Why did the male nude come to occupy such an important place in ancient Greek culture? Despite extended debate, the answer to this question remains obscure. In this book, Sarah Murray demonstrates that evidence from the Early Iron Age Aegean has much to add to the discussion. Her research shows that aesthetics and practices involving male nudity in the Aegean had a complicated origin in prehistory. Murray offers a close analysis of the earliest male nudes from the late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, which mostly take the form of small bronze votive figurines deposited in rural sanctuaries. Datable to the end of the second millennium BCE, these figurines, she argues, enlighten the ritual and material contexts in which nude athletics originated, complicating the rationalizing accounts present in the earliest textual evidence for such practices. Murray's book breaks new ground by reconstructing a scenario for the ritual and ideological origins of nudity in Greek art and culture.

Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs is the first detailed consideration of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon society dealt with social outcasts. Beginning with the period following Roman rule and ending in the century following the Norman Conquest, it surveys a period of fundamental social change, which included the conversion to Christianity, the emergence of the late Saxon state, and the development of the landscape of the Domesday Book. While an impressive body of written evidence for the period survives in the form of charters and law-codes, archaeology is uniquely placed to investigate the earliest period of post-Roman society - the fifth to seventh centuries - for which documents are lacking. For later centuries, archaeological evidence can provide us with an independent assessment of the realities of capital punishment and the status of outcasts. Andrew Reynolds argues that outcast burials show a clear pattern of development in this period. In the pre-Christian centuries, 'deviant' burial remains are found only in community cemeteries, but the growth of kingship and the consolidation of territories during the seventh century witnessed the emergence of capital punishment and places of execution in the English landscape. Locally determined rites, such as crossroads burial, now existed alongside more formal execution cemeteries. Gallows were located on major boundaries, often next to highways, always in highly visible places. The findings of this pioneering national study thus have important consequences on our understanding of Anglo-Saxon society. Overall, Reynolds concludes, organized judicial behaviour was a feature of the earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, rather than just the two centuries prior to the Norman Conquest.

In the course of the fifth century, the farms and villas of lowland Britain were replaced by a new, distinctive form of rural settlement: the settlements of the Anglo-Saxons. This volume presents the first major synthesis of the evidence - which has expanded enormously in recent years - for such settlements from across England and throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, and what it reveals about the communities who built and lived in them, and whose daily lives went almost wholly unrecorded. Helena Hamerow examines the appearance, function, and 'life-cycles' of their buildings; the relationship of Anglo-Saxon settlements to the Romano-British landscape and to later medieval villages; the role of ritual in daily life; and the relationship between farming regimes and settlement forms. A central theme throughout the book is the impact on rural producers of the rise of lordship and markets, and how this impact is reflected in the remains of their settlements. Hamerow provides an introduction to the wealth of information yielded by settlement archaeology, and to the enormous contribution that it makes to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon society.

Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century, while trade and manufacturing were insignificant by modern standards. In Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming, the authors employ a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other agricultural products that sustained English economy, society, and culture before the Norman Conquest. The first part of the volume draws on written and pictorial sources, archaeology, place-names, and the history of the English language to discover what crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques were used to produce them. In part two, using a series of landscape studies - place-names, maps, and the landscape itself, the authors explore how these techniques might have been combined into working agricultural regimes in different parts of the country. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was recognisably the beginning of a tradition that only ended with the Second World War. 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.

This book explores the medieval art, architecture and archaeology of the city of Cracow and the surrounding region of Lesser Poland. It highlights the role of Cracow and Lesser Poland as a vibrant artistic centre fostering links with Italy, Bohemia, Germany and France.

Think of a souvenir from a foreign trip, or an heirloom passed down the generations - distinctive individual artefacts allow us to think and act beyond the proximate, across both space and time. While this makes anecdotal sense, what does scholarship have to say about the role of artefacts in human thought? Surprisingly, material culture research tends also to focus on individual artefacts. But objects rarely stand independently from one another they are interconnected in complex constellations. This innovative volume asserts that it is such 'networks of objects' that instill objects with their power, enabling them to evoke distant times and places for both individuals and communities. Using archaeological case studies from the Bronze Age of Greece throughout, Knappett develops a long-term, archaeological angle on the development of object networks in human societies. He explores the benefits such networks create for human interaction across scales, and the challenges faced by ancient societies in balancing these benefits against their costs. In objectifying and controlling artefacts in networks, human communities can lose track of the recalcitrant pull that artefacts exercise. Materials do not always do as they are asked. We never fully understand all their aspects. This we grasp in our everyday, unconscious working in the phenomenal world, but overlook in our network thinking. And this failure to attend to things and give them their due can lead to societal 'disorientation'.

Roman-Period and Byzantine Nazareth and its Hinterland presents a new social and economic interpretation of Roman-period and Byzantine Nazareth and its hinterland as a whole, showing the transformation of a Roman-period Jewish village into a major Byzantine Christian pilgrimage centre. Although Nazareth is one of the most famous places in the world, this is the first book on Roman-period and Byzantine Nazareth by a professional archaeologist, the only book to consider the archaeology of Nazareth in the context of its adjacent landscape, and the first to use contemporary archaeological methods and theory to explore Nazareth's archaeology. Taking as his starting point a systematic survey of the valley between Nazareth and the Roman town of Sepphoris, Dark offers an interpretation of communities elsewhere in the Roman world as networks of interlocking cells, with interactions along routeways being more important in cultural and economic terms than the relationship between urban centres and their surrounding countryside. His conclusions have implications for the wider archaeology of the Roman and Byzantine worlds, as well as for archaeological theory, and demonstrate the importance of Nazareth to world archaeology. This unique book will be invaluable to those interested in Nazareth and its surrounding landscape, as well as to archaeologists and scholars of the Roman and Byzantine worlds.

Andrew Tibbs, the man behind the popular @RomanScotland account, brings together an overview of the history and archaeology of this famous monument, along with a guide to the key Roman sites to visit in and around Hadrian's Wall. The history of the wall starts with the earliest Roman invasion of northern Britain. This led to the construction of the Stanegate, a chain of forts across northern England superseded by the construction of Hadrian's Wall. Thirty key sites are examined, all of which can be visited, and Tibbs provides maps, illustrations and details of each of these. This is the perfect book for anybody interested in the history of the wall and the rich variety of interesting sites that can be found along it.

In this volume, Philip Kay examines economic change in Rome and Italy between the Second Punic War and the middle of the first century BC. He argues that increased inflows of bullion, in particular silver, combined with an expansion of the availability of credit to produce significant growth in monetary liquidity. This, in turn, stimulated market developments, such as investment farming, trade, construction, and manufacturing, and radically changed the composition and scale of the Roman economy. Using a wide range of evidence and scholarly investigation, Kay demonstrates how Rome, in the second and first centuries BC, became a coherent economic entity experiencing real per capita economic growth. Without an understanding of this economic revolution, the contemporaneous political and cultural changes in Roman society cannot be fully comprehended or explained.

Recipient of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Volume 2 presents the concluding research on Sitagroi, a prehistoric settlement mound in northeastern Greece, excavated between 1968 and 1970. This volume offers a detailed report on the plant remains along with a full treatment of craft and technology: artifacts of adornment; tools of bone and flaked stone; artifacts and tools of bone and ground and polished stone (and petrology); tools of the spinner, weaver and mat maker; pottery technology; metallurgy; and special clay finds such as seals, miniatures, and utensils. This rich presentation offers unparalleled insights into the life of the prehistoric inhabitants of the area. Sitagroi now becomes one of the most comprehensively published sites from prehistoric Europe and will be indispensable for all those concerned with European prehistory.

This volume is the first comprehensive archaeological catalogue of all the extant inscriptions written in the un-deciphered syllabary of Late Bronze Age Cyprus (1500-1200 BC): the so-called Cypro-Minoan script. In conjunction with Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions Volume 1: Analysis, this volume focuses on the physical reality of the inscribed objects containing Cypro-Minoan and the archaeological contexts in which they were found. Offering a detailed, systematic, and rigorous examination of both the objects and their functions in the material record, it proposes a new way of examining the inscriptions. This comprehensive standpoint therefore considers not only the inscriptions themselves, but more importantly the contexts and functions of the inscribed objects, which are significant for the documentary evidence they bear and the part they play as physical entities manufactured, shaped, and used by past peoples for a defined purpose. Organized in a catalogue format, each object is analysed, illustrated, and accompanied by a detailed commentary on the context of recovery and typological characteristics with full bibliographical references. While a standalone reference work, it aims to showcase the inscribed objects discussed in Volume 1: Analysis, fully illustrating them in a series of photographs, including 50 colour plates, and drawings.

The human race is on a 10,000 year urban adventure. Our ancestors wandered the planet or lived scattered in villages, yet by the end of this century almost all of us will live in cities. But that journey has not been a smooth one and urban civilizations have risen and fallen many times in history. The ruins of many of them still enchant us. This book tells the story of the rise and fall of ancient cities from the end of the Bronze Age to the beginning of the Middle Ages. It is a tale of war and politics, pestilence and famine, triumph and tragedy, by turns both fabulous and squalid. Its focus is on the ancient Mediterranean: Greeks and Romans at the centre, but Phoenicians and Etruscans, Persians, Gauls, and Egyptians all play a part. The story begins with the Greek discovery of much more ancient urban civilizations in Egypt and the Near East, and charts the gradual spread of urbanism to the Atlantic and then the North Sea in the centuries that followed. The ancient Mediterranean, where our story begins, was a harsh environment for urbanism. So how were cities first created, and then sustained for so long, in these apparently unpromising surroundings? How did they feed themselves, where did they find water and building materials, and what did they do with their waste and their dead? Why, in the end, did their rulers give up on them? And what it was like to inhabit urban worlds so unlike our own - cities plunged into darkness every night, cities dominated by the temples of the gods, cities of farmers, cities of slaves, cities of soldiers. Ultimately, the chief characters in the story are the cities themselves. Athens and Sparta, Persepolis and Carthage, Rome and Alexandria: cities that formed great families. Their story encompasses the history of the generations of people who built and inhabited them, whose short lives left behind monuments that have inspired city builders ever since - and whose ruins stand as stark reminders to the 21st century of the perils as well as the potential rewards of an urban existence.

This innovative monograph series reflects a vigorous revival of interest in the ancient economy, focusing on the Mediterranean world under Roman rule (c.100 BC to AD 350). Carefully quantified archaeological and documentary data will be integrated to help ancient historians, economic historians, and archaeologists think about economic behaviour collectively rather than from separate perspectives. The volumes will include a substantial comparative element and thus be of interest to historians of other periods and places. The use of stone in vast quantities is a ubiquitous and defining feature of the material culture of the Roman world. In this volume, Russell provides a new and wide-ranging examination of the production, distribution, and use of carved stone objects throughout the Roman world, including how enormous quantities of high-quality white and polychrome marbles were moved all around the Mediterranean to meet the demand for exotic material. The long-distance supply of materials for artistic and architectural production, not to mention the trade in finished objects like statues and sarcophagi, is one of the most remarkable features of the Roman world. Despite this, it has never received much attention in mainstream economic studies. Focusing on the market for stone and its supply, the administration, distribution, and chronology of quarrying, and the practicalities of stone transport, Russell offers a detailed assessment of the Roman stone trade and how the relationship between producer and customer functioned even over considerable distances.

The south-eastern tip of continental Europe was a major focus of creative energy in the second half of the first millennium BC. As the bridgehead between Europe, Asia, and the Mediterranean, the lands that corresponded to northern Greece, Bulgaria, and the European parts of Turkey became a focus of interest for a variety of external powers keen to benefit from this region's burgeoning wealth. While the ancient kingdoms of Macedon and Thrace were thought of as fringe areas of the Mediterranean, they became rich and successful, partly by exploiting the region's mineral wealth and timber and from the effective herding of livestock. In economic terms, these land-based states were strongly connected to the maritime powers of central and southern Greece and with areas far beyond the Aegean. Using the most up-to-date methods and theories about ancient economies, Archibald explores the cultural and economic dynamics of a region that continues to reveal unexpected dimensions of Classical antiquity.

Greek Art and Aesthetics in the Fourth Century B.C. analyzes the broad character of art produced during this period, providing in-depth analysis of and commentary on many of its most notable examples of sculpture and painting. Taking into consideration developments in style and subject matter, and elucidating political, religious, and intellectual context, William A. P. Childs argues that Greek art in this era was a natural outgrowth of the high classical period and focused on developing the rudiments of individual expression that became the hallmark of the classical in the fifth century. As Childs shows, in many respects the art of this period corresponds with the philosophical inquiry by Plato and his contemporaries into the nature of art and speaks to the contemporaneous sense of insecurity and renewed religious devotion. Delving into formal and iconographic developments in sculpture and painting, Childs examines how the sensitive, expressive quality of these works seamlessly links the classical and Hellenistic periods, with no appreciable rupture in the continuous exploration of the human condition. Another overarching theme concerns the nature of "style as a concept of expression," an issue that becomes more important given the increasingly multiple styles and functions of fourth-century Greek art. Childs also shows how the color and form of works suggested the unseen and revealed the profound character of individuals and the physical world.

This volume reconstructs the history of documentary practice in pharaonic Egypt from the early Old Kingdom to the major administrative changes imposed by the colonizing regimes of the Graeco-Roman period. Relating administrative and legal practice to the physical practicalities of the media used for writing, and through the close reading of primary textual sources, it examines how different types of documents - private and official - were created and used. It explores the ways in which the writing of documents was embedded deeply in the interactions between customary social practices, which were essentially oral, and in the penetration of outside hierarchies into local government. Eyre argues that the potential of the written document as evidence or proof was never fully exploited in the pharaonic period, even though writing was a powerful symbol and display of hierarchical authority. He presents the government as a system rooted in personal prestige and patronage structures, lacking the effective departmental hierarchies and archive systems that would represent a true bureaucratic system.

York was one of the most important cities in medieval England. This original study traces the development of the city from the Norman Conquest to the Black Death. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries are a neglected period in the history of English towns, and this study argues that the period was absolutely fundamental to the development of urban society and that up to now we have misunderstood the reasons for the development of York and its significance within our history because of that neglect. Medieval York argues that the first Norman kings attempted to turn the city into a true northern capital of their new kingdom and had a much more significant impact on the development of the city than has previously been realised. Nevertheless the influence of York Minster, within whose shadow the town had originally developed, remained strong and was instrumental in the emergence of a strong and literate civic communal government in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Many of the earlier Norman initiatives withered as the citizens developed their own institutions of government and social welfare. The primary sources used are records of property ownership and administration, especially charters, and combines these with archaeological evidence from the last thirty years. Much of the emphasis of the book is therefore on the topographical development of the city and the changing social and economic structures associated with property ownership and occupation.

Trees were of fundamental importance in Anglo-Saxon society. Anglo-Saxons dwelt in timber houses, relied on woodland as an economic resource, and created a material culture of wood which was at least as meaningfully-imbued, and vastly more prevalent, than the sculpture and metalwork with which we associate them today. Trees held a central place in Anglo-Saxon belief systems, which carried into the Christian period, not least in the figure of the cross itself. Despite this, the transience of trees and timber in comparison to metal and stone has meant that the subject has received comparatively little attention from scholars. Trees and Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World constitutes the very first collection of essays written about the role of trees in early medieval England, bringing together established specialists and new voices to present an interdisciplinary insight into the complex relationship between the early English and their woodlands. The woodlands of England were not only deeply rooted in every aspect of Anglo-Saxon material culture, as a source of heat and light, food and drink, wood and timber for the construction of tools, weapons, and materials, but also in their spiritual life, symbolic vocabulary, and sense of connection to their beliefs and heritage. These essays do not merely focus on practicalities, such as carpentry techniques and the extent of woodland coverage, but rather explore the place of trees and timber in the intellectual lives of the early medieval inhabitants of England, using evidence from archaeology, place-names, landscapes, and written sources.

A landmark in the study of ancient glass from Greece, this volume presents 404 vessels, mostly fragmentary, excavated in the Athenian Agora. Fragments of almost every type of glass known from antiquity were found: 37 pieces date to the Classical and Hellenistic periods, when the Agora as civil center of the city was at its height, and 15 are assigned to the ninth to eighteenth centuries. The bulk of the material belongs to the Roman Empire and Late Antiquity. In these periods, glass was a common material in the market place and household, and it was used side b side with ceramics and metals with which it competed as tableware and as containers. Excavated to exacting scientific standards, much of the material comes from independently datable contexts. The glass offers a significant contribution to our assessment of the trade and economy of Athens after the city had lost its status of foremost city in Greece but was still an important industrial center. The volume provides an overview of the history of glass manufacturing techniques as evidenced within the city of Athens followed by a discussion of the contexts in which the objects were deposited. the catalogue entries proper. Figures, plates (some in color), an extensive bibliography, deposit summaries, concordances, and indices complete the book. The first excavation monograph from Greece to present the glass from all periods of the history of one site, this volume will be an essential reference work for archaeologists and glass historians alike.

In ancient Athenian democracy there were one hundred and thirty-nine official demes, or recognized population centres, which formed the foundation of the political system introduced by Kleisthenes in 508/7 BC. Enrolment in one of these demes was a prerequisite for citizenship and participation in the Athenian socio-political system. Acharnai was by far the largest of the Kleisthenic demes and one of the best known from the ancient sources, most notably Thucydides and Aristophanes' comedy Acharnians; it therefore provides a rare opportunity for a comprehensive investigation into the workings of a rural deme. In this volume, Kellogg combines literary, prosopographical, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence to create an encompassing overview of this dynamic and historical settlement with a well-developed identity and unique traditions. Such an investigation also functions as a corrective to a 'one size fits all' approach to rural Attica, which privileges the city and its political and economic opportunities over the countryside where most of the Athenian citizenry lived. This volume constitutes a new and distinctive contribution to the study of ancient Athens, and is a major advance in the analysis of the critically important role of the Attic demes in the economic, political, social, and religious structures of Athenian democracy.

Harvesting the Sea provides the first systematic treatment of the exploitation of various marine resources, such as large-scale fishing, fish salting, salt and purple-dye production, and oyster and fish-farming, in the Roman world and its role within the ancient economy. Bringing together literary, epigraphic, and legal sources, with a wealth of archaeological data collected in recent years, Marzano shows that these marine resources were an important feature of the Roman economy and, in scope and market-oriented production, paralleled phenomena taking place in the Roman agricultural economy on land. The book also examines the importance of technological innovations, the organization of labour, and the use of the existing legal framework in defence of economic interests against competitors for the same natural resource.

Images of ancient Sparta have had a major impact on Western thought. From the Renaissance to the French Revolution she was invoked by radical thinkers as a model for the creation of a republican political and social order. Since the 19th century she has typically been viewed as the opposite of advanced liberal and industrial democracies: a forerunner of 20th-century totalitarian and militaristic regimes such as the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Yet positive images of Sparta remain embedded in contemporary popular media and culture. This is the first book in over 40 years to examine this important subject. Eleven ancient historians and experts in the history of ideas discuss Sparta's changing role in Western thought from medieval Europe to the 21st century, with a special focus on Enlightenment France, Nazi Germany and the USA. The volume also covers new aspects of Sparta's reception not covered in previous work.

This book focuses primarily on the end of the pagan religious tradition and the dismantling of its material form in North Africa (modern Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) from the 4th to the 6th centuries AD. Leone considers how urban communities changed, why some traditions were lost and some others continued, and whether these carried the same value and meaning upon doing so. Addressing two main issues, mainly from an archaeological perspective, the volume explores the change in religious habits and practices, and the consequent recycling and reuse of pagan monuments and materials, and investigates to what extent these physical processes were driven by religious motivations and contrasts, or were merely stimulated by economic issues.

The World of the 'Fullo' takes a detailed look at the fullers, craftsmen who dealt with high-quality garments, of Roman Italy. Analyzing the social and economic worlds in which the fullers lived and worked, it tells the story of their economic circumstances, the way they organized their workshops, the places where they worked in the city, and their everyday lives on the shop floor and beyond. Through focusing on the lower segments of society, Flohr uses everyday work as the major organizing principle of the narrative: the volume discusses the decisions taken by those responsible for the organization of work, and how these decisions subsequently had an impact on the social lives of people carrying out the work. It emphasizes how socio-economic differences between cities resulted in fundamentally different working lives for many of their people, and that not only were economic activities shaped by Roman society, they in turn played a key role in shaping it. Using an in-depth and qualitative analysis of material remains related to economic activities, with a combined study of epigraphic and literary records, this volume portrays an insightful view of the socio-economic history of urban communities in the Roman world.

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