Bücher der Reihe British Archaeological Reports International Series

Edited by Jessica Cox, Caleb R. Hamilton, Katharine R. L. McLardy, Amy J. Pettman and David StewartProceedings of a Conference held between 18-20 October 2013 on Approaches to Studying the Ancient PastThis volume presents 12 of the papers from the Ancient Cultures at Monash University post-graduate conference (2013) at Monash University, Australia, in the disciplines of archaeology, history, Classics and indigenous studies. The papers showcase research by post-graduates at Monash across a range of ancient disciplines, and as such contains a lot of innovative study. It is an interesting and varied collection of articles on a range of topics from the Classical world and the ancient Near East.

Starting as an examination of space in Roman Pompeii, the author soon found the sheer architectural fabric of the city at odds with the rather simplistic explanations for it offered in the academic literature. This prompted a more rigorous exploration of the definition of 'built space' and an ultimate goal of highlighting the diversity of housing in Pompeii and offering a new interpretation of its meaning. In an attempt to broach the archaeological question of how we can come to understand human social action from a contemplation of built space, the author turned equally to the disciplines of architecture and anthropology, before realizing the need to develop his own interpretative framework. What follows is a study which takes as its point of departure the fabric of Pompeian housing, with a theoretical understanding of the relationship between construction and human society, and, as such, reaches out beyond Roman Archaeology to touch anyone interested in the analysis and interpretation of built space. Contains 99 pages of ground plans, access maps, and tables of spatial analyses.

Presented here are the results of research on the transition from Locarno Beach archaeological culture type (3500/3300 -2500/2400 BP) to Marpole culture type (2500/2400 4500/1100 BP) within the Gulf of Georgia region of the Northwest Coast of North America. Nearly 6000 artifacts from seven Southern Vancouver Island archaeological sites are typologically reclassified and combined with previously recorded data from twenty Gulf of Georgia site components. In this volume multidimensional scaling is used to examine variability within the Marpole culture type. Results show the continuation of the Old Musqueam, Beach Grove and Garrison subphases of the Marpole culture and the addition of a fourth subphase, Bowker Creek. Based on spatial and temporal distribution, the culture historical sequence is reinterpreted here and new subphases to Locarno Beach culture type are identified, shifting the date of the Locarno Beach- Marpole transition to around 2000 BP. The author shows that Southern Vancouver Island may exhibit a different culture history than the Fraser River.

During recent years new excavations at a number of Neolithic locations in the Central Zagros by German, British and Iranian archaeologists have revealed a series of important results. Notable are the Early Neolithic sites of Choga Golan, Jani, Sheikh-e Abad, and East Chia Sabz, all discovered and excavated within the last ten years. In this volume Hojjat Darabi gives a survey of the discoveries on which our knowledge is based. The book is set in a chronological frame, in an environmental context, and in a regional and theoretical perspective. It is illustrated by a number of useful photos, drawings charts and diagrams. The book is a presentation of our knowledge about Neolithic Revolution as it appears right now; in addition, it provides an outline of further steps for future research.

A collection of archaeological materials and burial remains, recovered during large scale excavations or by accidental discovery by travellers and locals, are presented in this volume on sixth- to seventh century mortuary and funerary practices from the Achaemenid to the Sasanian period in Iran. Much of this material has been poorly published in the past, or not been published at all. The author has collected a wide range of data to shed light on mortuary and funerary practices of cultures within the ancient Persian Empire who lived near or inside the borders of modern-day Iran.

Studies of social complexity increasingly recognize the role of maritime communities in the development of large sociopolitical systems. The Central Andes present an ideal region for understanding maritime aspects of ancient social complexity, due to one of the most productive sea biomasses in the world. In this study the author investigates Samanco, an ancient seaside town, and its contribution to urban transformations along the North-Central coast of Peru during the mid-1st millennium BCE. This book focusses on Samanco's primary occupation (circa 500-1 BC). The author consults a theoretical framework of performance and its influence on community organization as a framework for analyzing sociopolitical development. Two field seasons of intensive excavations at Samanco in 2012 and 2013 yielded a substantial dataset to analyze performance and maritime aspects of early urbanism in the Central Andes. This book provides an in-depth look at Samanco's archaeological record, supplanted with theoretical analysis of performance, common experiences, and community organization. The research reveals a thriving coastal town during a period of settlement nucleation, known as the Salinar phenomenon, which is not adequately understood in the ancient Andean world.

En suma, este libro se propone presentar y desarrollar un estudio que fundamentado en las Admoniciones de Ipuwer, de cuenta de la literatura política y la sociedad del Reino Medio y de cómo las expresiones sobre lo político y lo ideológico contenidas en dicho texto y en otras fuentes literarias del período se conjugaban y articulaban con mecanismos de legitimación estatal y cohesión social de las propias elites del período.

Torres Strait lies at a crucial point both geographically and conceptually between Australia and the Pacific. This book examines methodologies used in both regions for examining bounded archaeological communities. It applies a model of social archaeologyand regionalisation to identify the settlement history of Mabuyag. By investigating sites of importance to the community this study provides an archaeology that is alive and important to the Goemulgaw people today. The author examines the archaeology of one Torres Strait Islander community, the Goemulgal of Mabuyag in central western Torres Strait. The book provides the first detailed archaeological study into the emergence and development of historically and ethnographically-known villages in the Torres Strait. The close examination of settlement and subsistence histories on Mabuyag furnishes chronological insights into the changing role of villages for a single island community. By examining chronologies previously established by archaeological researchers working in Torres Strait, this study adds to emerging broad chronological patterns across the region.

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.

Tell el-Ghaba project was born as part of an international project launched in the early 1990s by the Egyptian government and UNESCO to save the monuments of North Sinai threatened by the imminent construction of the El-Salam Canal and its distributaries. This is the third volume of the work undertaken by the Argentine Archaeological Mission (AAM) at Tell el-Ghaba in North Sinai. This volume of Tell el-Ghaba consolidates and extends the results of the excavations undertaken in the first stage between 1995 and 1999 and includes the results of the fieldwork conducted in the second stage in 2010. The overall objective of this project is to study the history, archaeology and environment of Tell el-Ghaba. Our research has been directed at developing a deep knowledge of the site: its environment, occupancy levels, architecture, economy, urban planning and social structure, and towards understanding the role of Tell el-Ghaba at a regional level, taking into account its particular location in the north-eastern boundary of the Delta and its proximity to the route that once connected Egypt with the south of Palestine. The volume is divided into an introduction and four main sections: The environmental and physical studies; the fieldwork; pottery; other finds.

From 1956 to 1970 excavations at Tikal, one of the most famous classical Maya sites, was carried out by the University of Pennsylvania Museum Tikal Project. Until now, much of the field research from these excavations has remained unpublished. This volume draws on the original work and data collected by Dennis E. Puleston. Puleston's investigations at Tikal remain unparalleled and this edited and revised collection of his work presents the most extensive mapping work conducted outside of a Lowland Maya ceremonial centre. Work conducted at Tikal provides us with invaluable evidence for many aspects of Maya civilization including agriculture, water systems, earth-work systems and settlement hierarchies. This volume is the only full report of the Tikal survey and crucial for the understanding of Maya civilization. It also summarises related sub-projects, including excavations from satellite sites to Tikal and includes many photographs, maps and illustrations. By making this data accessible for the first time, the volume aims to answer old questions and stimulate new debates.

The history of European settlement of South Americas has been the subject of much historical, archaeological and anthropological research. Guianas in the Amazon region, however life and society in the pre-Columbian period remain comparatively neglected topics. Though the Guianas were inhabited by different local groups before and after European colonisation began in the late sixteenth century, little is known about Pre-Columbian life and society in this region. The eleven papers in this volume seek to fill this gap in research, each focussing on a range of different archaeological and historical methods, such as archaeobotanical analysis, cartography and ethnology. This volume provides a highly original, multifaceted and truly interdisciplinary account of the pre-Columbian Guianas. It also benefits from a greater focus on scientific analysis than the few other studies of the region in this period. The papers included here will be of interest to anyone seeking to learn more about in the pre-Columbian Amazon region, and South America more generally. An English language abstract is included for each of the papers in this volume.

A collection of papers in honour of Eyptologist Ulrich Luft.

18 papers from the 1st Red Sea Project, held at the British Museum in October 2002.

Between the 5th and 12th centuries Ireland was responsible for some of the most beautiful decorative work in bronze, silver and gold in Europe. This study focuses on the archaeological and industrial context of these objects, an area, Michelle Comber argues, that has been largely overshadowed in favour of aesthetic appreciatopn.

Death and the life-giving waters of the Nile were intimately interwoven in ancient Egyptian religion. The principal objective of this study is to develop a synthetic perspective for enhancing the understanding of the religious roles water had in the rise and constitution of the Egyptian civilisation during the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom. The author employs an archaeological, inter-disciplinary and comparative 'water perspective' in which water not only forms the analytical framework, but also provides empirical data that allow for new questions to be addressed. Thus, the Nile itself is used as the primary point of departure to analyse how, why and when religious changes took place, with a particular emphasis on the development of the Osiris cult. Use is made of contemporary written sources, in particular the Pyramid Texts, but also other mortuary texts as well as flood records. The evolution of the Osiris cult is then analysed in relation to the development of the mortuary monuments; the mastabas in the First and the Second Dynasties and the emergence of the pyramids from the Third Dynasty. Hence, by comparing the different funerary monuments and practices with the emergence of the Osiris cult in relation to climatic changes and fluctuations in the Nile's yearly inundation, Ancient Egyptian religion and the rise of the civilisation is analyzed according to a water perspective. It is noted that the Blue Nile was not blue, but red-brownish during the flood. When the flood started, the White Nile was not white, but green. The author argues that these fundamental characteristics of the Nile water formed the basis for the Osiris mythology. The red floodwaters in particular represented the blood of the slain Osiris.

Proceedings of the XVI World Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (Florianopolis, Brazil, 4-10 September 2011), Volume 2, Session 47This book includes papers from the session 'Tumuli Graves - Status Symbol of the Dead in Bronze and Iron Ages in Europe' held at the XVI IUPPS World Congress (Florianopolis, 4-10 September 2011).

Liza Cleland's study of Greek clothing led her inevitably to the Brauron Catalogues - inscriptions of great significance for any study of this kind. This book is made up of her research into the texts, and is intended as a reference text to give 'a foothold in the impenetrable faces' of the Brauron Catalogue.

Edited by Maggie Morrow, Mike Morrow, Tony Judd and Geoff PhillipsonConsultant Editor Pete CherryForeword by Toby WilkinsonWe are used to thinking of Egypt, ancient and modern, in terms of the Nile valley: well-watered, green and fertile, a narrow strip of life-sustaining land between vast tracts of hostile desert. But this accustomed view is an illusion: even today, the deserts of Egypt - which seem so inhospitable - support flora, fauna and people. In prehistoric times, the climate was wetter and life was much more abundant. The deserts' early inhabitants left behind images of their environment, lifestyle and deepest beliefs in the form of rock art, etched into the landscape. One of the biggest concentrations of this ancient, ancestral art is found to the east of the Nile, in the wadis (dry valleys) that dissect the hills and plains between the Wadi Hammamat to the north and the Wadi Barramiya to the south. In the space of just five months, between October 2000 and February 2001, three teams of dedicated volunteers carried out a systematic survey of this remarkable region. They succeeded in locating and recording over 100 new sites of rock art, previously unknown to archaeology. The results, comprising many thousands of individual scenes, are presented here for the first time. They open up a fascinating and largely unexpected window on Egypt's past, and on the beginnings of civilisation in north-eastern Africa. Hence, the present volume is, without doubt, an important contribution to an exciting new area of Egyptology. As always, new discoveries raise as many questions as they answer. The study of ancient Egyptian origins has been pursued for more than a century, yet many puzzles remain. For example, how and why did a great civilisation emerge in Egypt? Did the prehistoric inhabitants already share essentially the same culture, or did rival groups play a part in fashioning the distinctive Pharaonic tradition that we all recognise? The rock art of Egypt's Eastern Desert promises important new clues to these and other unsolved mysteries - clues that scholars will now have the chance to decipher and debate. Future generations of archaeologists and ancient historians will be thankful that the study of Egypt has enthusiasts as committed as the editors of this excellent survey report.

This book concerns the ways in which the adaption of a steppe innovation, the horse-drawn chariot, in Chinese society during the 12th - 3rd century BCE contributed profoundly to the development of Chinese political and social value. The importance of the steppe driving skill in warfare, and political and ritual ceremonies in Chinese society not only brought a number of steppe people to serve in Chinese states, but also largely transformed Chinese social, political, and burial practices, and value systems. These early uses were reinterpreted in later periods and still have their influence today.

The continual question of why identities are imposed, why people are excluded and why the insupportable is supported forms the basis of this study. The author takes the apparently opposing contexts of New Kingdom and Coptic Egypt as prime case studies in which to look at how and why people manage to live under extreme centralisation and under its opposite, locally based power. Chapter One places the topic in its historiographical and theoretical setting. Chapter Two looks at statements of self emanating from the centre of power, and assesses their impact. Letters in Middle/Late Egyptian from royal and non-royal contexts are discussed. In Chapter Three the author contrasts the material from the preceding chapter with evidence from New Kingdom Memphis. Chapter Four contrasts the New Kingdom world, with its superficially centralized and strong state, with that of the Coptic period. Chapter Five assesses how far beliefs expressed in textual sources were reflected in the built environment.

Ten years of research at the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (CAHO, University of Southampton)University of Southampton Series in Archaeology No.8This book includes papers from the 2011 conference marking ten years of Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (CAHO, University of Southampton).

The results of the excavation of two Paleolithic sites on the Nile in the Republic of the Sudan, undertaken from the autumn of 1965 into the spring of 1966, are presented in this report. Artifacts from Khor Abu Anga and Magendohli, currently housed in the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, are described and quantified. The artifact assemblages are identified as discrete units, placed in chronological order, compared in terms of cultural content, and assigned to known industrial complexes. The Khor Abu Anga and Magendohli assemblages are comparable to and part of recognized prehistoric industrial Acheulian, the Sangoan, the Lupemban, and Aterian complexes well documented in Africa and in parts of Europe and western Asia. The archaeological deposits at Khor Abu Anga are part of a record of evolving lithic technology from late Acheulian through Sangoan into Lupemban in the upper Nile valley over a long period of time.

Report from a Marie Curie Project 2009-2012 with Concluding Conference at Aarhus University, Moesgaard 2012: Volume 2.With a strong emphasis on data, the two volumes of this book demonstrate that mobility was essential to the European Bronze Age by exploring the shared cultural expression of Bronze Age societies in contrast to their simultaneous development of new local and regional characteristics. During this seminal époque, cultural and social formations of an entirely new kind and magnitude came to characterize Europe. The intense and dynamic relations between local and large-scale change processes coincided with increased mobility in different domains and forms, forging new identities and shaping the emergence of Europe as a distinct cultural zone. Through over fifty essays by leading Bronze Age scholars, the reader engages with cultural mobility and connectivity and the ways in which these forces affected and transformed human behaviour. The two volume set includes four parts; this volume contains parts 3 (Modes and Channels of Movement and Transmission) and 4 (Geo-political Configurations, Boundaries and Transformations).

A volume representing collaborative research between the Swedish universities of Kalmar and Stockholm and the University of Sheffield in the UK. The themes centred on the investigation of cultural diversity in the 3rd millennium BC in the British Isles and Scandinavia, not so much to divine any prehistoric cultural links between the two in that period but to compare and contrast empirical evidence and theoretical approaches. The papers presented in this work cover aspects under the headings of 'The Middle Neolithic in Sweden', 'The Beaker People Project', and 'The Stonehenge Riverside Project'.

Research on rock art conducted during the last several decades has shown the skill and knowledge demonstrated by the painters, engravers and sculptors who executed the motifs on rock surfaces and supports. Some motif sets required their creators to acquire a strong graphic command while workmanship techniques have very often proved to be more complex than previously assumed, including for remote periods. It also appears that the motifs have been placed according to specific criteria in connection with spatial orientation or support shape, for instance. The aim of this volume is to question these aesthetic productions with the conceptual tools of art history. How were the techniques used put to the service of the aesthetic project? How can the iconographic study and the stylistic analysis contribute to the understanding of the decorated site? Can we approach the "short time" of the realisation of cave or rock art sets? Is it possible to target regional particularisms? These are some ofthe questions to which current investigation techniques may give some fresh insight.

This monograph focuses on Greek architectural terracottas coming from recent excavations at the urban sanctuary of Kaulonia, a polis on the eastern coast of Calabria. The work outlines the phenomenon of architectural terracottas in their diachronic development, clarifying the manner in which their production first arose, reconstructing the range of distribution of the products of Kaulonia (among the most important in Magna Graecia), and highlighting their links with other materials of the same class in Greece and Southern Italy. It also examines significant aspects of production and attempts to investigate the ideological elements implicit in 'horn' roofs (a peculiar group of Southern Italy terracottas). The monograph further presents results that are of interest to wider architectural studies and Greek archaeology, including a reappraisal of 'horn' roofs class and a new identification of roofs found at Olympia.

The strategies of production and consumption of lithic artifacts implemented by the hunter-gatherer societies who participated in the first peopling (final Pleistocene - 13,000/10,000 BP - and early Holocene - 10,000/7500 BP) of the southern end of the American continent are investigated in this book. The analyzed materials were recovered from rock shelters in the Central Plateau of Santa Cruz, Patagonia Argentina. The lithic materials are approached from a dynamic concept of technology. This research extends the knowledge of the dynamics of tool production and resource exploitation, rather than just analyzing the procurement and manufacturing practices. The differences in and continuities of the technological preferences of the early hunter-gatherer societies are recorded, especially regarding the use and design of edges. This study presents a model of how to analyze the variability in use of artifacts from a perspective which goes beyond the idea of tools having a univocal nature.

Khok Charoen (Hill of Prosperity) is a neolithic burial ground in Central Thailand, excavated in the 1960s and 70s by the Thai-British Archaeological Expedition, but because of the substantial Australian contribution these excavations can rightly be called the first Australian venture into Southeast Asian archaeology.The site, dated to the latter half of the second and the beginning of the first millennium BC, consists of three cemeteries with a total of 65 burials, straddling a discontinuity caused by floods, which greatly disturbed these burials and their finds, which include 513 pots, but no bronze. The study of this pottery is the key to the understanding of the cultural and social history of the site, explaining killings and grave robberies within a divided society.The aim of this book is to present, with the help of a great number of illustrations, an overall picture of this site at the junction of Stone and Bronze.

In modern studies pinax refers to a flat, rectangular, painted slab of clay placed in a sanctuary or tomb. In this study the author presents the various occurrences and possible meanings of the word pinax in the sources and examines the representation of pinakes on vases. A synthesis of pinakes is much needed since it can provide valuable information about ancient Greek religious and social practices. To this end, this book by concentrating on Attic pinakes fills a substantial gap in scholarship since Attic pinakes have not been methodically studied before, although they form one of the largest corpora of pinakes, and are hence a rich and reliable source of information. Chapter one examines the terminology, usage, and placement of pinakes drawing upon ancient testimonia found in literary sources, inscriptions, and representations in vase-painting. This chapter focuses on pinakes as a special category of offering regardless of the material of manufacture, be it wood, metal, or clay. Chapter two presents the corpus of surviving Attic pinakes. A discussion of their archaeological context is followed by an analysis of their iconographic themes in relation to Attic vase-painting in general and in conjunction with various contemporary Attic cults. Chapter three considers the inscriptions, techniques of manufacture, and decoration of Attic pinakes, as well as the attributions to Attic black-figure and red-figure painters. Questions of import, circulation, and dating are also addressed. Chapter four places the dedication of pinakes in the context of Athenian 'votive religion' and society by correlating them with other classes of votives dedicated in Attic sanctuaries, notably the Athenian Acropolis. By examining the iconography of genre scenes on Attic pinakes in light of current modes of representation of specific social groups, chapter four contributes to a sociology of dedication in ancient Greece, an under-explored subject of inquiry. Finally, an appendix correlates the Corinthian pinakes from Penteskouphia and the Potters' Quarter with the Attic material.