Forsaken Relics examines the intricate mechanisms of ritualistic appropriation of ruined and/or abandoned assets and artifacts. It explores how this process occurs in situations where there is legislation to regulate the appropriation of ownerless property, as well as in cases where such rules are either absent or contested, leading to disputes and conflicts.Every society has developed its unique ways of managing the re-appropriation of ‘ownerless things’, such as places and houses abandoned after conflicts, crises, or natural disasters, forsaken cemeteries, tombs, and forgotten goods. These practices often involve the use of ritualistic methods to mask the intent to appropriate abandoned artifacts. The book aims to stimulate comparative analysis of this topic in both ancient and modern societies, profiling the identity of the ‘actors’ of appropriation, examining the definition of abandonment, and exploring the ritual aspects such as inventorying material, dedication to ancestors, and prayers to gods that legitimize the re-appropriation of places and goods classified as abandoned.

Archaeoacoustics, the study of sound in the past, is increasingly attracting attention. Although some work, particularly in musical archaeology, had been conducted previously, the field received a significant boost when the term itself was coined by Scarre and Lawson in their 2006 volume of that name, which brought together two major distinct strands: archaeomusicology and the acoustics of archaeological spaces. Since 2006, the number of publications has steadily been growing, yet the field remains in its infancy. This is partly due to the complexity inherent in the analysis of sound, which requires multidisciplinary collaboration across various disciplines. This complexity is reflected in the approaches followed and the contributors from diverse academic fields, including not only archaeology but also anthropology, architecture, classics, history, art history, and sound engineering.The aim is to provide an overview of a selection of the different topics covered by the field of archaeoacoustics. Contributors aspire to advancing the field through innovative approaches, including those stemming from psychology, a field not commonly associated with archaeology. Additionally, the book seeks to expand the field by developing a number of new ideas based on novel case studies. It presents some of the results derived from major research projects, such as the ERC funded Artsoundscapes and the Soundspace projects led by DíazAndreu and Knighton, respectively. The book will cover a wide range of topics, including a synthetic history of research provided in the introduction, theories about the origins of music in early humans, experimental archaeomusicology, approaches from the fields of neuroacoustics and psychoacoustics, experimental studies of portable and fixed lithophones and other musical instruments, explorations of soundscapes, representations of sound in early medieval frescoes, late medieval urbanscapes, and postmedieval proxemics. Case studies are located in America, Asia, and Europe.

Water may separate islands and the mainland, but the sea also offers a vital link. This volume is one of three major outputs of the research and public engagement project ‘Being an Islander’: Art and Identity of the Large Mediterranean Islands, implemented between 2019 and 2024 at the University of Cambridge. This project aimed to elucidate what defines island identity in the Mediterranean. It explored how insularity affects and shapes cultural identity by integrating transdisciplinary research methodologies, for example, by producing an award-winning documentary on insularity and island identity, drawing on the principles of visual anthropology, social anthropology, and environment studies. This volume is the culmination of the project’s research strands, undertaken by our key research teams in Cambridge, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy. It disseminates our research across our main project themes: insularity, connectivity, mobility, migration, island art and material culture production, hybridity and diachronicity, and provides cross-disciplinary arguments and suggestions on the future of island archaeology and associated disciplines. Contributions included suggest that the relationship between people, place, and material culture is what reveals important aspects of island identity and reframes the concept of the islands as a dynamic interplay shaped by social and historical episodes, connectivity and mobility, rather than geography or political boundaries. The volume advocates that the complex histories of the Mediterranean islands can also be a story of connections.

Pottery was at the heart of the ‘Neolithic package’ appearing in Britain with the first farmers around 4000 BC. It arrived as a mature technology and was essential to the new, largely sedentary, lifestyle and economy. It transformed storage and cooking practices, and the earliest ceramics seem to have been essential equipment in the new practice of dairying. The pottery changed over time and, as a result, ceramics have been fundamental to the construction of relative chronologies since the early days of modern archaeology. Even with the development of absolute dating techniques, the role of pottery as a dating tool has not diminished but instead has become refined and more accurate.But pottery is not just a tool for dating the past – it also represents a facet of prehistoric art and expression. Starting simply, ceramics became arguably the main medium for display, with often complex designs. Simple techniques, motifs and panels are combined to create highly decorated vessels, often of great individuality. The use of inlays, pastes and slips added contrasting colours to these vibrant designs.By the end of the Neolithic, ceramics became one of the major grave goods of British prehistory, acting as accompaniments to those that warranted formal burial whether by inhumation or cremation. This practice continued throughout the Early Bronze Age to the extents that, lacking contemporary domestic sites, most of the corpora of Early Bronze Age ceramics are largely sepulchral in context. As we increasingly realise that burial rituals may have been varied and complex, so the roles of these ceramics are becoming all the more questioned.This book traces the 3000 years of ceramic use and development in Britain, charting the changing forms and decorative techniques and the differing and changing roles that pottery played within its contemporary society.

Northwold Manor is a multi-period listed building (grade II*), about which almost nothing was known. Uninhabited since 1955, it had fallen into a state of extreme dereliction, and was beyond economic repair when the author purchased the property in 2014. He and his wife, Diane Gibbs, embarked on a major restoration that ran for nine years. The restoration was carried out as a quasi-archaeological operation, revealing that the building complex had Tudor origins, followed by the construction of a Stuart house, with Georgian improvements, and a new entertaining suite added in 1814. The Manor, with its fine drawing room, ballroom and orangery, was the grandest house in Northwold, and research into the families that occupied it revealed unexpected connections to the French Bourbon Court. From the 17th to the 20th century, the Carters were the principal owners, and a local branch of the family included Howard Carter, discoverer of Tutankhamen’s tomb.This account begins with a topographical study of Northwold and its three medieval manors, followed by an exploration of the decline of the Carter family in the late 19th century. That triggered the break-up of the Northwold Estate in 1919. Passing through several ownerships, the Manor was earmarked for demolition in 1961; reprieved, it became a furniture store in the 1970s, and every room was solidly packed. As the roofs failed and water poured in, ceilings and floors collapsed, carrying with them the stacks of rotting furniture. By the late 1990s, walls and gables were collapsing too, and the local authority attempted to intervene. A long struggle to save the Manor ensued, finally ending with compulsory purchase in 2013.Although manor houses occur in most English parishes, they have received surprisingly little archaeological study. Every year, hundreds are restored or altered, but rarely accompanied by detailed recording or scholarly research; and popular television programs reveal the shameful level of destruction that takes place in the name of ‘restoration’. This is a book like no other: the holistic approach to the rehabilitation of Northwold’s derelict manor house – involving history, archaeology, architecture and genealogy – demonstrates how much can be learned about a building that had never before been studied. The project has received several awards.

Rock art in Dakhleh was produced for perhaps as long as 10 millennia, resulting in the formation of hundreds of sites displaying thousands of images. In some places, petroglyphs form a true melting pot of iconographic creations, elsewhere only isolated depictions appear on rock surfaces. Various rock art traditions, from prehistoric, through pharaonic, Graeco-Roman, and mediaeval, have all added to a tremendous variety of petroglyphs, their formal traits and subject matter. This book is the first ever monograph on Dakhleh Oasis rock art, providing both an introduction to the versatile topic as well as an overview of the current state of research. It is designed as a collection of essays that deal with specific aspects of the research. The reader is offered here not only old and new documentation, much of it previously unpublished, but also a great deal of innovative interpretation.All chapters, although devoted to different case studies, revolve around an all-encompassing concept of landscape of motion. It is argued here that rock art, regardless of its date of origin, was (and is) always involved in certain dynamic contexts. In Dakhleh, the majority of petroglyphs – especially during historical periods – were produced in spatial contexts of paths and routes, and thus by people on the move. It is argued here that various kinds of movement were often a significant factor contributing to the meaning and function of the images. The intention of this book is to explore and unveil such contexts, which may prove somewhat elusive if we focus our analyses exclusively on the representational aspects of rock art. Such a type of integration of rock art, landscape and motion is the major aim of this work, and has hopefully been achieved by merging perspectives and concepts derived from Egyptology, Anthropology, and other social sciences.

The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 stands out as one of the most important finds of modern archaeology, revealing an enormous wealth of objects encapsulating techniques, vestiges of uses and re-uses of materials, as well as unrivalled clues regarding the complex set of beliefs associated with the pharaonic funerary material culture. Once cleared from the tomb, these objects have captivated the world with their irresistible charm and beauty ending up playing a role in contemporary popular culture. However, it seems that such magnetism rather hindered than facilitated the scholarly study of the find. One hundred years after the discovery of this magnificent tomb, most of its objects remain insufficiently studied to this day. This volume aims to show how it remains challenging to study Tutankhamun’s objects, gathering a collection of studies authored by leading scholars on conservation, materials, funerary beliefs as well as the reception of motifs and the impact of the discovery. Through these studies it becomes clear how ancient objects can help us reconstruct the complex fabric of the ancient Egyptian society and how they keep interacting with modern audiences.

Recent research has uncovered new evidence of long-distance interactions between Scandinavia and Iberia during the Late Bronze Age. Advances in various lines of inquiry, such as 3D recording of rock art, iconography, metals and amber sourcing, linguistics, and, to some extent, more indirect indications from human remains, as reflected by strontium and aDNA results, have made this possible. The main goal of this book is to cross reference Iberian Late Bronze Age warrior iconography with Scandinavian warrior iconography. However, we will also account for links based on archeometallurgical evidence, linguistics, and other lines of inquiry, such as Baltic Amber, and metal artifacts. The results have been produced within the framework of the RAW project, an international undertaking funded by the Swedish Research Council. The RAW project is motivated by the discovery of isotopic and chemical evidence for Nordic Bronze Age artifacts made of copper that originated in the Iberian Peninsula. These findings led to re-opening two long known, but poorly explained, phenomena: 1) numerous shared motifs and close formal parallels in the rock art of Scandinavia and Iberian ‘warrior’ stelae, and 2) a large body of inherited words shared by the Celtic and Germanic languages, but not the other Indo-European branches. An integrated explanation for the three phenomena (Iberian metal in Scandinavia, parallels in Bronze Age rock carvings, and Celto-Germanic vocabulary) could now be formulated as a testable hypothesis: an episode in the Bronze Age when materials and ideas were exchanged over long distances between Scandinavia and the Atlantic West, including the Iberian Peninsula.

The tombs, with their scenes, inscriptions, objects and human remains, represent our richest source of information for the understanding of Egyptian beliefs and practices, art and architecture and of many aspects of daily life. Detailed, scholarly reports on individual cemeteries and tombs are abundant but in this fully illustrated, more general work, reproduced in this facsimile edition, Kanawati provides an invaluable introduction to, and overview of, the key elements of Egyptian tombs from Predynastic to the Late Period. ¬The Egyptian dead enjoyed a continued existence in both the Netherworld and the land of the living – the individual possessing multiple entities that experienced different destinies after death. ¬The tomb provided an everlasting earthly dwelling and consisted of a chapel above ground where the deceased’s cult was maintained and offerings presented, and a burial chamber for the body. Either or both could be richly decorated with paintings, reliefs and inscriptions. Kanawati describes and illustrates the principal forms and features of architecture and nature and subject matter of decoration and demonstrates how tomb design and decoration changed through time.

This volume is a facsimile reissue of the full publication of the tomb identified as that of Amenemhab, a middle ranking priest of Amon. ¬The tomb lies within the lower enclosure of the major cemetery of Elwet Sheikh-Abdel Qurnah in ¬Thebes. It is cut into a perpendicular cliff of limestone and shale and is one of the private, so-called house-like chapel tombs of local dignitaries, mainly dating to the Ramesside Period. The plan is a common form for Theban tombs, comprising a short entranceway leading into a broad hall, an axial passage and a long hall or shrine with a niche and it is oriented north-east to south-west with a maximum length of c. 9.3 m. ¬There are no side chambers or columns. The tomb decoration was first recorded by Sir Robert Mond but not published by him. Although richly furnished with brightly coloured paintings and text, much of the decoration was badly degraded and damaged. The burial shaft was not discovered. In this volume Hassan El-Saady provides a summary description of the tomb itself with a panel by panel description of the inscriptions and paintings, accompanied by photographs and explanatory line drawings. He identifies the owner of the tomb and members of his family, and though close dating of the tomb is difficult as no ruling pharaoh is alluded to anywhere within it, scrutiny of the style, content and arrangement of both the actual tomb and the decoration points to the reign of Ramesses II.

The tomb of Re‘-wer lies in the south-eastern corner of the mortuary temple of King Teti, first King of the 6th Dynasty, beside the pyramid of Teti, in the Old Kingdom necropolis at Saqqara. Excavations in 1906–7 and in the early 1920s were not published and the tomb was re-excavated and partly restored in 1975–7. It comprised a paved courtyard within a temenos containing the rectangular chapel tomb, with surviving structure built of fine quality limestone blocks in inner and outer walls. It is unusual in having two false doors in the west wall. The roof was missing. Nothing was recovered from a burial shaft that lies close to the tomb. The walls and false doors are adorned with inscriptions and reliefs. ¬This facsimile reissue of Said el-Fikey’s detailed description of the surviving structure, decoration and transcription of the inscriptions is accompanied by a full set of photographs and illustrations. No biographical text survived and the author considers the possible date of the tomb in relation to the adjacent architecture and the style of the reliefs, concluding that it most likely dates to the reign of Pepi I. He discusses indications for the personality, family situation and official position of Re‘-wer, which may suggest that he was father to a wife of King Pepi and that both were disgraced for some reason.

This is a facsimile reissue of Flinders Petrie’s 1907 account of excavations at Gizeh and at Dier Rifeh in Upper Egypt, just south of Asyut. At Gizeh excavations focused on a cemetery lying on a ridge about 1 km south of the Great Pyramid while work at Rifeh extended from a well-known Coptic village for about 5 km southwards to beyond the village of Zowyeh, and mostly investigated several cemeteries in the plain of primarily XIth–XVIIth Dynasty date. The area contained numerous Coptic settlements and the ruins of Coptic monasteries at Balyzeh and Ganadleh were excavated, producing many fragments of Coptic manuscripts. A chronologically ordered account of the tombs excavated begins with those at Gizeh followed by Zaraby and Zowyeh and then Rifeh. Those at Rifeh produced around 150, previously rarely encountered, ‘soul houses’, being clay models of contemporary dwellings used as offering trays, which are discussed in detail. A classification of pottery is provided. Later burials were also excavated at the cemeteries close to Gizeh where three Demotic inscriptions and several cartonnages of papyri were recovered. The Demotic inscriptions and Coptic manuscripts are described with translations.

The period of Egypt’s Ramesside empire is best known for its foreign wars and monumental buildings but the chronological history of many of its rulers and pre-eminent priests and their genealogies was poorly understood. While it was not possible to fi x the chronology exactly, a combination of known dates or date ranges, such as for the accession of Ramesses II, and the determination of family trees that extended over a large period, enabled Bierbrier to present a much closer definition of the span of individual dynasties and their key figures than had been possible previously. That volume is reissued here in facsimile. An important source of information is the genealogical references on funerary statues and tomb paintings, though vocabulary used is limited and often ambiguous. There are also several types of statuary, set up by individuals for different purposes, most frequently by sons or descendants to cause the name of the deceased to live on, many of which may have been created before the death of the individual commemorated. Taking into account these, and other difficulties, Bierbrier’s painstaking research proved groundbreaking in elucidating the chronology, sequences of events and family connections of the period from the official families of the XIXth Dynasty through those of the XXVth.

The Bronze Age (1700–500 BCE) petroglyphs of southern Scandinavia comprise a unique tradition of rock art in northern Eurasia. Despite a limited repertoire of motifs such as cupmarks, boats, anthropomorphs, zoomorphs, podomorphs and circles, it shows great variability in design, elaboration and articulation. This book is a study of the Mälaren region in southern-central Sweden that includes one of the most prominent rock art clusters of southwest Uppland as well as the hinterland of Södermanland county. The rock art in this region is studied on three scales: regional, local and particular. This allows for comparisons between dense and small sites, an exploration of how the Bronze Age rock art tradition developed over time in the area, and equally how the design and articulation of certain motifs relate to contemporary settlements, waterways and varying environmental settings.Patterns and structures in the distribution and articulation of the petroglyphs show that the different motifs are not only visual expressions but very much material enactments. The motifs often physically relate to each other, the flows of water, and the microtopography and mineral contents of the rocks. The study is therefore not as much about rock art as images and symbols as it is about the ecology of rock art – the web of social and physical relations in which it was enacted and employed. From this perspective, the petroglyphs are seen as petrofacts, that is something akin to tools or devices articulated in various ways to affect humans, other-than-humans and the animacies of the coastal milieus where they were made.

This facsimile edition of a much acclaimed volume brings back into print a major study of the evidence for the domesticated plants and animals exploited by the ancient Egyptians. The rise of agriculture must be amongst the most important steps that humans have taken on their long road to the present day and marked the beginning of sedentary life from the Neolithic onwards and the development of civilization. Of the earliest civilizations, Ancient Egypt remains a particularly useful field of study: the physical remains are preserved by the dry desert environment and the Egyptians have left us with an abundance of written and pictorial records which go back over 5000 years. Grasses, legumes, vegetables, fruits, domestic animals and pets are all considered in this comprehensive study. It is profusely illustrated from Egyptian wall paintings and reliefs, which provide us with a vivid record of the Egyptian’s use of plants and animals in their daily lives. Thirty years after its original publication, this groundbreaking volume remains an invaluable sourcebook for archaeologists in all fields and to anyone interested in zoology, botany and early agriculture.

This volume follows on from papers presented at the 13th International Cretan Congress in 2022 and covers the period from the 1st century BC to 4th–5th centuries AD, with the articles in the volume set around the topic of upheavals and disruptions, and in particular those evidenced with the arrival of Rome, the creation of the Roman Province, along with those resulting from the dividing of the Roman Empire and the emergence of the Byzantine world. The volume is set against the background of the Roman conquest of Crete in 67 BC, which heralded the end of the power and control of the Greek city-states, which were themselves steeped in age-old traditions and governed by a variety of legal frameworks, some of which had their roots in Archaic times. The ensuing changes, when they arrived, took centuries to develop but resulted in the establishment of a Greco-Roman culture and society that was far removed from its Hellenistic predecessor. Roman Crete witnessed several significant periods of disruption and interventions that had a direct impact on daily life and society. These included the military invasion of the island by Rome, at one end of the period, and the AD 365 destructive earthquake at the other, but other interruptions also occurred: changes to religion and religious practices, including the introduction of Christianity; fluctuations in natural resources that affected agricultural production and thus local economies and trade; monetary devaluations in Rome; movements of populations; external shifts in trading networks; and multiple instances of tectonic activity in the Imperial period that caused damage and instability.