How were the dead remembered in early medieval Britain? Originally published in 2006, this innovative study demonstrates how perceptions of the past and the dead, and hence social identities, were constructed through mortuary practices and commemoration between c. 400-1100 AD. Drawing on archaeological evidence from across Britain, including archaeological discoveries, Howard Williams presents a fresh interpretation of the significance of portable artefacts, the body, structures, monuments and landscapes in early medieval mortuary practices. He argues that materials and spaces were used in ritual performances that served as 'technologies of remembrance', practices that created shared 'social' memories intended to link past, present and future. Through the deployment of material culture, early medieval societies were therefore selectively remembering and forgetting their ancestors and their history. Throwing light on an important aspect of medieval society, this book is essential reading for archaeologists and historians with an interest in the early medieval period.

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.

This book is a companion volume to K. D. White's Agricultural Implements of the Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 1967). He deals here with equipment and instruments which were for the most part used in processing and storage as opposed to cultivation. Each item is described in detail and there are abundant references to sources, literary and archaeological. The volume is amply illustrated. As before, Professor White has unearthed a wealth of information of special value to archaeologists, lexicographers and historians of technology. His discussions of the use made of the articles catalogued have a broader human interest and throw illuminating sidelights on the social and economic life of the Roman world.

Whatever aspect of Athenian culture one examines, whether it be tragedy and comedy, philosophy, vase painting and sculpture, oratory and rhetoric, law and politics, or social and economic life, the picture looks very different after 400 BC from before 400 BC. Scholars who have previously addressed this question have concentrated on particular areas and come up with explanations, often connected with the psychological effect of the Peloponnesian War, which are very unconvincing as explanations for the whole range of change. This book attempts to look at a wide range of evidence for cultural change at Athens and to examine the ways in which the changes may have been coordinated. It is a complement to the examination of the rhetoric of revolution as applied to ancient Greece in Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2006).

In this survey of the burial and settlement evidence of late Iron Age Etruria, Corinna Riva offers a new reading of the socio-political transformations that led to the formation of urban centres in Tyrrhenian Central Italy. Through a close examination of burial ritual and the material culture associated with it, Riva traces the transformations of seventh-century elite funerary practices and the structuring of political power around these practices in Etruria, arguing that the tomb became the locus for the articulation of new forms of political authority at urban centres. Challenging established views that deem contact with eastern Mediterranean regions crucial to these developments, Riva offers a radically new interpretation of the so-called Orientalizing material culture, taking a long-term perspective on local changes and east-west contact across the Mediterranean.

For the last 150 years the historiography of the Crusades has been dominated by nationalist and colonialist discourses in Europe and the Levant. These modern histories have interpreted the Crusades in terms of dichotomous camps, Frankish and Muslim. In this revisionist study, Ronnie Ellenblum presents an interpretation of Crusader historiography that instead defines military and architectural relations between the Franks, local Christians, Muslims and Turks in terms of continuous dialogue and mutual influence. Through close analysis of siege tactics, defensive strategies and the structure and distribution of Crusader castles, Ellenblum relates patterns of crusader settlement to their environment and demonstrates the influence of opposing cultures on tactics and fortifications. He argues that fortifications were often built according to economic and geographic considerations rather than for strategic reasons or to protect illusory 'frontiers', and that Crusader castles are the most evident expression of a cultural dialogue between east and west.

This volume of Medieval European Coinage deals with the coinage of south Italy, Sicily and Sardinia between the mid-tenth century, when Part I ended, and the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic, on the threshold of the modern era. It thus covers very different coinages of the immediate pre-Norman period and those of the Norman, Hohenstaufen, Angevin and Aragonese dynasties, which in turn ruled part or the whole of the Mezzogiorno. The complex background to the history of this region makes its coinages among the most interesting of medieval Europe. They have rarely been studied together or in a single volume, and the work, which makes extensive use of written evidence and coin finds, will take its place as the standard work of reference for the foreseeable future.

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

Recent studies have highlighted the diversity, complexity, and plurality of identities in the ancient world. At the same time, scholars have acknowledged the dynamic role of material culture, not simply in reflecting those identities but their role in creating and transforming them. This volume explores and compares two influential approaches to the study of social and cultural identities, the model of globalization and theories of hybrid cultural development. In a series of case studies, an international team of archaeologists and art historians considers how various aspects of material culture can be used to explore complex global and local identity structures across the geographical and chronological span of antiquity. The essays examine the civilizations of the Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, Persians, Phoenicians, and Celts. Reflecting on the current state of our understanding of cultural interaction and antiquity, they also dwell on contemporary thoughts of identity, cultural globalization, and resistance that shape and are shaped by academic discourses on the cultural empires of Greece and Rome.

Much of our understanding of the origins and early development of the Greek architectural order is based on the writings of ancient authors, such as Virtruvius, and those of modern interpreters. Traditionally, the archaeological evidence has been viewed secondarily and often made to fit within a literary context, despite contradictions that occur. Barbara Barletta s study examines both forms of evidence in an effort to reconcile the two sources, as well as to offer a coherent reconstruction of the origins and early development of the Greek architectural orders. Beginning with the pre-canonical material, she demonstrates that the relatively late emergence of the Doric and Ionic orders arose from contributions of separate regions of the Greek world, rather than a single center. Barletta s reinterpretations of the evidence also assigns greater importance to the often overlooked contributions of Western Greece and the Cycladic Islands."

Dramatic social and political change marks the period from the end of the Late Bronze Age into the Iron Age (ca. 1300 700 BCE) across the Mediterranean. Inland palatial centers of bureaucratic power weakened or collapsed ca. 1200 BCE while entrepreneurial exchange by sea survived and even expanded, becoming the Mediterranean-wide network of Phoenician trade. At the heart of that system was Kition, one of the largest harbor cities of ancient Cyprus. Earlier research has suggested that Phoenician rule was established at Kition after the abandonment of part of its Bronze Age settlement. A reexamination of Kition s architecture, stratigraphy, inscriptions, sculpture, and ceramics demonstrates that it was not abandoned. This study emphasizes the placement and scale of images and how they reveal the development of economic and social control at Kition from its establishment in the thirteenth century BCE until the development of a centralized form of government by the Phoenicians, backed by the Assyrian king, in 707 BCE."

This second edition of Alison E. Cooley's accessible introduction to Pompeii takes into account the major new theories and discoveries that have emerged since the first edition was published 20 years ago. Italy's third most popular tourist destination, Pompeii attracts millions of visitors each year, and images of the town are familiar all around the world. However, even today our picture of the site is being impacted by new archaeological discoveries. This book focuses particularly on the date of the eruption, the natural environment of Pompeii, the recovery of skeletal remains and plaster casts, and Pompeii in the popular imagination. In addition, three new chapters look at the popularization of Pompeii, archaeological reconstruction of the Roman town, and how we know what we know about the people who lived there. The technological advances of the 20th and 21st centuries have transformed our understanding of the urban environment of Pompeii, raising new questions even as they dig ever deeper into the surviving material evidence. This volume offers a succinct and insightful exploration of the impact of these scientific and archaeological innovations, as well as that of contemporary politics, upon interpretations of Pompeii over the last 250 years, including the ways in which advances in volcanology have transformed our picture of its last moments.

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.

Why say thank you with a portrait statue? This book combines two different and quite specialized fields, archaeology and epigraphy, to explore the phenomenon of portraits in ancient art within the historical and anthropological context of city-states honouring worthy individuals through erecting statues, and the development of families imitating this practice. This transaction tells us a lot about the history of these cities and how ancient art worked as a construction of relations during the Hellenistic period (c. 350 BC- c. AD 1), which is marked by a political culture of civic devotion, common decision making, and publicness. As honorific statues were considered public art, the volume also investigates the workings of images, representations, memory, and the monumental public form of permanent inscription, to see what stories the Hellenistic city-states can reveal about themselves.

This book is an account of an almost completely neglected archaeological epic, the uncovering and restoration of all the classical monuments of Rome during the French occupation (1809 14). This was the first large-scale archaeological programme in the city. Based on archives in Rome and Paris, the archaeology of these five years is placed against its essential background: the fate of the monuments since antiquity and the contemporary Napoleonic political and cultural history. Mr Ridley describes the enormously complicated organisation which carried out the work and identifies the leading administrators, archaeologists and architects. The bulk of the work is a detailed account of the excavation and restoration work on the Forum Romanum, the Colosseum and the Forum of Trajan, the main classical monuments. There are numerous illustrations of the monuments both before and after the French intervention, as well as unpublished plans from the archives. There is an extensive specialist index. The book is intended for anyone interested in archaeology, in Napoleonic Europe and above all, in Rome.

In 97 CE Julius Frontinus was appointed by the Emperor Nerva to the post of water commissioner for the city of Rome. In the De Aquaductu Urbis Romae he sets forth his duties, responsibilities and accomplishments during his first year in office. He sketches the history of the aqueducts, furnishes a wealth of technical data and quotes verbatim from legal documents. This edition is the first since 1922 to be based on the single authoritative witness discovered at Monte Cassino in 1429 and is also the first to take into account the idiosyncrasies of its twelfth-century scribe, Peter the Deacon, a man notorious for literary affectations of his own. R. H. Rodgers provides the first full commentary since the early eighteenth century, dividing his attention between text and language on the one hand and content and interpretation on the other.

While the study of networks has grown exponentially in the past decade and is now having an impact on how archaeologists study ancient societies, its emergence in the field has been dislocated. This volume provides a coherent framework on network analysis in current archaeological practice by pulling together its main themes and approaches to show how it is changing the way archaeologists face the key questions of regional interaction. Working with the term 'network' as a collection of nodes and links, as used in network science and social network analysis, it juxtaposes a range of case studies and investigates the positives and negatives of network analysis. With contributions by leading experts in the field, the volume covers a broad range: from Japan to America, from the Palaeolithic to the Precolumbian.

The Frontier area of northern England is the most important and reliable source for archaeologists in existence. The perpetuation of the Roman imperial ideal, the survival of classical art and literature, and the spread of the Christian faith depended on the strength of the Empire's frontier and the people who lived there. In Britain these peoples represent nearly 400 years of a cosmopolitan society with the basic elements of a true civilisation. They had greater freedom and security and were more literate and prosperous than at any previous time or for many centuries after. Dr Salway's study of this area is a detailed investigation of the Romanised part of the civilian population to be made. He describes the people themselves and every aspect of their background and way of life, their legal status and their administrative system. He then examines each of the sites individually, making special use of aerial photographs.

This book explores how art and material culture were used to construct age, gender and social identity in the Greek Early Iron Age, 1100-700 BCE. Coming between the collapse of the Bronze Age palaces and the creation of Archaic city-states, these four centuries witnessed fundamental cultural developments and political realignments. Whereas previous archaeological research has emphasized class-based aspects of change, this study offers a more comprehensive view of early Greece by recognizing the place of children and women in a warrior-focused society. Combining iconographic analysis, gender theory, mortuary analysis, typological study and object biography, Susan Langdon explores how early figural art was used to mediate critical stages in the life-course of men and women. She shows how an understanding of the artistic and material contexts of social change clarifies the emergence of distinctive gender and class asymmetries that laid the basis for classical Greek society.

Early in the archaic period of Greek history, Messenia was annexed and partially settled by its powerful neighbour, Sparta. Achieving independence in the fourth century BC, the inhabitants of Messenia set about trying to forge an identity for themselves separate from their previous identity as Spartan subjects, refunctionalising or simply erasing their Spartan heritage. Professor Luraghi provides a thorough examination of the history of Messenian identity and consequently addresses a range of questions and issues whose interest and importance have only been widely recognised by ancient historians during the last decade. By a detailed scrutiny of the ancient written sources and the archaeological evidence, the book reconstructs how the Messenians perceived and constructed their own ethnicity at different points in time, by applying to Messenian ethnicity insights developed by anthropologists and early medieval historians.

Late in August 410, Rome was starving, its residents were turning on one another, and, to make matters worse, the Gothic army camped at Rome's gates was restless. The Gothic commander was Alaric, a Roman general and barbarian chieftain. Leading an army that was short of food and potentially mutinous, sacking Rome was his only way forward. The old heart of Rome's empire fell to a conqueror's sword for the first time in eight hundred years. For three days, Alaric's Goths sacked the eternal city. In the words of a contemporary, the mother of the world had been murdered. Alaric's story is the culmination of a long historical journey by which the Goths came to be a part of the Roman world. Whether as friends or foes of the Roman empire, the Goths and their history are entwined with the larger history of Rome in the third and fourth centuries. Rome's Gothic Wars explains how the Goths came into existence on the margins of the Roman world, how different Gothic groups dealt with the enormous power of Rome just beyond their lands, and how, in two traumatic years, thousands of Goths entered the imperial provinces and destroyed the army that was sent to suppress them, leaving the emperor of the eternal city dead on the field of battle. Unlike other histories of the barbarians, Rome's Gothic Wars shows exactly how and why modern historians understand the Goths the way they do and why our understanding is so controversial. Michael Kulikowski is associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. A recipient of the Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he is the author of Late Roman Spain and Its Cities, which was awarded an Honorable Mention in Classics and Archaeology from the Association of American University Presses. His scholarly articles have appeared in Early Medieval Europe, Britannia, Phoenix, and Byzantium, and he has appeared on the History Channel's Barbarians series."

Der griechische Geschichtsschreiber Herodot (5. Jh. v. Chr.) hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten aus einem Protohistoriker, der "zahllose Lugengeschichten" erzahlt (so noch Ciceros Diktum), uber einen geachteten, doch etwas naiven Vorlaufer des Thukydides zu einem der wichtigsten antiken Autoren uberhaupt entwickelt. Er geniesst daher zu Recht die Aufmerksamkeit von Forschern aus den unterschiedlichsten Disziplinen. Trotzdem sind viele Aspekte der Herodot-Forschung umstritten, und von einer verbindlichen Sichtweise uber den pater historiae, den "Vater der Geschichtsschreibung", scheint man weiter entfernt als jemals zuvor. Dieser Sammelband bildet das weite Spektrum moderner Perspektiven auf Herodot ab, ohne sich einer einzigen Forschungstendenz als Dogma zu verschreiben.

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

Edward Gibbon laid the fall of the Roman Empire at Christianity's door, suggesting that 'pusillanimous youth preferred the penance of the monastic to the dangers of a military life ... whole legions were buried in these religious sanctuaries'. This surprising study suggests that, far from seeing Christianity as the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, we should understand the Christianisation of the household as a central Roman survival strategy. By establishing new 'ground rules' for marriage and family life, the Roman Christians of the last century of the Western empire found a way to re-invent the Roman family as a social institution to weather the political, military, and social upheaval of two centuries of invasion and civil war. In doing so, these men and women - both clergy and lay - found themselves changing both what it meant to be Roman, and what it meant to be Christian.

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