Bridges have always played an important role on the social and economic history of human development, and Buckinghamshire has a great wealth of them. Trade systems and road networks must solve the challenges of geography’s waterways, and bridges, causeways, fords, and flood systems were necessarily a key aspect of the experience of historical travel. Bridges and river crossings anchored the Buckinghamshire road network in the landscape, and once established it proved remarkably durable. Settlements, villages, and eventually cities have traditionally sprung up at bridgeheads or where a river could be crossed at any time of the year. Some examples in Buckinghamshire are Newport Pagnell, Buckingham, and Cookham. The most ancient, vital, and interesting architectural structures linked to use of these crossings are bridges, and people hold a deep fascination for them. There are literally thousands of bridges in Buckinghamshire, varying vastly in size, style, and materials. Many are stone, a few are wooden, and thereare numerous brick and more modern steel and concrete constructions. The bridges featured in this book are more than 100 years old, mostly lie on public roads or rights-of way, are publicly accessible, and have a significant proportion of the original bridge intact. Through colour photographs, stories, and historical facts, this book looks at the wonderful historic bridges that make up the chronology of Buckinghamshire.

The Crownthorpe hoard was discovered in 1982 during a metal detector search of a Roman temple site. It consists of seven bronze vessels: native copies of two Roman silver wine cups and a spouted strainer bowl, together with an imported Roman saucepan, patera and a pair of dishes. The cups are copies of plain silver vessels of form Eggers 170, and may well have been made in a workshop in Norfolk. They are the only complete examples of insular copies of Roman wine cups from Britain. Copies of Roman wine cups were made in the east of England from before c. 25 BC. Some of these local imitations were inspired by imported cups that have not survived in the archaeological record. Bearing in mind that no imported silver plate is known from late Iron Age Britain after c. 10 BC, insular copies of wine cups show that more silver plate reached Iron Age Britain than we have hitherto realised. Confirmation comes from images of Roman silver cups on Iron Age coins. The spouted strainer bowl was made in a workshop to the south of Crownthorpe, somewhere in the counties north of the lower Thames. Such vessels are an insular type that owed nothing significant to the Roman world. They were used primarily for flavouring local drinks. A corpus of thirty-one such copper-alloy vessels is provided here, including three examples that reached the mainland of Europe. The Roman saucepan in the hoard is an Eggers 151 saucepan of Trau-Kasserolle type. They are rare finds: Crownthorpe is only the fourth example from Britain, and the only complete one. It came from a workshop along the Rhine or Danube frontiers. The patera is Italian and part of a set of hand-washing vessels; the jug that would have been used in conjunction with it was not present in the hoard. The two dishes have tinned inner surfaces and represent a long-lived Roman vessel type. The hoard was assembled at Crownthorpe c. AD 40-75. Relating the hoard to the local context suggests that the date can be narrowed down to c. AD 45-60/61. It was buried by a Briton, a member of the local Icenian elite. The set of vessels at Crownthorpe was used for preparing and serving local ale or mead flavoured with fruit or vegetable additives, and drunk from the cups. Wine amphoras are seldom found in late Iron Age and early Roman Norfolk, and that precludes the use of the Crownthorpe cups for the drink. As there are two cups, we should envisage their use for the host and a guest. The Eggers 151 saucepan was used to ladle the drink into the strainer bowl for its flavouring. Snacks to accompany the drink were served in the two dishes. Hand-washing in the course of these revelries was facilitated by the patera. Burial of the hoard near the site of a later Romano-Celtic temple with no trace of an organic container to facilitate recovery suggests it was votive. Other base-metal utensil hoards from Roman Britain cannot be satisfactorily accounted for as the temporary concealment of portable wealth with the intention of recovery, and strengthen the case for Crownthorpe being votive. No comparable hoards are known from late Iron Age Britain because few copper-alloy utensils were in use then, but we know that the practice of burying such hoards had its roots in a native tradition because single copper-alloy vessels have been recovered from watery contexts in the late Iron Age. Components of the Crownthorpe hoard had been dismantled when it was buried, but it should not be seen as a hoard of scrap metal intended for recycling. It is proposed instead that the termination of the useful working life of the hoard vessels represents an act of renunciation, in this case a repudiation of Icenian dealings with the Roman world that culminated in the calamity of the Boudican Revolt of AD 60-61.

This highly-illustrated book reveals a brand-new story of the royal castle of Lincoln – how it was imposed on the late Anglo-Saxon town and how it developed over the next 900 years in the hands of the king or his aristocratic associates. Today, we have been left a surviving monument of three great towers, each with its own biography. Led by FAS Heritage, archaeologists, architectural historians and a large cohort of the general public have come together to produce a revealing and accessible account of the story of Lincoln Castle; in doing so, we gain further insight into the history, culture and society of medieval England.

Holy Island is a small island just off the west coast of Anglesey, North Wales, which is rich in archaeology of all periods. Between 2006 and 2010, archaeological excavations in advance of a major Welsh Government development site, Parc Cybi, enabled extensive study of the island’s past. Over 20 hectares were investigated, revealing a busy and complex archaeological landscape, which could be seen evolving from the Mesolithic period through to the present day. Major sites discovered include an Early Neolithic timber hall aligned on an adjacent chambered tomb and an Iron Age settlement, the development of which is traced by extensive dating and Bayesian analysis. A Bronze Age ceremonial complex, along with the Neolithic tomb, defined the cultural landscape for subsequent periods. A long cist cemetery of a type common on Anglesey proved, uncommonly, to be late Roman in date, while elusive Early Medieval settlement was indicated by corn dryers. This wealth of new information has revolutionised our understanding of how people have lived in, and transformed, the landscape of Holy Island. Many of the sites are also significant in a broader Welsh context and inform the understanding of similar sites across Britain and Ireland.

Of all of Britain's great archaeological monuments the prehistoric and later hillforts have arguably had the most profound impact on the landscape, if only because there are so many; yet we know very little about them. Were they recognised as being something special by those who created them or is the ‘hillfort’ purely an archaeologist's 'construct'? How were they built, who lived in them and to what uses were they put? This book, which is richly illustrated with photography of sites throughout England and Wales, addresses these and many other questions. After discussing the difficult issue of definition and the great excavations on which our knowledge is based, Ian Brown investigates in turn the origins of hillforts, their architecture and the role they played in Iron Age society. He also discusses the latest theories about their location, social significance and chronology. The book provides a valuable synthesis of the rich vein of research carried out in England and Wales on hillforts over the last thirty years. The great variability of hillforts poses many problems, and this book should help guide both the specialist and non-specialist alike though the complex literature. Furthermore, it has an important conservation objective. Land use in the modern era has not been kind to these monuments, with a significant number either disfigured or lost. Public consciousness of their importance needs raising if their management is to be improved and their future assured.

There has been an increasing archaeological interest in human-animal-nature relations, where archaeology has shifted from a focus on deciphering meaning, or understanding symbols and the social construction of the landscape to an acknowledgement of how things, places and the environment contribute with their own agencies to the shaping of relations. This means that the environment cannot be regarded as a blank space that landscape meaning is projected onto. Parallel to this, the field of environmental humanities poses the question of how to work with the intermeshing of humans and their surroundings. To allow the environment back in as an active agent of change, means that landscape archaeology can deal better with issues such as global warming, an escalating loss of biodiversity as well as increasingly toxic environment. However, this does not leave human agency out of the equation. It is humans who reinforce the environmental challenges of today. The scholarly field of the humanities deal with questions like how is meaning attributed, what cultural factors drive human action, what role is played by ethics, how is landscape experienced emotionally, as well as how concepts derived from art, literature, and history function in such processes of meaning attribution and other cultural processes. This humanities approach is of outmost importance when dealing with climate and environmental challenges ahead and we need a new landscape archaeology that meets these challenges, but also that meets well across disciplinary boundaries. Here inspiration can be found in discussions with scholars in the emerging field of Environmental Humanities.

Social inequality is a subject of contemporary concerns. Life capabilities and the access to resources vary significantly in rich and poor countries, between elites and others. Furthermore, inequalities based on bio-anthropological and non-bio-anthropological causes are almost universal. Accordingly, inequality was also inherent in past societies and archaeologists have continually examined and interpreted social inequalities in sources such as burial grounds.This book continues such analyses with a new multi-proxy approach. It reveals social inequalities in selected past burial grounds from Southwestern Germany. The burial grounds date to the Early Neolithic (Schwetzingen), the Late Neolithic (Lauda-Königshofen), the Early Bronze Age (Singen), the Early Iron Age (Magdalenenbergle), and the Early Medieval period (Horb-Altheim). The challenge was to identify hierarchical and heterarchical differences and inequalities within the burial grounds based on a multitude of different proxies. The examination encompasses variations in the distribution of grave goods, burial pit sizes, bio-anthropological and isotope data. Furthermore, spatial analyses of burial grounds and, in particular, on the distances between the graves play an essential role in this examination.The results reveal social inequalities among and within genders and age cohorts that are differently pronounced in the respective cemeteries. Furthermore, the results of multi-proxy analyses lead to the interpretation that the sites differ concerning the respective degrees of inequality and power strategy modes. In detail, it can be observed that the Early Iron Age and the Early Bronze Age sites demonstrate a relatively high degree of inequality as compared to the other sites. More specifically, the investigation of sites from the Early Iron Age and the Late Neolithic rather reveal a network-based power strategy, whereas sites from the Early Neolithic, the Early Bronze Age and the Early Medieval period tend to show a corporate-based power strategy.

Markets emerge in recent historical research as important spheres of economic interaction in ancient societies. In the case of ancient Egypt, traditional models imagined an all-encompassing centralized, bureaucratic economy that left practically no place for market transactions, as many surviving documents only described the activities of the royal palace and of huge institutions, mainly temples. Yet scattered references in the sources reveal that markets and traders were crucial actors in the economic life of ancient Egypt. In this perspective, this volume aims to discuss the role of markets, traders and economic interaction (not necessarily organized through markets) and the use of "money" (metals, valuable commodities) in pre-modern societies, based on archaeological, anthropological and historical evidence. Furthermore, it intends to integrate different perspectives about the social organization of transactions and exchanges and the different forms taken by markets, from meeting places where exchanges operated under ritualized procedures and conventions, to markets in which profit-seeking activities were marginal in respect with other practices that stressed, on the contrary, community collaboration. The book also deals with social forms of pre-modern exchanges in which trust and ethnic solidarity guaranteed the validity of commercial operations in the absence of formal codes of laws or accepted authorities over long distances (trade diasporas, guilds, etc.). Finally, the volume analyzes a critical aspect of small-scale trade and markets, such as the commercialization of agricultural household production and its impact on the peasant economic strategies. In all, the book covers a diversity of topics in which recent research in the fields of economic sociology, archaeology, anthropology, economics and history proves invaluable in order to analyze the role of Egyptian trade in a broader perspective, as well as to suggest new venues of comparative research, theoretical reflection and dialogue between Egyptology and social sciences.

The Brough of Birsay was the power-centre of the Viking earldom of Orkney and is one of Historic Environment Scotland’s key monuments and visitor attractions on the islands. This publication is the culmination of 60 years of investigations that took place on the site between 1954 and 2014.This new volume incorporates comprehensive accounts of work undertaken by Dr Ralegh Radford and Mr Stewart Cruden between 1954 and 1964, excavations by the Viking and Early Settlement Research Project under the direction of the author on site between 1974 and 1981, a rescue excavation in 1993, a geophysical survey in 2007 and archival research up to 2014. Specialist artefactual and palaeobiological studies of metallurgical material, ogham inscriptions and a gilt-bronze mount of Insular origin are included, together with re-analysis of the radiocarbon dates from all sites in Birsay Bay, and a re-assessment of the architecture and dating of the church and related buildings on the Brough itself.The final two chapters put the Brough, as both a Pictish power-centre and the hub of the Viking earldom, in the overall context of Birsay Bay and Viking and late Norse Orkney, and the wider world between the Pictish and late Norse/Medieval periods.As well as being the author’s third and final volume reporting on work for the Birsay Bay Project, this volume completes a trilogy of studies of the Brough itself, alongside Mrs Cecil Curle’s and Prof John Hunter’s earlier monographs.

The human body serves as a symbolic bridge between communities of the living and the divine. This is clearly evident in mythological stories that recount the creation of humans by deities within ancient and contemporaneous societies across a very broad geographical environment. In certain circumstances, parts of selected humans can become an ideal proxy for connecting with the supernatural, as demonstrated by the cult of human skulls in Near Eastern Neolithic communities, as well as the cult of relics of Christian saints from the early Christian era. To go deeper into this topic, this volume undertakes a cross-cultural investigation of the role played by both humans and human remains in creating forms of relationality with the divine in antiquity. This approach highlights how the human body can be envisioned as part of a broader materialisation of religious beliefs that is based on connecting different realms of materiality in the perception of the supernatural by communities of the living.

Network theory and methodologies have become central to exploring and explaining social, economic and political relationships and connections in past societies. However, in archaeology, the deployment of networks has sometimes been more descriptive than analytical. Methodologies have often depended upon underlying assumptions which inevitably simplify relationships that were complex and multi-faceted. However, the fragmentary, heterogenous and usually proxy data we possess are not always amenable to reconstructing that complexity. In ancient societies, we must infer the movement of knowledge about 'how to make things' largely from objects themselves. This is because we usually lack direct evidence of the human relationships that entwined people with objects and their makers, and hence have only imperfect understanding of the full range of diverse factors that shaped the relationships that constituted these networks. The chapters in this volume aim to interrogate the interpretative potential of network concepts for understanding the movement over time and space of ideas about making, using and moving things through a range of archaeological case studies, which reveal both functional and dysfunctional relationships. The purpose is to consider how more broadly contextualised and multi-faceted studies can both enhance, and be enhanced by, network and related approaches. The volume contributes to the search for greater understanding of the movement and transmission of knowledge (or in some cases their absence), and to debates about how best to expand the utility of network concepts and approaches.

Objects of adornment have been a subject of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic study for well over a century. Within archaeology, personal ornaments have traditionally been viewed as decorative embellishments associated with status and wealth, materializations of power relations and social strategies, or markers of underlying social categories such as those related to gender, class, and ethnic affiliation. Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity seeks to understand these artefacts not as signals of steady, pre-existing cultural units and relations, but as important components in the active and contingent constitution of identities. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on materiality and relationality in archaeological and social theory, this book uses one genre of material culture - items of bodily adornment - to illustrate how humans and objects construct one another. Providing case studies spanning 10 countries, three continents, and more than 9,000 years of human history, the authors demonstrate the myriad and dynamic ways personal ornaments were intertwined with embodied practice and identity performativity, the creation and remaking of social memories, and relational collections of persons, materials, and practices in the past. The authors’ careful analyses of production methods and composition, curation/heirlooming and reworking, decorative attributes and iconography, position within assemblages, and depositional context illuminate the varied material and relational axes along which objects of adornment contained social value and meaning. When paired with the broad temporal and geographic scope collectively represented by these studies, we gain a deeper appreciation for the subtle but vital roles these items played in human lives.

Clothing was an essential part of material culture in ancient societies both as a form of body protection and as house equipment. Besides a practical function, textiles played a crucial role in communicating various aspects of social and personal identity. Based largely on the analysis of textile tools, this book is intended to be the first systematic attempt at reconstructing textile culture in ancient Sicily. Textile implements represent the most abundant category of evidence for textile activity in Sicily and in this book they are used as a means to explore the social dynamics within cultural interactions in the final Bronze–Iron Age and Archaic Sicily. The book begins with an overview of the cultural complexity of communities in Sicily and the Aeolian islands, focusing on two crucial periods of Sicilian history, which are characterised by intense movements of peoples from the Italian peninsula and the establishment of Greek and Phoenician settlements. Through the investigation of textile tools, the book discusses several key aspects, including technological features of textile technology and production, knowledge transfer, networks of weavers, as well as the social significance of textile activity. By employing an interdisciplinary perspective, this book is important not only for textile specialists but also for scholars and students dealing with culturally hybrid frameworks of ancient Sicily and provides a springboard for future studies on textile culture and cultural interactions in the ancient world.

This volume reports on the ways in which humans engaged in their material and biotic environments at Çatalhöyük, using a wide range of archaeological evidence. This volume also summarizes work on the skeletal remains recovered from the site, as well as analytical research on isotopes and aDNA.

Published by Oxford University in the Thames Valley Landscapes Monograph Series, this volume (no. 43) brings together the work of an award-winning, five-year lottery-funded university/community research project ("Archeox") on the landscape and history of East Oxford, part of the City of Oxford (UK). It documents field and geophysical surveys, archive and collections research, excavations at two Medieval ecclesiastical sites (a leper hospital and a Benedictine nunnery), at a prehistoric pit alignment, together with an extensive campaign of test-pitting which has given new insights into the Roman, Medieval and post-Medieval settlement pattern. The book tells the prehistory and history of a formerly rural area on the eastern outskirts of Oxford which underwent rapid urbanisation after 1850, and is now an integral part of the city. The research plan relied upon engaging and working with the community to participate and to provide access to many study areas, and offered a comprehensive programme of training and education to all those who took part, ensuring that the work done was to an appropriately high standard. It has produced new insights into a number of nationally-important archaeological sites, gained new overviews of the development of the landscape, and brought out from obscurity many under-studied or forgotten finds in local collections. Fundamentally a project which sought to unite university and city, the contemporary story of people and their heritage is a key part of its message. Working in and among some of Oxford's most deprived communities, "Archeox" has been recognised as an exemplar of good practice in breaking down barriers to higher education. Over seven hundred people participated as volunteers, and the project reached many more through outreach and engagement programmes and events. The book is extensively illustrated with many maps, plans and photographs, and is authored by 55 participants in the project, ranging from leading Professors of Archaeology to volunteers who are achieving published work for the first time.

This book brings together 30 papers by leading scholars in the field of usewear and residue analysis. This publication aims to revive the debate on the role of traceology (use-wear and residues) in multidisciplinary approaches that address archaeological questions. Many studies on technological aspects of material culture deal with specific material categories (e. g. flint, ceramics, bone), often in separate or isolated ways, and this division does not really reflect the integrated nature of technical systems in which different material categories are in dynamic interaction. Hence, exploring the interaction between different chaînes opératoires is crucial for a more global concept of the toolkit with all its components and it is a precondition for paleo-ethnographic reconstructions of technical systems and economies. Starting from a functional perspective, the papers in this book explore various topics such as apprenticeship, group dynamics, social status, economy, technological evolution, spatial organization, mobility patterns and territories, or adaptations to cultural and environmental changes.This collection of papers, presented at the AWRANA conference in 2018, constitutes a major sign of the dynamism, popularity and scientific importance of our discipline in current archaeological research. AWRANA 2018 was dedicated to the memory of H. Keeley.