In Pannonia and Upper Moesia, first published 1974, Andras Mocsy surveys the Middle Danube Provinces from the latest pre-Roman Iron Age up to the beginning of the Great Migrations. His primary concern is to develop a general synthesis of the archaeological and historical researches in the Danube Basin, which lead to a more detailed knowledge of the Roman culture of the area. The economic and social development, town and country life, culture and religion in the Provinces are all investigated, and the local background of the so-called Illyrian Predominance during the third century crisis of the Roman Empire is explained, as is the eventual breakdown of Danubian Romanisation. This volume will appeal to students and teachers of archaeology alike, as well as to those interested in the Roman Empire - not only the history of Rome itself, but also of the far-flung areas which together comprised the Empire's frontier for centuries.

This edited collection focuses on how the ancient past of the city of Naples has been invented, shaped, transmitted, and received in literature, art, and material culture since the time of the city's foundation. Adopting a chronological approach, chapters examine important moments in Naples' reception history from the Roman period (when the city was already several centuries old) to the present day. Among the topics covered are representations of the city's early history and mythology in texts and temples of the Roman period; later uses of Roman spolia (marble sculptures and architectural elements) in Christian churches; the importance of antiquity to the rulers of the Angevin and Swabian periods; the appropriation of the city's classical heritage by Renaissance humanists; the image of the 'local' poets Virgil and Statius in later eras; humanist images of the ancient aqueducts and catacombs that ran beneath the city; representations of classical monuments in early modern city guides; images of ancient ruins in contemporary Catholic nativity scenes; and the archaeology and philosophy of the city's Metro system. Featuring contributions from an interdisciplinary range of scholars, this comprehensive volume provides a highly accessible point of entry into the vast bibliography on ancient Naples.

Philippe Rouet examines how Attic painted vases were interpreted by Edmond Pottier (1855-1934), founder of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, and John Beazley (1885-1970), the master of attributions in the twentieth century. The comparison shows two markedly different approaches, one primarily archaeological, the other centred on the history of ancient art.

Plutarch's Lives: Parallelism and Purpose Aedited by Noreen Humble Plutarch's Parallel Lives were written to compare famous Greeks and Romans. This most obvious aspect of their parallelism is frequently ignored in the drive to mine Plutarch for historical fact. However, the eleven contributors to the present volume, who include most of the world's leading commentators on Plutarch, together bring out many ways in which Plutarch invoked aspects of parallelism. They show how pervasive and how central the whole notion was to his thinking. With new analysis of the synkriseis; with discussion of parallels within and across the Lives and in the Moralia; with an examination of why the basic parallel structure of the Lives lost its importance in the Renaissance, this volume presents fresh ideas on a neglected topic crucial to Plutarch's literary creation.

This is the first detailed and comprehensive study of the shipshed complexes which housed the great navies of the Greco-Roman world, including Athens and Carthage. These complexes represented some of the largest and most expensive building projects of antiquity, and the volume provides a comprehensive survey of the archaeological and literary evidence. It explains how the buildings were carefully designed to keep warships dry and out of reach of shipworm, whilst enabling them to be launched quickly, easily and safely when required. It also serves as a handbook for archaeologists who may excavate such buildings, which are often difficult to identify and interpret. The analytical chapters are complemented by a full and detailed catalogue of known sheds, with plans for all the major sites specially drawn for easy comparison. The book thus provides an indispensable guide for all those interested in these buildings and in the maritime infrastructure of the ancient world.

A religious reformation occurred in the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries which scholars often call Christianization. Examining evidence relevant to Roman Africa of this period, this book sharpens understanding of this religious revolution. Focusing on the activities of Augustine and his colleagues from Augustine's ordination as a priest in 391, to the fall of the Emperor Honorius' master of soldiers, Stilicho, in 408, it proposes Catholicization as a term to more precisely characterize the process of change observed. Augustine and Catholic Christianization argues that at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century Augustine emerged as the key manager in the campaign to Catholicize Roman Africa by virtue of a comprehensive strategy to persuade or suppress rivals, which notably included Donatists, Arians, Manichees, and various kinds of polytheism. Select sermons from 403 and 404 reveal that Augustine's rhetoric was multivalent. It addressed the populus and the elite, Christians and non-Christians, Catholics, and Donatists. Key sources examined are selected laws of the Theodosian Code, the Canons of the African Council of Catholic Bishops, Augustine's Dolbeau sermons (discovered in 1990), Contra Cresconium, as well as other sermons, letters, and treatises of Augustine. This book clarifies our perception of Augustine and Christianity in the socio-religious landscape of Late Roman Africa in at least three ways. First, it combines theological investigation of the sources and development of Augustine's ecclesiology with sociohistorical tracing of the process of Catholicization. Second, an account of the evolution of Augustine's self-understanding as a bishop is given along with the development of his strategy for Catholicization. Third, Augustine is identified as resembling modern political "spin-doctors" in that he was a brilliant spokesperson, but he did not work alone; he was a team player. In brief, Augustine influenced and was influenced by his fellow bishops within Catholic circles.

This volume is based on a session at a 2005 Society for Historical Archaeology meeting. The organizers assembled historical archaeologists from the UK and the US, whose work arises out of differing intellectual traditions. The authors exchange ideas about what their colleagues have written, and construct dialogues about theories and practices that inform interpretive archaeology on either side of the Atlantic, ending with commentary by two well-known names in interpretive archaeology.

The first three centuries AD saw the spread of new religious ideas through the Roman Empire, crossing a vast and diverse geographical, social and cultural space. In this innovative study, Anna Collar explores both how this happened and why. Drawing on research in the sociology and anthropology of religion, physics and computer science, Collar explores the relationship between social networks and religious transmission to explore why some religious movements succeed, while others, seemingly equally successful at a certain time, ultimately fail. Using extensive epigraphic data, Collar provides new interpretations of the diffusion of ideas across the social networks of the Jewish Diaspora and the cults of Jupiter Dolichenus and Theos Hypsistos, and in turn offers important reappraisals of the spread of religious innovations in the Roman Empire. This study will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of ancient history, archaeology, ancient religion and network theory.

Women in Mycenaean Greece is the first book-length study of women in the Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Greece and the only to collect and compile all the references to women in the documents of the two best attested sites of Late Bronze Age Greece - Pylos on the Greek mainland and Knossos on the island of Crete. The book offers a systematic analysis of women's tasks, holdings, and social and economic status in the Linear B tablets dating from the 14th and 13th centuries BCE, identifying how Mycenaean women functioned in the economic institutions where they were best attested - production, property control, land tenure, and cult. Analysing all references to women in the Mycenaean documents, the book focuses on the ways in which the economic institutions of these Bronze Age palace states were gendered and effectively extends the framework for the study of women in Greek antiquity back more than 400 years. Throughout, the book seeks to establish whether gender practices were uniform in the Mycenaean states or differed from site to site and to gauge the relationship of the roles and status of Mycenaean women to their Archaic and Classical counterparts to test if the often-proposed theories of a more egalitarian Bronze Age accurately reflect the textual evidence. The Linear B tablets offer a unique, if under-utilized, point of entry into women's history in ancient Greece, documenting nearly 2000 women performing over fifty task assignments. From their decipherment in 1952 one major gap in the scholarly record remained: a full accounting of the women who inhabited the palace states and their tasks, ranks, and economic contributions. Women in Mycenaean Greece fills that gap recovering how class, rank, and other social markers created status hierarchies among women, how women as a group functioned relative to men, and where different localities conformed or diverged in their gender practices.

In this book, Thomas F. Tartaron presents a new and original reassessment of the maritime world of the Mycenaean Greeks of the Late Bronze Age. By all accounts a seafaring people, they enjoyed maritime connections with peoples as distant as Egypt and Sicily. These long-distance relations have been celebrated and much studied; by contrast, the vibrant worlds of local maritime interaction and exploitation of the sea have been virtually ignored. Dr Tartaron argues that local maritime networks, in the form of 'coastscapes' and 'small worlds', are far more representative of the true fabric of Mycenaean life. He offers a complete template of conceptual and methodological tools for recovering small worlds and the communities that inhabited them. Combining archaeological, geoarchaeological and anthropological approaches with ancient texts and network theory, he demonstrates the application of this scheme in several case studies. This book presents new perspectives and challenges for all archaeologists with interests in maritime connectivity.

A wide-ranging study of the significance of swords throughout the whole Anglo-Saxon period, offering valuable insights into the meaning of and attitude towards swords. Swords were special in Anglo-Saxon England. Their names, deeds and pedigrees were enshrined in writing. Many were curated for generations, revealed by their worn and mended condition. Few ended their lives as casual discards, placed instead in graves, hoards and watercourses as part of ritualised acts. Contemporary sources leave no doubt that complex social meanings surrounded these weapons, transcending their use on the battlefield; but they have yet to transcend the traditional view that their primary social function was as status symbols. Even now, half a century after the first major study of Anglo-Saxon swords, their wider significance within their world has yet to be fully articulated. This book sets out to meet the challenge. Eschewing modern value judgements, it focuses instead on contemporary perceptions - exploring how those who made, used and experienced swords really felt about them. It takes a multidisciplinary and holistic approach, bringing together insights from art, archaeology and literature. Comparison with Scandinavia adds further nuance, revealing what was (and was not) distinctive of Anglo-Saxon views of these weapons. Far from elite baubles, swords are revealed to have been dynamic "living" artefacts with their own identities, histories and places in social networks - ideas fuelled by their adaptability, durability and unique rolein bloodshed. Sue Brunning is Curator of European Early Medieval Collections at The British Museum.

This book is a comprehensive examination of Olympic victor lists. The origins, development, content, and structure of Olympic victor lists are explored and explained, and a number of important questions, such as the source and reliability of the year of 776 for the first Olympics, are addressed. Olympic victor lists emerge as a clearly defined type of literature that is best understood as a group of closely related texts. This book offers a fresh perspective on works by familiar writers such as Diodorus Siculus and a sense of the potential importance of less-well-known authors such as Phlegon of Tralleis.

In this study, Hamish Forbes explores how Greek villagers have understood and reacted to their landscapes over the centuries, from the late medieval period to the present. Analyzing how they have seen themselves belonging to their local communities and within both local and wider landscapes, Forbes examines how these aspects of belonging have informed each other. Forbes also illuminates cross-disciplinary interests in memory and the importance of monuments. Based on data gathered over 25 years, Forbes' study combines the rich detail of ethnographic field work with historical and archaeological time-depth, showing how landscapes have important meaning beyond the religious sphere in terms of kinship, ideas about the past, and in their role as productive assets.

Coinage is one of our key sources for the rich and fascinating history of the Hellenistic world (323-31 BC). This book provides students of the period with an up-to-date introduction to Hellenistic gold, silver and bronze coins in their cultural and economic contexts. It also offers new perspectives on four major themes in contemporary Hellenistic history: globalisation, identity, political economy and ideology. With more than 250 illustrations, and written in a lucid and accessible style, this book sheds new light on the diverse and multicultural societies of the Hellenistic world, from Alexander to Augustus. The author assumes no prior knowledge of Hellenistic history, and all Greek and Latin texts are translated throughout.

The antiquary Sir William Gell (1777 1836) was most famous for his two books on the archaeological discoveries at Pompeii (also reissued in this series) but his interest in the topography of classical sites resulted in several other publications, including this two-volume work, first published in 1834. The work was intended to accompany a map (available to download at http: //www.cambridge.org/9781108042109) of the territory of Ancient Rome, for which the field research and surveying activities were carried out in 1822. It provides alphabetical entries (from Abbatone to Zagarolo) on all the sites in Rome and its environs, with their modern names and populations, and their significance in ancient history and literature. Volume 2 also contains essays on the history and languages of Ancient Italy, and supplements to various entries, where new discoveries had been made during the course of the work's preparation.

Made from Bronze with eyes inlaid with glass pupils set in metal rings, the 'Meroe Head' is a magnificent portrait of Julius Caesar's great nephew and adopted heir Augustus (63 BC-AD 14). Once forming part of a statue of Rome's revered first true emperor - one of many such statues that were erected in Egyptian towns - the head was violently separated from the body and carried away in triumph by ancient Meroitic tribesman shortly after its creation. For nearly two millennia it remained buried in front of a temple in their capital city of Meroe (modern Sudan), so that worshippers ritually had to trample the face of the supreme leader of Rome. The head was recovered in 1910 and remarkably well preserved, is one of the British Museum's most treasured objects. This book reveals the significance of the head in light of Augustus' rise to power and the role of portraits in the Roman world. Accompanied by a series of new photographs that highlight the wonderful, dramatic qualities of the head, this is an absorbing introduction about a portrait which was made as a continuous reminder of the all-embracing power of Rome, yet whose fate is a graphic illustration of resistance to its rule.

The 23 chapters in this volume explore the material culture of sanctity in Latin Europe and the Mediterranean between c. 1000 and c. 1220, with a focus on the ways in which saints and relics were enshrined, celebrated, and displayed. Reliquary cults were particularly important during the Romanesque period, both as a means of affirming or promoting identity and as a conduit for the divine. This book covers the geography of sainthood, the development of spaces for reliquary display, the distribution of saints across cities, the use of reliquaries to draw attention to the attributes, and the virtues or miracle-working character of particular saints. Individual essays range from case studies on Verona, Hildesheim, Trondheim and Limoges, the mausoleum of Lazarus at Autun, and the patronage of Mathilda of Canossa, to reflections on local pilgrimage, the deployment of saints as physical protectors, the use of imagery where possession of a saint was disputed, island sanctuaries, and the role of Templars and Hospitallers in the promotion of relics from the Holy Land. This book will serve historians and archaeologists studying the Romanesque period, and those interested in material culture and religious practice in Latin Europe and the Mediterranean c.1000-c.1220.

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 first 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."

When does a continuum become a divide? This book investigates the genetic relationship between Linear A and Linear B, two Bronze Age scripts attested on Crete and Mainland Greece and understood to have developed one out of the other. By using an interdisciplinary methodology, this research integrates linguistic, epigraphic, palaeographic and archaeological evidence, and places the writing practice in its sociohistorical setting. By challenging traditional views, this work calls into question widespread assumptions and interpretative schemes on the relationship between these two scripts, and opens up new perspectives on the ideology associated with the retention, adaptation and transmission of a script, and how identity was negotiated at a moment of closer societal interaction between Cretans and Greek-speaking Mainlanders in the Late Bronze Age. By delving deeper into the structure and inner workings of these two writing systems, this book will make us rethink the relationship between Linear A and B.

The crisis of the Roman Republic and its transformation into an Empire have fascinated generations of scholars. It has long been assumed that a dramatic demographic decline of the rural free peasantry (which was supplanted by slaves) triggered the series of social and economic developments which eventually led to Rome's political crisis during the first century BC. This book contributes to a lively debate by exploring both the textual and the archaeological evidence, and by tracing and reassessing the actual fate of the Italian rural free population between the Late Republic and the Early Empire. Data derived from a comparative analysis of twenty-seven archaeological surveys - and about five thousand sites - allow Dr Launaro to outline a radically new picture according to which episodes of local decline are placed within a much more generalised pattern of demographic growth.

This 1957 book describes a series of early Greek tombs, unwittingly discovered in 1933 on the slopes of the Acropolis of Knossos in Crete by a peasant. The excavation was carried out in 1933 and 1935 by two former Directors of the British School of Archaeology at Athens, Humfry Payne and Alan Blakeway, both of whom died before the material could be prepared for preparation. It was eventually presented by one of the members of their party, James Brock, on behalf of the British School. The tombs are described as far as possible in chronological order, so that the illustrations of their contents convey an impression of the development of Cretan art. The catalogue contains more than 1300 vases, nearly all of them complete and many of the highest quality. From detailed analyses of the pottery, a continuous sequence of ceramic phases, spanning nearly four centuries, can be established.

The late sixth century was a period of considerable change in Etruria; this change is traditionally seen as the adoption of superior models from Greece. In a re-alignment of agency, this 2007 book examines a wide range of Etruscan material culture - mirrors, tombs, sanctuaries, houses and cities - in order to demonstrate the importance of local concerns in the formation of Etruscan material culture. Drawing on theoretical developments, the book emphasises the deliberate nature of the smallest of changes in material culture form, and develops the concept of surface as a unifying key to understanding the changes in the ways Etruscans represented themselves in life and death. This concept allows a uniquely holistic approach to the archaeology of Etruscan society and has the potential for other archaeological investigations. The book will interest all scholars and students of classical archaeology.

In Isis in a Global Empire, Lindsey Mazurek explores the growing popularity of Egyptian gods and its impact on Greek identity in the Roman Empire. Bringing together archaeological, art historical, and textual evidence, she demonstrates how the diverse devotees of gods such as Isis and Sarapis considered Greek ethnicity in ways that differed significantly from those of the Greek male elites whose opinions have long shaped our understanding of Roman Greece. These ideas were expressed in various ways - sculptures of Egyptian deities rendered in a Greek style, hymns to Isis that grounded her in Greek geography and mythology, funerary portraits that depicted devotees dressed as Isis, and sanctuaries that used natural and artistic features to evoke stereotypes of the Nile. Mazurek's volume offers a fresh, material history of ancient globalization, one that highlights the role that religion played in the self-identification of provincial Romans and their place in the Mediterranean world.

In this book, Adam Rogers examines the late Roman phases of towns in Britain. Critically analysing the archaeological notion of decline, he focuses on public buildings, which played an important role, administrative and symbolic, within urban complexes. Arguing against the interpretation that many of these monumental civic buildings were in decline or abandoned in the later Roman period, he demonstrates that they remained purposeful spaces and important centres of urban life. Through a detailed assessment of the archaeology of late Roman towns, this book argues that the archaeological framework of decline does not permit an adequate and comprehensive understanding of the towns during this period. Moving beyond the idea of decline, this book emphasises a longer-term perspective for understanding the importance of towns in the later Roman period.