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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region > European archaeology
This comparative analysis argues that there were four or, more likely, five major turning points of world history, whose lasting effects are being felt to this day. These turning points show striking resemblances to each other: An apparently coherent community of shared convictions and a shared way of life splits unexpectedly in two, with one section swerving off on the road to a radically new set of values. This has probably been true of the rise of monotheism in opposition to the existing polytheistic norms of Oriental cultures. It has been true of the primitive Christian Church breaking away from Judaism. It was true of the Protestants breaking away from Rome. It also has been true for two secular revolutions: the independence of the United States of America inventing the republican order of representative democracy, and the Russian Revolution, when the revolutionaries decided to give up on peaceful socialism and resort to violence.
As an archaeologist with primary research and training experience in North American arid lands, I have always found the European Stone Age remote and impenetrable. My initial introduction, during a survey course on world prehis tory, established that (for me, at least) it consisted of more cultures, dates, and named tool types than any undergraduate ought to have to remember. I did not know much, but I knew there were better things I could be doing on a Saturday night. In any event, after that I never seriously entertained any notion of pur suing research on Stone Age Europe-that course was enough for me. That's a pity, too, because Paleolithic Europe-especially in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene-was the scene of revolutionary human adaptive change. Iron ically, all of it was amenable to investigation using precisely the same models and analytical tools I ended up spending the better part of two decades applying in the Great Basin of western North America. Back then, of course, few were thinking about the late Paleolithic or Me solithic in such terms. Typology, classification, and chronology were the order of the day, as the text for my undergraduate course reflected. Jochim evidently bridled less than I at the task of mastering these chronotaxonomic mysteries, yet he was keenly aware of their limitations-in particular, their silence on how individual assemblages might be connected as part of larger regional subsis tence-settlement systems."
Urban Transformations is a theoretical and empirical account of the changing nature of urbanization in Germany. Where city planners and municipal administrations had emphasized free markets, the rule of law, and trade in 1871, by the 1930s they favoured a quite different integrative, corporate, and productivist vision. Urban Transformations explores the broad-based social transformation connected to these changes and the contemporaneous shifts in the cultural and social history of global capitalism. Dynamic features of modern capitalist life, such as rapid industrialization, working-class radicalism, dramatic population growth, poor quality housing, and regional administrative incoherence significantly influenced the Greater Berlin region. Examining materials on city planning, municipal administration, architecture, political economy, and jurisprudence, Urban Transformations recasts the history of German and European urbanization, as well as that of modernist architecture and city planning.
An authoritative new history of the Roman conquest of Britain Why did Julius Caesar come to Britain? His own account suggests that he invaded to quell a resistance of Gallic sympathizers in the region of modern-day Kent - but there must have been personal and divine aspirations behind the expeditions in 55 and 54 BCE. To the ancients, the Ocean was a body of water that circumscribed the known world, separating places like Britain from terra cognita, and no one, not even Alexander the Great, had crossed it. While Caesar came and saw, he did not conquer. In the words of the historian Tacitus, "he revealed, rather than bequeathed, Britain to Rome." For the next five hundred years, Caesar's revelation was Rome's remotest imperial bequest. Conquering the Ocean provides a new narrative of the Roman conquest of Britain, from the two campaigns of Caesar up until the construction of Hadrian's Wall across the Tyne-Solway isthmus during the 120s CE. Much of the ancient literary record portrays this period as a long march of Roman progress but recent archaeological discoveries reveal that there existed a strong resistance in Britain, Boudica's short lived revolt being the most celebrated of them, and that Roman success was by no means inevitable. Richard Hingley here draws upon an impressive array of new information from archaeological research and recent scholarship on the classical sources to provide a balanced picture of the military activities and strategies that led to the conquest and subjugation of Britain. Conquering the Ocean is the fullest picture to date of a chapter in Roman military history that continues to captivate the public.
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 period from the death of Alexander the Great to the rise of the Islam (c. late fourth century BCE to seventh century CE) saw a significant growth in economic, diplomatic and cultural exchange between various civilisations in Africa, Europe and Asia. This was in large part thanks to the Indian Ocean trade. Peoples living in the Roman Empire, Parthia, India and South East Asia increasingly had access to exotic foreign products, while the lands from which they derived, and the peoples inhabiting these lands, also captured the imagination, finding expression in a number of literary and poetic works. The Indian Ocean Trade in Antiquity provides a range of chapters that explore the economic, political and cultural impact of this trade on these diverse societies, written by international experts working in the fields of Classics, Archaeology, South Asian studies, Near Eastern studies and Art History. The three major themes of the book are the development of this trade, how consumption and exchange impacted on societal developments, and how the Indian Ocean trade influenced the literary creations of Graeco-Roman and Indian authors. This volume will be of interest not only to academics and students of antiquity, but also to scholars working on later periods of Indian Ocean history who will find this work a valuable resource.
Often viewed as self-sufficient, Roman farmers actually depended on markets to supply them with a wide range of goods and services, from metal tools to medical expertise. However, the nature, extent, and implications of their market interactions remain unclear. This monograph uses literary and archaeological evidence to examine how farmers - from smallholders to the owners of large estates - bought and sold, lent and borrowed, and cooperated as well as competed in the Roman economy. A clearer picture of the relationship between farmers and markets allows us to gauge their collective impact on, and exposure to, macroeconomic phenomena such as monetization and changes in the level and nature of demand for goods and labor. After considering the demographic and environmental context of Italian agriculture, the author explores three interrelated questions: what goods and services did farmers purchase; how did farmers acquire the money with which to make those purchases; and what factors drove farmers' economic decisions? This book provides a portrait of the economic world of the Roman farmer in late Republican and early Imperial Italy.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of the tombs of Pompeii and its immediate environs, examining the funerary culture of the population, delving into the importance of social class and self-representation, and developing a broad understanding of Pompeii's funerary epigraphy and business. The Pompeian corpus of evidence has heretofore been studied in a piecemeal fashion, not conducive to assessing trends and practices. Here, a holistic approach to the funerary monuments allows for the integration of data from five different necropoleis and analysis of greater accuracy and scope. Author Virginia Campbell demonstrates that the funerary practices of Pompeii are, in some ways, unique in to the population, moving away from the traditional approach to burial based on generalizations and studies of typology. She shows that while some trends in Roman burial culture can be seen as universal, each population, time, and place constructs its own approach to commemoration and display. Including an extensive catalogue of tomb data and images never before assembled or published, this collective approach reveals new insights into ancient commemoration. The Tombs of Pompeii is the first English-language book on Pompeian funerary rituals. It's also the first in any language to provide a complete survey of the tombs of Pompeii and the first to situate Pompeian differences within a wider Roman burial context.
The German Ocean examines archaeological and historical evidence for the development of economies and societies around the North Sea from the beginning of the twelfth century until the mid sixteenth century. It draws in material from Scandinavia to Normandy and from Scotland to the Thames estuary. While largely concerned with the North Sea littoral, when necessary it takes account of adjacent areas such as the Baltic or inland hinterlands. The North Sea is often perceived as a great divide, divorcing the British Isles from continental Europe. In cultural terms, however, it has always acted more as a lake, supporting communities around its fringes which have frequently had much in common. This is especially true of the medieval period when trade links, fostered in the two centuries prior to 1100, expanded in the 12th and 13th centuries to ensure the development of maritime societies whose material culture was often more remarkable for its similarity across distance than for its diversity. Geography, access to raw materials and political expediency could nevertheless combine to provide distinctive regional variations.Economies developed more rapidly in some areas than others; local solutions to problems produced urban and rural environments of different aspect; the growth, and sometimes decline, of towns and ports was often dictated by local as much as wider factors. This book explores evidence for this 'diverse commonality' through the historic environment of the North Sea region with the intention that it will be of interest not only to historians and archaeologists but to those who live and work within the historic environment. This environment is a common European resource with much to contribute to a sustainable future - the book provides an archaeological contribution to the understanding of that resource.
Anglo-Saxon farming made England so wealthy by the eleventh century that it attracted two full-scale invasions. In Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming, Debby Banham and Rosamond Faith explore how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other crops and animal products that sustained England's economy, society, and culture before the Norman Conquest. The volume is made up of two complementary sections: the first examines written and pictorial sources, archaeological evidence, place-names, and the history of the English language to discover what kind of crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques they used in producing them. The second part assembles a series of local landscape studies to explore how these techniques were combined into working agricultural regimes in different environments. These perspectives allow the authors to take new approaches to the chronology and development of open-field farming, to the changing relationship between livestock husbandry and arable cultivation, and to the values and social relationships which under-pinned rural life. The elite are not ignored, but peasant famers are represented as agents, making decisions about the way they managed their resources and working lives. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was, by the time of the Conquest, recognizably the beginning of a tradition that only ended in the modern period. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, but infinitely adaptable to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.
Travellers in Time re-evaluates the extent to which the earliest Mediterranean civilizations were affected by population movement. It critiques both traditional culture-history-grounded notions of movement in the region as straightforwardly transformative, and the processual, systemic models that have more recently replaced this view, arguing that newer scholarship too often pays limited attention to the specific encounters, experiences and agents involved in travel. By assessing a broad range of recent archaeological and ancient textual data from the Aegean and central and east Mediterranean via five comprehensive studies, this book makes a compelling case for rethinking issues such as identity, agency, materiality and experience through an understanding of movement as transformative. This innovative and timely study will be of interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduate students and scholars in the fields of Aegean/Mediterranean prehistory and Classical archaeology, as well as anyone interested in ancient Aegean and Mediterranean culture.
In recent years scholars have re-evaluated the "parting of the ways" between Judaism and Christianity, reaching new understandings of the ways shared origins gave way to two distinct and sometimes inimical religious traditions. But this has been a profoundly textual task, relying on the writings of rabbis, bishops, and other text-producing elites to map the terrain of the "parting." This book takes up the question of the divergence of Judaism and Christianity in terms of material--the stuff made, used, and left behind by the persons that lived in and between these religions as they were developing. Considering the glass, clay, stone, paint, vellum, and papyrus of ancient Jews and Christians, this book maps the "parting" in new ways, and argues for a greater role for material and materialism in our reconstructions of the past.
This volume offers a comprehensive survey of Roman villas in Italy and the Mediterranean provinces of the Roman Empire, from their origins to the collapse of the Empire. The architecture of villas could be humble or grand, and sometimes luxurious. Villas were most often farms where wine, olive oil, cereals, and manufactured goods, among other products, were produced. They were also venues for hospitality, conversation, and thinking on pagan, and ultimately Christian, themes. Villas spread as the Empire grew. Like towns and cities, they became the means of power and assimilation, just as infrastructure, such as aqueducts and bridges, was transforming the Mediterranean into a Roman sea. The distinctive Roman/Italian villa type was transferred to the provinces, resulting in Mediterranean-wide culture of rural dwelling and work that further unified the Empire.
With the emergence and structuring of the Lucanian ethnos during the fourth century BC, a network of cult places, set apart from habitation spaces, was created at the crossroads of the most important communication routes of ancient Lucania. These sanctuaries became centers of social and political aggregation of the local communities: a space in which the community united for all the social manifestations that, in urban societies, were usually performed within the city space. With a detailed analysis of the archaeological record, this study traces the historical and archaeological narrative of Lucanian cult places from their creation to the Late Republican Age, which saw the incorporation of southern Italy into the Roman state. By placing the sanctuaries within their territorial, political, social, and cultural context, Battiloro offers insight into the diachronic development of sacred architecture and ritual customs in ancient Lucania. The author highlights the role of material evidence in constructing the significance of sanctuaries in the historical context in which they were used, and crucial new evidence from the most recent archaeological investigations is explored in order to define dynamics of contact and interaction between Lucanians and Romans on the eve of the Roman conquest.
This volume presents the papers from the conference "Crete 2000: A Centennial Celebration of American Archaeological Work on Crete (1900-2000)," held in Athens from July 10-12, 2000. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP) Study Center for East Crete organized the conference. Scholars participating in the American and joint Greek-American excavations on Crete or studying material from these excavations were invited to present papers at the conference. The volume is divided into the following sections: Trade, Society and Religion, Chronology and History, Landscape and Survey, and Technology and Production.
The original edition of "Pompeii: A Sourcebook" was a crucial resource for students of the site. Now updated to include material from Herculaneum, the neighbouring town also buried in the eruption of Vesuvius, "Pompeii and Herculaneum: A Sourcebook" allows readers to form a richer and more diverse picture of urban life on the Bay of Naples. Focusing upon inscriptions and ancient texts, it translates and sets into context a representative sample of the huge range of source material uncovered in these towns. From the labels on wine jars to scribbled insults, and from advertisements for gladiatorial contests to love poetry, the individual chapters explore the early history of Pompeii and Herculaneum, their destruction, leisure pursuits, politics, commerce, religion, the family and society. Information about Pompeii and Herculaneum from authors based in Rome is included, but the great majority of sources come from the cities themselves, written by their ordinary inhabitants men and women, citizens and slaves. Encorporating the latest research and finds from the two cities and enhanced with more photographs, maps, and plans, Pompeii and Herculaneum: A Sourcebook offers an invaluable resource for anyone studying or visiting the sites."
Chromatius of Aquileia and the Making of a Christian City examines how the increasing authority of institutionalized churches changed late antique urban environments. Aquileia, the third largest city in Italy during late antiquity, presents a case study in the transformation of elite Roman practices in relation to the urban environment. Through the archaeological remains, the sermons of the city's bishop, Chromatius, and the artwork and epigraphic evidence in the sacred buildings, the city and its inhabitants leave insights into a reshaping of the urban environment and its institutions which occurred at the beginning of the 5th century. The words of the bishop attacking heretics and Jews presaged a shift in patronage by rich donors from the city as a whole to only the Christian church. The city, both as an ideal and a physical reality, changed with the growing dominance of the Church, creating a Christian city.
Tombs of the Ancient Poets explores the ways in which the tombs of the ancient poets - real or imagined - act as crucial sites for the reception of Greek and Latin poetry. Drawing together a range of examples, it makes a distinctive contribution to the study of literary reception by focusing on the materiality of the body and the tomb, and the ways in which they mediate the relationship between classical poetry and its readers. From the tomb of the boy poet Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, which preserves his prize-winning poetry carved on the tombstone itself, to the modern votive offerings left at the so-called 'Tomb of Virgil'; from the doomed tomb-hunting of long-lost poets' graves, to the 'graveyard of the imagination' constructed in Hellenistic poetry collections, the essays collected here explore the position of ancient poets' tombs in the cultural imagination and demonstrate the rich variety of ways in which they exemplify an essential mode of the reception of ancient poetry, poised as they are between literary reception and material culture.
Who were the ancient Phoenicians-and did they actually exist? The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the "Phoenicians" never actually existed as such. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies-and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources.
The Etruscans and the History of Dentistry offers a study of the construction and use of gold dental appliances in ancient Etruscan culture, and their place within the framework of a general history of dentistry, with special emphasis on appliances, from Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Egypt to modern Europe and the Americas. Included are many of the ancient literary sources that refer to dentistry - or the lack thereof - in Greece and Rome, as well as the archaeological evidence of ancient dental health. The book challenges many past works in exposing modern scholars' fallacies about ancient dentistry, while presenting the incontrovertible evidence of the Etruscans' seemingly modern attitudes to cosmetic dentistry.
Germania inferior, province between the civilizations: Celtic periphery, immigration area for the Germanic tribes, Roman dominion. The South fertile and rich in raw materials, the North barren and inhospitable. Roman cities and native settlements, villas and farms; too Roman for the Germanic inhabitants, too Germanic for the Romans. Who did actually inhabit the province? To what social conditions did the regional environment give rise? What economic exchange was there between town and country, between the native inhabitants, the Romans and the free Germanic peoples? Archaeologists and historians now have more sophisticated tools and can provide new, more precise answers to these questions. The North of the province in particular has been explored more thoroughly, and the results of that research form the basis of this volume. The papers resultet from a colloquium with German and Dutch archaeologists and historians. They draw up an account of the current state of the art and show the perspective for future research.
From the thousands of pieces of Late Roman small change discovered trodden into beaten earth floors and dropped into wells to the hoards of 19th-century A.D. silver French francs discovered beneath modern houses, many post-classical coins have been discovered during excavations at the Agora. This booklet presents Byzantine, Frankish, Venetian, Turkish, and modern Greek coins, with many pieces illustrated with clear black and white photos of both obverse and reverse.
Examination and analysis of one of the most important artefacts of Anglo-Saxon society, the cruciform brooch, setting it in a wider context. Cruciform brooches were large and decorative items of jewellery, frequently used to pin together women's garments in pre-Christian northwest Europe. Characterised by the strange bestial visages that project from the feet of thesedress and cloak fasteners, cruciform brooches were especially common in eastern England during the 5th and 6th centuries AD. For this reason, archaeologists have long associated them with those shadowy tribal originators of the English: the Angles of the Migration period. This book provides a multifaceted, holistic and contextual analysis of more than 2,000 Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches. It offers a critical examination of identity in Early Medievalsociety, suggesting that the idea of being Anglian in post-Roman Britain was not a primordial, tribal identity transplanted from northern Germany, but was at least partly forged through the repeated, prevalent use of dress and material culture. Additionally, the particular women that were buried with cruciform brooches, and indeed their very funerals, played an important role in the process. These ideas are explored through a new typology and an updated chronology for cruciform brooches, alongside considerations of their production, exchange and use. The author also examines their geographical distribution through time and their most common archaeological contexts: the inhumation and cremation cemeteries of early Anglo-Saxon England. Dr Toby Martin is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University.
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