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 study uses place-names to suggest the major routes in use in early medieval England. Many Roman roads existing by the fifth century are known. Some fourteenth century routes in existence can be deduced from the Gough map of c.1360, and seventeenth century routes from Ogilby's road atlas of 1675. Between the fifth and fourteenth centuries there is little information about routes except in scattered charter boundary references. Here it is suggested that this gap can be partially filled using place-name evidence. Certain names such as Stratton, Drayton and Compton occur consistently by Roman roads and a few other old routes but rarely elsewhere. A string of such names along a route suggests that it was in use. Hythe and Eaton indicate waterways in use. The needs of travellers, possible destinations and how such a naming system may have arisen is considered.

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 follows the study of the ecclesiastical geology of almost all Anglo-Saxon religious sites throughout England. There, it proved possible to both understand and distinguish clearly obvious patterns in the use of stonework, to determine the use and value of specific rock types, and to illustrate diagnostic features which could be used to identify building of that period. Subsequent studies of ecclesiastical sites, in Scotland and the Scottish Islands, the Isle of Man and Ireland expanded the value of the English studies by revealing closely analogous examples of the same indicative features. Beyond the domain of the Anglo-Saxons but of the same age, they were shown to follow a fashion; to this fashion the name 'Patterned' was applied.

A Landscape of Conflict? Rural Fortifications in the Argolid (400-146 BC) is the first systematic study of Late Classical and Hellenistic rural fortifications in the territories of ancient Argos and the city-states of the Argolic Akte (northeastern Peloponnese). Based on one of the largest regional corpora of Greek fortified sites to date, the volume investigates the function of rural fortifications by placing them in the context of their surrounding landscape. This approach - combining 'traditional' methods of ancient history and landscape archaeology with GIS-based data analyses - helps to readdress the long-standing tension between 'military-strategic' and 'non-military' research agendas in Greek fortification studies, and highlights that Classical and Hellenistic rural fortifications are neither a priori fortified farmsteads nor parts of military-strategic networks of territorial defence. Instead, rural fortifications emerge in this monograph as multifunctional and multifaceted sites, which open a new window into different forms of 'formal' and 'informal' conflict in the ancient countryside and bear witness to a remarkable degree of local motivation and agency. The study thus demonstrates how ancient fortifications can provide an unexpected and so far much underappreciated opportunity for writing local or regional Greek histories - political and military as well as social and economic - from archaeological sources.

This volume contains papers presented at the international conference Networks in the Hellenistic world according to the pottery in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond which took place at the universities of Cologne and Bonn 23rd 26th February 2011. The organizers, all specialists in Hellenistic pottery of different regions in the Eastern Mediterranean, invited participants working from the Adriatic Sea to Asia Minor and up to Central Asia to consider their material according to the common platform of networks and exchange systems. Among the questions addressed by the contributors are: What is the character of the trade relations between political centres? What is the nature of economic development in minor cities and rural areas? Are some regions cut off from trade routes and thus characterised by a more restricted spectrum of local pottery? Which places traded their pottery globally? Whose pottery was copied, and by whom? Can the repertoire of forms reflect the adoption of specific customs?"

The city of Pompeii, or Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeiorum, the stage of the action that takes place here, is seen by the author from the perspective of its integration in the macro-economic system of the Roman Empire. The characters that take the centre stage here are slaves, freed slaves and free citizens of low social status, distinguished from others by the place they occupy within relations of oppression and exploitation. In the pages that follow, the author brings the popular Pompeian soul to life, through its manifestations of love, sexuality, anguish and sadness. The work examines particular linguistic expression of popular Latin and, most specifically, through the graffiti written on the walls of a Roman colonial city, rendered there for the attention of the local community.

The Plague Cemetery of Alghero (Sardinia, Italy, 1582-1583) presents a bioarchaeological analysis of the individuals exhumed from the cemetery of Alghero, which is associated with the plague outbreak that ravaged the city in 1582-1583. This cemetery revealed a particular burial typology, consisting of long and narrow trenches, each containing multiple inhumations, which attests to a catastrophic event, such as an epidemic with high mortality in a short period of time. Given the rarity of human remains from epidemic contexts buried in trenches, the skeletal sample from Alghero represents valuable material. In fact, no other Italian plague cemeteries have been examined through a detailed bioarchaeological analysis, and the study thus serves as a model for future research. The author examines a series of parameters, starting from the demographic profile of the sample -181 individuals from 15 trenches - and taphonomic analysis, and then analysing stature, dental pathologies, stress indicators, degenerative joint disease, entheseal changes and other pathologies. The study is intended to illuminate a cross section of 16th century Sardinian society in a coastal city through a holistic view, which interweaves the documentary evidence for plague, funerary responses and the health status of the population. The main objective is therefore to shed light on a population which lived during a period of plague, revealing lifestyles, activity patterns and illnesses and providing a significant contribution to the bioarchaeology, palaeopathology, and archaeology of the Italian territory.

Old St Peter's Basilica in Rome stood for over eleven centuries until it was demolished to make room for today's church on the same Vatican site. Its last eyewitness, Maffeo Vegio, explained to the Roman hierarchy how revival of the papacy, whose prestige after the exile to Avignon had been diminished, was inseparable from a renewed awareness of the primacy of Peter's Church. To make his case, Vegio wrote a history founded on credible written and visual evidence. The text guides us through the building's true story in its material reality, undistorted by medieval guides. This was its living memory and a visualization of the continuity of Roman history into modern times. This volume makes available the first complete English translation of Vegio's text. Accompanied by full-color digital reconstructions of the Basilica as it appeared in Vegio's day.

Few people are aware that shortly after 1456, when Athens yielded without fighting to the bitter end, she had become one of the bigger Balkan towns within the Ottoman Empire. The limited area confined within the boundaries of the late Roman fortification walls soon developed into a town of thirty-six mahalles. A thorough analysis of the town/country relationship within the Ottoman feudal system of production in general, and as related to Athens in particular, reveals the dynamic conditions of urban development. Athens shared many of the characteristics of prosperity based on specific modes of appropriation of surpluses and patterns of division of labour between town and countryside. Strange though it might seem, it was only after the middle of the 17th century, when land-tenure conditions changed and Athens was heading towards decline, that an 'Ottoman' character as such could be detected in its built environment, although Christians still strongly outnumbered Muslim citizens. That being so, the presence at that time in Athens of representatives of the European Enlightenment, hypnotized by the myth of its artistic and cultural treasures, did not affect the general conditions of development. In the 1830s, Athens, by that time a provincial town of secondary importance, was 'ordered' to stride from feudalism to capitalism, to transform itself into a modern capital city of a new-born state. The shift from a small town under Ottoman rule to the modern city of the Hellenic Kingdom implied the quick transformation of belonging to a community (understood in terms of sharing common cultural characteristics) to a sense of being a member of a society (understood as an institution, as an externality demanding obedience). The amorphous masses of the medieval quarters that had arranged themselves so that unity within variety was established, where each particular architectural entity retained its meaning in so far as it was experienced as part of the whole urban fabric, had to give way to the early 19th-century planning environment, conceived more or less as a series of autonomous architectural identities understood only within a specific urban complex. It was not easy for Athens to cross the 'line' in 1834. The rejection of the first plan should not be naively understood as an urban restructuring triggering the virulent dissent of those Athenian landowners who detected threats to their vested interests. A violent break with the past was necessary so that new compositional stratagems could be implemented. But ever since Athens became a capital city, the pendulum of its history swung dramatically between tradition and modernism, not least because nationalism kept propagating an idealistic vision of an historical continuum that ran from the glorious ancient past down to the euphoria of the modern Greek state. Although Athens did make steady steps towards becoming a 'modern', 'European-like' city, comprehensive planning and centralized control of public works, as they had been essayed in central and western European cities in the second half of the 19th century, were totally incompatible with the build-as-you-please practice foisted on the capital city of Greece. Architectural and urban analysis of Athens between 1456 and 1920 discloses the metamorphosis of a town to a city, experienced as an invigorating adventure through the meandering routes of history. This is what this book is about.

This monograph provides a comprehensive synthesis and discussion of the archaeology of early medieval settlement in Ireland. Drawing on both published and unpublished material, it sets out an interpretive, analytical text and a gazetteer of some 241 key early medieval settlements revealed through archaeological excavations. Analysis focuses on four major areas: early medieval houses and other buildings; settlement enclosures; agriculture as part of the wider settlement landscape; and crafts and industrial activities on early medieval settlements.

The main aim of this book is to provide a synthesis of all published research on sites of the Urnfield culture (c. 1300 BC - 750 BC) in continental Croatia. Using the basic division into settlements, cemeteries and hoards, the author concentrates on the analysis of the material culture following a typological-comparative method, while in the analysis of the finds from hoards a statistical method was used in order to show frequencies and distribution of certain types of items. Although the available data is scarce and includes a small number of sites that have not been excavated sufficiently, the study tries to obtain as complete a picture on the lifestyle of the people of the Urnfield culture in Croatia as

One Sunday evening in the summer of 2008, while prospecting on commercial land in the vicinity of the village of Warmington, situated on the summit of Edge Hill (south Warwickshire, England), a metal-detectorist saw a small silver disk on the surface. This was followed by the registration of a further two coins by his equipment, then others as he began a methodical survey of the area. After he had alerted the local Warmington Heritage Group to his discovery, the decision was taken to locate and mark the nucleus of the soundings being made and to leave further work to the following day. This revealed a spread of coins, at times up to fifty metres away from the original finds, but it was not till Tuesday that the nucleus itself was excavated, revealing a pot full of unstratified coins. Following cleaning, photographing, and initial identification, the hoard was deposited in the Warwickshire Museum pending arrangement of the necessary inquest in accordance with the Treasure Act. During this period additional coins came to light, bringing the total to 1146 specimens. Chronologically the hoard covers the period from 194/190 BC to AD 64,

This research takes an integrative approach to the study of Hellenistic cult and cultic practices in an important part of western Asia by employing a combination of archaeological, numismatic and historical evidence. Although any thorough investigation of Seleukid religion would prove illuminating in itself, this research uses religion as a lens through which to explore the processes of acculturation and rejection within a colonial context. It discusses the state attitude towards, and manipulation of, both Hellenic and indigenous beliefs and places this within a framework developed out of a series of case studies exploring evidence for religion at a regional level. The study outlines the development of religious practices and expression in the region which formed the birthplace of the modern world's three most influential monotheistic religions.

One of the most tenacious and long-running controversies regarding the origin and development of the late Anglo-Saxon town has been the nature and function of 'heterogeneous tenure', one of the defining characteristics of the Domesday borough. This refers to the basic division of the larger boroughs as described in Domesday Book into the customary burgesses or tenements which owed dues and obligations to the king alone, and the non-customary burgesses or tenements which were appurtenant to the various manors of tenants-in-chief of the shire (and sometimes neighbouring shires) to whom they paid rent and owed other dues and services. This present study outlines a preliminary model for the development of these rural-urban connections, based primarily on a reassessment of the evidence in Domesday Book and in earlier charters, where available, and the spatial relationships of the manors enumerated in it to their central boroughs, their neighbours, and to shire and other early boundaries, as well as to other features of the physical and historic landscape. This model is developed and tested by the analysis of evidence from several adjoining areas in central England - 1) Wiltshire (chapters 2 and 3); 2) Hampshire (chapter 4); 3) Warwickshire and south Staffordshire (chapter 5); 4) Gloucestershire (including the former Winchcombeshire) (chapter 6); 5) Worcestershire (chapter 7); and 6) Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire (chapters 10-12).

Resheph was quite a popular god in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC - especially in Syria - but during the 1st millennium his cult became extinct. Finally it was only maintained in several peripheral and isolated sites, such as in the Palmyra desert and in Cyprus. Maciej M. Munnich presents the written sources which mentioned Resheph and analyzes the features of Resheph's cult. He emphasizes that there is no confirmation for the theory that Resheph was a lord of the netherworld. Resheph was a belligerent, aggressive god who used diseases to attack people, but who could also heal. In Egypt, Resheph was originally venerated as the deity who supported the Pharaoh in battles, but then he was summoned mainly because of illness and everyday needs. In ancient Israel, Resheph was at first reduced to the level of a demonic assistant of Yahweh, but his name then became a common term, always however in reference to the character of the deity. Among the Hurrites, Resheph appeared as a divine guardian of trade. He was not treated as a solely harmful, dangerous god, as has been suggested in numerous previous studies.

This monograph examines the religious and mythological concepts of Zeus from prehistoric times until the Early Archaic period. The research was performed as an interdisciplinary study involving the evidence of the Homeric poems, archaeology, linguistics, as well as comparative Indo-European material. It is argued that Greek Zeus, as a god with certainly established Indo-European origins, was essentially a god of the open sky and the supposed progenitor of everything, a supreme, but not ruling deity; initially, he must have been distinct from the god of storms, who, for unknown reasons, completely disappeared from Greek religion and mythology by as early as the Late Bronze Age. From the time of Homer, Zeus-Father appeared as a storm-god, the autocratic ruler of the universe, and an offspring of elder deities, on the level of mythology. Such a concept does not correspond to the traditional Indo-European patterns and seems to have been formed under the influence of Near-Eastern concepts of the supreme almighty god, on the one hand, and the Cretan-Minoan concept of a young god/divine child, on the other. However, the Homeric concept of Zeus was adopted by his practising cults much later, only from the Late Archaic period.

This illustrated book introduces serious students of Anglo-Saxon culture to selected aspects of the realities of Anglo-Saxon life through reference to artefacts and textual sources. Everyday practices and processes are investigated, such as the exploitation of animals for clothing, meat, cheese and parchment; ships for travel, trade and transport; manufacturing processes of metalwork; textiles for dress and furnishing and the practicalities of living with illness or disability. Articles collected in this volume illuminate how an understanding of the material culture of the daily Anglo-Saxon world can inform reading and scholarship in Anglo-Saxon studies. Scholarly and practical material presented inform one another, making the book accessible to any reader seriously interested in England in the early Middle Ages.

A detailed study of the masonry defences of one England's most important Roman sites. Erected in c. 270 AD, the masonry walls of the Roman town of Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum; Hampshire, S. England) are part of the third system in a series of defensive works. They stand today to a height of almost 5m and are composed of up to seven lifts or stages, each consisting of a flint core and facing (now almost completely robbed away), capped by a string-course of large blocks and slabs that stretches across the full width (c. 3m) of the walls, formed of a wide variety of rock-types foreign to the district.

This volume combines diverse interests and methodologies with a single purpose: to give an overall picture of the new trends and perspectives currently used in the study of the epoch of Theodosius the Great and his successors, with special emphasis on the dynamics of places, power, belief and learning, and their mutual interdependencies. It is structured in two main sections - Ancient History and Archaeology and Philosophy and Literature. 16 essays in English, 8 in Spanish.

To date there has been little systematic study of the appropriation of, or attitudes to, prehistoric monuments in settlements of the period. The objectives of the research presented here are twofold. Firstly, it assesses how widespread the reuse of prehistoric monuments was in early to middle Anglo-Saxon settlements. In so doing, it examines the types of settlements in which the activity occurred and the types of prehistoric features that were reused. This is achieved through a review of the Anglo-Saxon settlement evidence in a regional study area. The settlements discussed in this study date to the period c.AD 450-850, with a regional focus based on central England, defined here to the north by the Humber and to the south by the Thames. In addition to well-known and published sites, this review makes use of data that is less frequently discussed in archaeological discourse, such as partially excavated or unpublished settlements that have not previously attracted a great deal of attention from scholars. The second aim is to assess how, and particularly why, monuments were appropriated in settlements. In order to answer these questions an in-depth, site-by-site approach is taken, in which the layout and use of space in a number of case studies are analysed. These case studies allow greater understanding of the ways in which older monuments could be referenced in settlements, how reuse changed over time, and why monuments may have been significant. Four Gazetteers provide locational and reference data to the selected sites.

In 1995, Jeremy B. Rutter presented the pottery of the Fourth Settlement at Lerna in Lerna III: The Pottery of Lerna IV. The present volume is the companion to the Rutter volume, outlining the architectural sequence of the EH III period at the site with descriptions of the major building types and other features, such as hearths, ovens, and bothroi. Careful examination of the individual buildings and their contents constitutes the core of the text. The changing settlement patterns of the site through time are considered, and sources of influences are suggested.

This is a study on textile production in central Tyrrhenian Italy from the final Bronze Age to the Republican period. Textile production is studied here through its technological, social and economic aspects. Textiles and their making were important parts of all fields of life in ancient Italy. Textiles and textile implements are found from settlement sites, burials, votive deposits and sanctuaries. The differences between the finds from different contexts through time point out the changes in material culture related to textile-making. The changes in the materials also indicate the change from household production of textiles

The present study evolved out of an attempt to explore the mechanisms involved in the transformation of a social practice and its spatial context from one cultural, technological and architectural system to another in a given geographical area in classical antiquity. The practice chosen was that of the bath, the two main and overlapping cultural traditions were the Greek and the Roman and the two technological traditions are termed in the present study 'before' and 'after' the hypocaust. The geographical area covered in the study is that of modern Greece with a more detailed analysis of the Peloponnese.