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.

Originally published in 1964, this book presents R. M. Cook's Cambridge University Inaugural Lecture on the classical archaeology surrounding the myth of Niobe and her children. A detailed bibliography is included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Ancient Greek mythology and archaeology.

Although the Hellenistic period has become increasingly popular in research and teaching in recent years, the western Mediterranean is rarely considered part of the 'Hellenistic world'; instead the cities, peoples and kingdoms of the West are usually only discussed insofar as they relate to Rome. This book contends that the rift between the 'Greek East' and the 'Roman West' is more a product of the traditional separation of Roman and Greek history than a reflection of the Hellenistic-period Mediterranean, which was a strongly interconnected cultural and economic zone, with the rising Roman republic just one among many powers in the region, east and west. The contributors argue for a dynamic reading of the economy, politics and history of the central and western Mediterranean beyond Rome, and in doing so problematise the concepts of 'East', 'West' and 'Hellenistic' itself.

Christopher Loveluck's study explores the transformation of Northwest Europe (primarily Britain, France and Belgium) from the era of the first post-Roman 'European Union' under the Carolingian Frankish kings to the so-called 'feudal' age, between c. AD 600 and 1150. During these centuries radical changes occurred in the organisation of the rural world. Towns and complex communities of artisans and merchant-traders emerged and networks of contact between northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle and Far East were redefined, with long-lasting consequences into the present day. Loveluck provides the most comprehensive comparative analysis of the rural and urban archaeological remains in this area for twenty-five years. Supported by evidence from architecture, relics, manuscript illuminations and texts, this book explains how the power and intentions of elites were confronted by the aspirations and actions of the diverse rural peasantry, artisans and merchants, producing both intended and unforeseen social changes.

How did Roman Britain end? This new study draws on fresh archaeological discoveries to argue that the end of Roman Britain was not the product of either a violent cataclysm or an economic collapse. Instead, the structure of late antique society, based on the civilian ideology of paideia, was forced to change by the disappearance of the Roman state. By the fifth century elite power had shifted to the warband and the edges of their swords. In this book Dr Gerrard describes and explains that process of transformation and explores the role of the 'Anglo-Saxons' in this time of change. This profound ideological shift returned Britain to a series of 'small worlds', the existence of which had been hidden by the globalizing structures of Roman imperialism. Highly illustrated, the book includes two appendices, which detail Roman cemetery sites and weapon trauma, and pottery assemblages from the period.

This book teaches students and scholars of Greco-Roman medical history how to use and critically assess archaeological materials. Ancient medicine is a subject dominated by textual sources, yet there is a wealth of archaeological remains that can be used to broaden our understanding of medicine in the past. In order to use the information properly, this book explains how to ask questions of an archaeological nature, how to access different types of archaeological materials, and how to overcome problems the researcher might face. It also acts as an introduction to the archaeology of medicine for archaeologists interested in this aspect of their subject. Although the focus is on the Greco-Roman period, the methods and theories explained within the text can be applied to other periods in history. The areas covered include text as material culture, images, artifacts, spaces of medicine, and science and archaeology.

For four centuries Britain was an integral part of the Roman Empire, a political system stretching from Turkey to Portugal and from the Red Sea to the Tyne and beyond. Its involvement with Rome started long before the Conquest launched by the Emperor Claudius in 43 AD, and it continued to be a part of the Roman world for some time after the final break with Roman rule. Bringing together archaeological investigation and historical scholarship, Peter Salway explores some of the key issues arising from this period in Britain's history, discussing the question of identity at this time and analysing the importance of widespread literacy in Roman Britain. Covering the period from Julius Caesar's first forays into Britain and Claudius' subsequent conquest, as well as Britain under the later Roman Empire, Salway outlines the key events of this time period, providing a focus on society in Roman Britain, and offering a thoughtful consideration of the aftermath of Roman rule. In the new edition of this Very Short Introduction, Peter Salway makes a number of essential updates in light of recent research in the area. He looks at issues of ethnicity, 'Britishness', and post-colonialism, provides alternative theories to the end of the Roman period in Britain, and draws parallels between the history of Roman Britain and a wide range of other periods, territories, and themes, including the modern experience of empires and national stereotypes. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Inspired by Schliemann's discoveries at Mycenae and Troy, Sir Arthur John Evans (1851-1941), keeper of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum from 1884 to 1908, trustee of the British Museum and fellow of the Royal Society, used his inherited wealth to purchase land in Crete at Knossos. From 1900 he commenced excavations there in co-operation with the British School at Athens. Work continued for eight full seasons, uncovering a Bronze Age palace and bringing to light further architectural and artefactual remains of Minoan civilisation, including numerous texts in Linear A and Linear B. Evans' speculative reconstruction of the site in reinforced concrete remains controversial, and some of his interpretations are disputed, but his work was pioneering and published in several volumes between 1921 and 1935. The index to this monumental achievement, published in 1936, was the result of a painstaking collaboration with his half-sister, Dame Joan Evans (1893-1977).

Originally published in 1897, this book was written to provide both archaeologists and visitors with an accessible guide to Greek vases in the Fitzwilliam Museum: 'to publish and make accessible to archaeologists a record of the vases it contains, and to assist the visitor, and more especially the student in observing the history and technique of Greek vase-painting'. The text contains illustrations of every vase in the collection, except those that reproduce well-known and common types; these illustrations replace lengthy description and allow for easy identification of subject and style. This is a beautifully presented book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum, archaeology and Greek vases.

The archaeologist Edward Dodwell (c.1776 1832) published this two-volume work in 1819. Elected an honorary member of Berlin's Royal Academy in 1816, Dodwell had been educated at Cambridge, toured France and Germany, and lived in Rome and Naples. Writing extensively on Greek antiquity, he made three tours of Greece, where he produced hundreds of drawings, recording in particular the Athenian Acropolis and the city walls of Argos. He also collected coins and discovered or acquired many valuable artefacts, notably bronzes and vases. Including reproductions of his accomplished illustrations, Volume 1 covers his tours of 1801 and 1805, during which he visited Corfu, Mount Parnassus, Thebes and Attica, spending considerable time in Athens. His detailed account, mixing travelogue with serious scholarship, remains of interest and relevance to classical archaeologists.

The archaeologist Edward Dodwell (c.1776 1832) published this two-volume work in 1819. Elected an honorary member of Berlin's Royal Academy in 1816, Dodwell had been educated at Cambridge, toured France and Germany, and lived in Rome and Naples. Writing extensively on Greek antiquity, he made three tours of Greece, where he produced hundreds of drawings, recording in particular the Athenian Acropolis and the city walls of Argos. He also collected coins and discovered or acquired many valuable artefacts, notably bronzes and vases. Including reproductions of his accomplished illustrations, Volume 2 covers the end of his tour of 1805 and the whole of his final tour of 1806. Dodwell touches on the culture of contemporary Greece, covering also the Echinos ruins, the pass of Thermopylae, and the artefacts of Corinth. His detailed account, mixing travelogue with serious scholarship, remains of interest and relevance to classical archaeologists.

This book describes and analyses the development of the Roman West from Gibraltar to the Rhine, using primarily the extensive body of published archaeological evidence rather than the textual evidence underlying most other studies. It situates this development within a longer-term process of change, proposing the later second century rather than the 'third-century crisis' as the major turning-point, although the latter had longer-term consequences owing to the rise in importance of military identities. Elsewhere, more 'traditional' forms of settlement and display were sustained, to which was added the vocabulary of Christianity. The longer-term rhythms are also central to assessing the evidence for such aspects as rural settlement and patterns of economic interaction. The collapse of Roman imperial authority emphasised trends such as militarisation and regionalisation along with economic and cultural disintegration. Indicators of 'barbarian/Germanic' presence are reassessed within such contexts and the traditional interpretations questioned and alternatives proposed.

Celebrating the rich heritage of archaeology and of archaeological research in Hertfordshire, the 15 papers collected in this work focus on various aspects of the region, including the Neolithic to the post-Medieval periods, and include a report on the important excavations at the formative henge at Norton. Several chapters focus new attention on the Iron Age and Roman periods, both from a landscape perspective and through detailed studies of artefacts, while a discussion of the rare early Saxon material recently excavated at Watton at Stone makes a vital contribution to the existing corpus of knowledge about this little-understood period. All of the papers in the volume focus on the local scene with an understanding of wider issues in each period and as a result, the papers are of importance beyond the boundaries of the county and will be of interest to scholars with wide-ranging interests.

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.

This book discusses how Greek and South Italian vase paintings of the musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas became the model for Etruscan representations of Cacus ambushed by the Vibennae brothers, two Etruscan heroes of the sixth century B.C. The study demonstrates that the Etruscans knowingly adapted Greek iconographic forms to represent their own legends.

Originally published in 1982.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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

Democracy's Ancient Ancestors examines the political landscape of the ancient Near East through the archive of over 3000 letters found in the royal palace of Mari. These letters display a rich diversity of political actors, encompassing major kingdoms, smaller states and various tribal towns. Mari's unique contribution to the ancient evidence is its view of tribal organization, made possible especially by the fact that its king Zimri-Lim was first of all a tribal ruler, who claimed Mari as an administrative base and source of prestige. These archaic political traditions are not essentially unlike the forms of pre-democratic Greece, and they offer fresh reason to recognize a cultural continuity between the classical world of the Aegean and the older Near East. This book bridges several areas of interest, including archaeology, ancient and classical history, early Middle and Near East, and political and social history.

Reconstructing the lost monuments of Antiquity became, after 1800, a complement to Europe's colonial imagination. Countless archaeologists and architects travelled to the East, excavated extinct cities, and shipped their finds to Europe for display in imperial museums. Antiquity on Display is a critical biography of Berlin's Pergamon Museum and its popular architectural displays: the Great Altar of Pergamon, the Market Gate of Miletus, and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. In this volume, Bilsel argues that the museum has produced a modern decor, an iconic image, which has replaced the lost antique originals, rather than creating an explicitly hypothetical representation of Antiquity. Addressing the dilemmas raised by the continuing presence of these displays, which embody the distinctive traits of the artistic and ideological programs of the last two centuries, Bilsel questions what the process of reproduction and authentication of Antiquity in the museum tells us about our changing perceptions of historic monuments. Documenting the process through which these imaginative reproductions of architecture were conceived, staged, and came to be perceived as authentic monuments, this volume offers an insight into the history of Berlin's Museum Island and the shifting regimes of the authentic in museum displays from the nineteenth century to the present.

By far the largest single source of new information about the ancient Greek and Roman world is provided by the flow of newly discovered inscriptions, which presents both a challenge and an opportunity. In order to interpret any inscription we need to be able to apply the knowledge that we already have. On the other hand, inscriptions present the opportunity to gain new knowledge about virtually every aspect of the mix of cultures and societies which we call Graeco-Roman antiquity. This book therefore emphasises the importance of the two-way connections and contributions which link epigraphic studies with the historical sciences as a whole. Epigraphic information is helping to reshape and extend our knowledge of the religious life, the languages, the populations, the governmental systems, and the economies of the Graeco-Roman world. New techniques and technologies are helping to make epigraphically based information more accessible, whether in terms of public display or in terms of the ever-widening possibilities of information technology. The act of looking at the Graeco-Roman world through the window provided by the epigraphic record offers a distinctive gaze of unique and exceptional value.

Robert Pashley (1805 59) spent 1833 4 exploring Greece and Turkey as a Trinity College, Cambridge Travelling Fellow and contributor to a British survey of the Mediterranean, yet it was the island of Crete that most captivated his attention; his travels there became the subject of this two-volume account, published in 1837. The following year, Pashley's notes, collected artefacts and books were destroyed in a fire, so this work is all that remains from his expedition to the island. Crete at various points in its history had been ruled by Romans, Byzantines, Venetians and Ottomans. At the time of Pashley's arrival it was under Egyptian administration and there were palpable tensions between Christians and Muslims. In Volume 1, Pashley begins his journey in the western town of Chania, and his lively narrative weaves contemporary observations about Cretans with a discussion of the island's rich history.

Robert Pashley (1805 59) spent 1833 4 exploring Greece and Turkey as a Trinity College, Cambridge Travelling Fellow and contributor to a British survey of the Mediterranean, yet it was the island of Crete that most captivated his attention; his travels there became the subject of this two-volume account, published in 1837. The following year, Pashley's notes, collected artefacts and books were destroyed in a fire, so this work is all that remains from his expedition to the island. Crete at various points in its history had been ruled by Romans, Byzantines, Venetians and Ottomans. At the time of Pashley's arrival it was under Egyptian administration and there were palpable tensions between Christians and Muslims. In Volume 2, Pashley ends his travels in the south-western Samaria region. This volume also includes an appendix of Venetian manuscripts, and economic and demographic statistics from 1834.

The impact of long-distance exchange on the developing cultures of Bronze Age Greece has been a subject of debate since Schliemann's discovery of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. In Mycenaean Greece, Mediterranean Commerce, and the Formation of Identity, Bryan E. Burns offers a new understanding of the effects of Mediterranean trade on Mycenaean Greece by considering the possibilities represented by the traded objects themselves in their Mycenaean contexts. A range of imported artifacts were distinguished by their precious material, uncommon style and foreign writing, signaling their status as tangible evidence of connections beyond the Aegean. The consumption of these exotic symbols spread beyond the highest levels of society and functioned as symbols of external power sources. Burns argues that the consumption of exotic items thus enabled the formation of alternate identities and the resistance of palatial power.

Sir William Ridgeway (1858-1926) was a prominent classical scholar, archaeologist and anthropologist who was appointed to the Disney Chair for Archaeology in 1892. Originally published in 1913, this volume was created in honour of his sixtieth birthday. It provides essays and studies by various contributors covering three broad areas: classics and ancient archaeology; medieval literature and history; anthropology and comparative religion. Abundant illustrations are also contained within the text. This is a wide-ranging book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in the numerous topics covered.

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.