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This book attempts to define, analyse, and evaluate the institutional and ideological systems which empowered and sustained one of the most successful civilizations of the ancient world for a period in excess of three and a half millennia. The book adopts the premise that all societies are the product of a continuous dialogue with their physical context — understood in the broadest sense — and that, in order to achieve a successful symbiosis with this context, they develop an interlocking set of systems, defined by historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists as culture. Culture, therefore, can be described as the sum total of the methods employed by a group of human beings to achieve some measure of control over their environment. Covering the entirety of the civilization, including translations of original Egyptian texts, the book focuses on the main aspects of Egyptian culture which gave the society its particular character, and endeavours to establish what allowed the Egyptians to maintain that character for an extraordinary length of time, despite enduring cultural shock of many different kinds.

In antiquity, Rome represented one of the world's great cultural capitals. The city constituted a collective repository for various commemoratives, cultural artefacts, and curiosities, not to mention plunder taken in war, and over its history became what we might call a ‘museum city’. This book considers how cultural objects and memorabilia both from Rome and its empire came to reflect a specific Roman identity and, in some instances, to even construct or challenge Roman perceptions of power and of the self. The book argues that Roman cultural values and identity are indicated in part by what sort of materials Romans deemed worthy of display and how they chose to display, view, and preserve them. Grounded in the growing field of museum studies, this book includes a discussion on private acquisition of cultural property and asks how well the Roman community at large understood the meaning and history behind various objects and memorabilia. Of particular importance was the use of collections by a number of emperors in the further establishment of their legitimacy and authority. Through an examination of specific cultural objects, the book questions how they came to reflect or even perpetuate Roman values and identity.

This book collects nearly 250 translated extracts from an extensive array of ancient sources, which, from a variety of different perspectives, illuminate the history of the Arabs before the emergence of Islam. These sources are drawn from a broad period from the eighth century BC to the Middle Ages, and include texts written in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Persian, and Arabic, inscriptions in a variety of languages and alphabets, and discussions of archaeological sites from across the Near East. More than 20 experts, drawn from the fields of archaeology, classics and ancient history, linguistics and philology, epigraphy, and art history, provide detailed commentary and analysis on this diverse selection of material. The book provides a comprehensive examination of what ancient sources had to say about the politics, culture, and religion of the Arabs in the pre-Islamic period. It offers a full consideration of the traces which the Arabs have left in the epigraphic, literary, and archaeological records, and sheds light on their relationship with their often more powerful neighbours—the states and empires of the ancient Near East.

Research work on coastal Bengal has mostly focused on maritime trading networks. In a clear departure from the existing scholarship, this volume questions the linearity of considering trade as the sole determinant of creation of settlement in the coastal regions. Focusing on settlement strategies, Chattopadhyay unravels how human societies, through successive generations, have adapted to the coastal environment and bio-regime. First-hand data, procured through extensive fieldwork, forms the sound basis of this work. From structural remains, ceramic and bone implements, and stone tools, to terracotta figurines and inscriptions—a vast array of sources is analysed, including epigraphic and literary sources. Significantly, the volume also highlights the interconnection between the coastal geography and the hinterland. Chattopadhyay’s meticulously researched work offers a geographical and temporal frame which allows the research in coastal Bengal to be viewed as an integral part of the archaeological developments in the subcontinent, as well as in the adjoining region of the Southeast Asian countries.

Think of a souvenir from a foreign trip, or an heirloom passed down the generations — distinctive individual artefacts allow us to think and act beyond the proximate, across both space and time. While this makes anecdotal sense, what does scholarship have to say about the role of artefacts in human thought? Surprisingly, material culture research tends to focus on individual artefacts. But objects rarely stand independently from one another; they are interconnected in complex constellations. This book asserts that it is such ‘networks of objects’ that instil objects with their power, enabling them to evoke distant times and places for both individuals and communities. Using archaeological case studies from the Bronze Age of Greece throughout, the book develops a long-term, archaeological angle on the development of object networks in human societies. The book explores the benefits such networks create for human interaction across scales, and the challenges faced by ancient societies in balancing these benefits against their costs. In objectifying and controlling artefacts in networks, human communities can lose track of the recalcitrant pull that artefacts exercise. Materials do not always do as they are asked. We never fully understand all their aspects. This we grasp in our everyday, unconscious working in the phenomenal world, but overlook in our network thinking. And this failure to attend to things and give them their due can lead to societal ‘disorientation’.

Long Kesh/Maze prison was infamous as the major holding centre for paramilitary prisoners during the course of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Some of the major events of the recent conflict centred on, emanated from, and were transformed by it, including the burning of the internment camp in 1974, the protests and hunger strikes of 1980–1981, the mass escape of PIRA prisoners in 1983, and the role of prisoners in facilitating and sustaining the peace process of the 1990s. Now, over a decade after the signing of the Belfast Agreement (1998), Long Kesh/Maze remains one of the most contentious remnants of the conflict and has become central to debates about what we do with such sites, what they mean, and how they relate to contemporary rememberings of the difficult recent past. The only independent archaeological investigation of Long Kesh/Maze prior to its partial demolition, this volume reveals the seminal role of material culture in understanding the prison. It moves from traditional uses of solely documentary and oral evidence to exploring the full range of material remains of the prison as they have been abandoned in situ or been dispersed and re-contextualised into wider society.

This is both a defense of the importance of aristocrats in Greek society and a reassessment of their social, cultural and political roles. The author provides a concise portrait of the aristocratic way of life, the roots and nature of aristocrats' economic power, their patronage of the arts, and the influence they had on the way the Greeks visualized their gods. A concluding chapter examines the lasting influence of the aristocratic ideal in late Western history.

European first millennium BC studies have witnessed an increasing theoretical divide between the approaches adopted in different countries. Whilst topics such as ethnicity, identity, and agency have dominated many British studies, such themes have had less resonance in continental approaches. At the same time, British and Iberian first millennium BC studies have become increasingly divorced from research elsewhere in Europe. While such divergence reflects deep historical divisions in theory and methodology between European perspectives, it is an issue that has been largely ignored by scholars of the period. This book addresses these issues. Initial chapters introduce major themes (landscape studies, social organisation, historiography, dynamics of change, and identity), providing overviews on the history of approaches to these areas, personal perspectives on current problems, and possible future research directions. Subsequent chapters develop these topics, presenting case studies and in-depth discussions of particular issues relating to the first millennium BC in the Atlantic realm of Western Europe.

The beginning of the Neolithic in Britain is a topic of perennial interest in archaeology, marking the end of a hunter-gatherer way of life with the introduction of domesticated plants and animals, pottery, polished stone tools, and a range of new kinds of monuments, including earthen long barrows and megalithic tombs. Every year, numerous new articles are published on different aspects of the topic, ranging from diet and subsistence economy to population movement, architecture, and seafaring. This book offers a treatment that synthesizes all of this material, presenting a coherent argument to explain the process of transition between the Mesolithic-Neolithic periods. Necessarily, the developments in Britain are put into the context of broader debates about the origins of agriculture in Europe, and the diversity of processes of change in different parts of the continent is explored. These are followed by a historiographic treatment of debates on the transition in Britain. Chapters cover the Mesolithic background, processes of contact and interaction, monumental architecture and timber halls, portable artefacts, and plants and animals. The concluding argument is that developments in the economy and material culture must be understood as being related to fundamental social transformations.

The Caribbean before Columbus is a new synthesis of the region’s insular history on multiple scales: temporal, spatial, local, regional, environmental, social, and political. It combines the results of the authors’ 55 years of archaeological research with that of their colleagues. For the first time the complete histories of the major islands and island groups are elucidated, and new insights are gained through inter-island comparisons. The concepts of series and ages provide structure, but historical names, such as Taíno and Lucayan, are avoided. The authors challenge the conventional wisdom concerning island colonization, societal organization, interaction and transculturation, and other basic elements of cultural development and change. The emphasis is on elements that unite the Bahamas, Lesser Antilles, and Greater Antilles as a culture area, and also on their divergent pathways. Colonization is presented as a multifaceted wave-like process. Continuing ties to the surrounding mainland are highlighted. Interactions between residents and new colonists are recognized. New solutions are offered to the “Huecoid problem,” the “Carib problem,” the “Taíno problem,” and the evolution of social complexity, especially in Puerto Rico. These solutions required a rethinking of social organization and its expression on the landscape.

It is beyond doubt that the climate is changing, presenting us with one of the biggest challenges in the twenty-first-century. During the past 150 years, archaeologists have studied the impact of climate change on humanity; however, this information has not yet been used when considering the impact climate change will have on future human communities. This study addresses this major paradox in modern climate change research, and provides the theoretical basis for archaeological data to be included in climate change debates — an approach which uses archaeological research as a repository of ideas and concepts which can help build the resilience of modern communities against the background of rapid climate change. Applying this approach to four case study areas, which will be among the first to be significantly affected by climate change: — the coastal wetlands of the North Sea, the Sundarbans, Florida’s Gulf Coast, and the Iraqi Marshland — this comparative study illustrates the diversity of adaptive pathways implemented in times of climate change in the past and how these can help prepare modern communities.

The chapters in this book reflect a half-century of outstanding scholarship on the ancient world. The chapters range from early Greek colonization in the sixth century BC, through the classical period and the wars with Persia, to the disastrous defeat of the Greeks by Philip II of Macedon at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC.

The Neolithic of the Near East is a period of human development which saw fundamental changes in the nature of human society. It is traditionally studied for its development of domestication, agriculture, and growing social complexity. This book takes a new approach, focusing on the human body and investigating mortuary practices — the treatment and burial of the dead — to discover what these can reveal about the people of the Neolithic Near East. The remarkable evidence relating to mortuary practices and ritual behaviour from the Near Eastern Neolithic provides some of the most breath-taking archaeological evidence excavated from Neolithic contexts. The most enigmatic mortuary practices of the period produced the striking ‘plastered skulls’, faces modelled onto the crania of the deceased. Archaeological sites also contain evidence for many intriguing mortuary treatments, including decapitated burials and the fragmentation, circulation, curation, and reburial of human and animal remains and material culture. Drawing on recent excavations and earlier archive and published fieldwork, the book provides an overview and introduction to the period, presenting new interpretations of the archaeological evidence and in-depth analyses of case studies. The book explores themes such as ancestors, human-animal relationships, food, consumption and cannibalism, personhood, and gender.

Since the eighteenth century, the concept of prehistory was exported by colonialism to far parts of the globe and applied to populations lacking written records. Prehistory in these settings came to represent primitive people still living in a state without civilisation and its foremost index, literacy. Yet, many societies outside the Western world had developed complex methods of history-making and documentation, including epic poetry and the use of physical and mental mnemonic devices. Even so, the deeply engrained concept of prehistory — deeply entrenched in European minds up to the beginning of the twenty-first century — continues to deny history and historical identity to peoples throughout the world. This book provides examples of how the concept of prehistory has diminished histories of other cultures outside the West and how archaeologists can reclaim more inclusive histories set within the idiom of deep histories — accepting ancient pre-literate histories as an integral part of the flow of human history.

This book presents a detailed account of the evolutionary building blocks of economic history in the eastern Mediterranean and neighbouring regions. Case studies look at management and institutions; human mobility and natural resources; the role of different agents — temples and cities, as well as rulers — in enhancing resources and circulating wealth; the levers exerted by monopolies and by disparate status groups, including slaves. An introductory chapter summarizes the operational elements that drove the engines of these economies.

This book approaches archaeological research as an engagement within an assemblage — a particular configuration of materials, things, places, humans, animals, plants, techniques, technologies, forces, and ideas. The book develops a new interpretative method for that engagement, exploring how archaeological research can, and does, reconfigure each assemblage. Recognising the successive relationships that give rise to and reshaped assemblages over time, it proposes a relational realist understanding of archaeological evidence based on a reading of relational and non-representational theories, such as those presented by Karen Barad, Tim Ingold, and Bruno Latour. The volume explores this new approach through the first ever synthesis of Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age mortuary practices in North-East England (c.2500–1500 BC), taking into account how different concepts and practices have changed the assemblage of Early Bronze Age mortuary practices in the past 200 years. The book argues that it is vital to retain the most valuable archaeological tools, such as typology, while developing an approach that focuses on the contingent, specific, and historical emergence of past phenomena. This study moves from analyses of changing types of mortuary practices and associated things and places, to a vivid discussion of how past relationships unfolded over time and gave rise to specific patterns in the material remains we have today.

Osiris, god of the dead, was one of the most important deities in ancient Egypt. The earliest secure evidence for belief in him dates to the fifth dynasty (c.2494–2345 BC). He continued to be worshipped until the fifth century AD. This book is concerned with Egyptian conceptions of the relationship between Osiris and the deceased, or what might be called the Osirian afterlife. What was the nature of this relationship and what were the prerequisites for enjoying its benefits? The book does not provide a continuous or comprehensive account of Egyptian ideas on this subject. Rather, it focuses on five distinct periods in their development, spread over four millennia. The periods in question are ones in which significant changes in Egyptian ideas about Osiris and the dead are known to have occurred, or where it has been argued that they did. An important aim of this book is to investigate when and why such changes happened, treating religious belief as a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon. Egyptian aspirations for the Osirian afterlife took time to coalesce and reach their fullest form of expression. This book seeks to trace the key stages in the development of these aspirations, from their origin to their demise, and see how these are reflected in the textual and archaeological records. It also explores broader issues, making use of cross-cultural comparisons, for instance, how different societies regard death and the dead, why people convert from one religion to another, and why people abandon belief in a god or gods altogether.

Mankind’s utter dependency on technology extends back approximately three million years to the first stone tools, but it was only with the innovation of hafting, some 300,000 years ago, that technology took its first modern form and revolutionised our social and economic lives. The development of handles and shafts, which were added to some tools previously made of single materials and hand-held, made the tools not only more efficient but improved their makers’ chances of survival by making the quest for food more productive. This book brings together evidence for the cognitive, social, and technological foundations necessary for the development of hafting to form a speculative theory about this revolutionary innovation. The creation of tools with handles required considerable planning based on an expert understanding of the properties of the raw materials involved, a form of early engineering. Yet it was the ability to envisage the final, integrated form of the tool which underpinned the remarkable novelty of hafting, one which had massive implications for the human species and which laid the foundations for the technology we rely on today.

This book is a brief but concise collection of lectures which discuss the nature of early Indian society during the mid-first millennium BC and relate it to the ancient Indian historical tradition in its earliest forms. It also looks at the particular character of social formations, their genesis, and continuity as part of the later Indian social landscape. Examining the social and political formulations of the period, this volume analyses the transformation of lineage-based societies into state formulations. It considers the migration and arrival of the monarchies in the middle Ganga valley, where the evolution of these societies resulted in the formation of a state. It provides insights into environmental influences on settlements, the particularities of caste, the role of rituals, and the interaction of ideology with these changes. The volume presents an account of the interplay of a range of variables in state formation.

This book focuses on Latin poetry and historiography from the mid-first century BC to the early second century AD. Most of the chapters represent close readings of individual poems or passages of text. The authors principally featured are Catullus, Horace, and especially Tacitus, but there are also treatments of Cicero, Virgil, Livy, Augustus' Res Gestae, Velleius, and the younger Pliny. The volume includes four chapters not previously published, as well as an epilogue which discusses some of the issues raised.