Paradigm Found brings together papers by renowned researchers from across Europe, Asia and America to discuss a selection of pressing issues in current archaeological theory and method. The book also reviews the effects and potential of various theoretical stances in the context of prehistoric archaeology. The 23 papers provide a discussion of the issues currently re-appearing in the focal point of theoretical debates in archaeology such as the role of the discipline in the present-day society, problems of interpretation in archaeology, approaches to the study of social evolution, as well as current insights into issues in classification and construction of typologies. Taking a fresh, and often provocative, look at the challenges contemporary archaeology is facing, the contributors evaluate the effects of past developments and discuss the impact they are likely to have on future directions in archaeology as an internationally connected discipline. In its final part the volume reflects on current thinking on prehistory, using case-studies from a number of European regions and the Mediterranean, from the Neolithic to the Roman Period.The volume represents a tribute to the lifetime achievements of Professor Evžen Neustupný, a distinguished Czech archaeologist who contributed to the advancement of prehistoric studies in Europe and to archaeological theory and method in particular.

Textile and dress production, from raw materials to finished items, has had a significant impact on society from its earliest history. The essays in this volume offer a fresh insight into the emerging interdisciplinary research field of textile and dress studies by discussing archaeological, iconographical and textual evidence within a broad geographical and chronological spectrum. The thirteen chapters explore issues, such as the analysis of textile tools, especially spindle whorls, and textile imprints for reconstructing textile production in contexts as different as Neolithic Transylvania, the Early Bronze Age North Aegean and the Early Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean; the importance of cuneiform clay tablets as a documentary source for both drawing a detailed picture of the administration of a textile industry and for addressing gender issues, such as the construction of masculinity in the Sumerian kingdoms of the 3rd millennium BC; and discussions of royal and priestly costumes and clothing ornaments in the Mesopotamian kingdom of Mari and in Mycenaean culture. Textile terms testify to intensive exchanges between Semitic and Indo-European languages, especially within the terminology of trade goods. The production and consumption of textiles and garments are demonstrated in 2nd millennium Hittite Anatolia; from 1st millennium BC Assyria, a cross-disciplinary approach combines texts, realia and iconography to produce a systematic study of golden dress decorations; and finally, the important discussion of fibres, flax and wool, in written and archaeological sources is evidence for delineating the economy of linen and the strong symbolic value of fibre types in 1st millennium Babylonia and the Southern Levant. The volume is part of a pair together with Greek and Roman Textiles and Dress: An Interdisciplinary Anthology edited by Mary Harlow and Marie-Louise Nosch.

Seals and their Context in the Middle Ages offers an extensive overview of approaches to and the potential of sigillography, as well as introducing a wider readership to the range, interest and artistry of medieval seals. Seals were used throughout medieval society in a wide range of contexts: royal, governmental, ecclesiastical, legal, in trade and commerce and on an individual and personal level. The fourteen papers presented here, which originate from a conference held in Aberystwyth in April 2012, focus primarily on British material but there is also useful reference to continental Europe. The volume is divided into three sections looking at the history and use of seals as symbols and representations of power and prestige in a variety of institutional, dynastic and individual contexts, their role in law and legal practice, and aspects of their manufacture, sources and artistic attributes. Importantly and distinctively, the volume moves beyond the study of high status seals to consider such themes as the social and economic status of seal-makers, the nature and meaning – including reflections of deliberate wit and boastfulness – of specific motifs employed at various levels of society, and the distribution of seals in relation to the location of, for instance, religious institutions and along major routeways. In so doing, it sets out ways in which sigillography can open new pathways into the study of non-elites and their cultures in medieval society.

The nine papers presented here set out to broaden the recent focus of archaeological evidence for medieval children and childhood and to offer new ways of exploring their lives and experiences. The everyday use of space and changes in the layout of buildings are examined, in order to reveal how these impacted upon the daily practices and tasks of household tasks relating to the upbringing of children. Aspects of work and play are explored: how, archaeologically, we can determine whether, and in what context, children played board and dice games? How we may gain insights into the medieval countryside from the perspective of children and thus begin to understand the processes of reproduction of particular aspects of medieval society and the spaces where children’s activities occurred; and the possible role of children in the medieval pottery industry. Funerary aspects are considered: the burial of infants in early English Christian cemeteries the treatment and disposal of infants and children in the cremation ritual of early Anglo-Saxon England; and childhood, children and mobility in early medieval western Britain, especially Wales. The volume concludes with an exploration of what archaeologists can draw from other disciplines – historians, art historians, folklorists and literary scholars – and the approaches that they take to the study of childhood and thus the enhancement of our knowledge of medieval society in general.

Recently, Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeology has been breaking boundaries worldwide. Finds such as the Mesolithic house at Howick, the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, and the recently discovered footprints at Happisburgh all serve to indicate how archaeologists in these fields are truly at the cutting edge of understanding humanity’s past. This volume celebrates this trend by focusing on recent advances in the study of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. With contributors from a diverse range of backgrounds, it allows for a greater degree of interdisciplinary discourse than is often the case, as the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic are generally split apart. Wild Things brings together contributions from major researchers and early career specialists, detailing research taking place across the British Isles, France, Portugal, Russia, the Levant and Europe as a whole, providing a cross-section of the exciting range of research being conducted. By combining papers from both these periods, it is hoped that dialogue between practitioners of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeology can be further encouraged. Topics include: the chronology of the Mid-Upper Palaeolithic of European Russia; territorial use of Alpine high altitude areas by Mesolithic hunter-gatherer; discussing the feasibility of reconstructing Neanderthal demography to examine their extinction; the funerary contexts from the Mesolithic burials at Muge; the discovery of further British Upper Palaeolithic parietal art at Cathole Cave; exploitation of both lithics and fauna in Palaeolithic France; and an analysis of Mesolithic/Neolithic trade in Europe.

Scholars working in a number of disciplines – archaeologists, classicists, epigraphers, papyrologists, Assyriologists, Egyptologists, Mayanists, philologists, and ancient historians of all stripes – routinely engage with ancient textual sources that are either material remains from the archaeological record or historical products of other connections between the ancient world and our own.Examining the archaeology-text nexus from multiple perspectives, contributors to this volume discuss current theoretical and practical problems that have grown out of their work at the boundary of the division between archaeology and the study of early inscriptions. In 12 representative case-studies drawn from research in Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and Mesoamerica, scholars use various lenses to critically examine the interface between archaeology and the study of ancient texts, rethink the fragmentation of their various specialized disciplines, and illustrate the best in current approaches to contextual analysis. The collection of essays also highlights recent trends in the development of documentation and dissemination technologies, engages with the ethical and intellectual quandaries presented by ancient inscriptions that lack archaeological context, and sets out to find profitable future directions for interdisciplinary research.

Archaeology has long dealt with issues of identity, and especially with ethnicity, with modern approaches emphasising dynamic and fluid social construction. The archaeology of the Iron Age in particular has engendered much debate on the topic of ethnicity, fuelled by the first availability of written sources alongside the archaeological evidence which has led many researchers to associate the features they excavate with populations named by Greek or Latin writers. Some archaeological traditions have had their entire structure built around notions of ethnicity, around the relationships existing between large groups of people conceived together as forming unitary ethnic units. On the other hand, partly influenced by anthropological studies, other scholars have written forcefully against Iron Age ethnic constructions, such as the Celts.The 24 contributions to this volume focus on the south east Europe, where the Iron Age has, until recently, been populated with numerous ethnic groups with which specific material culture forms have been associated. The first section is devoted to the core geographical area of south east Europe: Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia, as well as Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The following three sections allow comparison with regions further to the west and the south west with contributions on central and western Europe, the British Isles and the Italian peninsula. The volume concludes with four papers which provide more synthetic statements that cut across geographical boundaries, the final contributions bringing together some of the key themes of the volume. The wide array of approaches to identity presented here reflects the continuing debate on how to integrate material culture, protohistoric evidence (largely classical authors looking in on first millennium BC societies) and the impact of recent nationalistic agendas.

How may Bohuslän rock art and landscape be perceived and understood? Since the Bronze Age, the landscape has been transformed by shore displacement but, largely due to misunderstanding and certain ideas about the character of Bronze Age society, rock art research in Tanum has drawn much of its inspiration from the present agrarian landscape. This perception of the landscape has not been a major issue. This volume, republished from the GOTAC Serie B (Gothenburg Archaeological thesis 49) aims to shed light on the process of shore displacement and its social and cognitive implications for the interpretation of rock art in the prehistoric landscape. The findings clearly show that in the Bronze Age, the majority of rock art sites in Bohuslän had a very close spatial connection to the sea.Much rock art analysis focuses on the contemplative observer. The more direct activities related to rock art are seldom fully considered. Here, the basic conditions for the production of rock art, social theory and approaches to image, communication, symbolism and social action are discussed and related to palpable social forms of the “reading” of rock art. The general location and content of the Bronze Age remains indicate a tendency towards the maritime realm, which seems to have included both socio-ritual and socio-economic matters of production and consumption and that Bronze Age groups in Bohuslän were highly active and mobile. The numerous configurations of ship images on the rocks could indicate a general transition or drift towards the maritime realm. Marking or manifesting such transitions in some way may have been important and it is tempting to perceive the rock art as traces of such transitions or positions in the landscape. All this points to a maritime understanding of Bronze Age rock art in northern Bohuslän.

This volume is the outcome of collaborative European research among archaeologists, archaeobotanists, ethnographers, historians and agronomists, and frequently uses experiments in archaeology. It aims to establish new common ground for integrating different approaches and for viewing agriculture from the standpoint of the human actors involved. Each chapter provides an interdisciplinary overview of the skills used and the social context of the pursuit of agriculture, highlighting examples of tools, technologies and processes from land clearance to cereal processing and food preparation. This is the second of three volumes in the EARTH monograph series, The dynamics of non-industrial agriculture: 8,000 years of resilience and innovation , which shows the great variety of agricultural practices in human terms, in their social, political, cultural and legal contexts.

The city of Erbil, which now claims to be one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, lies on the rich alluvial plains at the foot of the piedmont of the Zagros mountains in a strategic position which made it a natural gateway between Iran and Mesopotamia. Within the context of ancient Mesopotamian civilisation there can be no doubt that it will have been one of the most important urban centres but archaeological research of the remains has been limited. Three recent archaeological assessments of the mound have sought to evaluate the significance of the remains within their historical context. This work is dedicated to the cuneiform sources of information.There are a number of references to Erbil in Eblaite and Sumerian administrative texts of Akkadian (2334 - 2193 BC) and Ur III (2120 - 2004 BC) date and hundreds of references in Akkadian texts from the 2nd and 1st millennia; only two of which may actually come from Erbil. There are a handful of references in unpublished Elamite texts from Persepolis. In Old Persian the city only appears in the corresponding version of the inscription at Behistun belonging to the Achaemenid period (539-330 BC). There are no references in Hittite, Hurrian, Urartian or Ugaritic sources. The sources include a wide variety of administrative texts, royal and other inscriptions, letters, votives and lexical texts.

Fifteen papers examine a variety of aspects of medieval towns and their topography. The first part of the volume comprises essays on the excavations in the Frankish emporium of Quentovic, directed by David Hill; London; Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian mints; the burhs of Somerset; and urban perspectives in literature. The second part concentrates on topographical subjects including an examination of the significance of the distribution through trade of Mayen Lava quernstones in early medieval north-west Europe and the evidence of a charter for the topography of late Anglo-Saxon Worcester which reveals that standing crosses were, by then, considered old fashioned. Other papers consider landscape through place-name studies; long term archaeology projects in The Vale of Pickering, Yorkshire, and western Cheshire; medieval dykes; land holdings needed supporting the monasteries of Jarrow and Monkwearmouth; and aspects of mapping and the understanding of geographical space from Anglo-Saxon times and in the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. The papers are preceded by a tribute to archaeologist and historian David Hill, and a bibliography of his publications.

This volume presents the proceedings of a conference hosted by the American School of Classical Studies, Athens and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Athens in 2004. There are additional contributions from Patricia Butz, Robin Osborne, Katherine Schwab, Justin St. P. Walsh, Hilda Westervelt and Lorenz Winkler-Horacek. The contents are divided into four sections I. Structure and Ornament; II. Technique and Agency; III. Myth and Narrative and IV. Diffusion and Influence. Highlights include Robin Osbornes discussion of What you can do with a chariot but can't do with a satyr on a Greek temple; Ralf von den Hoffs consideration of the Athenian treasury at Delphi; and Katherine Schwabs presentation of New evidence for Parthenon east metope 14. The papers not only cover a great variety of issues in architectural sculpture but also present a range of case studies from all over the Greek world. The result is an important collection of current research.

This book brings together a selection of twenty-eight previously disparate articles by Nicholas Postgate that represent some thirty years of engagement with the nature of Assyrian society and government. Most are broadly synthetic and deal with general issues; they are a tremendous body of work, and this will be an invaluable collection for everyone interested in Assyria.

This volume breaks new ground in approaching the Ancient Economy by bringing together documentary sources from Mesopotamia and the Greco-Roman world. Addressing textual corpora that have traditionally been studied separately, the collected papers overturn the conventional view of a fundamental divide between the economic institutions of these two regions. The premise is that, while controlling for differences, texts from either cultural setting can be brought to bear on the other and can shed light, through their use as proxy data, on such questions as economic mentalities and market development. The book also presents innovative approaches to the quantitative study of large corpora of ancient documents. The resulting view of the Ancient Economy is much more variegated and dynamic than traditional ‘primitivist’ views would allow. The volume covers the following topics: Babylonian house size data as an index of urban living standards; the Old Babylonian archives as a source for economic history; Middle Bronze Age long distance trade in Anatolia; long-term economic development in Babylonia from the 7th to the 4th century BC; legal institutions and agrarian change in the Roman Empire; papyrological evidence for water-lifting technology; money circulation and monetization in Late Antique Egypt; the application of Social Network Analysis to Babylonian cuneiform archives; price trends in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, as well as the effects of locust plagues on prices.

Exploring the origins of urbanism – the emergence and development of the first cities, has long constituted one of the main challenges of archaeological and ancient historical research. Studying cities in a long-term and cross-cultural perspective links the past with the present, allowing a better understanding of one of the most important developments in human history. Moreover, archaeological research on ancient cities can contribute to a better understanding of contemporary processes of urbanisation. The 21 papers in this volume aim bring together the latest continental and English-speaking research with contributions by well-established researchers and younger colleagues providing innovative perspectives. The whole Iron Age – ca. 800 BC to the beginning of the Common Era – is considered on an international basis to consider such topics as the similarities and differences observed between centralisation and urbanisation processes of the Early and Late Iron Age; new approaches to the internal organisation of settlements and their formation processes; the supply management of central places and economic support from their environment; and the crucial role of sanctuaries in the formation of urban settlements. Contributions cover an area stretching from central Spain to Moravia and from southern France to Britain. The aim has been to produce a work of reference for readers interested in Iron Age archaeology in particular, and in urbanisation processes in general.

An understanding of textiles and the role they played in the past is important for anyone interested in past societies. Textiles served and in fact still do as both functional and symbolic items. The evidence for ancient textiles in Europe is split quite definitely along a north-south divide, with an abundance of actual examples in the north, but precious little in the south, where indirect evidence comes from such things as vase painting and frescoes. This volume brings together these two schools to look in more detail at textiles in the ancient world, and is based on a conference held in Denmark and Sweden in March 2003. Section one, Production and Organisation takes a chronological look through more than four thousand years of history; from Syria in the mid-third millennium BC, to Seventeenth Century Germany. Section two, Crafts and Technology focuses on the relationship between the primary producer (the craftsman) and the secondary receiver (the archaeologist/conservator). The third section, Society, examines the symbolic nature of textiles, and their place within ancient societal groups. Throughout the book emphasis is placed on the universality of textiles, and the importance of information exchange between scholars from different disciplines.