No Place Like Home: Ancient Near Eastern Houses and Households had its genesis in a series of six popular and well-attended ASOR conference sessions on Household Archaeology in the Ancient Near East. A selection of papers are presented here, together with four invited contributions. The 18 chapters are organized in three thematic sections. Chapters in the first, Architecture as Archive of Social Space, profile houses as records of the lives of inhabitants, changing and adapting with residents; many offer a background focus on how human behavior is shaped by the walls of one’s own home. This section also includes innovative approaches to understanding who dwelled in these homes. For instances, one chapter explores evidence for children in a house, another surveys what it was like to live in a military barracks. The middle section, The Active Household, focuses on the evidence for how residents carried out household activities including work and food preparation. Chapters include the ‘heart of household archaeology’ in their application of activity area research, but also drill down to the social significance of what residents were doing or eating, and where such actions were taking place. The final section, Ritual Space at Home, features studies on the house as ritual space. The entire complement of chapters provides the latest research on houses and households spanning the Chalcolithic to the Roman periods and from Turkey to Egypt.

Oxbow says: These nine essays, taken from the Acts of the International Colloquium held at the Maison de l'Orient et de la Mediterranee at Lyon in 2002, examine the subject of medicine and doctors in the texts of the ancient Near East. Subjects include images of birth in Mesopotamia, the human body and sexuality in Babylonian medical texts, skeletal markers of task activities in the Iron Age human remains from Tell Mishrife in central Syria, the treatment of illness in Babylonia, the digestion of food, palaeopathological approaches, healers at the Neo-Assyrian court, and the vocabulary used to describe the dead.