Pre-state ceremonial monuments, rich mortuary arrangements, forts, walled settlements and temples: all these occur in a narrow stretch of the Euphrates River valley prior to the rise of Carchemish, one of the major capital cities of the Ancient Near East. This well-illustrated book examines recently discovered evidence from the hinterlands of archaeologically inaccessible Carchemish in its regional context. Amongst the 18 contributors Tony Wilkinson characterizes the neighbouring regions of Carchemish, Guy Bunnens elaborates on a site hierarchy within the valley and Gioacchino Falsone appraises unpublished records from excavations at Carchemish itself. These material culture studies are important for those interested in the emergence of complex societies that do not conform to the Mesopotamian paradigm.

This collection of essays looks beyond the focus of existing works on ancient travel and its documentation, to examine its social and cultural implications. For travel (and the reasons behind it) offers a window on to many features of ancient societies - sense of place, perceptions of space, administration, relations with foreign powers, engagement with other cultures, and representation of homelands. Also of import is the study of ancient geographical knowledge, as well as ancient travel writing (an increasingly popular genre today), its popularity and purpose. All of the papers presented here show that ancient travel was considerably more widespread than is often assumed.

This edited volume provides a full report on the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site of WF16, southern Jordan. Very few sites of PPNA date have been excavated using modern methods, so this report makes a very significant contribution to our understanding of this period. Excavations have shown that the site contains a highly dynamic use of architecture, and the faunal assemblage reveals new information on the processes that lead to the domestication of the goat.

Ian Hodder's campaigns of excavation at the world-famous Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyuek are one of the largest, most complex, and most exciting archaeological field projects in the world and recognized as agenda-setting not only in terms of our understanding of early farming communities in the Near East, particularly the central role religion played in their daily lives, but also in terms of the interaction between theory and practice in the trenches and on-site laboratories. This volume presents the results of excavation in three areas of the site, known as South, North, and KOPAL, excavated between 1995 and 1999. The book describes aspects of the excavation, recording and sampling methodologies that are necessary for an understanding of the results presented plus it incorporates interpretive discussion. It brings in data from the study of animal bones, lithics, ceramics, micromorphology and the full suite of analyses conducted on the material. These accounts are interspersed with individual specialists' commentaries and conclusions, that mimic the process of collaborative interpretation that takes place during excavation and post-excavation. The 'objective descriptions' of the archaeology are thus exposed as interpretations involving a balancing of a variety of different types of data and scholarly input. Another thought-provoking volume in the Çatalhöyuek excavation series which will be read with profit by any archaeologist engaged in working at theory in practice in the field.

This volume contains basic information about 17,500 items from Lachish in Israel that were acquired by the British Museum in 1980. This handlist will be widely consulted by all those wanting to use this important resource, as well as scholars with an interest in near eastern archaeology.

Most of the papers published in this volume were originally presented at a conference of the same name, organised by the editors, and held in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 2003. The Wadi Arabah falls between the two areas of southern Jordan and Negev, and has traditionally been seen as a barrier and border. This book (and the conference it came out of) is an attempt to look at this neglected area anew: bridge, rather than barrier.

This is a facsimile reprint of the trail-blazing book by David Oates, originally published by the British Academy in 1968 and out-of-print for too long. It is primarily the report of his survey and excavation of sites in northern Iraq between 1954 and 1958, but it is at the same time a memorial to the great explorer, Sir Aurel Stein, whose pioneer fieldwork on the Roman frontiers in Iraq in 1938-39 provided the initial stimulus.

This volume, number six in the Çatalhöyuek Research Project series, draws on material from Volumes 3 to 5 to deal with broad themes. Data from architecture and excavation contexts are linked into broader discussion of topics such as seasonality, art and social memory. Rather than assuming that the work of the project is finished once the basic excavation and laboratory results have been presented in Volumes 3 to 5, it has been thought important to present more synthetic accounts that result from the high degree of integration and collaboration which the project has strived for at all stages. In this synthetic volume we most clearly describe the stories we have been telling ourselves during the data recovery/interpretation process. This volume thus provides a contextualisation of the work carried out in Volumes 3 to 5; it records the framework of thought within which the data were collected and studied, but it is also the result of the interpretation that occurred in the interaction with data.

Volume 5 deals with aspects of the material culture excavated in the 1995-99 period. In particular it discusses the changing materiality of life at the site over its 1100 years of occupation. It includes a discussion of ceramics and other fired clay material, chipped stone, groundstone, worked bone and basketry. As well as looking at typological and comparative issues in relation to these materials, the chapters explore themes such as the specialisation and scale of production, the engagement in systems of exchange, and consumption, use and deposition. A central question concerns change through time, and the degree and speed of this change. The occupants of the site increasingly get caught up in relations with material objects that start to act back upon them.

Contents: Introduction ( Sarah Searight ); Travelling to post: Lady Liston, an ambassadress in Constantinople ( Deborah Manley ); Two feisty ladies in the Levant: Princess Caroline and Lady Craven ( Charles Plouviez ); Travels in the Slavonic provinces of Turkey-in-Europe: Miss Muir Mackenzie and Miss Irby ( Dorothy Anderson ); Three travellers in nineteenth-century Egypt: Sarah Belzoni, Amelia Edwards and Margaret Benson ( Megan Price ); Lucie Duff Gordon: a woman's perception of Egypt ( Sarah Searight ); Governess to the Grand Pasha of Egypt: Emmeline Lott ( Alix Wilkinson ); The unknown pilgrimage to Sinai ( Deborah Manley ); Archaeologists' wives as travel writers ( Elizabeth French ); Women's perceptions of, and perceptions of women in, Egypt's Eastern desert ( Janet Starkey ).

The XLIXe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale convened in London to celebrate the British Museum's quarter millennium. Nineveh, the last great imperial capital of the Assyrian Empire, was a topic well suited to the occasion. On the museum's behalf excavations were conducted at the site intermittently for more than 80 years, from 1847 to 1932. The attractive bas-reliefs that adorned the palaces of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal have become some of the museum's most familiar exhibits. The vast numbers of clay tablets sent back from Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard and his successors are less eye-catching but remain the cornerstone of almost all Assyriological research. But there is more to Nineveh than an imperial city of the seventh century B.C. Mallowan's famous deep sounding of 1931-32 took the history of the settlement back another five thousand years. More recent research has collected evidence for the city's history in the post-Assyrian periods. Looking beyond the local horizons, the renown of Nineveh as an important city survived the end of ancient Mesopotamian civilisation in the literary and historical traditions of the Greeks and the Bible. The proceedings of RAI 49 comprise a wide range of papers on Nineveh and form an invaluable and well-informed academic resource for future research on the city itself and the civilisation that built it.

The eastern Mediterranean was the centre of trade for many centuries, sitting at the junction of what are now Europe, Asia and Africa. It was the place where exotic produce and products could be traded or exchanged for things that had their origins perhaps thousands of miles away. But wherever trade takes place, a similar exchange of ideas, technology and culture also occurs. This book presents thirty papers on this very subject, looking at the ways in which we can measure the transmission of culture, and how this transmission varied across time and space.

The excavations at Canhasan Höyök I in the Konya plain of central Turkey revealed a series of settlements running through the Chalcolithic period (c.5500-3000 BC). The pottery from the site, much of it of types previously unknown or not found elsewhere in stratified contexts, is of fundamental importance for an understanding of this period in Anatolia. In this volume, Dr French, the excavator of Canhasan and for many years director of the British Institute at Ankara, carefully and concisely presents both the plain and decorated wares, with detailed descriptions of their characteristic fabrics, shapes and decoration. There is a full catalogue of the best-preserved and most important pieces (which were registered finds), but a major feature of the volume are the drawings of over 2500 less well-preserved pieces, which illustrate all the characteristic shapes and types of decoration. A special feature of the study is a careful grading of the material in terms of chronological reliability. The author privileges the whole, or nearly whole, pots found on floors in each layer, as the only types which were certainly made at the time. Related pottery may be accepted as contemporary, but with less certainty, while unrelated wares must be treated with circumspection, for they may be either recycled from an earlier layer or intrusive from a later one. This rigorous methodology means that the Chalcolithic pottery provides a completely reliable relative chronology through the Chalcolithic period, and the volume will remain a basic reference for Near Eastern archaeology.

The Fifth Anatolian Iron Ages Colloquium, held at Van in 2001, brought together specialists from Turkey, Europe and America to focus on the archaeology of Anatolia in the complex period between the collapse of the Hittite empire and the Persian conquest. The papers gathered in this volume cover the area from Urartu in the east to Phrygia in the west, and range from the discussion of broad problems of chronology and cultural interaction to the presentation of new material from both major and less well known sites. Although most of the papers relate to the area of present-day Turkey, a significant feature of the Fifth Colloquium was the inclusion of papers placing Anatolian archhaeology in its wider context from Thrace, through the Black Sea area, to the Caucasus and beyond.

Volume 4 deals with various aspects of the habitation of Çatalhöyuek. Part A embarks on a discussion of the relationship between the site and its environment, using a wide range of evidence from faunal and charred archaeobotanical remains. Part B looks at evidence from human remains which inform us about diet and lifestyle, as well as wider issues of population dynamics and social structure, including a consideration of population size. Part C looks at the sediments at Çatalhöyuek, exploring ways in which houses and open spaces in the settlement were lived in. In all of these ways, a picture is built up of the way in which people moved through and lived in the natural and cultural environment of the places we subsume under the name of 'Çatalhöyuek'.

This book provides a detailed description of the three ancient temples unearthed between 1954-1961 near Barbar on the northern part of Bahrain island in the Persian Gulf. Two of the structures, from the centuries around 2000 BC, reveal traditions going back to Sumerian temples. A number of spectacular objects were found here, including cylindrical alabaster jars, a human-shaped copper mirror handle and the most famous object from the Barbar Temples, a bull's head of copper. Structurally, a chamber was found over a freshwater spring, indicating the presence of a water cult and perhaps forging a connection to Enki, the Mesopotamian god of the subterranean freshwater ocean, apsu. The temple-apsu is well known from cuneiform sources, but has been extremely difficult to identify in Mesopotamian excavations. The Barbar well chamber may be such an apsu, as the authors point out among their highly detailed descriptions and analysis of the finds.