important bodies of evidence: the first generated from the University of Cincinnati's recent archaeological excavations into a Pompeian neighborhood of close to twenty shop-fronts, and the second resulting from a field-survey of the retail landscapes of more than a hundred cities from across the Roman world. The richness of this information, combined with the volume's interdisciplinary approach to the lives of the Roman sub-elite, results in a refreshingly original look at the history of retailing and urbanism in the Roman world.
Lindsay Allason-Jones has been at the forefront of small finds and Roman frontier research for 40 years in a career focussed on, but not exclusive to, the north of Britain, encompassing an enormous range of object types and subject areas. Divided into thematic sections the contributions presented here to celebrate her many achievements all represent at least one aspect of Lindsay's research interests. These encompass social and industrial aspects of northern frontier forts; new insights into inscribed and sculptural stones specific to military communities; religious, cultural and economic connotations of Roman armour finds; the economic and ideological penetration of romanitas in the frontiers as reflected by individual objects and classes of finds; evidence of trans-frontier interactions and invisible people; the role of John Clayton in the exploration and preservation of Hadrian's Wall and its material culture; the detailed consideration of individual objects of significant interest; and a discussion of the widespread occurrence of mice in Roman art.
This volume is both a companion to the editors' Greek Historical Inscriptions, 404-323 BC, and a successor to the later part of the Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century BC, edited by Russell Meiggs and David M. Lewis and published in 1969. As with the editors' earlier collection, it seeks to make a selection of historically significant inscribed texts accessible to scholars and students of fifth-century Greek history. Since the publication of Meiggs and Lewis' collection, a number of significant new inscriptions and fragments have been unearthed and new interpretations of previously known examples developed. As well as updating the scholarly corpus, this volume aims to broaden the thematic range of inscriptions discussed and to include a greater selection of material from outside Athens, while still adhering to the intention of presenting texts which are important not just as typical of their genre but in their own right. In doing so, it offers an entry point to all aspects of fifth-century history, from political and institutional, to social, economic, and religious, and in order to make the material as accessible as possible for a broad readership concerned with the study of these areas, the Greek texts are presented here alongside both English translations and incisive commentaries, which will be of utility both to the specialist academic and to those less familiar with the areas in question. The inclusion of photographs depicting inscribed stones and bronzes complements discussion of the inscriptions themselves and enables parallel consideration of their nature, appearance, and transmission history, resulting in a work of thoroughly comprehensive, cutting-edge scholarship and an invaluable reference text for the study of fifth-century Greek history.
The first such dictionary since that of Platner and Ashby in 1929, "A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome" defines and describes the known buildings and monuments, as well as the geographical and topographical features, of ancient Rome. It provides a concise history of each, with measurements, dates, and citations of significant ancient and modern sources.
The present volume brings together papers by internationally renowned specialists in Jewish history in the Roman period. Most of them were read at a conference at Tel Aviv University in 2009 in honour of Aharon Oppenheimer. The volume focuses on a number of well-defined key topics in the history of the Jews both in Judea and in the diaspora: first of all the image of Jews among non-Jews and of non-Jews among Jews; questions of social and intellectual history, mostly those dealing with the transformation that took place as a result of the failed Jewish revolts against Rome and urgent issues in modern scholarship. Studies to be mentioned here are: the relationship and cultural differences between Palestinian and Babylonian Jews; the relationship between Jews and early Christians; the evolving image of first century Judaism as projected in the early Christian sources and modern scholarship; the role of the sages in this period, conversion to Judaism, and Jewish resistance and martyrdom under Roman rule. Many of the papers provide a new assessment of the relevant subjects in the light of changing views of social and religious history. Central to many of the papers is a focus on attitudes toward others and collective image: the Jews as seen by others; Jews looking at others and at internal groups. Another category of articles are chapters in social and intellectual history with a sensitive and controversial ideology in the background, some of them providing provocative re-assessments.
This illustrated study comprises a comprehensive and detailed account of the historical development of Greek military architecture and defensive planning, specifically in Arkadia in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Employing data gathered from the published literature, and collected during the field reconnaissance of every site, the fortification circuit of each Arkadian polis is explored. In this way, the book provides an accurate chronology for the walls in question; an understanding of the relationship between the fortifications and the local topography; a detailed inventory of all the fortified poleis of Arkadia; a regional synthesis based on this inventory; and the probable historical reasons behind the patterns observed through the regional synthesis. Maher argues that there is no evidence for fortified poleis in Arkadia during the Archaic period. However, when the poleis were eventually fortified in the Classical period, the fact that most appeared in the early fourth century BC, strategically distributed in limited geographic areas, suggests that the larger defensive concerns of the Arkadian League were a factor. Although the defensive responses to innovations in siege warfare and offensive artillery of the Arkadian fortifications follow the same general developments observable in the circuits found throughout the Greek world, there does exist a number of interesting and noteworthy, regionally specific, patterns. Such discoveries validate the methodology employed and clearly demonstrate the value of an exclusively regional focus for shedding light on a number of architectural, topographical, and historic issues.
Minoan Crete is rightly famous for its idiosyncratic architecture, as well as its palaces and towns such as Knossos, Malia, Gournia, and Palaikastro. Indeed, these are often described as the first urban settlements of Bronze Age Europe. However, we still know relatively little about the dynamics of these early urban centres. How did they work? What role did the palaces have in their towns, and the towns in their landscapes? It might seem that with such richly documented architectural remains these questions would have been answered long ago. Yet, analysis has mostly found itself confined to building materials and techniques, basic formal descriptions, and functional evaluations. Critical evaluation of these data as constituting a dynamic built environment has thus been slow in coming. This volume aims to provide a first step in this direction. It brings together international scholars whose research focuses on Minoan architecture and urbanism as well as on theory and methods in spatial analyses. By combining methodological contributions with detailed case studies across the different scales of buildings, settlements and regions, the volume proposes a new analytical and interpretive framework for addressing the complex dynamics of the Minoan built environment.
In 2012, fieldwork began at two large sites in the Beheira Province in the western Nile Delta: Kom al-Ahmer and Kom Wasit (ancient Metelis). Being close to the important ports of Thonis-Heracleion, Alexandria, and Rosetta meant that they had been ideally placed to take advantage of the trade between the Mediterranean and Egypt. The sites are being thoroughly investigated to reveal their archaeological significance. Kom al-Ahmer - Kom Wasit I Excavations in the Metelite Nome, Egypt presents the results of the Italian archaeological mission between 2012 and 2016. It provides details of the survey and excavation results from different occupation phases. A complete town beneath the Nile silt was revealed using a combination of modern scientific techniques. Hellenistic houses and a temple enclosure wall were investigated at Kom Wasit; while at Kom al-Ahmer, a Late Roman house, an amphora storage building, a cistern and an early Islamic cemetery were revealed. Dating from the Late Dynastic to the Early Islamic period, the remains found at Kom al-Ahmer and Kom Wasit demonstrate for the first time the rich archaeological heritage of this region. Edited by Mohamed Kenawi, this volume contains contributions by Cristina Mondin, Michele Asolati Louise Bertini, Audrey Eller, Urska Furlan, Ole Herslund, Israel Hinojosa Balino, Marie-Caroline Livaditis, Giorgia Marchiori, Marcus Muller, Benjamin T. Pennington and Amy Wilson.
Since then new texts have appeared (such as the Artemidoros palimpsest), and new editions of existing texts (by geographical authorities who include Agatharchides, Eratosthenes, Pseudo-Skylax and Strabo) have been produced. There has been much archaeological research, especially at the perimeters of the Greek world, and a more accurate understanding of ancient geography and geographers has emerged. The topic is therefore overdue a fresh and sustained treatment. In offering precisely that, Duane Roller explores important topics like knowledge of the world in the Bronze Age and Archaic periods; Greek expansion into the Black Sea and the West; the Pythagorean concept of the earth as a globe; the invention of geography as a discipline by Eratosthenes; Polybios the explorer; Strabo's famous Geographica; the travels of Alexander the Great; Roman geography; Ptolemy and late antiquity; and the cultural reawakening of antique geographical knowledge in the Renaissance, including Columbus' use of ancient sources.
More than a century of archaeological investigation in Portugal has helped to discover, excavate and study many Lusitanian amphorae kiln sites, with their amphorae being widely distributed in Lusitania. These containers were identified in Ostia and Rome from the 1970s and thereafter in many sites around the Mediterranean, but their numbers have always seemed scarce. Were they not being recognized and therefore underestimated? Were they all fish-product amphorae? Did they ever reach a significant market share in the other provinces of Hispania? And what was their contribution to the supply of the city of Rome or to other cities in the centre of the Empire? This collective volume is a contribution to the discussion of these and other questions, and to a better understanding of the production and distribution of Lusitanian amphorae.
All the sources categories, epigraphy, literature and archaeology, together with the contributions of contemporary scientific methods form a solid foundation for the purpose of this paper: the study of the military hierarchy in Dacia. The most complex aspect is by far the hierarchy of soldiers. Epigraphic sources provide a rich source of data for Dacia but a less documented aspect is that of promotions and careers. Thus, the understanding of military hierarchy across the Empire is very valuable. Following the obvious hypothesis, that one cannot understand the history of Roman Dacia, unless in the wider context of the Roman Empire, the author attempts to decrypt the multitude of ranks and functions in the career of the solider. Thus, the research has moved from general to particular, starting from literary sources and contemporary monographic studies and reaching the individual epigraphic sources and studies concerned with a certain category of officers or a particular phenomenon found in an inscription. It was necessary to study each category of Roman units because the connections between them are very strong, especially as far as it involves soldiers, personnel and officers as elements of the whole functional entity in the Mediterranean space. For the purpose of systematization, the author chose the classification proposed by Domaszewski, more than 100 years ago, dividing the military ranks into several categories: soldier ranks - immunes and principales, centurions and primipili.
The buildings and artefacts uncovered by Canadian excavations at Stymphalos (1994-2001) shed light on the history and cult of a small sanctuary on the acropolis of the ancient city. The thirteen detailed studies collected in Stymphalos: The Acropolis Sanctuary illuminate a variety of aspects of the site. Epigraphical evidence confirms that both Athena and Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, were worshipped in the sanctuary between the fourth and second centuries BCE. The temple and service buildings are modest in size and materials, but the temple floor and pillar shrine suggest that certain stones and bedrock outcrops were held as sacred objects. Earrings, finger rings, and other jewelry, along with almost 100 loomweights, indicate that women were prominent in cult observances. Many iron projectile points (arrowheads and catapult bolts) suggest that the sanctuary was destroyed in a violent attack around the mid-second century, possibly by the Romans. A modest sanctuary in a modest Arcadian city-state, the acropolis sanctuary at Stymphalos will be a major point of reference for all archaeologists and historians studying ancient Arcadia and all southern Greece in the future.
The aim of this work was to examine land-use and settlement on the Berkshire Downs from the Bronze Age to the end of the Romano-British period. Earlier research in this region had presented a landscape history that was in contrast to elsewhere on the Wessex chalklands and rather than a land that grew organically over 2.5 millennia, the area is seen as one which was sporadically occupied, worked, and possibly abandoned. In the west of the region late Bronze Age linear ditches mark a major reorganization in the scale of the landscape, but only a small number of contemporary settlements are known, and field systems appear to be absent. This is followed by an apparent hiatus until the establishment of organised farming communities in the Romano-British period engaged in large-scale cereal production. In the east, Segsbury Camp is seen to signal the emergence of early Iron Age occupation into an area of previously unoccupied and unused land, with later settlement on the Downs continuing into the late Iron Age. Beyond this period little is known and the fragmentary field systems in this region remain undated. It is proposed that these interpretations are illusory, created by large-scale Romano-British arable expansion in the west masking earlier occupation, and post Roman land-use in the east destroying upstanding monuments and creating a bias in our interpretation. Today, these former landscapes, some of which survived into the 20th century, are mostly plough-levelled. As such, further understanding lies beyond the limit of many conventional fieldwork methods. A multi-disciplinary approach was used to rebuild this landscape. Aerial transcription from the National Mapping Programme is used to provide a view of the landscape before its destruction through modern agriculture, while maps and documents, lidar, woodland survey, geophysics and metal detected finds are used to create a theoretical account of activity across this region.
East Macedonia in northern Greece has rich deposits of gold and silver as well as copper and iron ores. The gold and silver were important to Classical Athens and even more so to Alexander the Great's Hellenistic world. Copper was extracted as early as the Late Neolithic, and iron was worked from the Iron Age to Ottoman times. Bringing to life the essential background to this wealth derived from metals, this book looks at the archaeological and archaeometallurgical evidence, some of it very new, for the mining and processing of the ores and the extraction of the metal. The book is written with the visitor to the region very much in mind, taking the reader closer to the landscapes where these practices took place to make sense of `silent landscapes' where so much happened at one time but where nature has now taken over the remains of buildings, installations and heaps of waste rendering them `mute' and meaningless for all but the expert historian of technology. Written by a native of the region who has himself been directly involved in field and laboratory work on ancient metallurgy, this book will raise the profile of this aspect of the region's past as well as the region's great natural beauty.
These archaeological studies offer to provide an alternative tour through Vesuvian cities. One way to see Pompeii, for example, is via its hydraulic systems, from the higher parts to waterlogged landfills at the mouth of Sarno. They invite you to walk the streets amidst the traces of regulation issued in municipal law and the free initiative of those who built and maintained the sidewalks. The graffiti and paintings allow us to take a tour specially designed to understand the tastes and devotions of the inhabitants of the Vesuvian cities. Thus, disparate themes researched separately may be presented here as a coherent work that initiates the visitor into Vesuvian studies. Each author gives us a particular tour of the specifics of the cities and villages of the Vesuvian area, its story, furniture, findings and the research process that has been developed over many years.
The five-hundred year occupation of Insula IX at Silchester has yielded a sequence of 87 whetstones, mostly tabular but some bar- or rod-shaped. These are described, illustrated and characterized with the help of thin-section microscopic petrography. The whetstones originated in many geological sources, not all of which can at present be identified. Whetstones from the earliest levels at Silchester are comparatively local in origin (sarsen, ironstone) or were made from discarded, imported milling stones (Quartz Conglomerate, Upper Old Red Sandstone). During the first and second centuries AD substantial number of bar-shaped whetstones manufactured in the Wroxeter manner from sandstones in the Weald Clay Formation (earliest Cretaceous) were imported into Silchester. Almost all the whetstones of the later Roman period are secondary in character produced from discarded roofing tiles of Brownstones (Lower Old Red Sandstone) and Pennant sandstone (later Upper Carboniferous) imported from the West Country. Small numbers of whetstones can be traced to the Portland Group (Upper Jurassic) and to the Lower and Upper Greensand Groups (Lower Cretaceous). The provision of sharpening stones to Silchester as a whole is estimated to run into many thousands.
In the late 4th century AD, the site of Kourion, Cyprus was destroyed by an earthquake that struck with little or no warning, trapping victims and objects where they lay. Although much of the site was reoccupied and rebuilt, some areas were not, thus providing a unique example of a moment truly frozen in time. This work presents the results of a comprehensive study of the architecture, stratigraphy, and material culture assemblage recovered from the Earthquake House, a multi-roomed domestic structure destroyed during this seismic event. The architectural analysis revealed a number of modifications to the structure that increased its overall size and subdivided its internal spaces, although their timing and reasons remain unknown at present. Study of the artifact assemblage provided significant insights into the processes surrounding the use, re-use, and discard of artifacts. This analysis identified numerous behaviors including consumable and non-consumable storage, storage of material for reuse and/or recycling, food preparation, and waste disposal, including a partial reconstruction of the domestic waste stream. This study produced a more nuanced model for understanding the distribution of artifacts in ancient domestic contexts and demonstrates that even in cases of near instantaneous destruction without significant disturbance, a wide variety of variables must be considered when examining the artifacts of domestic assemblages.
This work aimed to study the Roman lamps collected in Alcacova de Santarem. The set is formed by a total of 393 unpublished fragments, although some references to some complete lamps in archaeological reports. Given the high fragmentation of the set, was not easy his classification and interpretation. Chronologically, the lamps was dated between the last quarter of the second century BC and the beginning of the fifth century AD. However, the largest volume of lychnological imports is from the High Empire. After the early second century AD, Scallabis seems to suffer a reduction of economic purchase which may be due to several factors, symptom that also is reflected by the Roman lamps."
The combination of portrait statue, monumental support, and public lettering was considered emblematic of Roman public space even in antiquity. This book examines ancient Roman statues and their bases, tombs, dedicatory altars, and panels commemorating gifts of civic beneficence made by the Augustales, civic groups composed primarily of wealthy ex-slaves. Margaret L. Laird examines how these monuments functioned as protagonists in their built and social environments by focusing on archaeologically attested commissions made by the Augustales in Roman Italian towns. Integrating methodologies from art history, architectural history, social history, and epigraphy with archaeological and sociological theories of community, she considers how dedications and their accompanying inscriptions created webs of association and transformed places of display into sites of local history. Understanding how these objects functioned in ancient cities, the book argues, illuminates how ordinary Romans combined public lettering, honorific portraits, emperor worship, and civic philanthropy to express their communal identities. |
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