This volume combines scholarly contributions on the relation between values and cleaning processes in different places, cultures and times. The core disciplines are archaeology and anthropology with interdisciplinary additions from sinology, classic philology, philosophy, sociology and fine arts.

Rural Settlement and Economic Activity is a key new addition to literature on the rural economy of Tripolitania during Antiquity. The chapters explore the geography and climate of the area and present the results of the author’s archaeological survey. Settlement types and their constructions are examined, followed by a detailed analysis of olive oil presses and their production capacity. Finally, amphora production sites are discussed, with examples of the types of amphora and their capacities. The conclusions give an overview of the rural economy of Tarhuna during the Roman period, focusing on economic aspects and offering an astonishing new picture of this highly productive landscape

In recent decades, there has been a new surge of interest in the history and legacies of the Silk Roads both within academic and public discourses. A field of Silk Roads Studies has come into its own. Consciously mirroring the temperament of its subject, the field has moved out of the narrow niches of particular disciplines to become a truly interdisciplinary endeavor. New research findings about the historical operations of the Silk Roads and interpretations of their legacies for the modern and contemporary world have broken down geographical and temporal divides that once demarcated the Silk Roads as primarily pre-modern and Old World-centered conduits of globalization. In light of these developments, the time is ripe to begin formulating a new definition of the contour of Silk Roads Studies and laying a new foundation for further work in this field. Silk Roads: From Local Realities to Global Narratives brings together leading scholars in multiple disciplines related to Silk Roads studies. It highlights the multiplicity of networks that constituted the Silk Roads, including land and maritime routes, and approaches the Silk Roads from Antiquity to China’s One Belt One Road Initiative from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas. This holistic approach to understanding ancient globalization, exchanges, transformations, and movements - and their continued relevance to the present - is in line with contemporary academic trends toward interdisciplinarity. Indeed, the Silk Roads is such an expansive topic that many approaches to its study must be included to represent accurately its many facets. The volume emphasizes exchange and transformation along the Silk Roads - moments of acculturation or hybridization that contributed to novel syncretic forms. It highlights the multiplicity of networks that constituted the Silk Roads, including land and maritime routes, and approaches to the Silk Roads from Antiquity to China’s One Belt One Road Initiative from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas.

The Material Cultures in Public Engagement volume seeks to document and explore the significant change in the relationship of Museums with collections of the Ancient World and their audiences. The volume establishes a new approach to the study of public archaeology as a discipline and application within Museums, by bringing together the voices and experiences of museum professionals (curators, conservators and researchers) and public engagement professionals. Chapters in this volume present clear case-studies of the variety and diversity of public engagement projects conducted currently within European Museums and beyond. While the majority of case studies presented in the volume’s chapters stem from European Museum programmes, plenty of reference is made on parallel strategies and successful public engagement programmes outside Europe. Case studies within the volume provide important insights as to why public engagement programmes have developed in different ways between Europe and the Americas, as well as whether these differences may stem from different curatorial practices. Finally, a number of studies included in this volume point out that methodologies and practices of public engagement applied currently by Museums in or outside Europe, are rarely the subject of theoretical and methodological scrutiny, unlike other fields of study of the Ancient World or other social sciences. In summary, chapters within the book promise to contribute to the advancement of public engagement with the Ancient World, as well as to the advancement of public archaeology itself as a practice.

The Eastern Fertile Crescent region of western Iran and eastern Iraq hosted major developments in the transition from hunter-forager to farmer-herder lifestyles through the Early Neolithic period, 10,000-7000 BC. Within the scope of the Central Zagros Archaeological Project, excavations have been conducted since 2012 at two Early Neolithic sites in the Kurdistan region of Iraq: Bestansur and Shimshara. Bestansur represents an early stage in the transition to sedentary, farming life, where the inhabitants pursued a mixed strategy of hunting, foraging, herding and cultivating, maximising the new opportunities afforded by the warmer, wetter climate of the Early Holocene. They also constructed substantial buildings of mudbrick, including a major building with a minimum of 65 human individuals, mainly infants, buried under its floor in association with hundreds of beads. These human remains provide new insights into mortuary practices, demography, diet and disease during the early stages of sedentarisation. The material culture of Bestansur and Shimshara is rich in imported items such as obsidian, carnelian and sea-shells, indicating the extent to which Early Neolithic communities were networked across the Eastern Fertile Crescent and beyond. This volume includes final reports by a large-scale interdisciplinary team on all aspects of the results from excavations at Bestansur and Shimshara, through application of state-of-the-art scientific techniques, methods and analyses. The net result is to re-emphasise the enormous significance of the Eastern Fertile Crescent in one of the most important episodes in human history: the Neolithic transition.

Archaeologists excavating burials often find that they are not the first to disturb the remains of the dead. Graves from many periods frequently show signs that others have been digging and have moved or taken away parts of the original funerary assemblage. Displaced bones and artefacts, traces of pits, and damage to tombs or coffins can all provide clues about post-burial activities. The last two decades have seen a rapid rise in interest in the study of post-depositional practices in graves, which has now developed into a new subfield within mortuary archaeology. This follows a long tradition of neglect, with disturbed graves previously regarded as interesting only to the degree they revealed evidence of the original funerary deposit. This book explores past human interactions with mortuary deposits, delving into the different ways graves and human remains were approached by people in the past and the reasons that led to such encounters. The primary focus of the volume is on cases of unexpected interference with individual graves soon after burial: re-encounters with human remains not anticipated by those who performed the funerary rites and constructed the tombs. However, a first step is always to distinguish these from natural and accidental processes, and methodological approaches are a major theme of discussion. Interactions with the remains of the dead are explored in eleven chapters ranging from the New Kingdom of Egypt to Viking Age Norway and from Bronze Age Slovakia to the ancient Maya. Each discusses cases of re-entries into graves, including desecration, tomb re-use, destruction of grave contents, as well as the removal of artefacts and human remains for reasons from material gain to commemoration, symbolic appropriation, ancestral rites, political chicanery, and retrieval of relics. The introduction presents many of the methodological issues which recur throughout the contributions, as this is a developing area with new approaches being applied to analyze post-depositional processes in graves.

The International Conference on Insular Art (IIAC) is the leading forum for scholars of the visual and material culture of early medieval Ireland and Britain, including manuscript illumination, sculpture, metalwork, and textiles, and encompassing the work of Anglo-Saxon-, Celtic- and Norse-speaking artists. The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the eighth IIAC, which took place in Glasgow 11-14 July 2017. The theme of IIAC8 - Peopling Insular Art: Practice, Performance, Perception - was intended to focus attention on those who commissioned, created, and engaged with Insular art objects, and how they conceptualised, fashioned, and experienced them (with ‘engagement’ covering not only contemporary audiences, but later medieval and modern ones too). The twenty-one articles gathered here reflect the diverse ways in which this theme has been interpreted. They demonstrate the intellectual vibrancy of Insular art studies, its international outlook, its interdiscplinarity, and its openness to innovative technologies and approaches, while at the same time demonstrating the strength and enduring value of established methodologies and research practices. The studies collected here focus not only on made objects, but on the creative processes and intellectual decisions which informed their making. This volume brings Insular makers – the illuminators, pattern-makers, rubricators, carvers, and casters – to the fore.

From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behaviour while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalise their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practises. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinise carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalised – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyse the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

This edited volume delves into the current state of Iron Age and Early Medieval research in the North. Over the last two decades of archaeological explorations, theoretical vanguards, and introduction of new methodological strategies, together with a growing amount of critical studies in archaeology taking their stance from a multidisciplinary perspective, have dramatically changed our understanding of Northern Iron Age societies. The profound effect of 6th century climatic events on social structures in Northern Europe, a reintegration of written sources and archaeological material, genetic and isotopic studies entirely reinterpreting previously excavated grave material, are but a few examples of such land winnings. The aim of this book is to provide an intense and cohesive focus on the characteristics of contemporary Iron Age research; explored under the subheadings of field and methodology, settlement and spatiality, text and translation, and interaction and impact. Gathering the work of leading, established researchers and field archaeologists based throughout northern Europe and in the frontline of this new emerging image, this volume provides a collective summary of our current understandings of the Iron Age and Early Medieval Era in the North. It also facilitates a renewed interaction between academia and the ever-growing field of infrastructural archaeology, by integrating cutting edge fieldwork and developing field methods in the corpus of Iron Age and Early Medieval studies. In this book, many hypotheses are pushed forward from their expected outcomes, and analytical work is not afraid of taking risks, thus advancing the field of Iron Age research, and also, hopefully, inspiring to a continued creation of new knowledge.

The importance of skin processing technologies in the history and expansion of humankind cannot be overstated, yet these technologies can be difficult to identify in the archaeological record. This research outlines the development of a systematic, non-destructive method for identifying the tanning technologies used to produce prehistoric skin artefacts. The approach combines extensive archaeological research and over 25 years of the author’s personal tanning experience. The method employs observations of an extensive sample reference collection, both macroscopic and microscopic, to produce a database of defining characteristics for six tannage types, from a large geographic area and time frame. The primary collection contains 22 species identified as economically important from both Europe and North America. A secondary collection of clothing and utilitarian items, made from traditionally processed skins, was used to add ‘in-life use’ traces to the database. The method was tested against both archaeological items from a variety of preservation contexts, and ethnographic items from museum collections across North America and Europe. This analysis confirmed that defining characteristics do exist between the primary tannage technologies, and that at least some defining characteristics survived in all preservation contexts. These can be recorded at multiple levels of observation, and often provide insight into small sections of the artefact’s production sequence and life history.This research shows definitively that processed skin items from vastly different preservation contexts can provide a wealth of information about prehistoric tannage technologies, as well as information on manufacturing sequences and the conditions of use an item experienced. The method is a valuable analytical tool for those involved in conservation, curation or analysis of archaeological or ethnographic skin products. It provides a consolidated source of information for artisans working with traditional tanning, or re-enactors interested in the history or science of skin products. Finally, it serves as an example of the targeted use of experimental archaeology in a large-scale research project, and will be beneficial to anyone involved in experimental or experiential archaeology.

Grand Narratives of colonization, especially ones related to the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, began circulating soon after 1492. The danger of these Grand Narratives is that they are often mistaken as reality and eclipse all other possible narrations pertaining to a particular place and/or time. As more Caribbean territories become independent, the questioning of Grand Narratives has permeated many disciplines in the region, and archaeology is no exception. This work attempts to examine the lifeways at the archaeological site of Concepción de la Vega during its occupation from 1494 through 1564, using a Decolonial approach. Situated in present-day Dominican Republic (Hispaniola island), this site was one of the earliest and most affluent in Caribbean colonial history.The Decolonial approach used here critically analyzes and reinterprets primary data about Concepción from the point of view of those colonized, particularly non-elite, Indigenous peoples, and those of African descent. This approach uses various sources of data to recreate early lifeways, and helps gain a better understanding of the process through which the Spanish-American cultural tradition was created, and later disseminated, to the rest of Latin America.

This volume establishes a rich cross-disciplinary dialogue about the significance of stone in society across time and space. The material properties of stone have ensured its continuing importance; however, it is its materiality which has mediated the relations between the individual, society and stone. Bound up with the physical properties of stone are ideas on identity, value, and understanding. Stone can act as a medium through which these concepts are expressed and is tied to ideas such as monumentality and remembrance; its enduring character creating a link through generations to both people and place. This volume brings together a collection of seventeen papers which draw on a range of diverse disciplines and approaches; including archaeology, anthropology, classics, design and engineering, fine arts, geography, history, linguistics, philosophy, psychology and sciences.

Homeric Chalkis is situated on the coast of Aetolia at the very ‘gateway’ of the Gulf of Patras. The foundation occurred during an important period in early Greek history when trade and movement of peoples along the Gulf intensified with a resulting strong pull to the coast. Well-preserved stratigraphies date the foundation to the early seventh century BC and testify to a flourishing settlement in the sixth century lasting till the early fifth century BC when the site was temporarily given up. Walls and roads follow a rectilinear layout. A broad spectre of pottery shapes and wares attest to innovative local and regional workshops already from the onset of the settlement. Alongside the pottery, tools for complex textile manufacture were found in all houses, among which were many small, pyramidal loom weights and spools. These findings indicated a high degree of experimental weaving techniques and demonstrated how the courtyard house, as a new house model, was particularly well suited to accommodate this manufacture, probably mantels. The results therefore offer important new evidence on relations between gender behaviour and Greek houses. The catalogue is richly illustrated with profile drawings, plans, black-and- white and colour photos and accompanied by discussions of the material.

The Vale of York, in North Yorkshire, has been used and shaped by communities since the end of the last Ice Age to the modern day. Its earliest, prehistoric features chart the way in which household groups shifted from mobile to more sedentary forms of occupation over time, culminating in the creation of landscape divisions from the end of the Bronze Age, and then recognisable field systems during the Iron Age. Throughout all periods, a variety of activity types on the landscape has been evident in the landscape, taking significantly different forms in different contexts: water management; the creation of boundaries; agricultural production; structural development, from domestic houses to larger monuments; exchange and consumption; and mortuary practices plus other ritual activity. This volume takes a thematic approach to these activities, revealing much about the area's development. Providing a thematic analysis of the excavated evidence from the Heslington East area, this volume combines the results of commercial, student training and local community fieldwork between 2007 and 2013. A concluding chapter discusses temporal change by looking at key points of transition in landscape activity in the area and interpreting one of the largest exposures of prehistoric and Roman activity in the immediate hinterland of Eboracum, a major Roman town in Britain.

Modern-day Aldborough, in North Yorkshire, lies on the site of Isurium Brigantum, the former administrative capital of the Brigantes, one of the largest indigenous tribes of Roman Britain. Strategically located on Dere Street, by the second century AD it had become a key Roman town engaged with the supply of the northern frontier, with buildings and mosaics that reveal a thriving economy through to the fourth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the site of Isurium Brigantum was the subject of important antiquarian investigations. However, unlike some southern counterparts – for example, Calleva Atrebatum or Verulamium – in the twentieth century it attracted less archaeological attention until, in 2009, a team of archaeologists led by Dr Rose Ferraby and Professor Martin Millett began a major re-examination of the site. Large-scale geophysical surveys using both gradiometry and high-resolution ground-penetrating radar were conducted and these revealed most of the town and its surroundings, allowing its development from the second century AD to the medieval period to be mapped with great accuracy. Bringing together for the first time the results of large-scale geophysical surveys of Isurium Brigantum with a re-evaluation of earlier antiquarian study and more recent archaeological fieldwork and excavations – some never before published – providing provides historians and archaeologists with exciting new information about the topography of a key Roman town engaged with the supply of the northern frontier of Britain, and about its development and later landscape, together with a thorough review of the town in the broader context of Roman Britain and the western Empire.

Thinking Hinterlands – Spanning 25 years of fieldwork across a 3 sq. km swathe on the west side of Cambridge, this and its companion volume present the results of 15 sites, including seven cemeteries. The main focus is on the area’s prehistoric ‘inland’ colonization (particularly its Middle Bronze Age horizon) and the dynamics of its Roman hinterland settlements. The latter involves a variety of farmsteads, a major roadside centre and a villa-estate complex, and the excavation programme represents one of the most comprehensive studies of the Roman countryside anywhere within the lands of its former empire. Appropriately, this book also includes a review of Roman Cambridge, appraising its status as a town.