The Iron Age copper smelting site situated near the Cypriot village Agia Varvara is of particular importance among the ancient copper processing places in the Near East because it has revealed spatial as well as technological aspects of copper production in a hitherto rarely-seen depth of detail. Agia Varvara-Almyras: an Iron Age Copper Smelting Site in Cyprus presents the results of a comprehensive post-excavation analysis of the stratigraphy (part I), also of the geology, metallurgical materials (furnaces, tuyeres), finds (pottery, furnace lining, stone tools), as well as a synthesis of the copper smelting technology at Agia Varvara-Almyras (part II). The excavation analysis not only focuses on pyrotechnical information from individual furnaces, but also provides a detailed study of the spatial organisation as well as of the living conditions on the smelting site. An elaborate reconstruction of the features in a 3D model allows the visualisation of formerly-dispersed loci of copper production. Based on this virtual rebuilding of the hillock named Almyras, it becomes clear that archaeometallurgy must be unchained, and the idea of an 'operational chain' must be replaced by a more multidimensional research strategy labelled as an 'operational web'. The present volume aims to stimulate future excavations which pay attention to the reasons behind the exploitation of the riches of the island, as well as to the needs of the markets where the final product was very likely to have been appreciated as a strategic commodity, by power players operating on the island as well as by ordinary people in need of a repair to an everyday commodity which had broken.

For centuries lime was an essential ingredient in many aspects of life and work - such as farming, building and manufacturing - and the kilns in which lime was produced were a familiar sight across the country, not just in areas where limestone naturally occurred. The importance given to the industry is illustrated by the number of painters, notably Turner and Girtin, who chose to paint lime kilns either as the main focus or as an incidental element, and by the number of literary figures who brought lime burning into their novels. Lime Kilns: History and Heritage starts by discussing the uses and importance of lime, and how it has been portrayed artistically, then describes how lime kilns changed over time, from simple clamp kilns through small farmers' and estate field kilns to large commercially operated kilns. It is illustrated with contemporary and modern photographs, paintings and plans drawing on examples from across Britain. David Johnson has published and lectured widely on lime burning and is regarded as an authority on the subject.

Large-scale redevelopment at Kingsway Business Park, near Rochdale, and Cutacre Country Park, near Bolton, has provided an important opportunity to investigate the prehistoric and later rural landscapes in the south-eastern corner of the historic county of Lancashire, now part of Greater Manchester. A combination of archaeological techniques has been employed to explore the archaeology of these areas, principally comprising standing-building survey and open-area excavation, directed towards the investigation of 17 sites. Topographical survey and palaeoenvironmental coring were also used to examine the character of the early landscape. Evidence for prehistoric and medieval activity was discovered within the two areas, particularly a significant Middle Bronze Age settlement and medieval iron-smelting site at Cutacre, although the majority of the remains investigated dated to the post-medieval and industrial periods. These latter remains relate to a range of different rural house types and farm buildings, built by the lesser gentry, and the yeoman and tenant farmers of the region. This volume is the result of a multi-disciplinary approach to the archaeology, with the work of a range of authors from Oxford Archaeology and the University of Salford, and also several external specialists. The results greatly enhance an understanding of the archaeology of Greater Manchester, and, more generally, provide important information on rural settlement in north-west England.

Architecture militaire du Deccan focuses on the Deccan region in central India between the medieval and modern period, a period at the interface between local Indian culture and the Persian world, followed by relations with the colonial enterprise European in Asia. This period was marked by many conflicts, but also by an inventive adaptation of new military technologies in response to new forms of modern warfare in India, with the arrival of artillery. Using the most recent investigative techniques, such as photogrammetry and 3D modeling, this volume presents a wealth of new data. The author’s meticulous approach encompasses the study of urban maps, architectural plans and detailed descriptions of walls, bastions, moats, towers, gates, horsemen, granaries, hydraulic éléments, and more. Through the study of four representative fortified sites, the author synthesizes the evolution of the military architecture of the Deccan. One can only hope that this volume will inspire other scholars to work on other Indian fortified sites, not limited to the Deccan. Thus, a more complete understanding of the phases of evolution of Indian military architecture can emerge.

Excavations were carried out at the moated sites of Barrow Old Hall and Twiss Green, in Warrington, North West England, in the 1980s. Sub-manorial estates were established at these two sites by the fourteenth century, located near the boundaries of their multi-moated townships. Townships with multiple moats were a feature of parts of North West England and may have been the result of medieval assarting and the expansion of agriculture on to fringe or marginal areas, on the boundaries of earlier manors. It also owed much to the unusual tenurial arrangements of the region, whereby lords granted small estates out of their holdings, often to family members, to construct moated homesteads. This report presents the results of the excavations at these two small moated sites, including evidence for possible aisled halls at both sites, as well as a significant assemblage of medieval and early post-medieval pottery. There is also a full account of the finding of the remains of a timber bridge at Twiss Green and its full reconstruction; an illustration of which was previously published in the Shire Archaeology series book on Moated Sites in 1985. The publication of these excavations contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the role and development of moated sites in this part of North West England and completes the outstanding analysis of moated sites excavated in the Warrington area.

Visits to country houses are an important leisure pursuit throughout the British Isles, not just to appreciate their superb architecture, great paintings and elaborate furniture but also to experience something of the past life of our great families and their households. Mark Girouard suggested in Life in the English Country House that 'even when the customs have gone, the houses remain, enriched by the accumulated alterations, and often accumulated contents of several centuries. Abandoned lifestyles can be disinterred from them in much the same way as from the layers of an archaeological dig'. By the 19th century, life in most country houses changed as a result of various technical inventions such as improved water supplies, flushing water closets, boilers and pipes to provide central heating, internal communications by bells and then telephones, and better lighting by means of gas and electricity. Country houses, however, were usually too far from urban centres to take advantage of centralised sources of supply and so were obliged to set up their own systems if they wanted any of these services to improve the comfort of daily living. Some landowners chose to do this; others did not, and this book examines the motivations for their decisions. It also sets out to discover what evidence has survived for the impact of technological innovation on the buildings, contents, parks and gardens of country houses and on the lives of the people within them. In the course of their research, the authors have visited nearly one hundred houses around the United Kingdom, mostly those open to the public and the majority in the hands of the National Trust. Many books have been devoted to the life of those in domestic service in such houses, but this book looks not so much at the social records of their lives as the actual physical evidence for the greater levels of comfort and convenience sought by landowners in country houses from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.

This monograph examines Swahili plant subsistence and food production patterns through the analysis of macrobotanical remains from four archaeological sites on Pemba Island, Tanzania, dating to A.D. 700-1600. Specifically towns and villages are compared before and during the emergence of stonetowns, settlements characterized by stone/coral household and ritual architecture, which have been described as urban, based on their roles as economic, political, and religious centers along the eastern African coast. Swahili stonetowns are hypothesized to have exerted political control over the immediate hinterland for the purposes of obtaining trade items and staple goods, including plant products. Based on ethnohistoric reports, a wide variety of collected and cultivated plants have been previously proposed as being central to Swahili consumption and production economies including trees in mangrove habitats, coconut, sorghum, pearl millet, and Asian rice. Moreover, it has often been assumed that stonetowns obtained plant products, including staple grains, from the countryside and were not themselves primary food producers. These assumptions are tested directly against the archaeological record in this first comprehensive study of ancient Swahili plant foods.

This book is the result of a large-scale research undertaking "Trade Routes of the Near East", examining Egyptian-Levantine interaction in the 4th Millennium BC. Chapters explore many issues related to copper and trade in the long period covering the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages, but also Roman period, with a special extension to present metallurgical practices in the African interior. A wide range of data discussed here was collected from across the eastern Mediterranean region including Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus and Greece.

With the redevelopment of the former car park adjacent to Baskerville House as part of the Library of Birmingham project, the opportunity arose to examine some of the most complete remains of the 19th-century industrialisation in Birmingham. Birmingham Archaeology of the University of Birmingham, in association with Carillion and the Birmingham City Council, undertook an archaeological excavation, before the construction of the new Library of Birmingham, in an area between Cambridge Street and Centenary Square, Broad Street in the city centre. The excavation identified six phases of activity pre-dating, during and after the completion of the brass metal works.

This anthology is a collection of works from the Europa Postmediaevalis conference held in Prague in the spring of 2018. As the name of the conference suggests, the subject of interest is the Early Modern period (15th to 18th century) and the manner in which this relatively young discipline within the field of archaeology is approached in Europe. The first year of the conference set the goal of searching for topics in post-medieval archaeology that reflect their current situation while simultaneously addressing a broader group of scholars. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the central theme pursued by generations across Europe proved to be Early Modern ceramics, the large assemblages of which are, for many of us, the bread and butter of our daily lives – a delight and often a headache resulting from their further processing. Since this issue is the one perceived most acutely in the Czech Republic, the organisers decided to share their current quandaries in this field with both domestic and foreign colleagues. The long-term objective of the conference is to create a professional platform with a uniform communication language (English) and a biennial periodicity allowing scholars to meet regularly to exchange experience gained in their study and work in post-medieval archaeology. The articles published in this anthology reflect the current state of research of Early Modern pottery in individual European countries (the Czech Republic, Croatia, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Switzerland), including both successes and possible shortcomings. The individual studies should serve as impulses for further study, ideas for thought and discussion and, last but not least, as study material for those who come into contact with Early Modern material culture as part of their work.

During the 1850s and 1860s, Chinese immigrants played a major role in the development of the fishing industries in Australia. Prior to their involvement, the industry was hampered by the problems posed by the transportation of fish to market. It was common for whole catches of fish to putrefy before they could reach their destination. The influx of Chinese gold miners, who relied on fish as a dietary staple, increased the demand that prompted the creation of many Chinese fish-curing establishments. Chinese fish curers in colonial Australia fished but also purchased large quantities of fish, creating a new and reliable market for European fishermen. Fish-curing businesses supplied their compatriots on the goldfields with fresh and cured fish. These establishments, which made sums of money far greater than any European fishing operation, provided hundreds of jobs for both European and Chinese Australians in the fishing industry. Very few pieces of documentary evidence, along with archaeological records from one colonial-period Chinese fish-curing camp in Victoria, remain. They reveal a fascinating story of how Chinese fish curers successfully dominated Australia's fishing industry; how they lived, worked, organised themselves, participated in colonial society, and the reasons why they suddenly disappeared.

A large volume of papers presenting the latest research on millstones and quernstone, ancient, medieval and modern. Broad themes include: the study of quarries of all periods; quality, production and trade in querns and millstones; archaeometrical studies; ethnographic studies, including agriculture, ore processing and glass making; and protection and evaluation of millstone quarries.

This book is the most comprehensive empirical study to date of the social and technical aspects of milling during the ancient and medieval periods. Drawing on the latest archaeological evidence and historical studies, the book examines the chronological development and technical details of handmills, beast mills, watermills and windmills from the first millennium BCE to c. 1500. It discusses the many and varied uses to which mills were turned in the civilisations of Rome, China, Islam and Europe, and the many types of mill that existed. The book also includes comparative regional studies of the social and economic significance of milling, and tackles several important historiographical issues, such as whether technological stagnation was a characteristic of late Antiquity, whether there was an "industrial revolution" in the European Middle Ages based on waterpower, and how contemporary studies in the social shaping of technology can shed light on the study of pre-modern technology. Originally published in hardcover.

Oxbow says: Henry's Mill was just one of thousands of sawmills established in Victoria (Australia) from the 1850s to the Second World War. Rather than focusing on industrial and technological aspects of the mill, Peter Davies presents a social and material history of the lives of the men, women and children living and working at the mill. Based on archaeological and historical evidence, including documentary and oral sources, he asks who the people were that moved to the mill to seek work, where they had come from and their motives for re-locating. He goes on to study their living and working conditions, hygiene, illness and injury, the supply of goods and, and markets for the timber, as well as issues of community development, isolation, integration and consumption practices within the community of Henry's Mill.

At the beginning of the 18th century the west of Scotland was a relatively poor region. Most people lived a hand to mouth existence, at the mercy of the weather. By the end of the century the region was on the way to becoming a major economic power. This was not just in Scotland, Britain and Europe, but on a global scale. The changes which took place often come under the term Industrial Revolution and have been the subject of many general studies. Despite this attention, remarkably little has been done on what was actually happening at local or regional level. In effect, the history has been written back to front, with most interest given to the general trends, and very little to the more time consuming groundwork. This work investigates why, by the end of the eighteenth century, Renfrewshire had become one of three principal cotton manufacturing regions in Britain, and one of the first factory-type industrial regions in the world. The reasons behind this were by no means confined to cotton mills. The success could not have occurred without extensive earlier changes including to agriculture, population and settlement pattern, and the story of these is also uncovered in this study.

This research focuses on the complex issue of olive oil processing and the resulting technological changes associated with the olive oil industry during this industry's expansion from a small scale domestic to large-scale industrial technology during the Chalcolithic through Iron Ages (c. 4300-586 BC) in Syro-Palestine. The ultimate goal is to see if the level or type of olive oil technology used at sites can be determined based on their olive remains. However, before this could occur, the author prepares a methodology, the components of which include 1) an ethnographic study investigating how traditional oil pressing and processing affect olive remains, and the incorporation of those remains into the archaeological record, and 2) experimental studies to determine how different processing methods might affect olive remains and their incorporation into the archaeological record. The results from the experimental and ethnographic studies are then applied to archaeological remains from a Late Neolithic site to determine the possible type of processing technology. The type of processing indicated by the comparison of the experimental to the archaeological remains, crushing in a small basin, matches the olive oil processing artifacts and features found at the site. The methods used in this study can be applied to other paleoethnobotanical remains and technologies. Contents: Introduction; Origins and early history of the olive; Ethnographic research; Experimental research; Testing an archaeological sample; Olive oil, trade, and the city state; Conclusions.

For more than 250 years the name Sheffield was synonymous with the cutlery industry, although archaeological evidence shows that the industry goes back as far as the 12th century. With many of the buildings rapidly disappearing or being redeveloped, aside from those that have already been destroyed, this type of publication forms a vital record of an important part of industrial England. The contributors to this volume look at the development of the industry in the 18th century, the production of cutlery and flatware, forks and spoons, the organisation of the labour and working practices, and the geographical and structural development of workshops and other buildings associated with the industry.

Since Corby became the site of a new iron, steel & tube works in 1933, the village of 1,500 has grown into a new torn of 60,000. Many of the families that arrived came from north of the border and Corby became known as 'Little Scotland'. Almost 30 million tons of steel were produced in the forty-six-year life of what was once the largest plant of its type in Europe. The cost of producing steel from low-grade local ore spelled the end of the works once British Steel Corporation had built large plants with deepwater docking facilities, using high-grade imported ore. Once the shutdown was complete, work soon began on demolishing the plant and changing the face of the town that was, until 1980, totally reliant on one industry. The regeneration of the area, with the help of many millions of pounds from the Government, has been Corby pull itself back from becoming a possible ghost town. This book is a collection of images from inside The Works, showing scenes that could not be generally seen by the public. It provides an inside look into the works and is a record of an industry that is no more in the Northamptonshire countryside.

This survey highlights the evolution and distribution of pipe manufacturing in the London parish of Newington, placing it within the broader context of both local and regional industrial activity. The study assembles life histories for known makers in the area, examines the evidence for production sites and describes and illustrates their products, and analyses the status of pipemakers in relation to other industries in the area.