A common belief is that systems of writing are committed to transparency and precise records of sound. The target is the language behind such marks. Readers, not viewers, matter most, and the most effective graphs largely record sound, not meaning. But what if embellishments mattered deeply - if hidden writing, slow to produce, slow to read, played as enduring a role as more accessible graphs? What if meaningful marks did service alongside records of spoken language? This book, a compilation of essays by global authorities on these subjects, zeroes in on hidden writing and alternative systems of graphic notation. Essays by leading scholars explore forms of writing that, by their formal intricacy, deflect attention from language. The volume also examines graphs that target meaning directly, without passing through the filter of words and the medium of sound. The many examples here testify to human ingenuity and future possibilities for exploring enriched graphic communication.

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.

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.

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).

This book investigates the archaeological evidence for crafts and production in early medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100, with a particular focus on the extensive excavated evidence from rural secular and ecclesiastical settlements. The volume firstly provides an overview of the social and ideological contexts of crafts and technologies in early Ireland. It then outlines the extant evidence specifically for iron-working, non-ferrous metalworking, glass, enamel and millefiori, bone, antler and horn, and stone working, and characterises each craft practice in terms of scale, outputs and implications for society. Tables provide additional information on wood craft and pottery. The book then provides a detailed review of the use of different materials in dress and ornament, touches on cloth and textile production, and explores how social identities were performed through objects and material practices. The book then provides a voluminous site gazetteer accounting for all evidence for craft and production on hundreds of early medieval settlements, with numerous tables of data, site plans, artefact drawings and photographs and an extensive bibliography. The book is based on the work of the Early Medieval Archaeology Project (EMAP), which was funded through the Irish Heritage Council and Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht's INSTAR programme, a collaborative research project carried out by University College Dublin and Queens University Belfast which reviewed all archaeological excavations in Ireland between c.1930-2012. This particular book, building on EMAP's previous studies of dwellings and settlements, and agriculture and economy, provides the baseline for a generation of studies of early medieval crafts and production in Ireland in its northwest European contexts.

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 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.

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.

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 papers published here are developed from presentations made at a Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies Conference entitled 'The Anglo-Saxons in their World' held in 2010. An eclectic collection of studies drawing on Latin, Old English and Old Norse texts, artefacts and archaeology, papers are groups into five themed sections: 'Chosen people in their place'; 'Life in Anglo-Saxon England'; 'Beyond the shore'; 'The Mediterranean and beyond'; and 'The North, The Universe', though other connections may be found. Two papers focus largely on early archaeology (Battaglia, Trzaska-Nartowski and Riddler) and King's study is also of an archaeological find. A majority of papers relate to the intellectual climate of the early Christian period in England (Larpi, Higham, Grocock, King, Cesario, Barker and to some extent Sebo). Several take evidence from later Anglo-Saxon manuscripts (Scragg, Hill, Frederick, Sebo). Fafinski attempts a chronological sweep beginning in the Roman period, and Banham from the seventh century to the eleventh.

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.

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.

This volume presents nine articles (of which five are based on papers presented in the session Utilization of Brick in the Medieval Period Production, Construction, Destruction held at the EAA meeting in Helsinki in 2012) with topics ranging from applying natural scientific research methods such as OSL, AM and hXRF analyses, to the study of early brickmaking processes, to recent excavation discoveries and archaeological investigations of brick use in northern parts of continental Europe including the British Isles, Finland and Sweden."

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.