The Upper Thames Valley is an important area for prehistoric monuments and has one of the highest concentrations of cursuses, distinctive linear or elongated earthworks, in Britain. In the 1980s the Oxford Archaeological Unit along with the Abingdon Area Archaeological and Historical Society had the opportunity to extensively investigate one of these sites at Drayton. This site has produced many significant results for our present understanding of the date, construction and use of cursus monuments on the lowland river gravels of Britain. This volume reports on the excavations at Drayton, and includes an account of small-scale excavations undertaken at the Lechlade cursus by OAU and Lance and Faith Vatcher. It also provides a gazetteer of known cursus monuments in the Upper Thames Valley.

Raised to honour Maussolos, a Persian satrap of the 4th century BCE, the Maussolleion in Halikarnassos was renowned throughout the ancient world as one of its Seven Wonders. Pliny the Elder provided a useful description of it several centuries later, but another fourteen passed before the invention of moveable type made his observations available to a wider public. In Volume 5, Jeppesen tries to reconcile Pliny's account of the superstructure with recent archaeological finds. The passage in Pliny's Natural History has been corrupted by untold generations of copyists, and reconstructions have focused on producing a grammatically acceptable text, with little regard for consistency and sense. Jeppesen compares variant readings from the 58 known manuscripts and proposes a model that tallies with the new archaeological evidence. The volume concludes with a survey of the architectural fragments held by the British Museum and the Maussolleion Museum in Bodrum.

This volume is a study of selected ceramic finds from the Maussolleion site and the first major publication on Karian pottery since 1965. From a body of 120,000 items, the authors have emphasised in situ contexts related to the construction of the Maussolleion, and representative items from the large body of Hellenistic material.

By means of introduction, Peter Mitchell and Alison Roberts outline the background to, not only the geography, climate and ecology of South Africa, but also its archaeology and the role of the British in terms of archaeological study, research projects, funding and the acquisition of artefacts by British individuals and institutions. This precedes a large gazetteer of sites and objects that derive from various sites in South Africa, Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, which are now held by the British Museum.

Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943) is renowned for his archaeological expeditions to Central Asia, India, Iran, Iraq and Jordan. The mass of books and correspondence that he collected during his lifetime are distributed among collections in Britain and his homeland of Hungary. Within the collection bequeathed to the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is a unique source of material including photographs, letters, documents, manuscripts, articles, offprints and reviews within the subjects of Indology, Iranian studies, Central Asian linguistics and archaeology and Oriental manuscripts. This important collection is discussed and presented here.

This volume details Jan Zahle's investigations of subterranean structures close to the Maussolleion. Successive spoilations -- including Newton's -- have greatly muddled the archaeological record, and the Danish excavations uncovered evidence of another complication: plans for the site appear to have changed during construction, so what was originally intended as a modest extension of the existing structures evolves into a huge tomb on an immense terrace. Zahle's thorough sifting of evidence resolves many contradictions, though uncertainties still remain.

The first ever publication of the Neolithic Studies Group, containing papers on the `structures' of Neolithic Europe.Contributions include: Neolithic houses in mainland Britain and Ireland - a sceptical view (Julian Thomas); Houses in context: Building as process (Alasdair Whitlle); A Central European Perspective (Jonathon Last); Neolithic houses in Ireland (Eoin Grogan); Neolithic buildings in Scotland (Gordon Barclay); Neolithic buildings in England, Wales and the Isle of Man (Tim Darvill); Mesolithic or later houses at Bowmans Farm, Romsey Extra, Hampshire (Francis Green); Ballygalley houses, co.Antrim (Derek Simpson); Later Neolthic Structires at Trelystan, Powys (Alex Gibson); Life, times and works of House 59, Tell Ovcharovo, Bulgaria (Douglass Bailey); Structure ans ritual in Neolithic houses (Peter Topping); Architecture and Cosmology in the Balinese house: life is not that simple (Colin Richards); Houses in the Neolithic imagination: an Amazonian Example (Christine Hugh-Jones).

Reprint of another classic Neolithic Studies Group volume. 'It is a sign of the intellectual health of a specialist study group that its deliberations can generate collections of papers of general interest. The topical issue of landscape is addressed, although with the added complication of attempting to focus on the domestic as opposed to ceremonial aspects of Neolithic life'.

This monograph presents the revolutionary results of ten years of excavation and research in the Neolithic village of Sha'ar Hagolan, Jordan Valley, Israel. Sha'ar Hagolan is dated to the Pottery Neolithic period and is the type-site for the Yarmukian culture, which occupied large parts of the Mediterranean climatic zones of Israel, Jordan and Lebanon during the sixth millennium BC. Recent excavations at the site have far-reaching implications for the entire Neolithic period, as well as for the history of agriculture, art and cult and other aspects of material culture in the ancient Near East. The evidence for the architecture and village planning, material culture and remarkable art objects shows what was previously considered to be an era of decline was a time of cultural evolution and development in the Levant.

One of the most puzzling phenomena of the European Bronze Age, is that many communities buried or otherwise hid large numbers of valuable bronze objects, but never returned to retrieve them. This book focuses on the metal finds of one small European region, the southern Netherlands and the adjacent part of North Belgium. Fontijn considers the question of why so many elaborate bronze objects have been found in watery locations in this landscape, such as rivers, streams, and marshes, while so few have been found in the controlled excavations of local settlements and cemeteries. He looks at the evidence for the selective deposition of metal objects, and discusses the "cultural biographies" of weapons, ornaments or dress fittings, and axes respectively. He considers how different depositional contexts might be related to the construction of various forms of social identity, such as male or female, or of belonging to local or non-local communities. He also looks at the way the land itself may have been defined and structured by the act of object deposition.

Rhind's book on Thebes is unique in that unlike many other Egyptologists of his time, he gives a precise and detailed description of how he excavated the sites, in itself an immense value to the history of archaeology.

Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, located in the Dead Sea Rift valley, is one of the oldest non-African sites to have yielded evidence for the activities of groups of hominin hunter-gatherers. The excavations recovered thousands of Acheulian period stone tools and animal bones that had accumulated in and around an ancient lake about 780, 000 years ago. The deposits have remained waterlogged virtually ever since, and this unusual circumstance resulted in the preservation of plant macrofossils, including pieces of wood and bark that can be identified to the level of individual plant species. Most of the pieces probably accumulated naturally around the lake, but a few show signs of hominin modification - making them the oldest wooden artefacts yet discovered. The unique contribution of the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov palaeobotanical assemblage, however, lies in its value for the palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of a pre-agricultural age - an age that predates changes induced by intensive human activity. This monograph describes the geological and archaeological context of the ancient wood, the criteria for its identification, and its implications for the woods surrounding Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Lower to Middle Pleistocene times. They include detailed descriptions of the different wood taxa, discuss the present habitats of the identified species, and consider the possible mechanisms by which the wood was deposited. They also provide a survey of the wood fragments that have occasionally been found at other ancient Palaeolithic sites. This volume is the first in a series of monographs which will focus on different aspects of the multidisciplinary investigations at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov.

In its first three centuries the Roman Empire expanded politically at the same time as Greek culture was enjoying its heyday. This not only created tensions but also many productive impulses, which were mirrored in different branches of cultural life. In this collection of papers an assembled team of international scholars from the fields of philosophy, history of ideas, literature, epigraphy, archaeology and history explores the intercultural aspects of that thriving period. Lisa Nevett's paper "Continuity and change in Greek households under Roman rule - the role of women in the domestic context" looks at the extent to which individual households and especially attitudes to women changed under Roman control. her evidence of patterns of social behaviour is archaeological and she concludes that a relaxation of restrictions on women took place from the later Hellenistic period onwards and therefore was a development which had begun prior to the arrival of the Romans. Paolo Desideri surveys Greek historiographical literature of the second century AD to find a key to Greek mentality and political ideology in the late Roman Empire. The Greeks did not have to give up their civilisation and identity; Appian and Cassius Dio even created the idea of a Hellenistic rather than a Roman Empire. Philip Stadter in "Plutarch's Lives and their Roman Readers" argues that Plutarch in "Lives is counselling the elite class of the Roman Empire, and that Tiberius Gracchus in particular would have provided a useful lesson, e.g. for the emperor Hadrian. Ewen Bowie explores the literary tales of Hadrian in Latin and particularly Greek poetry, including ancient sources for his preferences, his own compositions and some of the poems composed by the friends of ministers. Hadrian seems to have preferred Antimaches over Homer, admired Archilochus, Parthenius and short polymetric compositions.

This is the second volume of the complete publication of Panskoye I, a short-lived Greek rural site in Northwestern Crimea dating from the period c. 400-270 BC. The settlement was founded by Olbia, the most important Greek city on the northern shores of the Black Sea. Half a century later the fortress was destroyed and the settlement taken over by another Greek city, Tauric Chersonesos. From then on and until its final destruction it formed part of the chora (territory) of this city. Both the necropolis and settlement provide invaluable archaeological information thanks to the unique combination of a very precise date with rich finds of the material culture such as pottery, metals, sculptures, coins, inscriptions, etc, as well as anthropological data allowing the paleodemographic reconstructions.

This is the first volume of the complete publication of Panskoye I, a rural settlement in North-western Crimea dating from the period c. 400-270BC. The settlement was founded by Olbia, the most important Greek city on the northern shores of the Black Sea. Half a century later the fortress was destroyed and the settlement taken over by another Greek city, Chersonesos Taurica. From then on and until its final destruction it formed part of the chora (territory) of this city. This volume published research results about a monumental building (U6) which was erected after the take-over by Chersonesos and details on the very varied and rich finds from the building. The volume encompasses detailed studies of the architecture and layout of the building, of a large number of finds such as sculpture, pottery, lamps, terracottas, coins, metal-, stone-, and glass objects and graffiti. Included also are the results of a number of scientific studies, such as geological, palaeobotanical and petrographic analyses. An introduction presents the large-scale survey of North-western Crimea which began in 1959 and of which the excavations of Panskoye I (1964-94) form a central part. This publication offers an insight into two important issues in ancient history and classical archaeology, a Greek city's exploitation of its territory and of the interaction between Greek settlers and all local tribes, in this case the Scythians and the Taurians. The volume is the first of three. Volume 2 will deal with the necropolis of the settlement, and volume 3 with the earliest fortress.

The late 4th millennium in South Mesopotamia is universally known as the Uruk Period because it is at Uruk that the German excavations have exposed the most remarkable manifestations of this complex society. Although the Uruk period in Iraq itself remains little understood, in recent decades artefacts and entire settlements have been discovered in places as far apart as the Mahi Dasht in Iran and the Euphrates in South-eastern Turkey. This volume attempts to track the Uruk phenomenon in the Near East, bringing together research on some of the most significant individual sites within the Levant and Egypt, placing emphasis on the artefactual evidence. The eleven papers were originally presented at a conference in Manchester in 1998. The contributors are Hans Nissen, Renate Gut, Mitchell Rothman, Virginia Badler, Joan Oates, Marcella Frangipane, Gil Stein, Fiona Stephen, Edgar Peltenburg, Govert van Driel, Graham Philip and Toby Wilkinson.