This volume presents the results of two excavations on the gravel terraces of the Lower Kennet Valley, at Green Park (Reading Business Park) Phase 3 and Moores Farm, Burghfield, Berkshire.The Green Park excavations uncovered a field system and occupation features dating to the middle to late Bronze Age. Five waterholes or wells were distributed across the field system, the waterlogged fills of which preserved wooden revetment structures and valuable environmental evidence. The pottery from the waterholes makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the middle to late Bronze Age transition in the region. Later activity included middle to late Iron Age boundaries, a late Iron Age cremation burial, a Romano-British field system and post-medieval trackways.The Moores Farm excavations revealed occupation from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, middle Bronze Age and early Iron Age. The middle Bronze Age settlement included pits, ovens and possible post structures, and was again situated within a contemporaneous field system dotted with waterholes.As well as discussing these two sites, the volume provides an overview of all of the work to date in the Green Park Farm/Reading Business Park area, exploring the development of this important prehistoric landscape.

From about 5500 cal BC to soon after 5000 cal BC, the lifeways of the first farmers of central Europe, the LBK culture (Linearbandkeramik), are seen in distinctive practices of longhouse use, settlement forms, landscape choice, subsistence, material culture and mortuary rites. Within the five or more centuries of LBK existence a dynamic sequence of changes can be seen in, for instance, the expansion and increasing density of settlement, progressive regionalisation in pottery decoration, and at the end some signs of stress or even localised crisis. Although showing many features in common across its very broad distribution, however, the LBK phenomenon was not everywhere the same, and there is a complicated mixture of uniformity and diversity. This major study takes a strikingly large regional sample, from northern Hungary westwards along the Danube to Alsace in the upper Rhine valley, and addresses the question of the extent of diversity in the lifeways of developed and late LBK communities, through a wide-ranging study of diet, lifetime mobility, health and physical condition, the presentation of the bodies of the deceased in mortuary ritual. It uses an innovative combination of isotopic (principally carbon, nitrogen and strontium, with some oxygen), osteological and archaeological analysis to address difference and change across the LBK, and to reflect on cultural change in general.

First discovered by sport divers in the 1970s, the two remarkable seabed finds of prehistoric bronze metalwork described here quickly became a testing ground for the new discipline of underwater archaeology, initially under the leadership of the pioneering maritime archaeologist Keith Muckelroy. A haul of 361 bronzes from Langdon Bay, Kent, represents one of the largest deposits from Bronze Age Europe. Dating to the thirteenth century BC, the collection is diverse in character and originates in various parts of western Europe and the British Isles. The assemblage from Salcombe, Devon covered here is of similar date with a unique combination of types and materials; further finds have since been made at this site.Neither site having yielded any ship’s remains, all possible mechanisms for deposition are reviewed, including erosion of coastal deposits and ritual deposition at sea. Extensive comparative analysis favours the conclusion that the unparalleled Langdon Bay and Salcombe assemblages represent material spilled or jettisoned from boats in trouble.For the first time, maritime archaeologists, period specialists, scientists and coastal geomorphologists, bring together research on these two exceptional sites: history of discovery, evaluation of context and character, detailed scientific analyses and a fully illustrated catalogue. Nineteen further marine finds of Bronze Age metalwork are also documented, models for seaborne exchange are reconsidered and cultural attitudes to the terre/mare interface are discussed.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, many travellers aimed to record their travels through Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant and Turkey by collecting souvenirs and mementos of places they had visited. This natural inclination took many different guises: from innocent activities such as making diaries and sketches, gathering academic knowledge or taking photographs, to acquiring souvenirs, very often antiquities. Other, more unscrupulous, travellers undertook journeys specifically to ‘collect’ antiquities to form the basis of museum collections or to profit by re-selling them. Souvenirs and New Ideas explores the human desire to retain the memory of a journey by ‘collecting objects’ with a series of essays examining the motivation of a variety of different travellers ranging from intrepid female solo travellers to European royalty. The acquisitions of these individuals ranged from tales of folklore and academic knowledge to the wholesale looting of Egyptian antiquities. Although the habit of ‘collecting antiquities’ is deplored and condemned today, this volume sheds light on the attitudes behind the practice and seeks to strengthen our current beliefs about the value of cultural patrimony.

Scenes from the Old Kingdom tombs represent our main sources for the study of daily life of private individuals. Written by a number of specialists with years of research, this monograph deals with various aspects of life in ancient Egypt, presented in an accessible manner to the scholar and lay-person alike. Richly illustrated with an excellent selection of photographs and drawings, the book aims to bring the reader as close as possible to the Egyptian sources, allowing them to delve into the world behind the scenes.

The archaeological sites on the Monastiriako Kephali hill analysed in this volume include the earliest known mortuary activity at the key Minoan centre of Knossos on the island of Crete. Two Bronze Age sites are presented, known as the ‘Tomb’ and the ‘Deposit’, originally excavated in the 1930s but until now never published in detail.The ‘Tomb’ represents the earliest known funerary site at Bronze Age Knossos, established in the late Prepalatial period and continuing in use until the Neopalatial. The function of the nearby ‘Deposit’ site is more ambiguous, but a mortuary interpretation is also possible for the phases contemporary with the ‘Tomb’, and is almost certain for the subsequent Late Minoan II–III era.This volume presents the excavated material held principally in the Stratigraphical Museum at Knossos. The stone artefacts, human remains, faunal remains, glyptic material and ceramics are described and discussed by Don Evely, Rebecca Gowland, Valasia Isaakidou, Olga Krzyszkowska and Laura Preston respectively, and the sites are placed within the broader framework of Minoan mortuary practices at Knossos during the second millennium BC.

The Jordanian badia is an arid region that has been largely protected from modern development by its extreme climate and has preserved a remarkably rich record of its prehistoric past. This is the second of two volumes to document extensive surveys and excavations in the region from Al-Azraq to the Iraqi border over the period 1979-1996. Broadly, it covers the Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic of the eastern badia. Over time, an outline prehistory of the region has emerged. Late Epipaleolithic campsites have been found in the north-west of the harra in the foothills of Jebel Druze, while the central basalt region saw a floruit of activity in the late Aceramic Neolithic, when it was used extensively for hunting. This volume covers the following period, which witnessed a further spread of campsites and short-term occupation out around the edges of the harra and across the hamad as far as the lands bordering the Euphrates to the north and east. This period was marked by the first appearance of sheep and goat as one element of the steppic economy alongside traditional practices of hunting and foraging. The concluding chapter discusses these changes and proposes models for the introduction of domesticated animals into the steppe as a precursor to a full nomadic pastoral economy.

The region of Rough Cilicia (modern area the south-western coastal area of Turkey), known in antiquity as Cilicia Tracheia, constitutes the western part of the larger area of Cilicia. It is characterised by the ruggedness of its territory and the protection afforded by the high mountains combined with the rugged seacoast fostered the prolific piracy that developed in the late Hellenistic period, bringing much notoriety to the area. It was also known as a source of timber, primarily for shipbuilding. The twenty-two papers presented here give a useful overview on current research on Rough Cilicia, from the Bronze Age to the Byzantine period, with a variety of methods, from surveys to excavations. The first two articles (Yağcı, Jasink and Bombardieri), deal with the Bronze and Iron Ages, and refer to the questions of colonisation, influences, and relations. The following four articles (Tempesta, de Souza, Tomaschitz, Rauh et al.) concern the pirates of Cilicia and Isauria who were a big problem, not only for the region but throughout the Mediterranean and Aegean during the late Hellenistic and especially Roman periods. Approaching the subject of Roman Architecture, Borgia recalls Antiochus IV of Commagene, a king with good relations to Rome. Six papers (Spanu, Townsend, Giobbe, Hoff, Winterstein, and Wandsnider) publish work on Roman architecture: architectural decoration, council houses, Roman temples, bath architecture, cenotaph, and public buildings. Ceramics is not neglected and Lund provides a special emphasis on ceramics to demonstrate how pottery can be used as evidence for connections between Rough Cilicia and northwestern Cyprus. Six contributions (Varinliog(lu, Ferrazzoli, Jackson, Elton, Canevello and Özy?ld?r?m, Honey) deal with the Early Christian and Byzantine periods and cover rural habitat, trade, the Kilise Tepe settlement, late Roman churches, Seleucia, and the miracles of Thekla. The final article (Huber) gives insight into methods applied to the study of architectural monuments.

Europe is dotted with tens of thousands of prehistoric barrows. In spite of their ubiquity, little is known on the role they had in pre- and protohistoric landscapes. In 2010, an international group of archaeologists came together at the conference of the European Association of Archaeologists in The Hague to discuss and review current research on this topic. This book presents the proceedings of that session.The focus is on the prehistory of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, but also includes an excursion to huge prehistoric mounds in the southeast of North America. One contribution presents new evidence on how the immediate environment of Neolithic Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture megaliths was ordered, another one discusses the role of remarkable single and double post alignments around Bronze and Iron Age burial mounds. Zooming out, several chapters deal with the place of barrows in the broader landscape. The significance of humanly-managed heath in relation to barrow groups is discussed, and one contribution emphasizes how barrow orderings not only reflect spatial organization, but are also important as conceptual anchors structuring prehistoric perception. Other authors, dealing with Early Neolithic persistent places and with Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age urnfields, argue that we should also look beyond monumentality in order to understand long-term use of “ritual landscapes”.The book contains an important contribution by the well-known Swedish archaeologist Tore Artelius on how Bronze Age barrows were structurally re-used by pre-Christian Vikings. This is his last article, written briefly before his death. This book is dedicated to his memory.This publication is part of the Ancestral Mounds Research Project of the University of Leiden.

The twenty-second Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) was held at the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main in spring 2012. During the three-day conference fifty papers were delivered, discussing issues from a wide range of geographical regions of the Roman Empire, and applying various theoretical and methodological approaches. An equally wide selection of subjects was presented: sessions looked at Greek art and philhellenism in the Roman world, the validity of the concept of ‘Romanisation’, change and continuity in Roman religion, urban neighbourhood relations in Pompeii and Ostia, the transformation of objects in and from the Roman world, frontier markets and Roman archaeology in the Provinces. In addition, two general sessions covered single topics such as the ‘transvestite of Catterick’, metal recycling or Egyptian funeral practice in the Roman period. This volume contains a selection of papers from all these sessions.

Some 2800 years ago, a man died in what is now the municipality of Oss, the Netherlands. His death must have been a significant event in the life of local communities, for he received an extraordinary funeral, which ended with the construction of an impressive barrow. Based on the meticulous excavation and a range of specialist and comprehensive studies of finds, a prehistoric burial ritual now can be brought to life in surprising detail. An Iron Age community used extraordinary objects that find their closest counterpart in the elite graves of the Hallstatt culture in Central Europe. This book will discuss how lavishly decorated items were dismantled and taken apart to be connected with the body of the deceased, all to be destroyed by fire. In what appears to be a meaningful pars pro toto ritual, the remains of his body, the pyre, and the objects were searched through and moved about, with various elements being manipulated, intentionally broken, and interred or removed. In essence, a person and a place were transformed through destruction. The book shows how the mourners carefully, almost lovingly covered the funeral remains with a barrow. Attention is also given to another remarkable monument, long mound 6, located immediately adjacent to mound 7. Excavations show how mound 7 was part of an age-old ritual heath landscape that was entirely restructured during the Early Iron Age, when it became the setting for the building of no less than three huge Hallstatt C barrows. Thousands of years later, during the Late Middle Ages, this landscape underwent a complete transformation of meaning when the prehistoric barrows became the scenery for a macabre display of the cadavers of executed criminals.This publication is part of the Ancestral Mounds Research Project of the University of Leiden.

Captain Bellen is a remarkable person in the history of Dutch prehistoric research who was active in the first half of the 20th century. This amateur archaeologist made a number of important discoveries and corresponded with the leading professionals of his time. In later years, Bellen became interested in folklore, the dowsing rod and ley lines as well, endangering his reputation as archaeologist. Henk M. Luning (1935) is amateurhistoricus en schrijft regelmatig over Drentse historische onderwerpen in de uitgave Ons Waardeel van de Drentse Historische Vereniging, de Nieuwe Drentse Volksalmanak en in de Asser Historische Reeks. Van zijn hand verschenen ondermeer Geschiedenis van de kerk te Noordlaren (1977) en De buitenplaatsen Meerlust, Bloemert, Meerwijk, van bisschoppelijk tafelgoed tot recreatieoord (1980).

Every ancient author writing about the Low Countries, was preoccupied with the complete contrast between the civilized people of the Roman Empire and the tribes of noble savages or barbarians living outside it. Julius Caesar exploited this preconception to enhance his own reputation, boasting that he had overcome the "bravest of all Gauls"; Tacitus employed the same stereotypes when he described the Batavian Revolt; and, in Late Antiquity, the Franks were still described as resembling monsters.The reality was different. The presence of the Roman army along the River Rhine radically changed the way of life in the small Roman province of Germania Inferior, and the need to maintain and feed this large army became a significant incentive for economic change. The tribes living along the lower reaches of the Rhine and close to the North Sea gradually began to resemble their occupiers.Historian Jona Lendering and archaeologist Arjen Bosman have combined their considerable expertise to create a successful synthesis of historical and archaeological evidence, in this history of Rome s Lower Rhine frontier.

The thirteenth Current Research in Egyptology (CRE) conference was held from the 27th – 30th March 2012 at the University of Birmingham and once again provided a platform for postgraduates and early career Egyptologists, as well as independent researchers, to present their research. These proceedings for CREXIII represent the wide-range of themes that were offered by delegates during the conference, and cover all periods of Egyptian history; from Predynastic skeletal analysis through to Egyptology during the Islamic Middle Ages. These twelve papers include gender studies, analysis of Egyptian festivals, revisiting of chronological models, archaeological reanalysis of ancient landscapes, as well as social, historical and linguistic studies allowing a new appraisal of many aspects of Egyptian culture and history.

Beyond the Aegean, some of the earliest written records of Europe come from the south-west, what is now southern Portugal and south-west Spain. Herodotus, the 'Father of History', locates the Keltoi or 'Celts' in this region, as neighbours of the Kunetes of the Algarve. He calls the latter the 'westernmost people of Europe'. However, modern scholars have been disinclined - until recently - to consider the possibility that the south-western inscriptions and other early linguistic evidence from the kingdom of Tartessos were Celtic. This book shows how much of this material closely resembles the attested Celtic languages: Celtiberian (spoken in east-central Spain) and Gaulish, as well as the longer surviving langiages of Ireland, Britain and Brittany. In many cases, the 85 Tartessian inscriptions of the period c. 750-c. 450 BC can now be read as complete statements written in an Ancient Celtic language.

The Middle Minoan III period on Crete was initially identified and studied in detail at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans. Subsequent scholarly attention focused on the preceding Old Palace period and the apparent floruit of the New Palaces at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age. In consequence one of the critical transitions in Minoan culture has been virtually overlooked, giving rise to confused and ill-informed judgements concerning developments in Crete and further afield. With numerous innovations in art, architecture and material culture — notably an entirely new palace at Galatas — the changes in Middle Minoan III are striking, and appear to herald a new political organisation of the island, centred on Knossos. The papers in this volume, presented at the first colloquium to be held in the Villa Ariadne at Knossos, now restore the period to its rightful position. The specialist contributions cover most key sites where Middle Minoan III occupation has been identified. The aim has been to rehabilitate Middle Minoan III as a dynamic period in Crete and also on Thera, in order to provide a better understanding of socio-political change across the island and beyond in the latter part of the Middle Bronze Age.