African Pottery Roulettes Past and Present considers ethnographic, museological and archaeological approaches to pottery-decorating tools called roulettes, that is to say, short lengths of fibre or wood that are rolled over the surface of a vessel for decoration. This book sets out, for the first time, a solid typology for the classification of African pottery decorated with such tools, and forges a consensus on common methodology and standards. It gives an overview of history of research into roulette decoration in Africa and elsewhere Jomon Japan, Neolithic Europe, Siberia, and New York among others; outlines the contemporary distribution of roulette usage in sub-Saharan African today, a 'success story' from Senegal to Tanzania; and proposes methodologies for the identification of selected roulette decoration types in the archaeological record. By achieving standardisation in pottery analysis, this book will help researchers make meaningful comparisons between different sites of West Africa, and thus guide further research on the West African past. As roulette decoration has been such a global phenomenon in the past, the book will also be of interest to all researchers with an interest in ceramics from different parts of the world.

Molluscs are the most common invertebrate remains found at archaeological sites, but archaeomalacology (the study of molluscs in archaeological contexts) is a relatively new archaeological discipline and the field of zooarchaeology is seen by many as one mainly focused on the remains of vertebrates. The papers in this volume hope to redress this balance, bringing molluscan studies into mainstream zooarchaeological and archaeological debate, and resulting in a monograph with a truly international flavour.

The transition between the 2nd and the 1st millennium BC was an era of deep economic changes in the ancient Near East. An increasing monetization of transactions, a broader use of silver, the management of the resources of temples through “entrepreneurs”, the development of new trade circuits and an expanding private, small-scale economy, transformed the role previously played by institutions such as temples and royal palaces. The 17 essays collected here analyse the economic transformations which affected the old dominant powers of the Late Bronze Age, their adaptation to a new economic environment, the emergence of new economic actors and the impact of these changes on very different social sectors and geographic areas, from small communities in the oases of the Egyptian Western Desert to densely populated urban areas in Mesopotamia. Egypt was not an exception. Traditionally considered as a conservative and highly hierarchical and bureaucratic society, Egypt shared nevertheless many of these characteristics and tried to adapt its economic organization to the challenges of a new era. In the end, the emergence of imperial super-powers (Assyria, Babylonia, Persia and, to a lesser extent, Kushite and Saite Egypt) can be interpreted as the answer of former palatial organizations to the economic and geopolitical conditions of the early Iron Age. A new order where competition for the control of flows of wealth and of strategic trading areas appears crucial.

This major new study by one of Europe’s leading prehistorians presents and discusses a series of rock art engravings from a Bronze Age barrow in Ljungarum parish, Jönköping Län, situated in the central part of southern Sweden. Sagaholm contains the largest group of rock engravings discovered in a burial context in northern Europe. Joachim Goldhahn addresses a number of aspects of the use of rock engravings in burial rituals during the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1600–1100 BC), combining the antiquarian and scientific history of this extraordinary find. In order to understand the meaning and significance of the rock art in the barrow, the author presents a theoretical argument that the art is meaningfully composed and can been seen as the result of an active symbolic praxis which mirrors a metaphorical way of thinking. Special concern is given to the frequent horse motifs at Sagaholm, and it is argued that they, and the morphology of this particular barrow, can be seen as a metaphor for a new and exotic cosmology that reached southern Scandinavia during the Middle Bronze Age. It is further suggested that this extraordinary find points to a (re)interpretation of Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art as an important part of burial ritual, linked to certain beliefs about the regeneration of life.

Small finds – the stuff of everyday life – offer archaeologists a fascinating glimpse into the material lives of the ancient Romans. These objects hold great promise for unravelling the ins and outs of daily life, especially for the social groups, activities, and regions for which few written sources exist. Focusing on amulets, brooches, socks, hobnails, figurines, needles, and other “mundane” artefacts, these 12 papers use small finds to reconstruct social lives and practices in the Roman Northwest provinces. Taking social life broadly, the various contributions offer insights into the everyday use of objects to express social identities, Roman religious practices in the provinces, and life in military communities. By integrating small finds from the Northwest provinces with material, iconographic, and textual evidence from the whole Roman empire, contributors seek to demystify Roman magic and Mithraic religion, discover the latest trends in ancient fashion (socks with sandals!), explore Roman interactions with Neolithic monuments, and explain unusual finds in unexpected places. Throughout, the authors strive to maintain a critical awareness of archaeological contexts and site formation processes to offer interpretations of past peoples and behaviours that most likely reflect the lived reality of the Romans. While the range of topics in this volume gives it wide appeal, scholars working with small finds, religion, dress, and life in the Northwest provinces will find it especially of interest. Small Finds and Ancient Social Practices grew out of a session at the 2014 Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference.

Textile technology is older than any other ancient craft and is an instance of cognitive archaeology that provides vital information about society. In ancient Greece, textiles were considered among the principal and most fundamental cultural expressions. Athena, the goddess of the city, of intelligence and of skill was also the patron goddess of weaving. She taught the craft of textile production to women thus making them conduits of civilisation. During Classical times, textile production was a fundamental part of the economy and was practised also by men in both the domestic and artisanal spheres. The resulting technological sophistication is reflected in depictions of discrete or elaborate patterns, in the rich diversity of textile implements and in the variety in the quality of the extant textiles. In Textile Production in Classical Athens Stella Spantidaki provides the first synthesis of the available evidence from textual, iconographic and archaeological sources on textile production in 5th and 4th century BC Athens, employing an interdisciplinary perspective that sets the frame for future research in the field. As such this study is of special importance for textile specialists, ancient history scholars, historians of technology and students and will lead to a better understanding of ancient Greek textile production and Classical Athenian society. Presents a detailed consideration of the historical and social context of textile production in classical Athens; Examines and discusses evidence for the equipment, materials, processes and techniques employed at each stage of the full production sequence; Discusses the organisation of production and trade.

Senneferi was the chancellor of the king in Thebes (modern Luxor) in the reign of Thutmose III (c. 1430 BC). His large but badly damaged tomb lies in the hill of Sheikh Abdel Qurna on the West Bank at Luxor. This first of two volumes focuses on the use of the tomb complex during the New Kingdom, especially the 18th dynasty (c. 1550–1300 BC). It begins with an account of Senneferi himself, looking at his career, his family and other monuments made in his name as far apart as Gebel Silsila in southern Egypt and the Sinai peninsula. The central section deals with the development of the layout of the tomb during this period and its recent exploration, including a detailed reconstruction of its history from 1430 BC to the 20th century AD. The remaining chapters detail the decoration and finds from the excavations, including a painted statue of Senneferi’s son-in-law and a unique set of implements from the Opening of the Mouth ritual, as well as possibly the largest ceramic assemblage yet known in a tomb of this date. This book presents the results of the detailed analysis of what at first sight appear to be unpromising finds and reveals new insights into burial practices at the height of the 18th dynasty.

Excavations at Mucking, Essex, between 1965 and 1978, revealed extensive evidence for a multi-phase rural Romano–British settlement, perhaps an estate centre, and five associated cemetery areas (170 burials) with different burial areas reserved for different groups within the settlement. The settlement demonstrated clear continuity from the preceding Iron Age occupation with unbroken sequences of artefacts and enclosures through the first century AD, followed by rapid and extensive remodelling, which included the laying out a Central Enclosure and an organised water supply with wells, accompanied by the start of large-scale pottery production. After the mid-second century AD the Central Enclosure was largely abandoned and settlement shifted its focus more to the Southern Enclosure system with a gradual decline though the 3rd and 4th centuries although continued burial, pottery and artefactual deposition indicate that a form of settlement continued, possibly with some low-level pottery production. Some of the latest Roman pottery was strongly associated with the earliest Anglo-Saxon style pottery suggesting the existence of a terminal Roman settlement phasethat essentially involved an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ community. Given recent revisions of the chronology for the early Anglo-Saxon period, this casts an intriguing light on the transition, with radical implications for understandings of this period. Each of the cemetery areas was in use for a considerable length of time. Taken as a whole, Mucking was very much a componented place/complex; it was its respective parts that fostered its many cemeteries, whose diverse rites reflect the variability and roles of the settlement’s evidently varied inhabitants.

It is over one hundred years since the publication of the wide ranging archaeological field investigation undertaken on the Marlborough Downs by the Rev A C Smith. His work Guide to the British and Roman Antiquities of the North Wiltshire Downs in a Hundred Square Miles round Abury was originally published in two volumes in 1884 by the Marlborough College Natural History Society, then reprinted and bound into a single volume and published in 1885 by the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society after half the original print run was destroyed in a fire. As in most works of inventory the volume has certainly stood the test of time and is still one of the basic reference texts for students of the area. Since then, apart from a few notable exceptions, archaeological literature about the area has been largely site-based and there has been little concerning the Marlborough Downs as a whole. In order to try and redress this imbalance, a day conference was organised in April 2002 at the University of Bath, Swindon, where it was possible to acknowledge and mark the ongoing validity of Smith's work and where a number of papers on various aspects of recent research on the Marlborough Downs were presented. The results of the conference are presented in this volume, together with a number of other commissioned contributions from individuals who have undertaken research in the area during the last decade or so. Each essay stands alone, but they are connected by a common theme, that of the land and how it has changed over millennia.

This, the final title to be published from the sessions of the 2002 ICAZ conference, focuses on the role of man's best friend. As worker or companion, the dog has enjoyed a unique relationship with its human master, and the depth and variety of the papers in this fascinating collection is a testament to the interest that this symbiotic arrangement holds for many scholars working in archaeology today. The book covers an eclectic range of subjects, such as considering dogs as animals of sacrifice and animal components of ancient and modern religious ritual and practice; dogs as human companions subject to loving care, visual/symbolic representation, deliberate or accidental breed manipulation; as working dogs; and finally as co-inhabitors of uman dwelling paces and co-consumers of human food resources. While many of the papers in this volume have a predominant focus, they also demonstate that the relationships between humans and dogs are rarely, if ever singular or simple. Instead these relationships are complex, often combining the practical, the ideological and the symbolic.

The main source of archaeological evidence for Late Roman Republican camps is a complex of installations around the Iberian city of Numantia in Spain, excavated by Adolf Schulten in the early 1900s. This book reassesses Schulten and concludes that much of his interpretation is questionable. Radically different alternative reconstructions making use of recent fieldwork are presented for several of the sites. A discussion of dating evidence leads to alternative dates being offered for some of the camps. To aid interpreting the sites, army organisation and art of encampment for the period of the Numantine Wars is discussed. This study gives added importance to the sites at Numantia, for they not only form the main source of archaeological evidence for Late Republican camps, but provide evidence for the form of camp for both the late manipular army and the early cohort one.

Nineteen essays present wide-ranging approaches to environmental reconstruction across Mediterranean Europe with case studies from southern and central France, central Italy, Spain, Greece, Slovenia and Turkey. It is Volume Two in the Archaeology of Mediterranean Landscapes series, which published five volumes as part of the POPULUS Project which aimed to establish a series of research goals and standards in Mediterranean landscape archaeology, so as to advance the study of ancient demography of the region on a broad comparative front.

This is an important study of the new types of warships which evolved in the navies of the Mediterranean in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, and of their use by Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans in the fleets and naval battles in the second and first centuries, culminating in the Battle of Aktion. The book includes a catalogue and discussion of the iconography of the ships with over fifty illustrations from coins, sculptures and other objects. John Coates discusses reconstructions, crews, ships and tactics illuminated by the recent experiments with the reconstructed trireme Olympias . Complete with gazetteer, glossary, bibliography and indexes.

The Eighth Annual Current Research in Egyptology Symposium (CRE 2007) was held at Swansea University on the 19th-21st April. The conference brought together graduate and postgraduate students of Egyptology from ten different countries, contributing to a total of 40 presentations. The range of topics included art and architecture, archaeology, literature and language, history and society as well as scientific analysis spanning the entire epoch of Egyptian history from the Predynastic to the Coptic era. The papers presented in the following volume represent a diverse range of topics and multidisciplinary approaches.

The Celtic languages and groups called Keltoi (i.e. ‘Celts’) emerge into our written records at the pre-Roman Iron Ag

Art in England fills a void in the scholarship of both English and medieval art by offering the first single volume overview of artistic movements in Medieval and Early Renaissance England. Grounded in history and using the chronology of the reign of monarchs as a structure, it is contextual and comprehensive, revealing unobserved threads of continuity, patterns of intention and unique qualities that run through English art of the medieval millennium. By placing the English movement in a European context, this book brings to light many ingenious innovations that focused studies tend not to recognize and offers a fresh look at the movement as a whole. The media studied include architecture and related sculpture, both ecclesiastical and secular; tomb monuments; murals, panel paintings, altarpieces, and portraits; manuscript illuminations; textiles; and art by English artists and by foreign artists commissioned by English patrons.