Books published by BAR Publishing

This volume contains a range of papers from a seminar held in Oxford in 2005. What did 'art' in its widest sense mean to 'them', the Romans, and what might it (or even should it), mean to us? The approach adopted avoids fashionable 'theory', mainly culled second-hand from the social sciences, and tries to engage directly with material culture.

This volume summarizes the archaeology of the Mimbres area. Mimbres is the archaeological term for ancient Native American peoples who lived along the river of that name (the Rio Mimbres) and several other valleys in the southwestern corner of the state of New Mexico. They flourished, artistically, from about A.D. 950 to 1150; and the characteristic black-on-white pottery of that period is represented in art museums and private collections around the world. A single Mimbres bowl can fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction. The pottery itself was not technically remarkable (hand-formed, indifferently finished earthenware) but the designs - painted in black pigment on the white-slipped interior of bowls - constitute one of the most appealing, intriguing and recognizable Native artistic tradition of ancient North America. Any reader of this volume almost certainly has seen Mimbres art, and the chances are good that the reader possesses a Mimbres image or two on a T-shirt, a trivet, a tea towel, or even a tattoo. As well as pottery, the author investigates: cremations and burial rituals, shells and canal irrigation, and other aspects of Mimbres archaeology, as well as indicating areas for future research.

Central European Series 2In this work the author investigates the pre-Turkish Hungarian landscape and describes how medieval woodland functioned. (Particular attention is given to the woods around Pilis and Bakony.) In combining this with evidence still visible on the ground, the author goes further than seeing trees and woods as mere "environment". His study in important in that it begins to trace a common tradition of cultural landscapes in north and central Europe, taking into account coppicing, 'royal forests', common and private woodland, pollarding, monastic usages, etc.

In this volume the author studies Roman baths in Israel, including a section on the miqveh (ritual Jewish bath), which first appears in the 2nd century BCE and becomes a fairly common feature both of Hellenistic private baths and other areas such as cemeteries, oil or wine presses and synagogues in Palestine in the 1st century BCE. The geographical limits of this study are set by the ancient identification of Palestine that is Cis- and Transjordania and the scope covers the time between the reign of Alexander Jannai (103-76 BCE) and the Muslim conquest (640 CE). The author draws a picture of the development of Roman baths and thermae in Palestine using a combination of literary and archaeological sources. This includes not only an account of the purely architectural development of the buildings, but also an account of the development of the institution of "bathing the Roman way" itself and the utilisation of the Roman baths and thermae in Palestine. The book concludes with a complete catalogue of baths in Roman Palestine and a selective catalogue of Miqva'ot in Roman Palestine.

In this work the author focuses on the social and other non-material dimensions of life that are increasingly integral to landscape archaeology. Although the geographical focus of the study is southern Epirus, and in particular the lower valley of the Acheron River, the author also attempts a general, though not exhaustive, synthesis of the Bronze Age evidence from all of Greek Epirus. The Epirote Bronze Age remains poorly known and there has been no new synthesis for some time. Until recently, most of the scholarly work has been in Greek, much of it rather inaccessible, and this may have discouraged the wide dissemination of information. More importantly for the present case, however, a fresh assessment of evidence from the whole of Epirus (and to a lesser extent, surrounding regions) was essential to place events and longer-term processes in the lower Acheron valley in proper context. The landscapes of Epirus are highly diverse, and the lower Acheron valley, as lowland, coastal, and Mediterranean in climate, presented a singular set of circumstances to Bronze Age inhabitants. The important contrasts detected across Epirus throw into relief the divergent trajectory of the lower Acheron valley, and suggest certain explanations for it. It is hoped that this work will give the reader a sense of the Bronze Age landscapes of lowland southern Epirus, and a feeling for what it might have been like to inhabit them.

Mycenaean society, it is commonly asserted, was characterised by centralised decision making over an integrated and culturally homogeneous region. In matters political and economic, the local rulers held sway over a population subject to taxes in kind and corvée labour. Beyond his obligations to the Palace, the Late Helladic inhabitant of the area commanded little by way of resources to engage in anything but subsistence activities. Such is the power of this long-prevailing view that, until recently, few scholars thought of questioning the logic and implications of the various concepts and models based on it. At its most simple, the argument revolves around the issue of whether Mycenaean society was strongly centralised with redistributive traits or whether the power and homogenising influence of the power base, if any, was not strong enough to touch the furthest corners of everyday, subsistence-level life. If the latter view has anything to commend it, this will have far-reaching ramifications for our perception of the nature of life and society in the Mycenaean Argolid. If, on the other hand, the long-held view can be proved to be correct, researchers will be on much firmer ground with respect to the inferences that may legitimately be drawn. In this monograph, the author addresses these issues by evaluating the conceptual and theoretical foundation upon which the now predominant view is based, as well as the claims made with respect to the nature and character of the economic system of Late Helladic society in the Argolid. Furthermore, the present study also sets out to analyse in more detail the role of Asine, a mid-tier settlement in the Argolid, with a view to establishing the vertical and horizontal linkages that this settlement may have had with the surrounding communities.

Edited by Rachel Ives, Daniel Lines, Christopher Naunton and Nina WahlbergFollowing a successful inaugural event at the University of Oxford and an expanded second at the University of Liverpool, the Third Symposium for Current Research in Egyptology was held in December 2001, at the University of Birmingham. The symposium was again successful in bringing together UK-based graduate students of Egyptology to provide an opportunity to disseminate the results of their research. It also served to encourage communication between an otherwise disparate group of students spread across the various Egyptological institutions throughout the country. Indeed, speakers came from nine different institutions and the papers presented illustrated well the broad range of topics currently being studied throughout the United Kingdom. The topics of the 9 featured papers include: The Lotus Reborn: the creation and distribution of the Description de L'Égypte; The arrival of the horse in Egypt: new approaches and a hypothesis; Aspects of the Hyksos' role in Egyptian society from the artistic evidence; Some thoughts on the social organisation of dockyards during the new kingdom; Egyptian blue: where, when, how?; The specialness of science: it's all in the mind; Crossing the night: the depiction of mythological landscapes in the Am Duat of the New Kingdom Royal Necropolis; Trends in burial evidence: evaluating expectations for the regional and temporal distribution of mortuary behaviour in Predynastic Egypt; Representations of Hathor and Mut in the Hibis temple.

In 1827, a local collector of antiquities encountered a vehicle carrying stones from the site of Kermenchik/Simferopol on the Black Sea near Chersonesos. The director of the Odessa Museum immediately recognized the importance of these finds and rushed to the site. In the first publication on the site, the author claimed to have discovered the Neapolis built by the Scythian, King Skiluros. Thus began the archaeological discoveries at a site that has fascinated excavators to this day. The author of this present monograph summarizes the decades of research and theories connected with this important site and its environs: features, architecture, rites, material cultural, trade, and cult objects. A uniform chronological and cultural model for Scythian Neapolis is proposed and phased characteristics show its historical evolution (c.300 BC to 300 AD). A group of farmsteads developed into a settlement, then into a royal fortress with a palace/temple complex, then into a significant fortified settlement of some scale, then once more into a royal (?) fortress before becoming the unfortified centre of an agrarian territory as the headquarters of a Bosphorean deputy. One Appendix concentrates specifically on the Mausoleum of King Skiluros, while the other details the inscriptions and sculptures from the 'Southern Palace' site.Translated from Russian by Valentina Mordvintseva

The Archaeological Sciences 1999 conference hosted by BASRG at the University of Bristol brought together scientists from throughout the UK, and also international participants from France, Germany, Poland and Egypt. The papers presented provided a valuable insight into the exciting new avenues for research opening up to archaeological science within the UK. This volume is representative of the very broad range of research themes addressed during the conference.

The majority of the 17 papers in this volume were presented as conference papers at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference in 1999 at Cardiff, Wales, in the session 'Peopling the Mesolithic in a Northern Environment'. The approach adopted was to investigate the social Mesolithic, a radical departure from traditional approaches to the period, which tends to focus on flint typologies rather than people. Many of the themes and debates raised by these papers have been discussed and argued at a number of subsequent conferences, sessions and day schools on reconstructing the social Mesolithic. The debate continues, and hopefully the papers in this volume will engender further discussion.

The Nordic Bronze Age provides rich and well-preserved material, including large amounts of Central European bronze. It was the northern extention of the European Bronze Age cultures, and was included in this sphere rather late. But when it happened, Nordic societies got fully engaged in large-scale bronze metallurgy and adopted many elements of foreign symbolism. This book focusses on the earliest Nordic Bronze Age, at the outset of large-scale bronze import and metallurgy - when new forms of hierarchies and leadership were in the making. A specific category of objects, the bronze scimitars of Southeastern Scandinavia, provides the opportunity to explore the issues of scale, distance and context.

A short report on the site and sanctuary of Torreparedones in rural Cordoba, constructed in the reign of Caesar and in use throughout the reign of Augustus, and abandoned in the 1st century AD. The authors summarise the archaeological evidence for the occupation of the site, the construction of the sanctuary, its use and religius significance."

The author sets himself two objectives in this study. One is to introduce alternative methods for the construction of chronological frameworks in order to determine the development sequence of Chalcolithic (5100-3500 BC) society in the Jordan Valley region of the southern Levant. In this regard, the work addresses a number of issues relating to settlement and social change throughout the period and proposes several explanations based on the sequence of events. The second objective is to evaluate the theoretical and methodological understandings associated with the classification of chronological units. This study advocates the integration of all sources of chronological information for the purpose of constructing regional sequences. In the final analysis, the agreement of both the relative and the radiocarbon sequence is considered.

The academic consensus that the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 landed at Richborough, Kent, has been challenged in recent years. Proponents of the alternative hypothesis that it took place at or near Fishbourne, West Sussex, have claimed that this makes better sense of the account in the ancient sources. This volume asks what sense the Fishbourne hypothesis makes in terms of the options for the naval strategy of the crossing. After considering the respective archaeological and topographical contexts of the sites, the work discusses general logistical issues as well as the type of ships available to the invading forces and assesses the evidence for their performance. The study concludes by looking at the choices facing the Roman naval planners of AD 43.

The first five centuries of Christian pre-eminence in what is now modern Hungary present their own special questions. Among them, did the end of the 5th century mean a real break in the whole of the Christian world or only in Pannonia (modern Hungary), or should a chronological boundary be drawn at some other date? This survey divides the period into two, before and after Constantine (ancient and early Christianity), and, from the evidence of the finds, explores the important changes that occurred in the era. The results throw considerable light on the populations of the various faiths and the gradual acknowledgment of the Christian religion.

This volume is a collection of 18 papers resulting from a symposium organized for the Society of American Archaeology in Chicago in 1999. The objective was to facilitate discussion on the fundamental problems of the European Early Upper Paleolithic period (c.30k-45k BP), with special focus on innovative techniques, methods, or theoretical frameworks that have usefully resituated the problems and knowledge of the EUP. The work is divided into three sections - The transition from LMP to EUP; Questions of typological significance and technological organization; Explaining interassemblage variability. The sites and finds discussed range from Portugal and Spain as far as the Middle East and the Ukraine.

This book includes papers from the Symposium, Kingdom of the Coral Seas, November 17, 2007, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The symposium and lectures brought Okinawan archaeology to a wide audience, including many students, professionals and those with an interest in this fascinating part of the Japanese archipelago from across Europe and elsewhere. The current volume represents a full record of the proceedings of the symposium, hopefully bringing the Ryukyus to an even broader readership.Papers by Shijun Asato, Hiroto Takamiya, Naoko Kinoshita, Akito Shinzato, Susumu Asato, Meitoku Kamei, Takashi Uezato, and Arne Rokkum.

In this significant study, Jill Bourne presents the corpus of all 70 surviving Kingston place-names, from Devon to Northumberland, and investigates each one within its historical and landscape context, in an attempt to answer the question, What is a Kingston? She addresses all previous published work on this recurrent place-name, both scholarship with an etymological focus and contextual scholarship which examines the names within their wider context. The core of the work is the hypothesis that names of the type cyninges t¿n or cyning t¿n derive not from independent coinages meaning 'manor/farm/enclosure of a king' in some general sense, or in direct relation to the phrase cyninges t¿n, as it is sometimes assumed in the literature, as an equivalent to villa regia. The study explores connections between Kingstons and the cyninges-t¿ns and villæ regales of the documentary sources; considers the concept and development of early kingship and its possible origins, the laws of the earliest kings, the petty kingdoms, and emergence of the larger kingdoms for which the term Heptarchy was coined (but not used at the time); and pays particular attention to Ancient Wessex, where more than half of the corpus of Kingston names are found, and to the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the Hwicce and Magonsæte, where a further quarter lie.

This volume presents research on the early Middle Palaeolithic in Cantabrian Spain (northern Atlantic façade), in particular on the economic and social behaviour of the Neanderthal groups living in the region between OIS 7 and OIS 4. The study is focused on the production, management and use of lithic tools, the strategies to capture and work with animal and plant resources, the ways of exploiting the territory and the range of social organisation within a diachronic and regional framework. This approach emphasises the reconstruction of the whole technical system as it reflects the social system and the historical dynamics in which it developed.

Edited by G. de Marinis, G. M. Fabrini, G. Paci, R. Perna and M. SilvestriniA collection of thirty-two papers dealing with the development of the city in the Adriatic area, on Italian, Dalmatian and Albanian coasts. The time period stretches from the Iron Age right through to the late Roman period.

This study examines the domestic architecture produced by the Late Dorset, an Arctic-adapted hunter-gatherer society which occupied much of the Eastern North American Arctic between circa 1500 B.P. and 500 B.P. Throughout this research, architecture, like any artefact class, is considered a dynamic and socially constructed technology that is produced, maintained, and transmitted by its practitioners. It is replicated via sequences of learned actions or techniques; patterns thus result from adherence to cultural standards while differences represent instances of technological divergence. Such departures are typically ignored or suppressed in closed systems, although they can be tolerated or even widely adopted in more flexible ones. In order to identify and explore patterning in Late Dorset domestic architecture, this analysis adopts a methodological strategy centred on the chaîne opératoire. Viewed through the lens of chaîne opératoire, domestic architecture is treated as a conduit for informing on Late Dorset social structure and organisation. As part of this investigation, a multi-scalar research design was implemented. The first analytical scale examined architecture across the entire Eastern Arctic Palaeoeskimo period in order to recognise regional patterns of behavioural variability. The second stage of analysis focused on the micro-scale study of architectural remains from three locations, each presented as fully contextualised case studies.

Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 80The two key themes in this work are 1) the meeting between knowledges about the material world, and 2) the intimate relationships between people and their material surroundings we find in the social dynamics of households. The approach consists of three comparative field studies of present-day contexts conducted among eastern Bantu-speakers in Mozambique, Botswana and South Africa, in addition to an archaeological synthesis of the sequence known as 'Moloko', belonging to the Late Iron Age (AD 1300-1840) in southern Africa. While located within the discipline of archaeology, the approach draws on insights from anthropology, history, sociology and philosophy. Focusing on the relationship between clay, ceramic containers and social interaction in household spaces which follow rationales that may be associated with a sub-Saharan 'thermodynamic philosophy', the main objective is to arrive at an understanding of the relevant social dynamics involved in the developments of the Moloko ceramic sequence and the spatial and material changes to associated settlements. The work is presented in three main parts. The first presents the archaeological research status of the Moloko sequence and provides an overview of the main theoretical strands in the discourse. The second part seeks to accommodate the theoretical framework into an approach for studying clay practice, a methodology which is implemented by three field studies. The third part consists of an archaeological synthesis which draws on the insights from the previous two parts. Three specific research questions are sought answered. These relate to 1) diachronic variation in social meanings of fire and hearths, 2) changes to the social dynamics of living members of households and their ancestral links, and 3) the relationship between the microscale changes and regional social transformations towards the terminal Iron Age in southern Africa, with a particular emphasis on the implications for women's personhood.

Proceedings of the XVI World Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (Florianopolis, Brazil, 4-10 September 2011). Volume 1, Session 17Edited by Emmanuel Anati (Chairman) , Luiz Oosterbeek (Co-Chairman) and Federico Mailland (Co-editor)

An art historical/contextual study of various representations of the Russian/Ukrainian saints Boris and Gleb, the first saints to be canonized after the country's Christianization. They were martyred between 1015-19 and buried in the Vyshhorod Cathedral. They are traditionally represented as two young princes, holding either a martyr's cross or armed with swords or spears.

A collection of articles on the use of analytical methods in studies concerning geospatial analysis and data integration for cultural heritage evaluation. This volume is presented as a collection of self-contained articles providing easy access to suit the requirements and interests of individual readers. In order to be self-contained, each article is prefaced by a general introduction which briefly provides the theoretical principles and the general background of the discussed methods or techniques.

IV Reunión Internacional de Teoría Arqueológica Sudamericana, Inter-Congreso del WAC 3-7 de Julio de 2007, Catamarca, ArgentinaSouth American Archaeology Series No 14The papers in this volume seek to examine the role of archaeological ceramics in the social processes of past societies, specifically with respect to the formulation and re-formulation of cultural practices. They also offer critical discussion with respect to the limitations of various theoretical approaches to the study of archaeological ceramics.

The dynamic relationship between technology, technological practice, and society is the focus of this book, based on the analysis of Neolithic pottery production in Valencia, eastern Spain. Two main questions frame this study: 1) what are the changes in technological practices in the manufacture of pottery during the Neolithic, and 2) how do these changes articulate with shifts in other realms of society? In order to address these questions the author turned to insights and discussions on the role of technology in society in evolutionary theory, agency-based approaches, and behavioral archaeology to frame the study in relevant, anthropological terms. With a set of explicit hypotheses the author then uses standard archaeological methods in the analysis of prehistoric pottery to reconstruct production techniques and evaluate the hypotheses.

Proceedings of the GIS session at EAA 2009, Riva del GardaThe GIS session entitled 'Go your own least cost path - Spatial technology and archaeological interpretation': as presented at the September 2009, European Association of Archaeologists 15th Annual Meeting in Riva del Garda, Italy.

A study of cultural change and development from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in the north and central Sudan.

South American Archaeology Series No 13The aim of this investigation is to evaluate, through technology, the mobility of hunter- gatherers who inhabited the northwest of Santa Cruz province (Patagonia, Argentina) during the late Holocene. Studying the technological aspects of the archaeological record recovered in areas with different ecological characteristics (low lake basins and high plateaux), the objective is not only to show its variability but also to explain it in relationship with the organization of groups living in specific climatic conditions.