The "Begram ivories" are widely considered to be miniature masterpieces of Indian art and are one of the largest archaeological collections of ancient ivories. They were excavated at the site of Begram, in northern Afghanistan, in 1937 and 1939 and belong to a period when Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India were united under rulers of the Kushan dynasty. Divided soon afterwards between the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul and the Musee national des arts asiatiques-Guimet in Paris, the collection in Kabul suffered a disaster during the civil war which ravaged the country during the early 1990s. Some of the pieces were successfully concealed by museum staff but most were stolen, hundreds have since been reported in different collections and very few have yet been recovered. In 2011 a group of twenty bone and ivory plaques was generously acquired for the National Museum of Afghanistan by a private individual. These were scientifically analysed, conserved and exhibited at the British Museum and returned to Kabul in 2012. This book describes their story from excavation to display and return, with individual object biographies and detailed scientific analyses and conservation treatments. It also discusses how these objects have attracted very different interpretations over the decades since their discovery, and how the new analyses shed a completely fresh light on the collection. It is lavishly illustrated in full colour, and includes many previously unpublished views of the objects when they were originally exhibited in Kabul. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the archaeology of Afghanistan, Indian art, polychromy, museum studies, object biographies or the history of conservation.

This publication deals with the archaeological and documentary evidence for mans' activities in Binsted and Kingsley (Hampshire/Surrey, S. England) during this period between the last Ice Age and the post-medieval period. An interim publication on the Alice Holt Roman potteries contains a short section on the contemporary landscape, accompanied by a rather rudimentary map of the distribution of Roman sites in Binsted and Kingsley parishes between Alton and the Hampshire/Surrey county boundary in north-east Hampshire. The ten years following this publication saw an intensive programme of landscape study in order to explore and understand the changing pattern of human settlement and land utilisation within the area over the last 10000 years or so. Conclusions of the current research reported in this volume are based on seven years of field-walking between 1981 and 1988, as well as some carried out during the early 1970s. All but about half a dozen of the arable fields within the 42 square kilometres of land encompassed by the two parishes were walked and most of the permanent pasture and woodland was also examined. This fieldwork was backed up by the survey of a number of vernacular buildings dating from before AD 1300 to c. AD 1700. Five flights were also carried out between 1981 and 1983 for the purpose of air photography. Excavations were carried out on Alice Holt Roman pottery waste dumps and other sites of all periods in and around the forest.