This book outlines the history of man in England and Wales from earliest times to the Norman Conquest and explains the basic terminology of archaeology, the methods used by archaeologists and the ways in which one can take part in excavations.

Ireland is a country rich in archaeological sites. Ireland: An Oxford Archaeological Guide provides the ultimate handbook to this fascinating heritage. Covering the entire island of Ireland, from Antrim to Wexford, Dublin to Sligo, the book contains over 250 plans and illustrations of Ireland's major archaeological treasures and covers sites dating from the time of the first settlers in prehistoric times right up to the seventeenth century. The book opens with a useful introduction to the history of Ireland, setting the archaeological material in its wider historical context, and then takes the reader on an unparalleled journey through the major sites and places of interest. Each chapter focuses on a particular geographical region and is introduced by a useful survey of the history and geography of the region in question. This is followed by detailed descriptions of the major archaeological sites within each region, arranged alphabetically and including travel directions, historical overview of the site, and details of the site's major features and the latest available archaeological evidence. As the most comprehensive and detailed compact guide to the archaeological sites of Ireland, this new volume will prove invaluable to archaeologists, students of Irish history, and tourists alike.

This book offers an in-depth description and analysis of Chinese coin-like charms, which date back to the second century CE and which continued to be used until mid 20th century. This work is unique in that it provides an archaeological and analytical interpretation of the content of these metallic objects: inscriptive, pictorial or both. As the component chapters show, these coin-like objects represent a wealth of Chinese traditional folk beliefs, including but not limited to family values, social obligations and religious desires. The book presents a collection of contributed chapters, gathering a diverse range of perspectives and expertise from some of the world's leading scholars in the fields of archaeology, religious studies, art history, language and museology. The background of the cover image is a page from Guang jin shi yun fu , a rhyming dictionary first published in the ninth year of the Kangxi Reign (1652 CE). The metal charm dates back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE), depicting two deities traditionally believed to possess the majic power of suppressing evil spirits. The stich-bound book in the foreground is a collection of seal impressions from the beginning of the 20th century. Its wooden press board is inscribed da ji xiang by Fang Zhi-bin in the year of bing yin (1926 CE).

The Druids and the Arthurian legends are all most of us know about early Britain, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age (4500 BC-AD 43). Drawing on archaeological discoveries and medieval Welsh texts like the Mabinogion, this book explores the religious beliefs of the ancient Britons before the coming of Christianity, beginning with the megaliths-structures like Stonehenge-and the role they played in prehistoric astronomy. Topics include the mysterious Beaker people of the Early Bronze Age, Iron Age evidence of the Druids, the Roman period and the Dark Ages. The author discusses the myths of King Arthur and what they tell us about paganism, as well as what early churches and monasteries reveal about the enigmatic Druids.

This book surveys four thousand years of pottery production and presents totally unexpected fresh information, using technical and analytical methods. It provides a study of ancient pottery of Jerusalem, from the earliest settlement to the medieval city and brings to light important aspects that cannot be discovered by the commonly accepted morphological pottery descriptions. Thus, third millennium BCE pottery appears to have been produced by nomadic families, mb ceramics were made by professional potters in the Wadi Refaim, the pottery market of the IA.II pottery cannot be closely dated and is still produced during the first centuries after the exile. The new shapes are made by Greek immigrant potters. The book contains a chapter on the systematics of ceramic studies and numerous notes about the potters themselves. H. J. Franken is Emeritus Professor at the State University Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book proposes a new model and scheme of analysis for complex burial material and applies it to the prehistoric archaeological record of the Liangshan region in Southwest China that other archaeologists have commonly given a wide berth, regarding it as too patchy, too inhomogeneous, and overall too unwieldy to work with. The model treats burials as composite objects, considering the various elements separately in their respective life histories. The application of this approach to the rich and diverse archaeological record of the Liangshan region serves as a test of this new form of analysis. This volume thus pursues two main aims: to advance the understanding of the archaeology of the immediate study area which has been little examined, and to present and test a new scheme of analysis that can be applied to other bodies of material.

Relying heavily on primary literary sources and archaeological scholarship, this study sheds new light on the development of towns in early England from late Roman to late Anglo-Saxon times. After a discussion of the problems of urban definition and typology, Russo examines the background of Romano-British urbanism in its prime and in its late Roman transformations. He demonstrates that late Roman towns were virtually abandoned before the Anglo-Saxon invasions. The emporia--new types of Anglo-Saxon towns--are analyzed on the basis of written and archaeological evidence and are compared with continental emporia. Finally, the origin and growth of the Anglo-Saxon burgh is considered from its eighth-century Mercian beginnings to the better known cases of King Alfred and his successors.

Archaeologies of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism illustrates how archaeology contributes to the knowledge of early modern Spanish colonialism and the "first globalization" of the 16th and 17th centuries. Through a range of specific case studies, this book offers a global comparative perspective on colonial processes and colonial situations, and the ways in which they were experienced by the different peoples. But we also focus on marginal "unsuccessful" colonial episodes. Thus, some of the papers deal with very brief colonial events, even "marginal" in some cases, considered "failures" by the Spanish crown or even undertook without their consent. These short events are usually overlooked by traditional historiography, which is why archaeological research is particularly important in these cases, since archaeological remains may be the only type of evidence that stands as proof of these colonial events. At the same time, it critically examines the construction of categories and discourses of colonialism, and questions the ideological underpinnings of the source material required to address such a vast issue. Accordingly, the book strikes a balance between theoretical, methodological and empirical issues, integrated to a lesser or greater extent in most of the chapters.

This book presents selected academic papers addressing five key research areas - archaeology, history, language, culture and arts - related to the Malay Civilisation. It outlines new findings, interpretations, policies, methodologies and theories that were presented at the International Seminar on Archaeology, History, and Language in the Malay Civilisation (ASBAM5) in 2016. Further, it provides new perspectives and serves as a vital point of reference for all researchers, students, policymakers and legislators who have an interest in the Malay Civilisation.

A timely and up-to-date account of religion in Roman Britain. Two thousand years ago, the Romans sought to absorb into their Empire what they regarded as a remote, almost mythical island on the very edge of the known world – Britain. The expeditions of Julius Caesar and the Claudian invasion of AD 43, and the continuing Roman presence up to the 5th century AD, brought fundamental and lasting changes to the island. Not least among these was the introduction of a new pantheon of Classical deities and religious systems, along with a clutch of exotic Eastern cults including Christianity. But what of Britannia and her own home-grown deities? What cults and cosmologies did the Romans encounter, and how did they react to them? Under Roman rule, the old gods and their adherents were challenged, adopted, adapted, absorbed and reconfigured. In Britain no inscriptions predate the Roman period, apart from brief coin-legends, and the divine imagery that adorned temples in the Roman world was largely lacking. But with the Romans, religion becomes much more visible. In this fresh and innovative new account Miranda Aldhouse-Green balances literary, archaeological and iconographic evidence (and scrutinizes their shortcomings) to illuminate the complexity of religion and belief in Roman Britain, and the two-way traffic of cultural exchange and interplay between imported and indigenous cults. Despite the remoteness of this period, on the cusp between prehistory and history, many of the forces, tensions, ideologies and issues of identity at work are still relevant today, as Sacred Britannia skilfully reveals.

For a full month in the autumn of 1812 the 2,000-strong garrison of the fortress the French had constructed to overawe the city of Burgos defied the Duke of Wellington. In this work a leading historian of the Peninsular teams up with a leading conflict archaeologist to examine the reasons for Wellington's failure.

The present volume is the result of a team research which gathered biblical scholars, philologists, and historians of religions, on the issue of the multiple «Interpretations of Moses inherited from the ancient mediterranean cultures. The concrete outcome of this comparative inquiry is the common translation and commentary of the fragments from the works of the mysterious Artapanus. The comparative perspective suggested here is not so much methodological, or thematic. It is first of all an invitation to cross disciplinary boundaries and to take account of the contributions of diverse cultures to the formation of a single mythology, in the case, a Moses mythology. With respect to Judea, Greece, Egypt or Rome, and further more an emerging christianity and its «gnostic counterpart, the figure of Moses is at the heart of a cross-cultural dialogue the pieces of which, if they can be seperated for the confort of their specific study, mostly gain by being put together.

As an introduction to the ancient history of Iraq, Goodspeed's book has stood the test of time. The reader is given a detailed rendition of the history of the Old Babylonian, Assyrian, and Neo-Babylonian Empires. Although out of print for many years, the book is consistently cited as a helpful introduction to the subject.

In 2011 Michel Aberson, Maria Cristina Biella, Massimiliano Di Fazio and Manuela Wullschleger (two Italians and two Swiss, two archaeologists and two historians of antiquity) met in Geneva at the Fondation Hardt pour l'étude de l'Antiquite classique and decided to undertake a challenging project together: to organize three conferences on the peoples of central Italy, taking into consideration the key milestones in their history, from their independence, through their relations with Rome and ending with the (re)construction of their identities within the Roman world. Underpinning the project, which immediately found the support of many colleagues and institutions, was the idea of bringing historians, archaeologists, linguists and specialists of Latin literature together to collaboratively create a comprehensive picture of these significantly multifaceted and sometimes even conflicting topics. The present volume is the outcome of the third conference of the series E pluribus unum? Italy from the Pre-Roman fragmentation to the Augustan Unity, held at the University of Oxford in October 2016; it deals with the specific moments of conscious rediscovery of conquered peoples’ contribution to Roman culture from the late Republic and during the Empire. These influences can be recognized particularly during the Late Republic and Augustan period, and the final outcome is the formation of a connective tissue, which can be described as the cement of the "unaccomplished identity" of ancient Italy. The volume investigates the issue from different perspectives in order to avoid the adoption of a Romanocentric perspective.

Smoking pipes are among the most commonly found artifacts at archaeological sites, affirming the prevalence and longevity of smoking as a cultural practice. Yet there is currently no other study in historical archaeology that interprets tobacco and smoking-related activities in such a wide spectrum and what clues they give about past societies. In The Archaeology of Smoking and Tobacco, Georgia Fox analyzes the archaeological record to survey the discovery, production, consumption, and trade of this once staple crop. She also examines how tobacco use has influenced the evolution of an American cultural identity, including perceptions of glamour, individuality, patriotism, class, gender, ethnicity, and worldliness, as well as notions of poor health, inadequate sanitation, and high-risk activities. Employing material culture found throughout North America and the Caribbean, Fox considers the ways in which Native Americans, enslaved Africans, the working class, the Irish, and women used tobacco. Her own research in Port Royal, Jamaica-an important New World hub in the British-colonial tobacco network-provides a fascinating case study to investigate the consumption of luxury goods in the pre-industrial era and the role tobacco played in an emerging capitalist world system and global economy.

The nucleus of society is situated at the local level: in the village, the neighborhood, the city district. This is where a community first develops collective rules that are intended to ensure its continued existence. The contributors look at such configurations in geographical areas and time periods that lie outside of the modern Western world with its particular development of society and statehood: in Antiquity and in the Global South of the present. Here states tend to be weak, with obvious challenges and opportunities for local communities. How does governance in this context work? Scholars from various disciplines (Classics, Theology, Political Science, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Human Geography, Sinology) analyze different kinds of local arrangements in case studies, and they do so with a comparative approach. The sixteen papers examine the scope and spatial contingency of forms of self-governance; its legitimization and the collective identity of the groups behind them; the relations to different levels of state governance as well as to other local groups. Overall, this volume makes an interdisciplinary contribution to a better understanding of fundamental elements of local governance and statehood.

For over threescore years Cyrus H. Gordon's scholarship and teaching have provided new directions to the study of the ancient Near East. This collection of 34 essays in honour of his 90th birthday, edited by three of his former pupils, celebrates his fascinating and remarkable achievements and reflects his broad command of ancient studies. The global impact of his research can be seen from the geographical dispersion of the outstanding scholars who have written here on the following topics: archaeology, Bible studies, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Arabic, Egypto-Semitic, the cuneiform world, Indo-European, Samaritan, the Graeco-Roman world, mediaeval studies. The inclusion of a complete bibliography of Gordon's works is of singular value.

Since 1899 more than 73,000 pieces of inscribed divination shell and bone have been found inside the moated enclosure of the Anyang-core at the former capital of the late Shang state. Nearly all of these divinations were done on behalf of the Shang kingsand has led to the apt characterization that oracle bone inscriptions describe their motivations, experiences, and priorities. There are, however, much smaller sets of divination accounts that were done on behalf of members of the Shang elite other than the king.First noticed in the early 1930's, grouped and periodized shortly thereafter, oracle bone inscriptions produced explicitly by or on behalf of "royal familygroups" reveal information about key aspects of daily life in Shang societythat are barely even mentioned in Western scholarship. The newly published Huayuanzhuang East Oracle Bone inscriptions are a spectacular addition to the corpus of texts from Anyang: hundreds of intact or largely intact turtle shells and bovine scapulae densely inscribed with records of the divinations in which they were used. They were produced on the behalf of a mature prince of the royal family whose parents, both alive and still very much active, almost certainly were the twenty-first Shang king Wu Ding (r. c. 1200 B.C.) and his consort Lady Hao (fu Hao). The Huayuanzhuang East corpus is an unusually homogeneous set of more than two thousand five hundred divination records, produced over a short period of time on behalf of a prince of the royal family. There are typically multiple records of divinations regarding the same or similar topics that can be synchronized together, which not only allows for remarkable access into the esoteric world of divination practice, but also produce micro-reconstructions of what is essentially East Asia's earliest and most complete "day and month planner." Because these texts are unusually linguistically transparent and well preserved, homogeneous in orthography and content, and published to an unprecedentedly high standard, they are also ideal material for learning to read and interpret early epigraphic texts. The Huayuanzhuang East oracle bone inscriptions are a tremendously important Shang archive of "material documents" that were produced by a previously unknown divination and scribal organization. They expose us to an entirely fresh set of perspectives and preoccupationscentering ona member of the royal family at the commencement of China's historical period. The completely annotated English translation of the inscriptions is the first of its kind, and is a vibrant new source of Shang history that can be accessedto rewrite and supplement what we know about early Chinese civilization and life in the ancient world. Before the discerning reader are the motives, preoccupations, and experiences of a late Shang prince working simultaneously in service both for his Majesty, his parents, and hisown family.

The distinguished Russian archeologist Aleksei P. Okladnikov's study reveals how a field archeologist goes about determining and writing prehistory. Over the course of his career, Okladnikov and his wife Vera Zaporozhskaya travelled across Siberia from the Lena River in the north to the Amur River in the south excavating archaeological sites. During that time Aleksei and Vera found and interpreted the rock art of the vast region from the Paleolithic Era to the present day. Relying on petroglyphs and pictographs left on cliffs and boulders, Okladnikov lays out in detail and straightforward language the prehistory of Siberia by "reading" these artifacts. This book permits the past to be told in its own words: the art portrayed on the cliffs of Siberia.

Here then is the fruit of Elena Kuz'mina's life-long quest for the Indo-Iranians. Already its predecessor ("Otkuda prishli indoarii?," published in 1994) was considered the most comprehensive analysis of the origins of the Indo-Iranians ever published, but in this new, significantly expanded edition (edited by J.P. Mallory) we find an encyclopaedic account of the Andronovo culture of Eurasia. Taking its evidence from archaeology, linguistics, ethnology, mythology, and physical anthropology pertaining to Indo-Iranian origins and expansions, it comprehensively covers the relationships of this culture with neighboring areas and cultures, and its role in the foundation of the Indo-Iranian peoples.

Over 3,000 years ago, in what would be northern North America, there was a cultural fluorescence. Native Americans were exchanging materials and ideas over long distances, and their shamans were overseeing treatment of the dead and conducting ceremonies to insure entry into the spirit world. The author details how archaeologists discovered their story.

The discovery, excavation, and interpretation of data on one of the most significant ancient Native American archaeological sites in the Northeast is chronicled. Research team leader Alan Leveillee outlines the regional, environmental, and cultural contexts, details the archaeological methodology, and synthesizes the results of analyses of lithics, metals, flora, fauna, and soils, and presents the on-site observations and interpretations of the Native American representative of the team.

Focusing on the discovery and subsequent archaeological approach to the first professionally excavated secondary burial complex in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Leveillee demonstrates that anthropological models enable consideration of how artifacts and features reveal 3,500-year-old ideologies, ceremonies, and social systems--the archaeology of ideas.

One of the earliest and most ambitious projects carried out by the Society of Jesus was the mission to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, which ran from 1557 to 1632. In about 1621, crucial figures in the Ethiopian Solomonid monarchy, including King Susenyos, were converted to Catholicism and up to 1632 imposing missionary churches, residences, and royal structures were built. This book studies for the first time in a comprehensive manner the missionary architecture built by the joint work of Jesuit padres, Ethiopian and Indian masons, and royal Ethiopian patrons. The work gives ample archaeological, architectonic, and historical descriptions of the ten extant sites known to date and includes hypotheses on hitherto unexplored or lesser known structures.

Useful for academic and recreational archaeologists alike, this book identifies and describes over 200 projectile points and stone tools used by prehistoric Native American Indians in Texas. This third edition boasts twice as many illustrations all drawn from actual specimens and still includes charts, geographic distribution maps and reliable age-dating information. The authors also demonstrate how factors such as environment, locale and type of artifact combine to produce a portrait of these ancient cultures.

This collection of books encompasses Scottish identity and cultural heritage, historical geography, health and social issues, industrial, economic, religious and political history. Originally published between 1935 and 1990, many of these titles were written at the height of discussions concerning the viability of an independent Scotland, an issue that has renewed relevance today. They include some of the notable volumes from the Routledge The Voice of Scotland series, as well as other books by leading authors. The empirical content of many of the books reissued here ensures they retain their relevance in informing studies of trends since the time they were first completed and will be of interest to anyone concerned with the ongoing debate about Scotland's role within the UK and Europe and the shape of her political future.