Books published by BAR Publishing

This is a compilation of papers devoted to diverse archaeozoological issues. Most of the contributions are based on lectures given at the Seminario Relaciones Hombre-Fauna (Human - Fauna Relationships Seminar) organized by the Laboratorio de Arqueozoología and sponsored by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, the Mexican federal agency at charge of preserving the palaeontological, anthropological and historical heritages of the country.

In 2001 a project entitled "Trade, migration and cultural change in the Indian Ocean" was launched at the Department of History, University of Bergen, with funding from the Norwegian Research Council. The project was planned to be the first joint project in a program called "The Indian Ocean History Program". From the beginning, the project invited interested researchers in other disciplines at the university (mainly in archaeology, anthropology and classics) to take part in our research seminar series in 2001-2002 in which work in progress and completed papers were presented. In addition, the project sought to establish more permanent research links with foreign researchers and research institutions concerned with the Indian Ocean. In order to promote international cooperation in the field of Indian Ocean research, three workshops were organised in Bergen, 2001, 2002, 2004, in which papers on a broad range of topics were presented and discussed. What binds the individual projects together is the focus on the movement of commodities, people, cultural features and ideas, and the durable networks and links that these created and the local impact around the Indian Ocean. The areas most focused on have been East Africa centred on Zanzibar, the Red Sea Region, the Persian Gulf and Southern Arabia, and finally on western and southern India. This volume shows parts of the research that has been undertaken by project members and associates. Most of the articles in this anthology were presented at the 2004 workshop. They focus on the Indian Ocean in the ancient period.

This work is an examination of those environmental and political factors which have influenced the distribution of settlement types in northwest Ireland during the Early Christian period (AD 500-1000). Various site types are discussed in Chapter One; the physical geography and history of the six counties of Northern Ireland which make up the study area is the subject of Chapters Two and Three. Cultural remains and written sources, both of which give insight into how society in general and the individual farm economies functioned during this period, are discussed in Chapter Four.

The objective of this research is to develop a model of social interaction for the Natufian culture in Southwest Asia through interpretation of environmental and material-culture variability. The author achieves this through the development of rigorous systematic grouping and spatial analysis of artifacts. The Natufian culture (approximately 13,000 or 12,800 BP) is critical to our understanding of the transition from mobile hunter-gatherers to sedentary hunter-gatherer-farmers. They are thought to represent one of the final periods of archaeologically known hunter-gatherers in Southwest Asia, preceding the advent of cultivation and agricultural economies. The people who we classify as Natufian are situated in the Levant, which now encompasses Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. This research is limited to those Natufian sites situated in what is now modern day Israel and Jordan. Characterization of the Natufian is primarily based on the chipped-stone technology. Other distinctive characteristics include material culture of ground stone, marine shell, and bone as well as architecture, bedrock mortars, and burials. The methods for this research include two components: systematics and spatial analysis. The first part addresses the theoretical paradigm and its role in this research. Chapter two explores the origins of agency theory and reviews the history of agency-centered research in archaeology, and discusses the theoretical perspective applied for this research. Chapter three explores the vibrant history of research on the Natufian. Chapters four to six introduce the archaeological data used in this research as well as the first stage of analysis. Chapters seven to nine direct attention to the second stage of analysis: spatial analysis. The last part of this research, chapter 10, tests the previous hypotheses and outlines the construction of an agency-centered model based on the information provided in the second stage of analysis, with the aim of constructing a model proposing social relations for a prehistoric population. Overall the study attempts to incorporate a social agency dimension into Natufian research.

This work examines the interrelationship between technology and society, using as its cultural-historical focus the Early and Middle Bronze Age periods among the Maros group villages of south-eastern Hungary. To claim that technology is social is not new, but to document how it is social has been difficult and this research aims to provide such documentation, using a ceramic archaeological example. As a result, the author's emphasis is on technological activities and the human actors that performed them. Practice theory, with its focus on conscious social actors, provides the major theoretical direction. Methodologically, to examine a wide range of ceramic technological activities, the author embraces the concept of the 'operational sequence', following ceramics from the procurement and preparation of raw materials, through their forming, finishing and firing, to their use. Through the potter's eye, the author tries to understand the choices made at each step of the production sequence and consider the ways in which they could have organized their labour. To obtain such diverse information, diverse sets of methods, borrowed from archaeology, geology and materials science are employed.

An analysis of the monument in Tunisia and its possible connection with the battle waged between Hannibal and Scipio in 202BCIn the remote countryside of north-central Tunisia, between the cities of Siliana and Le Kef, stands a ruined stone structure known as Kbor Klib. A thorough examination of North African archaeological documentation reveals that the monument has over the years been the subject of a variety of descriptions, discussions and investigations. In this study, the author looks afresh at the archaeological and historical evidence of the site and its environs, and the intriguing possibility that the structure is associated with the Roman North African occupation in general, and the famous battle of Zama in 202 BC between Hannibal and Scipio in particular.

In temperate eastern North America, steatite vessels have an unusual distribution - widespread (ranging from New Brunswick, Canada to Louisiana) but apparently short-lived (approximately 1800 - 800 B.C.). Consequently, they have been of unusual interest to archaeologists and commonly used to date assemblages typologically. This study examines the veracity of this distribution and why steatite vessels display this distribution. Why did steatite vessel manufacture occur when and where it did? Why did steatite vessel manufacture not occur sooner or last longer? Why do steatite vessels occur in the frequencies they do across space and through time? The larger issue addressed in this study is technological change. By taking a scientific approach, the results of this investigation are able to be independently tested. A scientific approach allows knowledge to accumulate precisely because the results or conclusions can be shown to be wrong or incomplete. This study provides an example of how technological changecan be examined in the archaeological record from a scientific perspective.

This research investigates the social technology of Roman iron production in the East Midlands, England. The research area covers the counties of Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and Rutland, as well as parts of Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. The aim is provide a detailed assessment of archaeometallurgical sites in the area, against a socio-economic background of settlement patterns and landscape development. An interdisciplinary archaeological and scientific approach is taken to appreciate the role of the East Midlands as a third region of significant iron production in Roman Britain. The term 'iron production' is used as an umbrella term for all stages necessary to make an iron implement ready for use, andis not confined to iron smelting alone. Hence, iron production covers the entire process from the mining of iron ore, ore processing, smelting, refining and the smithing processes involved up to the manufacture of an implement.

Section 9: Néolithique au Proche Orient et en Europe / Neolithic in the Near East and EuropeColloque / Symposium 9.310 papers (8 in English, 2 in French) from the lithic materials session of the UISPP Congress in Liège in September 2001. The areas of discussion focussed on lithic production in the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) communities of Europe, including: exploitation and processing of siliceous rocks; the characterization of different strategies for knapping blanks for tools at site level and of their mode of production (domestic, specialized, surplus production); the differentiation of settlements (producers, users);the networks of regional and extra-regional exchange (of raw materials, cores, blanks or tools); the modes of distribution, geographical and chronological evidence; and the problems involved in reconstructing the socio-economic context of lithic production.

Until recently it was thought that West Mexico was isolated from the cultural region defined as 'Mesoamerica', especially during the apogee of the city of Teotihuacan, Central Mexico. Studies on the exchange network of Teotihuacan have not considered the relations between Teotihuacan and West Mexico despite the existence of a number of artifacts in West Mexico that either originated in Teotihuacan or were locally reproduced copies of Teotihuacan artifacts. In this work the author investigates relations between Teotihuacan and the Cuitzeo Basin, Michoacán, from a world systemic perspective. Ideological factors seem to have been particularly important for the structure of the Teotihuacan world-system that extended over a broad area in Mesoamerica. The polarizing dichotomy between 'centre' and 'periphery' has impeded understanding of the dynamics of change for both the Cuitzeo Basin and Teotihuacan. This work examines whether dependency can be inferred by the local and imported material culture with references to other parts of the Teotihuacan world-system. An attempt is made to redefine the concept of complexity regarding peripheral areas and the role of important denominators such as trade, crafts specialization and symbolic complexity as manifested through specific cognitive concepts.

Sudan Archaeological Research Society, Publication Number 10In December 1952, the new Egyptian Government decided to construct the Aswan High Dam. In the late 1970s and 1980s the construction of a dam at the Fourth Cataract, known as the Merowe Dam, was again mooted (Hakim 1993, 1-2), while another was proposed at the Kajbar rapids a little downstream of the Third Cataract. In response to the threat posed to the antiquities of the Fourth Cataract region the Sudan Archaeological Research Society undertook a single season of survey (November/December 1999). Although the concession granted included the whole of the left bank, over a distance of 40km, and the islands between the two forts at Dar el-Arab (Suweiqi) and Jebel Musa (Kirbekan), at the downstream end of Boni Island, the wealth of archaeological sites coupled with the difficulties of travel in the region meant that only small areas were examined in detail (1km along the left bank in the vicinity of the village of Gereif; Birti Island and four other small islands; the left bank from a little upstream of Birti; ten islands immediately downstream of el-Tereif). Most of the sites located were described, sketch plans were made where appropriate and many were also surveyed in detail, plans being produced at a scale of 1:500 or 1:100. Artefacts were also collected either from each feature or from transects across the sites and this material was studied by the pottery, lithics and small finds specialists. Many of the rock pictures were traced onto acetate and their locations plotted by GPS or in relation to their local environment by total station. A detailed description of the sites surveyed is contained in the gazetteer which is followed by an analysis of the pottery, small finds and lithics. The results detailed in this volume are advanced tentatively and it is fully expected that further survey work and excavation will modify the conclusions arrived at here. However, in the light of the current situation where it seems likely that the dam will be built in the very near future, and of the need for the archaeological community to seriously address the loss of a vast number of archaeological sites along one of the least known stretches of the Nile Valley, it was felt to be desirable that this work be brought to publication as soon as possible. It offers a glimpseof the richness and diversity of the remains of human activity in what is generally considered one of the most inhospitable regions of the valley, over many millennia.Written by Derek A. Welsby with contributions by Pam Braddock and Donatella Usai.

The Garawa Aboriginal people of the southern inland Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia were, until relatively recently, hunter-gatherers. The three principal objectives of this volume are to provide an ethnography of Garawa land-use and settlement, to develop the methodological and theoretical strategies for studying hunter-gatherer settlement patterns in a way that will yield information useful to archaeologists, and, thirdly, to identify the main variables contributing to the regional and long term structure of subsistence and settlement patterns. The core study area is centred on three contiguous river catchments (Wearyan, Foelsche, Robinson Rivers) within the Robinson River Land Trust, representing approximately 11,000 square kilometers. Garawa institutions and strategies of land tenure, land-use and site location are compared, with each other and with environmental phenomena, to identify the phenomena and processes that structured the macro-scale spatial, temporal, and demographic characteristics of Garawa settlement patterns.

Al Mina, at the mouth of the Orontes, some 75 km SW of Chatal Hüyük, has long dominated Greek-Levantine discussions in the Geometric Period (c. 1000-700 BC); the site was the first to reveal an abundance of Greek pottery generally, and still is the findspot of the greatest quantity of Greek Geometric pottery in the Levant - about 1500 sherds. In this volume, the author undertakes an analysis and review of this 'Greek emporion', taking as her main topics for discussion - Al Mina as a 'port of trade', the evidence for Greek residence on the site, Greek geometric pottery in the Levant, and Geometric pottery in Greek-Levantine trade.

In the spring of 1993, two Mycenaean (14th-12th centuries BC) chamber tombs were discovered by accident at Pylona, not far from Lindos on the southern coast of Rhodes. Excavations uncovered a cemetery site of six tombs and a series of remarkable finds: human remains, pottery, bronze objects and jewellery. The excavation reports are published here with a complete catalogue of finds, including the extensive and especially fine pottery discoveries. Chapter six is a detailed illustrated study by P.J.P. McGeorge of the skeletal remains from the tombs, presented as a catalogue of finds and a concluding summary on the general health, living conditions, and customs of the community. The work also includes a further three specialist appendices: an ICP-AES analysis of some of the Pylona vessels (M.J. Ponting and the author); a review of the textile remains (D. de Wild); and chemical analyses of glass beads and the copper sword find (H. Mangou).With contributions by P.J.P. McGeorge, M. Ponting, H. Mangou, and D. de Wild

The concept of Sacred Space is among the most prominent and enduring aspects of religious expression. The main aim of this work is to examine the development of constructed cult loci from the late Iron Age to the late Roman period in southern Britain, focusing on the differential use of internal space. At the core of the study is an analysis of the use of space within certain constructed sacred sites. Contains 98 site 'databases', giving significant information and plans.

Edited by Suzanne M. M. Young, A. Mark Pollard, Paul Budd and Robert A. IxerThe book includes 43 papers which deal with various aspects of metals, metallurgy and metalworking in antiquity. Areas covered stretch from China, Americas to Europe. The general goal was to explore the distribution of metals in the natural environment, extractive metallurgy and fabrication processes, as well as social context, use and deposition of artefacts, and combine anthropology, archaeology and the earth sciences.

This work examines the minster churches of Dorset in relation to their immediate and intermediate environs within the context of the recent Saxon minster debate. It begins with the identification of 'high-status' churches, and goes on to compare the parochiae of minsters with the units of royal demesne. The various layouts of minster settlements are then explored, and the volume concludes with a study of the implications of the Dorset minster system over the Saxon period.

Notebooks on Military Archaeology and Architecture 6This work presents a preliminary report on some new studies in the field of Italian Postmedieval Archaeology. The first part refines the definition of Military Archaeology, sketched by the author in BAR S1920, 2009, Pietralunga 1744, with a studied review from the Classical to Postmedieval periods. The second part, The Stones of the King, presents the main features relating to the archaeology of field-fortifications along the western alpine frontier of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, in the second half of the 17th and the 18th century. Accordingly, part one includes the historical development of that particular alpine frontier region and its permanent (or temporary) fortifications; subsequently the text illustrates alternative research studies on 18th-century field-fortifications, while the concluding part proposes a preliminary classification of the main features of field-fortifications, with several examples and illustrations from the western Alpine territory.

This book presents the results of archaeological research in the extreme south of Madagascar between 1991 and 2003, and provides a synthesis of the region's archaeology. Madagascar is an island with many unique species of fauna and flora; its extreme south is a semi-arid region with remarkable vegetational adaptations. Before the arrival of humans, there were many species of megafauna of which the most extraordinary were the flightless elephant birds, the largest avian species in the world. Today the inhabitants of the south have adapted to this aridity with a vibrant culture and strong traditions. The dating of the first colonisation of Madagascar is not certain, but certain sites in the southwest have provided radiocarbon dates towards the end of the first millennium BC. From the tenth to thirteenth century, there was a well-developed civilisation in the south. During the fourteenth century, population numbers fell in the far south and the majority of settlements from this period are found in locations chosen for their defensive aspects. The way of life that evolved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is similar to that of recent times and today. Europeans arrived at the beginning of the sixteenth century and, by the mid-seventeenth century, the French had established a colony at Fort-Dauphin on the southeast coast. The people of the south are well known today for their large and elaborate stone tombs and standing stones. However, this is not a particularly ancient tradition. Before the appearance of these monumental funerary constructions, burials were marked by arrangements of small stone uprights or by wooden palisades. The large stone tombs that are such a dominant feature of today's landscape have their origins in standing-stone monuments around the end of the eighteenth century.Mike Parker Pearson with Karen Godden, Ramilisonina, Retsihisatse, Jean-Luc Schwenninger, Georges Heurtebize, Chantal Radimilahy and Helen Smith.With contributions by Irene de Luis, David Barker, Seth Priestman, Lucien Rakotozafy, Bako Rasoarifetra, Alan Vince, Zoë Crossland and Brian Boyd.

This work examines the values that people hold for the landscapes of the Scottish Highlands. The central premise of the study is that to make decisions about the best way to curate landscapes it is necessary to understand the values that people have for landscape, and what are the main influences on these values. It is argued that the values the general public have for landscape should be fully incorporated within landscape planning and policy. For this, two key research questions formed the basis of the study: How can qualitative preferences and values for landscape best be captured and measured in a repeatable and reliable manner, and to what extent and in what ways does an increased knowledge of landscape history affect people's landscape preferences and values. This study answers these questions with reference to the landscape of the Scottish Highlands.

First published 1989, this book is a new edition of the proceedings of a seminar held in South Shields (N England) in July 1985 on the architecture of the gates and defences of auxiliary forts in the early principate.

This research looks at the processes that led to the profound transformation of the Roman world between the 3rd and 7th century AD. By concentrating on archaeozoology this study provides information on socio-economic evolution during Antiquity and the Merovingian period in Northern Gaul. In particular, the economic aspects related to the production, distribution, and consumption of animal resources are studied. This archaeozoological study is based on a corpus of 106,486 faunal remains. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the geographical framework of the region investigated, the climatic conditions over time, and the changing regional landscape are all assessed.

This study discusses the results of archaeobotanical studies carried out in Bulgaria over the last five years, with a special focus on the archaeobotanical finds from 36 prehistoric sites from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.

A selection of some of the papers presented at two international workshops: Women and Maintenance activities in times of change and Interpreting household practices: reflections on the social and cultural roles of maintenance activities, which were held in Barcelona in November 2005 and November 2007. These two workshops were co-organised by the Centre d'Estudis del Patrimoni Arqueològic de la Prehistòria-CEPAP (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) and by the Departament d'Humanitats (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain).

This book includes papers from the session 'Non-Flint Raw Material Use in Prehistory: Old prejudices and new directions' (Vol. 11, Session C77) presented at the XV UISPP World Congress (Lisbon, 4-9 September 2006).

The spectacular physical presence of the rock engravings of the International Tagus raised, in the 1970s, the need to explain the symbolic expressions of a population that until then had been described as virtually inexistent and, as a matter of course, of little importance to the cultural panorama of Iberian Late Prehistory. This volume gathers together the research effort of the teams that over the past 25 years have developed archaeological interventions in the central area of the International Tagus.

Using northeast Thailand as a model, this work uses stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen to infer paleodietary change in subtropical monsoon Asia. It is hypothesized that in northeast Thailand during the pre-state Metal Age (2000 B.C. to A.D. 500) there are distinct differences among the populations during this time period which coincide with human induced environmental changes and developments of alternative subsistence technologies. It is further hypothesized that female and male diets differed, possibly from social circumstances, such as sex related food accessibility. The archaeological skeletal series is from Ban Chiang, Ban Na Di, Ban Lum Khao, and Noen U-Loke. Stable isotope analysis of local flora and fauna provide a baseline for interpreting stable isotope data from human samples for this and future studies of paleodiet. This work makes a significant contribution to studies of subsistence changes from extensive to intensive agriculture in subtropical monsoon Asia. This research is relevant to debates of agricultural change as well as the effect of cultural changes on subsistence patterns and the evolution of human diet.

Proceedings of a workshop at Ghent University (Belgium) November 28, 2006

This volume publishes the contributions to a research project involving 37 authors to examine the evolution of the idea of the precious stone looking at the role of objects considered to have aesthetic value in a wide range of cultures and time periods although focusing on the emergence of the concept in the palaeolithic. French text.

This work summarizes a techno-typological analysis of Chalcolithic (c. 4500-3500 B.C.) lithic assemblages from Southern Levant (sites from Israel, the Golan heights, the Jordan valley, Southern and eastern Jordan and eastern and north-eastern Sinai). This period witnessed major changes in the lifestyles of inhabitants in this region, representing the peak of a long development in the rural life, a process that started with first Neolithic villages and ended up in the Early Bronze Age period, with the establishment of first towns. All accessible assemblages dated to the above mentioned period have been studied in the laboratory. More than 200,000 flint artefacts were included in this work, among them c. 20,000 tools, the rest being equally divided between debris and débitage.