Uroš Matić and Bo Jensen have brought together a team of both young and senior researches from many different countries in this first volume that aims to explore the complex intersection between archaeology, gender and violence. Papers range from theoretical discussions on previous approaches to gender and violence and the ethical necessity to address these questions today, to case studies dealing on gender and violence from prehistoric to early medieval Europe, but also including studies on ancient Egypt, Persia and Peru. The contributors deal both with representations of violence and its gendered background in images and text, and with bioarchaeological evidence for violence and trauma with a gendered background. The volume is rich both in examples and approaches and includes opening and closing chapters by senior scholars in the field assessing the current state of work and addressing the scholarship to continue on the line of this volume.

In 1864, a large metal hoard of copper, bronze and silver objects was discovered at Pile in the southern Swedish region of Scania. The hoard has been dated to the onset of the rich Nordic Bronze Age, and emerges as the earliest, finest and one of the largest of the Nordic sacrificial deposits of metalwork in or near water. The metal hoard from Pile in Scania, Sweden provides the first detailed documentation, scientific examination and historical interpretation of the assemblage. Around 2000 BCE the site of Pile was networked with places near and the far in a manner that boosted the political economy of Southern Scandinavia, adding to an atmosphere of tensions and change -- and it made history. The chapters unfold as a ‘history from beneath’ beginning with place, things and time and concluding with metals and the worlds that intersected in Pile at the threshold of the long Bronze Age.

The ‘western seaways’ are an arc of sea extending from the Channel Islands in the south, through the Isles of Scilly around to Orkney in the north. This maritime zone has long been seen as a crucial corridor of interaction during later prehistory. Connections across it potentially led, for example, to the eventual arrival of the Neolithic in Britain, almost 1000 years after it arrived on the near continent. This book’s primary focus is Early Neolithic settlement on islands within the ‘western seaways’ – sites that offer significant insight into the character of the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition in this particular maritime zone. It also explores a series of directly related, wider themes: the nature and effects of ‘island-ness’ in later prehistory; the visibility of material connections across the sea; the extent of Neolithic settlement variability across Britain; and the consequences of geographical biases in research for our understanding of the prehistoric past. At the heart of the book lie the results of three substantial excavations at L’Erée, Guernsey; Old Quay, St Martin’s (Isles of Scilly); and An Doirlinn, South Uist. Key findings include: the first major Mesolithic flint assemblage recovered from Scilly; one of the most extensively excavated and long-lasting Neolithic/Bronze Age occupation sites in the Channel Islands; the first substantial Neolithic settlement on Scilly; and the longest sequence of Neolithic/Early Bronze Age occupation on a single site from the Outer Hebrides. In order to contextualise the significance of these findings, we also present an extended discussion and broad synthesis of Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology on each island group.

The year is 12,800 BP. Europe is entirely occupied by people of the so-called Upper Magdalenian culture. Well, not entirely one small region, southern Scandinavia, differs markedly from its neighbours. These lines open the first book-length treatment of the cultural evolution of late Ice Age forager societies at the northern edge of Europe. Splendid Isolation summarises more than ten years of research that connects the cataclysmic eruption of the Laacher See volcano in present-day western Germany with contemporary cultural changes. It also offers an in-depth treatment of the eruption’s impact on plants, animals and people as well as its cultural-historical consequences. Invoking the term ‘splendid isolation’, the author argues that despite the eruption’s evidently detrimental ecological impacts, it led to a regional cultural effervescence in the form of the Bromme culture. By charting this past calamity, the book also shows how the study of ancient disasters can be made useful in today’s debates of resilience, vulnerability and apocalypse.

The Roman period witnessed massive changes in the human-material environment, from monumentalised cityscapes to standardised low-value artefacts like pottery. This book explores new perspectives to understand this Roman ‘object boom’ and its impact on Roman history. In particular, the book’s international contributors question the traditional dominance of ‘representation’ in Roman archaeology, whereby objects have come to stand for social phenomena such as status, facets of group identity, or notions like Romanisation and economic growth. Drawing upon the recent material turn in anthropology and related disciplines, the essays in this volume examine what it means to materialise Roman history, focusing on the question of what objects do in history, rather than what they represent. In challenging the dominance of representation, and exploring themes such as the impact of standardisation and the role of material agency, Materialising Roman History is essential reading for anyone studying material culture from the Roman world (and beyond).

This volume reflects the most recent state of research on ancient Egypt presented and discussed at the international conference Current Research in Egyptology XVII, May 2016. Nine papers are arranged in chronological order covering the wide time span from the Predynastic till the Greco-Roman Period, with the remaining five considering more general thematic, theoretical, and cross-cultural topics. Papers re-examine the archives from early excavations of Predynastic tombs in the light of modern research; discuss various types of object from different periods; consider the roles of travelling artists, regional artistic schools styles, and the mobility of ancient high-skilled craftsmen. Thematic, theoretical, and cross-cultural papers consider the relation of gods, cosmic sacredness, and fertility beliefs; take a comparative approach to cultural identity extracted from narrative poetry of Greek and Egyptian origin; the inclusion of Egyptian musical elements incorporated into Greek traditions and the analysis of artifacts from the Egyptian collection of Zagreb, illustrating the range of information that essentially unprovenanced objects may have for future research.

Late Bronze Age Aegean cooking vessels illuminate prehistoric cultures, foodways, social interactions, and communication systems. While many scholars have focused on the utility of painted fineware vessels for chronological purposes, the contributors to this volume maintain that cooking wares have the potential to answer not only chronological but also economic, political, and social questions when analysed and contrasted with assemblages from different sites or chronological periods. The text is dedicated entirely to prehistoric cooking vessels, compiles evidence from a wide range of Greek sites and incorporates new methodologies and evidence. The contributors utilise a wide variety of analytical approaches and demonstrate the impact that cooking vessels can have on the archaeological interpretation of sites and their inhabitants. These sites include major Late Bronze Age citadels and smaller settlements throughout the Aegean and surrounding Mediterranean area, including Greece, the islands, Crete, Italy, and Cyprus. In particular, contributors highlight socio-economic connections by examining the production methods, fabrics and forms of cooking vessels. Recent improvements in excavation techniques, advances in archaeological sciences, and increasing attention to socioeconomic questions make this is an opportune time to renew conversations about and explore new approaches to cooking vessels and what they can teach us.

In Celebration of Greek Coinage is a readable but scholarly tribute to ancient Greek coins, its origin being a thoughtful study of the author's own collection, acquired over the past seventeen years. Two initial chapters relate the author's devotion to numismatics and his thoughts on Greek coins as art; these are followed by fifty essays inspired by coins in the author's own collection, comprised of articles which mainly first appeared in the Spink Numismatic Circular and its magazine the Insider, revised and updated for this volume. The essays seek to identify the formative geographical, historical, ethnic, political, religious, cultural, artistic, social, economic and commercial influences behind the coins.

The interpretation of archaeological remains as farmsteads has met with much debate in scholarship regarding their role, identification, and even their existence. Despite the difficult nature of scholarship surrounding farmsteads, this site type is repeatedly used to describe small sites in the countryside which have varying evidence of domestic, storage, and agricultural activity. The aim of this book is to engage with the archaeological and textual data for farmsteads dating to the Classical–Hellenistic period of mainland Greece, with the purpose of understanding how these sites fulfilled agricultural roles as centres for occupation, storage, and processing for those working the land. The conclusions reached here stress the connected nature of the agricultural landscape, and demonstrate how farmsteads played a fundamental role in ancient Greek agriculture.

Understanding Relations Between Scripts: The Aegean Writing Systems arises from a conference held in Cambridge in 2015. The question of how writing systems are related to each other, and how we can study those relationships, has not been studied in detail and this volume aims to fill a gap in scholarship by presenting a number of case studies focused on the writing systems of the Bronze Age Aegean. These include Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B, used predominantly in Crete and mainland Greece, as well as the Cypro-Minoan script of Cyprus. Most of these systems (the only major exception being Linear B) remain undeciphered to some degree but we nevertheless have considerable evidence for their development and use. Each contributor focuses on a different theoretical problem and/or set of scripts. Important questions include: How and why did writing emerge in Crete in the Middle Bronze Age? What is the relationship between writing and art? Why did different writing systems co-exist with each other? What changes were made when a new system was developed from an old one? Can our understanding of how different systems are related to each other help us to reconstruct the values of script signs? The contributors tackle such questions by employing a variety of methods, from epigraphic and palaeographic analysis to typological comparison and contextual study. The result is a coherent volume that will not only enrich our understanding of the ancient Aegean writing systems in particular, but will also provide an important example for future studies of writing across the world.

In recent decades, study of the ancient Egyptian natural world and its classification has adopted innovative approaches involving new technologies of analysis and a multidisciplinary general view. This collection of papers focuses on one particularly important aspect of foreign trade: the importation of aromatic products. Contributors present the results of the latest researches into the origin and meaning of foreign aromatic products imported in Egypt from the south (Nubia, Punt, Arabia, Horn of Africa) from the beginning of the Dynastic period. The quest for aromata has been of a crucial importance in Egypt, since it was closely connected with economic, political, ideological, religious and mythic spheres. Through archaeological research, epigraphic analysis and iconographic investigations new evidence is explored supporting the most likely hypothesis about the sources of these raw materials. The study of related documents has revealed possible linguistic links between ancient Egyptian and other African ancient languages, and a strong link between aromata and the divine world through the creation of many Egyptian myths. The references to some specific aromatic products (ti-shepes, snetjer, antyw, hesayt) have been subject to careful lexicographic analysis, with special reference to Old Kingdom occurrences. Iconographic and field investigations documented here seek to better define the Egyptian way of representing the 'foreign' world and the value of its products in the spheres of Egyptian religiosity and rising Pharaonic ideology.

This volume presents for the first time the results of the excavation and scientific analysis between 2005 and 2013 of seventeen Iron Age cauldrons discovered in a large pit on farmland in the parish of Chiseldon, Wiltshire, and consequently acquired by the British Museum. The assemblage is unprecedented in many respects and is the largest known single deposit of prehistoric cauldrons from Europe. The hoard was deposited in the fourth or third centuries BC, although hoarding as a practice is generally underrepresented during this period. The inclusion in the hoard of rare decorated cauldrons also means that it is one of very few deposits from Britain dating to the middle Iron Age known to contain multiple objects decorated with Celtic art and the only example where it is possible to ascertain that decorated objects were all deposited at the same time. Scientific investigation has revealed that the cauldrons were complicated to manufacture and sophisticated techniques such as quenching were used to make them. Examination of food residues adhering to the vessels demonstrates that they were used to prepare and serve both meat and vegetable based dishes probably including stews, gruels and porridges. The discovery of so many contemporary vessels in one deposit has important implications for our understanding of middle Iron Age society in southern Britain. Thought to be vessels made and used for feasting, the capacity represented by the Chiseldon Hoard indicates the potential in these societies to host feasts with many hundreds, if not thousands of participants, demonstrating levels of sophistication and organisation traditionally viewed as being beyond societies with relatively flat social hierarchies.

A review of the most recent evidence from cursuses, and ideas on their interpretation, with contributions as follows: Introduction (J Harding and A Barclay) , the radiocarbon problem (A Barclay and A Bayliss) , symbolic territories (J Harding) , processions, memories and the Dorset cursus (R Johnston) , Dorchester on Thames - ritual complex or ritual landscape (R Loveday) , cattle, cursus monuments and the river ..

A recent surge of interest in network approaches to the study of the ancient world has enabled scholars of the Roman Empire to move beyond traditional narratives of domination, resistance, integration and fragmentation. This relational turn has not only offers tools to identify, map, visualize and, in some cases, even quantify interaction based on a variety of ancient source material, but also provides a terminology to deal with the everyday ties of power, trade, and ideology that operated within, below, and beyond the superstructure of imperial rule. Thirteen contributions employ a range of quantitative, qualitative and descriptive network approaches in order to provide new perspectives on trade, communication, administration, technology, religion and municipal life in the Roman Near East and adjacent regions.

Unavailable for too long, this new edition reprints the original text of Renfrew's groundbreaking study, supplemented with a new introduction by the author and a foreword by John Cherry, in order to make this landmark publication available once again.

The Neolithic of Europe comprises eighteen specially commissioned papers on prehistoric archaeology, written by leading international scholars. The coverage is broad, ranging geographically from south-east Europe to Britain and Ireland and chronologically from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, but with a decided focus on the former. Several papers discuss new scientific approaches to key questions in Neolithic research, while others offer interpretive accounts of aspects of the archaeological record. Thematically, the main foci are on Neolithisation; the archaeology of Neolithic daily life, settlements and subsistence; as well as monuments and aspects of worldview. A number of contributions highlight the recent impact of techniques such as isotopic analysis and statistically modelled radiocarbon dates on our understanding of mobility, diet, lifestyles, events and historical processes. The volume is presented to celebrate the enormous impact that Alasdair Whittle has had on the study of prehistory, especially the European and British Neolithic, and his rich career in archaeology.