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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region > European archaeology
The second edition of The Romans: An Introduction is a concise, readable, and comprehensive survey of the civilization of ancient Rome. It covers more than 1200 years of political and military history, including many of the famous, and infamous, personalities who featured in them. Further, it describes the religions, society, and daily life of the Romans, and their literature, art, architecture, and technology, illustrated by extracts in new translations from Latin and Greek authors of the times. This second edition contains extensive additional and revised material designed to enhance the value of the book to students especially of classical or Roman civilization, Roman history, or elementary Latin, as well as to general readers and students of other disciplines for whom an understanding of the civilization and literature of Rome is desirable. In particular, the chapter on religions has been expanded, as have the sections on the role of women and on Roman social divisions and cultural traditions. There is more, too, on the diversity and administration of the empire at different periods, on changes in the army, and on significant figures of the middle and later imperial eras. New features include a glossary of Latin terms and timelines. Maps have been redrawn and new ones included along with extra illustrations, and reading lists have been revised and updated. The book now has its own dedicated website at www.the-romans.co.uk, which is packed full of additional resources.
From the sixteenth century, classical texts enabled Scottish and English authors and artists to imagine the character and appearance of their forebears and to consider the relevance of these ideas to their contemporaries. Richard Hingley's study crosses traditional academic boundaries by exploring sources usually separately addressed by historians, classicists, archaeologists, and geographers, to provide a new perspective on the origin of English and Scottish identity. His book is the first full exploration of these issues to cover such a long period in the development of British society and to relate ideas derived from Roman sources to the development of empire, while also placing ideas of origin in a European context. It is illustrated throughout with artefact drawings, site plans, and photographs.
Greece in the Making 1200 479 BC is an accessible and comprehensive account of Greek history from the end of the Bronze Age to the Classical Period. The first edition of this book broke new ground by acknowledging that, barring a small number of archaic poems and inscriptions, the majority of our literary evidence for archaic Greece reported only what later writers wanted to tell, and so was subject to systematic selection and distortion. This book offers a narrative which acknowledges the later traditions, as traditions, but insists that we must primarily confront the contemporary evidence, which is in large part archaeological and art historical, and must make sense of it in its own terms. In this second edition, as well as updating the text to take account of recent scholarship and re-ordering, Robin Osborne has addressed more explicitly the weaknesses and unsustainable interpretations which the first edition chose merely to pass over. He now spells out why this book features no rise of the polis and no colonization, and why the treatment of Greek settlement abroad is necessarily spread over various chapters. Students and teachers alike will particularly appreciate the enhanced discussion of economic history and the more systematic treatment of issues of gender and sexuality.
Spectacle and Display: A Modern History of Britain's Roman Mosaic Pavements is the first narrative to explore responses and attitudes to mosaics, not just at the point of discovery but during their subsequent history. It is a field which has received scant attention in the literature and provides a compelling insight into the agency of these spectacular remains. Analysis shows how mosaics have influenced and have been instrumental in the commodification of the past, the development of conservation practice and promoting the rise of the archaeologist. 'The most spectacular remains of Roman Britain' is a familiar description applied to the discovery of mosaics floors. They are exceptional symbols of Roman life in the province of Britannia and each new discovery is eagerly reported in the press. Yet one estimate suggested that 75% of all known mosaics from Britain have been lost, and they are commonly displayed out of context, wall mounted as artwork in museums and exhibitions and far from their role as floors. This is a contested narrative in which spectacle and survival, conservation and fine art, ownership and curation provide the discourse and texts of contemporary attitudes.
This all embracing survey of Pompeii provides the most comprehensive survey of the region available. With contributions by well-known experts in the field, this book studies not only Pompeii, but also for the first time the buried surrounding cities of Campania. The World of Pompeii includes the latest understanding of the region, based on the up-to-date findings of recent archaeological work. Accompanied by a CD with the most detailed map of Pompeii so far, this book is instrumental in studying the city in the ancient world and is an excellent source book for students of this fascinating and tragic geographic region.
Hellenistic Alexandria: Celebrating 24 Centuries' presents the proceedings of a conference held at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, on December 13-15, 2017, and includes high-level dialogues and philosophical discussions between international experts on Hellenistic Alexandria. The goal was to celebrate the 24 centuries which have elapsed since its foundation and the beginning of the Library and the Museum of Alexandria. The conference was divided into two parts, to include in the first part archaeology, history, philosophy, literature, art, culture and legal issues and in the second part science, medicine, technology and environment. A total of 28 original and peer-reviewed articles point to the importance of the brilliantly-original ideas that emerged during the Hellenistic age and the curious modernity of the whole atmosphere of the time. The range of presented topics covers a variety of new data on the foundation of Alexandria to comparison between Ptolemaic Alexandria and Ptolemaic Greece through philosophy, culture and drama to the forgotten revolution of science, medicine and the prevailing climatological and geophysical conditions throughout the Hellenistic Period. The conference and its proceedings were co-sponsored by the arianna V. Vardinoyannis Foundation, the Acropolis Museum, the Alexandria Center for Hellenistic Studies at Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Mariolopoulos-Kanaginis Foundation for the Environmental Sciences. The Publication also celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Alexandria Center for Hellenistic Studies, a joint collaboration between the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Vardinoyannis Foundation and the University of Alexandria. Scholars from around the world follow the Center's programme in various specialisations, ranging from historyliterature- art, to archaeology and architecture-philosophy, and science.
In medieval Britain people wore jewellery made of gold if they were rich, of base metal if they were poor; they might hoard their property, or give it away to guarantee that they would have friends when needed; and many of them paid tax on their possessions. In Gold and Gilt, Pots and Pins, David Hinton reviews the significance of artefacts in this period. From elaborate gold jewellery to clay pots, he looks at what possessions meant to people at every level of society. His emphasis is on their reasons for acquiring, keeping, displaying, and disposing of the things that they wore and had in their houses. Drawing on a wide range of physical and documentary evidence, including objects from archaeological excavations and written sources, he argues that the significance of material culture has not been properly taken into account in explanations of social change, particularly in the later Middle Ages. He also explores how identity was created, and how social division was expressed and reinforced. An overall review that looks at evidence in Scotland and Wales as well as in England, this book ranges chronologically from the end of the Roman rule of Britain to the introduction of the new modes and practices that are usually termed 'Renaissance', marked by the changes in religion. Profusely illustrated, the author provides a fascinating and illuminating window into the society of the Middle Ages.
This all embracing survey of Pompeii provides the most comprehensive survey of the region available. With contributions by well-known experts in the field, this book studies not only Pompeii, but also - for the first time - the buried surrounding cities of Campania. The World of Pompeii includes the latest understanding of the region, based on the up-to-date findings of recent archaeological work. Accompanied by a CD with the most detailed map of Pompeii so far, this book is instrumental in studying the city in the ancient world and is an excellent source book for students of this fascinating and tragic geographic region.
In this book, Marianne Hem Eriksen explores the social organization of Viking Age Scandinavia through a study of domestic architecture, and in particular, the doorway. A highly charged architectural element, the door is not merely a practical, constructional solution. Doors control access, generate movement, and demark boundaries, yet also serve as potent ritual objects. For this study, Eriksen analyzes and interprets the archaeological data of house remains from Viking Age Norway, which are here synthesized for the first time. Using social approaches to architecture, she demonstrates how the domestic space of the Viking household, which could include masters and slaves, wives and mistresses, children and cattle, was not neutral. Quotidian and ritual interactions with, through, and orchestrated by doorways prove to be central to the production of a social world in the Viking Age. Eriksen's book challenges the male-dominated focus of research on the Vikings and expands research questions beyond topics of seaborne warriors, trade, and craft.
Walking served as an occasion for the display of power and status in ancient Rome, where great men paraded with their entourages through city streets and elite villa owners strolled with friends in private colonnades and gardens. In this book-length treatment of the culture of walking in ancient Rome, Timothy O'Sullivan explores the careful attention which Romans paid to the way they moved through their society. He employs a wide range of literary, artistic and architectural evidence to reveal the crucial role that walking played in the performance of social status, the discourse of the body and the representation of space. By examining how Roman authors depict walking, this book sheds new light on the Romans themselves - not only how they perceived themselves and their experience of the world, but also how they drew distinctions between work and play, mind and body, and Republic and Empire.
This volume is the second in a series of five on the Insula (city block) of the Menander at Pompeii. The first (on the structures) and the fourth (on the silver treasure) have already been published; the third, on the objects, and the fifth, on the graffiti, are in preparation. The Insula of the Menander, approximately 3500 sq. m. in area, derives its name from the House of the Menander, one of the best-known dwellings of the ancient city. This was evidently the property of one of Pompeii's leading citizens. Renowned for its architectural grandeur and for the hoard of 110 pieces of silver plate found in a cellar, it also yielded room upon room of splendid wall-paintings and mosaic pavements, ranging in date from the first century BC to the eve of the eruption of AD 79. In addition to this dominant house, the block contains several smaller houses - notably the House of the Lovers and the House of the Craftsman - most of which contain further paintings and pavements of interest. The present volume publishes these decorations in full for the first time. Its importance lies in the fact that it covers the whole block, rather than concentrating upon isolated houses (as most previous volumes have done). This enables the reader not only to look at questions of chronology and iconography room by room and house by house, but also to observe broad patterns of taste and social differentiation within a particular neighbourhood of Pompeii.
The site of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, was rediscovered and partially excavated by C. T. Newton's expedition in 1865-6, and has been cleared completely by the Danish Archaeological Expedition to Bodrum (1966-76). Most of the fragments of relief sculpture have not been published before. The larger pieces, including slabs formerly incorporated in the Castle at Bodrum, are well known, but new, detailed photographs are published here for the first time. The Introduction includes a history of the site and the reliefs, with a new hypothesis on their location in the castle, a critique of Newton's accounts of his excavation, and a definitive rebuttal of many attempts made over the past century to attribute the reliefs to the sculptors named by Pliny and Vitruvius as responsible for decorating the four sides of the building, attempts now seen to be mistaken in method and misleading in results.
A large gap exists in the literature of ancient numismatics between general works intended for collectors and highly specialized studies addressed to numismatists. Indeed, there is hardly anything produced by knowledgeable numismatists that is easily accessible to the academic community at large or the interested lay reader. The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage will fill this gap by providing a systematic overview of the major coinages of the classical world. The handbook begins with a general introduction by volume editor William E. Metcalf followed by an article establishing the history and role of scientific analysis in ancient numismatics. The subsequent thirty-two chapters, all written by an international group of distinguished scholars, cover a vast geography and chronology, beginning with the first evidence of coins in Western Asia Minor in the seventh century BCE and continuing up to the transformation of coinage at the end of the Roman Empire. In addition to providing the essential background and current research questions of each of the major coinages, the handbook also includes articles on the application of numismatic evidence to the disciplines of archaeology, economic history, art history, and ancient history. With helpful appendices, a glossary of specialized terms, indices of mints, persons, and general topics, and nearly 900 halftone illustrations, The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage will be an indispensable resource for scholars and students of the classical world, as well as a stimulating reference for collectors and interested lay readers.
While there have been many studies devoted to the major heroes and heroines of Homeric epic, among them Achilles, Odysseus, and Helen, the figure of Menelaus has remained notably overlooked in this strand of scholarship. Menelaus in the Archaic Period is the first book-length study of the Homeric character, taking a multidisciplinary approach to his depiction in archaic Greek poetry, art, and cult through detailed analysis of ancient literary, visual, and material evidence. The volume is divided into two parts, the first of which examines the portrayal of Menelaus in the Homeric poems as a unique 'personality' with an integral role to play in each narrative, as depicted through typical patterns of speech and action and through intertextual allusion. The second part explores his representation both in other poetry of the archaic period - including lyric poetry and Simonides' 'Plataea elegy ' - and also archaic art and local Sparta cult, drawing on the literary, archaeological, and inscriptional evidence for the cult of Menelaus with Helen at Therapne. The depiction of Menelaus in archaic art is a particular focal point: Chapter 4 provides a methodology for the interpretation of heroic narrative on archaic Greek vases through iconography and inscriptions and establishes his conventional visual 'identity' on black figure Athenian vases, while an annotated catalogue of images details those that fall outside the 'norm'. Menelaus emerges from this comprehensive study as a unique and likeable character whose relationship with Helen was a popular theme in both epic poetry and vase painting, but one whose portrayal evinced a significant narrative range, with an array of continuities and differences in how he was represented by the Greeks, not only within the archaic period but also in comparison to classical Athens.
This is the first ever documented study of the 1,035 identifiable Greek city states (poleis) of the Archaic and Classical periods (c.650-325 BC). Previous studies of the Greek polis have focused on Athens and Sparta, and the result has been a view of Greek society dominated by Sophokles', Plato's, and Demosthenes' view of what the polis was. This study includes descriptions of Athens and Sparta, but its main purpose is to explore the history and organization of the thousand other city states. The main part of the book is a regionally organized inventory of all identifiable poleis covering the Greek world from Spain to the Caucasus and from the Crimea to Libya. This inventory is the work of 47 specialists, and is divided into 46 chapters, each covering a region. Each chapter contains an account of the region, a list of second-order settlements, and an alphabetically ordered description of the poleis. This description covers such topics as polis status, territory, settlement pattern, urban centre, city walls and monumental architecture, population, military strength, constitution, alliance membership, colonization, coinage, and Panhellenic victors. The first part of the book is a description of the method and principles applied in the construction of the inventory and an analysis of some of the results to be obtained by a comparative study of the 1,035 poleis included in it. The ancient Greek concept of polis is distinguished from the modern term `city state', which historians use to cover many other historic civilizations, from ancient Sumeria to the West African cultures absorbed by the nineteenth-century colonializing powers. The focus of this project is what the Greeks themselves considered a polis to be.
When the Roman tourist Pausanias visited Corinth around A.D. 160, he saw many shrines and buildings high up to the south of the city, on the slopes of Acrocorinth. This booklet describes excavations at one of these, the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone (Kore). The details of religious rites revealed are of particular interest since the cult of the two goddesses, also celebrated at Eleusis, is one of the most mysterious in antiquity, and no literary testimony exists to explain what may have happened behind the high walls. Terracotta dolls, ritual meals of pork, and miniature models of food-filled platters hint at a vigorous religious tradition associated with human and agricultural fertility.
This book tells the transnational history of Portuguese communities in Canada and the United States against the backdrop of the Cold War, the American Civil Rights movement, the Portuguese Colonial War, and Canadian multiculturalism. It considers the ethnic, racial, class, gender, linguistic, regional, and generational permutations of "Portuguese" diaspora from both a transnational and comparative perspective. Besides showing that diasporas and nations can be co-dependent, This Pilgrim Nation counters the common notion that hybrid diasporic identities are largely benign and empowering by revealing how they can perpetuate asymmetrical power relations.
Imprisoned in 1849 for organising a Carbonari cell among the workers at Pompeii, numismatist and archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli (1823 96) was eventually appointed Director of Excavations, as well as Professor of Archaeology at Naples, in 1860. He introduced systematic excavation to the site and meticulous record-keeping, including the creation of a general map and a 1:100 model, as well as the use of plaster casts to capture the forms of ancient bodies. Published in 1875, as Fiorelli left Naples to take up the position of Director General of Italian Antiquities and Fine Arts, this guide, in Italian, gives a description of Pompeii ordered by region, insula, and building - a system devised by Fiorelli and still in use today. As such, the work illuminates the development of modern archaeological methods and the history of this remarkable site.
Was the fall of Rome a great catastrophe that cast the West into
darkness for centuries to come? Or, as scholars argue today, was
there no crisis at all, but simply a peaceful blending of
barbarians into Roman culture, an essentially positive
transformation?
The excavation of settlements has transformed our understanding of life in north-west Europe during the early Middle Ages, a period for which written sources are scarce. This is the first overview and synthesis of the extensive and rapidly growing body of archaeological evidence for early medieval buildings, settlements, farming, craft production, and trade among the rural communities of this region. Helena Hamerow places the archaeological findings in their historical context and examines their significance for Anglo-Saxon England.
This book investigates how varying practices of gender shaped people's lives and experiences across the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Exploring how gender was linked with other socio-political characteristics such as wealth, status, age and life-stage as well as with individual choices, in the very different world of classical antiquity, is fascinating in its own right. But later perceptions of ancient literature and art have profoundly influenced the development of gendered ideologies and hierarchies in the West, and influenced the study of gender itself. Questioning how best to untangle and interpret difficult sources is a key aim. This book exploits a wide range of archaeological, material cultural, visual, spatial, demographic, epigraphical and literary evidence to consider households, families, life-cycles and the engendering of time, legal and political institutions, beliefs about bodies, sex and sexuality, gender and space, the economic implications of engendered practices, and gender in religion and magic.
Incorporating all of the latest archaeological and historical discoveries, ten leading international historians and archaeologists provide a fresh and dynamic picture of Italy's history from the end of the Roman Western Empire in 476 to the end of the tenth century.
This book describes and analyses the development of the Roman West from Gibraltar to the Rhine, using primarily the extensive body of published archaeological evidence rather than the textual evidence underlying most other studies. It situates this development within a longer-term process of change, proposing the later second century rather than the 'third-century crisis' as the major turning-point, although the latter had longer-term consequences owing to the rise in importance of military identities. Elsewhere, more 'traditional' forms of settlement and display were sustained, to which was added the vocabulary of Christianity. The longer-term rhythms are also central to assessing the evidence for such aspects as rural settlement and patterns of economic interaction. The collapse of Roman imperial authority emphasised trends such as militarisation and regionalisation along with economic and cultural disintegration. Indicators of 'barbarian/Germanic' presence are reassessed within such contexts and the traditional interpretations questioned and alternatives proposed.
This is the first study in nearly seventy years of one of the largest known hoards of Roman silver plate, found in the House of the Menander, one of the finest houses in the centre of Pompeii, buried in AD 79. It is the only surviving complete Roman dinner service for eight people, belonging to a rich citizen of Pompeii who was probably a local magistrate.
Although they do not survive intact, composite statues of gold and ivory were the most acclaimed art form in classical antiquity. Greek and Roman authors make their religious, social, and political importance clear. This study, the first to address the topic as a whole since 1815, presents not only literary references to lost works, but also representations of them in other media, and more importantly, fragmentary survivals that elucidate the techniques employed in their production and the quality achieved by their creators. |
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