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 three centuries which followed the conquests of Alexander are perhaps the most thrilling of all periods of ancient history. This was an age of cultural globalization: in the third century BC, a single language carried you from the Rhone to the Indus. A Celt from the lower Danube could serve in the mercenary army of a Macedonian king ruling in Egypt, and a Greek philosopher from Cyprus could compare the religions of the Brahmins and the Jews on the basis of first-hand knowledge of both. Kings from Sicily to Tajikistan struggled to meet the challenges of ruling multi-ethnic states, and Greek city-states came together under the earliest federal governments known to history. The scientists of Ptolemaic Alexandria measured the circumference of the earth, while pioneering Greek argonauts explored the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic coast of Africa. Drawing on inscriptions, papyri, coinage, poetry, art, and archaeology Peter Thonemann opens up the history and culture of the vast Hellenistic world, from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the Roman conquest of the Ptolemaic kingdom (30 BC).

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.

This is the report of the excavation of an enigmatic site in South Gloucestershire, which contained a decorated cellar with a cruciform setting of channels beneath its floor, almost certainly of 'ritual' significance, and a very large bath-house which included a swimming pool some fourteen metres long. Both the cellar and the bath-house had painted wall plaster and the bath-house contained a small area of tessellated floor. No other rooms were decorated in any way. The site dates from the late 1st Century AD and there was no evidence of any earlier activity apart from a number of randomly distributed flints, mainly Mesolithic.

The Birth and Development of the Idealized Concept of Arcadia in the Ancient World for the first time brings together all the available evidence for this topic, from the Homeric period to the early Roman Empire, in one place. The evidence is both literary and visual and is considered in a chronological sequence. Thus the reader can follow the blossoming of the Arcadian dream through eight centuries. The ideological, political and philosophical background that forms the basis of this phenomenon is also outlined, and the contributions of poets, historians, philosophers, antiquarians, architects, sculptors and painters are duly considered. The book brings to light a treasure-trove of evidence, both well-known and obscure or fragmentary, filling a significant gap in the scholarly bibliography.

The recent crisis in the world of antiquities collecting has prompted scholars and the general public to pay more attention than ever before to the archaeological findspots and collecting histories of ancient artworks. This new scrutiny is applied to works currently on the market as well as to those acquired since (and despite) the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which aimed to prevent the trafficking in cultural property. When it comes to famous works that have been in major museums for many generations, however, the matter of their origins is rarely considered. Canonical pieces like the Barberini Togatus or the Fonseca bust of a Flavian lady appear in many scholarly studies and virtually every textbook on Roman art. But we have no more certainty about these works' archaeological contexts than we do about those that surface on the market today. This book argues that the current legal and ethical debates over looting, ownership and cultural property have distracted us from the epistemological problems inherent in all (ostensibly) ancient artworks lacking a known findspot, problems that should be of great concern to those who seek to understand the past through its material remains.

The research reported in this monograph follows on directly from the findings that were reported in BAR 492, in which, among many other discoveries, the author recognised that the courses of both Roman Dere Street and Hadrian's Wall had been underpinned by frameworks of long-distance alignments. Stimulated by the detection of several more of these alignments across northern England by another researcher, Robert Entwistle, the author, who is a chartered engineer as well as an archaeologist, seeks to examine why, how, and when such long-distance alignments may have been laid out. Consideration is then given to the processes by which some of these alignments seem subsequently to have been adopted to help set out the courses of Roman roads. These processes are shown, at times, to have been far from straightforward, and this appears to offer an explanation for many of the minor divergences that Roman roads, as built, take from such alignments in practice. The courses of four well-known Roman roads in Northern England are then examined in detail to diagnose the processes by which they are likely to have been planned and laid out. These roads are the Western Main Road from Manchester northwards through the Lune Gorge, the Maiden Way, the network of cross-country roads from Kirkham to Aldborough, and the Devil's Causeway.

In an expansion of his 2012 Robson Classical Lectures, Clifford Ando examines the connection between the nature of the Latin language and Roman thinking about law, society, and empire. Drawing on innovative work in cognitive linguistics and anthropology, Roman Social Imaginaries considers how metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and ideation helped create the structures of thought that shaped the Roman Empire as a political construct. Beginning in early Roman history, Ando shows how the expansion of the empire into new territories led the Romans to develop and exploit Latin's extraordinary capacity for abstraction. In this way, laws and institutions invented for use in a single Mediterranean city-state could be deployed across a remarkably heterogeneous empire. Lucid, insightful, and innovative, the essays in Roman Social Imaginaries constitute some of today's most original thinking about the power of language in the ancient world.

The study explores patterns of interconnections between the coastal zone of the Corinthian Gulf and its surrounding hinterlands, between c. 600 and 300 B.C. Archaeological remains point to a substantial expansion in site numbers during this period, and the growth of identifiable central place sites in connection with coast-hinterland routes. Movements through these routes are further traced through both the material record and written sources. Coastal areas acted as important gateways for exchange systems linked to diverse hinterland environments and economies, and interaction patterns emphasise the importance of microregional connectivity in regards to economic and political dynamics.

The island of Melos in the Cyclades has a rich archaeology having played an important part in prehistory and throughout history. But owing to its unique geology it is also home to a wide array of rocks and minerals which have been exploited since the first human occupation of the island. This book is about the archaeology of the minerals industries of Melos in antiquity. The localities of their extraction and the type of processing they may have been subject to have been reconstructed on the basis of archaeological evidence. At the site of Aghia Kyriaki, SE Melos, there is evidence for large-scale exploitation of alum in the Late Roman period, its processing in large shallow vessels and packaging into amphorae; there is also evidence for the use of geothermal energy there and in neighbouring Palaeochori Bay; there are phreatic explosions near the sulphur mines at Fyrlingos; finally, there are the egkoila of Melos, the rock-cut cavities carved out of the island's ubiquitous white altered volcanic rock which gave rise to its minerals. The ancient texts and epigraphic evidence also take centre stage, depicting the nature of Melian society from the momentous events of 416BC to the Late Roman period. This book will have wide appeal to archaeologists and historians, to geologists and mineralogists and to all those interested in the island or just visiting it.

MOLA (formerly Northamptonshire Archaeology), has undertaken intermittent archaeological work within Bozeat Quarry over a twenty-year period from 1995-2016 covering an area of 59ha. The earliest archaeological features lay in the extreme northern area where a Bronze Age to Iron Age cremation burial was possibly contemporary with an adjacent late Bronze Age/early Iron Age pit alignment. In the middle to late Iron Age a settlement was established at the southern part of the site over a c170m by 150m area. It was a well organised farmstead, mostly open in plan with two roundhouses, routeway, enclosures, boundary ditches and pits. In the early 1st century AD, cAD 30, two separate settlements lay c0.5km apart. The former southern Iron Age farmstead had perhaps shifted location c150m to the north-west and a there was new farmstead to the north. Both settlements were located on a west facing slope of a valley side and were sited on sands and gravels at between 64m and 66m aOD. The Northern Settlement was only occupied for about 150 years and was involved in pastoral farming, but local coarseware pottery production was of some importance with a group of 12 pottery kilns dated to the middle to late 1st century AD. This is seemingly the largest number of pottery kilns from a single settlement of this period yet found in the regionally important Upper Nene Valley pottery producing area. The Southern Settlement was larger and continued to the end of the Roman period. In this area there was a notable scatter of 12 Iron Age and 1st century AD Roman coins as well as 24 contemporary brooches found over an area measuring c170m by c130m. This collection of finds may suggest the presence of a shrine or temple located in the area. It is perhaps significant that in 1964 directly to the west of the excavation, a middle Roman round stone building was found, perhaps an associated shrine. Within the excavation area in the latest Iron Age to early Roman period there was a possible roundhouse, a large oval enclosure and a field system. The latter largely related to pastoral farming including areas where paddocks were linked to routeways suggesting significant separation of livestock had occurred. Four cremation burials, including one deposited in a box, and an inhumation lay in three locations. Pastoral farming was a significant activity throughout the Roman period with enclosures, paddocks and linked routeways uncovered. In the late 2nd to 4th century there were two stone buildings and a stone malt oven at the extreme western extent of the site, within 50m to the east of the probably contemporary shrine recorded in 1964. There was minor evidence of early to middle Saxon occupation within the area of the former middle to late Iron Age settlement. No structures were found, although a few pits may date to this period and mark short stay visits. A small cemetery of five individuals respected the former Roman field system and probably dated to the late 6th to 7th centuries. The burials included a decapitation and a burial with a knife and a buckle. The site was then not re-occupied and became part of the fields of Bozeat medieval and post-medieval settlements.

This volume contains detailed information about 63 sites and shows, amongst other things, that the viticulture of the western delta was significant in Ptolemaic and Roman periods, as well as a network of interlocking sites, which connected with the rest of Egypt, Alexandria, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean. Far from being a border area - as perhaps it had been in the Pharaonic period - the west Delta network exerted an important economic production influence over a very wide area. In addition, with access to medieval and later Arabic sources, Kenawi's discussion of the sites has an added dimension not found in the work of western scholars. Mohamed Kenawi's meticulous and determined work has resulted in an improved set of data for the Delta and shown how its potential can be tapped.

Drawing on written records, coins, inscriptions and other archaeological evidence, the authors present a detailed picture of how the Roman cavalryman and his horse were equipped.

The present collection refers not only to the remains of the pagan religion of Greeks and Romans, but also to those of Edomites, Nabataeans and Itureans in the Hellenistic and Roman period. Furthermore, it also includes motifs which are found in Jewish archaeological contexts with a pagan content or a mythological origin (such as the Beth She'arim sarcophagi and the synagogue lintels and mosaics), as well as motifs of an obviously mythological origin (such as the widespread use of the vine and the wine motifs) which appear in the mosaic floors of Jewish synagogues and Christian churches.

This study explores the insights into provincial Roman societies that can be gained from the archaeological evidence for burial practice, focused on Britain, drawing on wider work in the archaeology of death. It evaluates the distribution of burial evidence and the factors that condition it, including, it is argued, archaeologically invisible burial continuing from the Iron Age. It reviews the archaeological evidence for cremation rituals and explores how social status was expressed through burial, primarily in case studies from south-east England. Funerary ritual was a dynamic arena for asserting social status throughout the Roman period, taking forms that can be read as both 'traditional' and 'Roman'. The setting of burial is assessed to establish spatial relationships between living and dead in town and country and the distribution of funerary display across the landscape.

This book presents aspects of research on the archaeological investigations at the multi-period site of Priniatikos Pyrgos and surrounding area. Incorporating the Vrokastro Survey Project, the Istron Geoarchaeological Project, the Priniatikos Pyrgos Excavation Project and other researches, this volume presents interdisciplinary case-studies that deal with domestic, technological and mortuary practices at the site and how these relate to settlement and resource exploitation in the surrounding landscape. This is set within its environmental context at the local and regional levels, assessing both long term processes and shorter term events. The visual representation of materials and settlement complexity are approached using a combination of established and novel digital methods.