Roman Egypt is a critical area of interdisciplinary research, which has steadily expanded since the 1970s and continues to grow. Egypt played a pivotal role in the Roman empire, not only in terms of political, economic, and military strategies, but also as part of an intricate cultural discourse involving themes that resonate today - east and west, old world and new, acculturation and shifting identities, patterns of language use and religious belief, and the management of agriculture and trade. Roman Egypt was a literal and figurative crossroads shaped by the movement of people, goods, and ideas, and framed by permeable boundaries of self and space. This handbook is unique in drawing together many different strands of research on Roman Egypt, in order to suggest both the state of knowledge in the field and the possibilities for collaborative, synthetic, and interpretive research. Arranged in seven thematic sections, each of which includes essays from a variety of disciplinary vantage points and multiple sources of information, it offers new perspectives from both established and younger scholars, featuring individual essay topics, themes, and intellectual juxtapositions.

Roman Archaeology for Historians provides students of Roman history with a guide to the contribution of archaeology to the study of their subject. It discusses the issues with the use of material and textual evidence to explain the Roman past, and the importance of viewing this evidence in context. It also surveys the different approaches to the archaeological material of the period and examines key themes that have shaped Roman archaeology. At the heart of the book lies the question of how archaeological material can be interpreted and its relevance for the study of ancient history. It includes discussion of the study of landscape change, urban topography, the economy, the nature of cities, new approaches to skeletal evidence and artefacts in museums. Along the way, readers gain access to new findings and key sites - many of which have not been discussed in English before and many, for which, access may only be gained from technical reports. Roman Archaeology for Historians provides an accessible guide to the development of archaeology as a discipline and how the use of archaeological evidence of the Roman world can enrich the study of ancient history, while at the same time encouraging the integration of material evidence into the study of the period's history. This work is a key resource for students of ancient history, and for those studying the archaeology of the Roman period.

This work provides a survey of the jewellery of Roman Britain. Fully illustrated and accessible to both the specialist and amateur enthusiast, it surveys the full range of personal ornament worn in Britain during the Roman period, the 1st to 4th centuries AD. It emphasizes the presence of two distinct cultural and artistic traditions, the classical element introduced by the Romans and the indigeneous Celtic background. The interaction of these traditions affected all aspects of Romano-British life and is illustrated in the jewellery.; The meaning and significance of personal ornament in a wide range of cultures is discussed, including such matters as symbolism and the display of wealth and status. The principal types of Romano-British jewellery are classified in detail, drawing attention to those which can be relatively closely dated. The coverage is not restricted to precious-metal objects, but includes jewellery made of base metals and materials such as bone, jet and glass. The final chapter is devoted to the techniques of manufacture, a subject which has become better understood in recent years as a result of scientific advances. The book should appeal to anyone who practices, teaches or studies Roman archaeology, together with all those with a professional or amateur interest in the history of jewellery and design.

James Delle has solved a number of problems in Caribbean archaeology with An Archaeology of Social Space. He deals with most of the problems by using historical archaeology, and clearly implicates Ameri canist prehistorians. Although this book is about coffee plantations in the Blue Mountains area of Jamaica, it is actually about the whole Caribbean. Just as it is about all archaeology, not only historical archaeology, it is also a book about colonialism and national inde pendence and how these two enormous events happened in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth century capitalism. The first issue raised appears to be an academic topic that has come to be known as landscape archaeology. Landscape archaeology considers the planned spaces around living places. The topic is big, comprehensive, and new within historical archaeology. Its fundamen tal insight is that in the early modern and modern worlds everything within view could be made into money. Seeing occurs in space and from 1450, or a little before, everything that could be seen could, potentially, be measured. The measuring-and the accompanying culture of record ing called a scriptural economy-became a way of controlling people in space, for a profit. Dr. Delle thus explores maps, local philosophies of settlement, town dwelling, housing, and the actual condition of plantations and their buildings now, so as to describe coffee-Jamaica from 1790-1860."

This study explains the Greco - Roman urban form as it relates to the geological basis at selected sites in the Mediterranean basin. Each of the sites - Argos, Delphi, Ephesus, and Syracuse among them - has manifested in its physical form the geology on which it stood and from which it was made.

In this book, Alessandro Pierattini offers a comprehensive study of the evolution of pre-archaic Greek temple architecture from the eleventh to mid-seventh century BCE. Demystifying the formative stages of Greek architecture, he traces how temples were transformed from unassuming shrines made of perishable materials into large stone and terracotta monuments. Grounded in archaeological evidence, the volume analyzes the design, function, construction, and aesthetic of the Greek temple. While the book's primary focus is architectural, it also draws on non-architectural material culture, ancient cult practice, and social history, which also defined the context that fostered the Greek temple's initial development. In reconstituting this early history, Pierattini also draws attention to new developments as well as legacies from previous eras. Ultimately, he reveals why the temple's pre-Archaic development is not only of interest in itself, but also a key to the origins of the Greek monumental architecture of the Archaic period.

The Etruscans are one of history's great mysteries -- a sophisticated society that flourished at the heart of the Classical world and then vanished, leaving relatively few archaeological remains and few records of their culture. The Etruscans were adept at magic, and Etruscan books of spells were common among the Romans but they have not survived. While greatly influenced by the Greeks, the Etruscans retained elements of an ancient non-Western culture, and these archaic traits contributed greatly to the civilization once thought of as purely Roman (gladiators, for example, and many kinds of divination). Leland retrieves elements of Etruscan culture from the living popular traditions of remote areas of the Italian countryside where belief in "the old religion" survives to an astonishing degree. Recorded when many of these secret beliefs and practices were fading away, this remarkable volume deals with ancient gods, spirits, witches, incantations, prophecy, medicine, spells, and amulets, giving full descriptions, illustrations, and instructions for practice.

This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY licence. Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are known for their grave goods, but this abundance obscures their interest as the creations of pluralistic, multi-generational communities. This book explores over one hundred early Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian cemeteries, using a multi-dimensional methodology to move beyond artefacts. It offers an alternative way to explore the horizontal organisation of cemeteries from a holistically focused perspective. The physical communication of digging a grave and laying out a body was used to negotiate the arrangement of a cemetery and to construct family and community stories. This approach foregrounds community, because people used and reused cemetery spaces to emphasise different characteristics of the deceased, based on their own attitudes, lifeways and live experiences. This book will appeal to scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies and will be of value to archaeologists interested in mortuary spaces, communities and social archaeology. -- .

Using archaeology and social anthropology, and more than 100 original line drawings and photographs, An Archaeology of Images takes a fresh look at how ancient images of both people and animals were used in the Iron Age and Roman societies of Europe, 600 BC to AD 400 and investigates the various meanings with which images may have been imbued. The book challenges the usual interpretation of statues, reliefs and figurines as passive things to be looked at or worshipped, and reveals them instead as active artefacts designed to be used, handled and broken. It is made clear that the placing of images in temples or graves may not have been the only episode in their biographies, and a single image may have gone through several existences before its working life was over. Miranda Aldhouse Green examines a wide range of other issues, from gender and identity to foreignness, enmity and captivity, as well as the significance of the materials used to make the images. The result is a comprehensive survey of the multifarious functions and experiences of images in the communities that produced and consumed them. Challenging many previously held assumptions about the meaning and significance of Celtic and Roman art, An Archaeology of Images will be controversial yet essential reading for anyone interested in this area.

The Hellenistic city of New Halos, situated on the coastal route between North and Central Greece, existed for only a short period (ca 302-265 BC) before being destroyed by an earthquake and finally abandoned. The city's original ninety-thousand inhabitants lived in modest houses in the lower town, six of which have been excavated. This book presents the plans of these six houses, detailing the arrangement of living quarters, storage rooms and courtyards, as well as analyzing numerous artifacts, most of which were found in-situ.
This volume contributes greatly to our knowledge of cities in Hellenistic Greece. The house plans and artifacts from the excavations (including agricultural equipment, animal remains, storage jars, kitchen ware, figurines, jewellery and coins) give a unique view of housing around 265 BC.

Contents:
Contents List of figures Preface Acknowledgements Part 1 The Discovery of Ignorance 1. Inventing the Middle Ages: Antiquarian Views (to c. 1800) 2. Lights and Shadows: Medievalism, the Gothic Revival and the Nineteenth Century (to 1882) 3. An Emerging Discipline: Monuments, Methods and Ideas (1882-1945) Part 2 Into the Light 4. Out of the Shell: Medieval Archaeology Comes of Age (1945-1970) 5. Breaking Ranks: New Ideas, New Techniques, the Rescue Years and After (1970-89) Part 3 Winds of Change 6. Retrospect and Prospect: Medieval Archaeology Today (1990 to the present) Bibliography Index

Gordion is frequently remembered as the location of an intricate knot ultimately cut by Alexander, but in antiquity it served as the center of the Phrygian kingdom that ruled much of Asia Minor during the early millennium B.C.E. The site lies approximately seventy kilometers southeast of Ankara in central Turkey, at the intersection of the great empires of the East (Assyrians, Babylonians, and Hittites) and the West (Greeks and Romans). Consequently, it occupied a strategic position on nearly all trade routes that linked the Mediterranean and the Near East. The University of Pennsylvania has been excavating at Gordion since 1950, unearthing a wide range of discoveries that span nearly four millennia. The vast majority of these artifacts attests to the city's interactions with the other great kingdoms and city states of the Near East during the Iron Age and Archaic periods (ca. 950-540 B.C.E.), especially Assyria, Urartu, Persia, Lydia, Greece, and the Neo-Hittite city-states of North Syria, among others. Gordion is thus the ideal centerpiece of an exhibition dealing with Anatolia and its neighbors during the first millennium B.C.E. Through a special agreement signed between the Republic of Turkey and the University of Pennsylvania, Turkey has loaned the Penn Museum more than one hundred artifacts gathered from four museums in Turkey (Ankara, Gordion, Istanbul, and Antalya) for an exhibition titled The Golden Age of King Midas. The exhibition features most of the material recovered in Tumulus MM, or the "Midas Mound" (ca. 740 B.C.E.), which was the burial site of King Midas's father, as well as a number of objects found in a series of Lydian tombs. The Turkish loan has made possible a uniquely comprehensive and elaborate exhibition that also features a disparate group of rarely seen objects from the Penn Museum's own collections, particularly from sites in the Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Greece. With the historic King Midas (ca. 740-700 B.C.E.) as its guiding theme, the exhibition illuminates the relationships Phrygia maintained with Lydia, Persia, Assyria, and Greece. The accompanying catalog includes full-color illustrations and essays that expound on the sites and objects of the exhibition.

Dialogos" encompasses Greek language and literature, Greek history and archaeology, Greek culture and thought, present and past: a territory of distinctive richness and unsurpassed influence. It seeks to foster critical awareness and informed debate about the ideas, events and achievements that make up this territory, by redefining their qualities, by exploring their interconnections and by reinterpreting their significance within Western culture and beyond.

This volume catalogues more than 400 lamps and lamp fragments dating from the Late Archaic to the Byzantine periods found over several decades at the Isthmian Sanctuary of Poseidon. These come from excavations undertaken by UCLA from 1967 to 1987 under the direction of Paul Clement and since then by OSU under the direction of Timothy Gregory. As well as the detailed descriptions of the lamps in the catalogue, the volume presents a commentary on the types of lamps used at the Sanctuary that enriches our knowledge of their manufacture, use, and artistic evolution over time. The lamps also contribute to a better understanding of the site, as they reflect the various historical, political, and religious vicissitudes at Isthmia and the Corinthia in general over the centuries. The author is one of the leading authorities in the world on lamps from ancient Greece, and her work advances our knowledge of the subject in Isthmia, the Corinthia, and beyond.

The Romans occupied Britain for almost four hundred years, and their influence is still all around us - in the shape of individual monuments such as Hadrians Wall, the palace at Fishbourne and the spa complex at Bath, as well as in subtler things such as the layout and locations of ancient towns such as London, Canterbury and Colchester, and the routes of many major roads. Yet this evidence can only suggest a small proportion of the effect that the Romans had on the landscape of Britain.
A Portrait of Roman Britain breaks new ground in enabling us to visualise the changes in town and countryside brought by Roman military and civilian needs. Using clear, well-documented descriptions, John Wacher answers questions such as:
* were Roman towns as neat and tidy as they are often represented?
* how much woodland was needed to fuel the bath houses of Roman Britain?
* how much land did a Roman cavalry regiment require for its horses?^

This book brings together sources translated from a wide variety of ancient languages to showcase the rich history of pre-Roman Italy, including its cultures, politics, trade, languages, writing systems, religious rituals, magical practices, and conflicts. This book allows readers to access diverse sources relating to the history and cultures of pre-Roman Italy. It gathers and translates sources from both Greek and Latin literature and ancient inscriptions in multiple languages and gives commentary to highlight areas of particular interest. The thematic organisation of this sourcebook helps readers to make connections across languages and communities, and showcases the interconnectedness of ancient Italy. This book includes maps, a timeline, and guides to further reading, making it accessible to students and other readers who are new to this subject. Italy Before Rome is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students, including those who have not studied the ancient world before. It is also intended to be useful to researchers approaching this material for the first time, and to university and schoolteachers looking for an overview of early Italian sources.

This volume initiates a new series of books on maritime or underwater archaeology, and as the editor of the series I welcome its appearance with great excitement. It is appropriate that the first book of the series is a collection of articles intended for gradu ate or undergraduate courses in underwater archaeology, since the growth in academic opportunities for students is an important sign of the vitality of this subdiscipline. The layman will enjoy the book as well. Academic and public interest in shipwrecks and other submerged archaeological sites is indicated by a number of factors. Every year there are 80 to 90 research papers presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology's Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, and the Proceedings are published. Public interest is shown by extensive press coverage of shipwreck investigations. One of the most important advances in recent years has been the passage of the Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987, for the first time providing national-level law con cerning underwater archeological sites. The legislation has withstood a number of legal challenges by commercial treasure salvors, a very hopeful sign for the long-term pres ervation of this nonrenewable type of cultural resource. The underwater archaeological discoveries of 1995 were particularly noteworthy. The Texas Historical Commission discovered the Belle, one of La Salle's ships, and the CSS Hunley was found by a joint project of South Carolina and a private nonprofit organization called NUMA."

The great cathedrals and churches of the medieval West continue to awe. How were they built, and why do they remain standing? What did their builders know about what they were doing? These questions have given rise to considerable controversy, which is fully reflected in the papers selected here. The first section of the book is concerned with the medieval builders and their design methods; the second focuses on engineering issues in the context of the infamous collapse of the choir at Beauvais in 1284. The following papers extend the analysis into the 15th century, looking for example at Brunelleschi's dome for Florence Cathedral, and deal with the often neglected structures of roofs, towers and spires.

Situated on the shores of the Argolic Gulf, only a few miles away from the much later prehistoric sites of Mycenae, Tiryns, and Midea, Lerna is one of the key building blocks in our understanding of Greek archaeology. The first evidence from the site is Neolithic, and the latest settlement evidence is Mycenaean. However, the most important material from the site comes from the middle of the 3rd millennium B.C. when a remarkable large, rectangular building known as The House of the Tiles was built. Possibly never finished, with unpainted walls and doors that lead nowhere, the purpose and meaning of this building has provoked vigorous debate. Was it the house of a chief and the precursor of the later Mycenaean palaces? Or was it a communal storage facility, designed to store the elaborately sealed chests and jars found inside? No less mysterious than its use is its destruction: After a violent fire, a huge mound was built on top of the charred foundations, the area avoided by later house builders. This guide is illustrated with many plans and black and white photos.

The study of Roman towns and cities has long been dominated by the "consumer city" model set out by Moses Finley in the 1970s, which characterizes ancient cities as sites of consumption, not production. Archaeologists and ancient historians are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of this model, and with its narrowly economic perspective. This work raises questions about how Roman cities are perceived by experts in the 1990s. The contributors use a variety of new approaches and methodologies. They consider the various social implications of Roman urbanism and the organization of urban space. By diverting attention away from "the consumer city", this collection re-contextualizes the Roman town where it belongs: in the realms of social and political relationships.

Ancient Civilizations offers a comprehensive and straightforward account of the world's first civilizations and how they were discovered, drawing on many avenues of inquiry including archaeological excavations, surveys, laboratory work, highly specialized scientific investigations, and both historical and ethnohistorical records. This book covers the earliest civilizations in Eurasia and the Americas, from Egypt and the Sumerians to the Indus Valley, Shang China, and the Maya. It also addresses subsequent developments in Southwest Asia, moving on to the first Aegean civilizations, Greece and Rome, the first states of sub-Saharan Africa, divine kings and empires in East and Southeast Asia, and the Aztec and Inka empires of Mesoamerica and the Andes. It includes a number of features to support student learning: a wealth of images, including several new illustrations; feature boxes which expand on key sites, finds, and written sources; and an extensive guide to further reading. With new perceptions of the origin and collapse of states, including a review of the issue of sustainability, this fifth edition has been extensively updated in the light of spectacular new discoveries and the latest theoretical advances. Examining the world's pre-industrial civilizations from a multidisciplinary perspective and offering a comparative analysis of the field which explores the connections between all civilizations around the world, this volume provides a unique introduction to pre-industrial civilizations in all their brilliant diversity. It will prove invaluable to students of Archaeology.

This work provides a survey of the jewellery of Roman Britain. Fully illustrated and accessible to both the specialist and amateur enthusiast, it surveys the full range of personal ornament worn in Britain during the Roman period, the 1st to 4th centuries AD. It emphasizes the presence of two distinct cultural and artistic traditions, the classical element introduced by the Romans and the indigeneous Celtic background. The interaction of these traditions affected all aspects of Romano-British life and is illustrated in the jewellery. The meaning and significance of personal ornament in a wide range of cultures is discussed, including such matters as symbolism and the display of wealth and status. The principal types of Romano-British jewellery are classified in detail, drawing attention to those which can be relatively closely dated. The coverage is not restricted to precious-metal objects, but includes jewellery made of base metals and materials such as bone, jet and glass. The final chapter is devoted to the techniques of manufacture, a subject which has become better understood in recent years as a result of scientific advances. The book should appeal to anyone who practices, te

In early Christianity it was established that every church should have a light burning on the altar at all times. In this unique study, Eternal light and earthly concerns, looks at the material and social consequences of maintaining these 'eternal' lights. It investigates how the cost of lighting was met across western Europe throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, revealing the social organisation that was built up around maintaining the lights in the belief that burning them reduced the time spent in Purgatory. When that belief collapsed in the Reformation the eternal lights were summarily extinguished. The history of the lights thus offers not only a new account of change in medieval Europe, but also a sustained examination of the relationship between materiality and belief. -- .

This book lets you wander through the labyrinth city of Knossos and lose yourself in its ancient treasures. There are full colour photographs of original artefacts, sculptures, reliefs and frescos that bring this fascinating palace to life. You can learn about the enthralling mythology that surrounds Knossos including the fabled minotaur that was said to dwell in a labyrinth in the gardens of the enormous palace. You can discover what everyday life was really like for the people of rural, urban and coastal Crete between 2000 and 1450BC. You can unearth the story of the city's discovery in the early 20th century and find out what can be seen at the historical site today.

This book explores the diachronic development of the ideological content of Pompey and Caesar's monuments in Rome, emphasising the importance of the late Republican period as a precursor to imperial propaganda through architecture. In the final years of the Roman Republic, individuals such as Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar exploited the communicative power of architecture. The former promoted the first and largest stone theatre in Rome; the latter started comprehensive town-planning projects that arguably verged on the utopian. Yet the study of the politics expressed by these monuments and how complex late Republican politics shaped the monuments themselves has attracted less attention than that of subsequent imperial architecture. Zampieri addresses this imbalance, exploring the ideological meaning of late Republican monuments and highlighting that monuments were fluid, adaptable entities, even in the lifespan of a single individual. Accompanied by detailed maps and images, this volume shows how late Republican architecture should be considered an important source for understanding politics of this period. Politics in the Monuments of Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar will be of use to anyone working on the politics and social world of the late Roman Republic, and on Roman architecture and patronage.