Books published by BAR Publishing

Excavaciones arqueológicas en la domus tancinus (2004-2008) (Condeixa-a-Velha, Portugal)Archaeological Excavations & Catalogues 2This volume collects the results of the archaeological excavations made in the so-called domus tancinus, in Conimbriga (Condeixa-a-Velha, Portugal). The work in part is based the 'Spanish Archaeological Mission' interdisciplinary research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, in Portugal between 2004 and 2008. Over 5 years a Spanish and Portuguese team worked in an intramural sector of the ancient city to understand the evolution and transformation of a Roman domus during Late Antiquity and beyond. The archaeological excavations show a very different picture of Conimbriga in post-Roman times and presents further information on the so-called 'Christian basilica' built in the domus tancinus.

This work follows the study of the ecclesiastical geology of almost all Anglo-Saxon religious sites throughout England. There, it proved possible to both understand and distinguish clearly obvious patterns in the use of stonework, to determine the use and value of specific rock types, and to illustrate diagnostic features which could be used to identify building of that period. Subsequent studies of ecclesiastical sites, in Scotland and the Scottish Islands, the Isle of Man and Ireland expanded the value of the English studies by revealing closely analogous examples of the same indicative features. Beyond the domain of the Anglo-Saxons but of the same age, they were shown to follow a fashion; to this fashion the name 'Patterned' was applied.

Embarcaciones de la Península Ibérica, Marruecos y archipiélagos aledaños hasta el principado de AugustoThis book aims to collect, discuss and analyse all references to boats with connections to the Iberian Peninsula, Morocco, and the Balearic and Canary Islands. They range from the earliest prehistory to the Augustan Principate. The vessels studied were built in the western Mediterranean and nearby Oceanic coasts, or reached these areas before the technological standardization that the Roman Empire brought to the whole Mediterranean. The research presents an overview of the historical sources relating to pre-Roman navigation.

This publication is one of the volumes of the proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ), which was held in Paris (France) 23rd-28th August 2010.

Proceedings of the International Symposium on Funerary Anthropology, 5-8 June 2011 '1 Decembrie 1918' University (Alba Iulia, Romania)Edited by Raluca Kog¿lniceanu, Roxana-Gabriela Curc¿', Mihai Gligor and Susan StrattonThe study of burial practices, of human attitudes and behaviour in the face of death, has been an important part of archaeological research from its very beginnings. Some funerary discoveries have achieved sensational fame. Yet beyond this the archaeological community quickly came to understand that it is possible to gain as much information about the lives of past people from studying their funerary behaviour as it is from studying their daily activities and the resultant artefacts. This volume gathers together the majority of the papers presented at the International Symposium on Funerary Anthropology, 'Homines, Funera, Astra', which took place at '1 Decembrie 1918' University of Alba Iulia, 5-8 June 2011. The theme of the conference, aimed to address the investigation of human osteological remains and burial practices specific to the prehistory and history in Central and Eastern Europe.

A sample of 1227 Spanish wills, dating from fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Madrid and Seville, is the basis for an in-depth exploration of the connection between individual action, identity and grave location. Each will is a repository of information concerning the will (intent) and prospective actions of one individual. The field of action in which personal will operates in this study centres on the necessity of finding a gravesite - an endeavour that is highly relevant to archaeological interests. Real-world descriptions in the wills of where graves are and how they may be identified, or not, with the bodies of the deceased and with the remembrance of their souls, highlight the sharp distinction between archaeologists' and testators' concepts of space and grave location. The distinction is rooted in the testator's construct of personal identity, associated with the placement of his or her grave and the artefacts used to indicate the allegiances of body and soul in death, as in life. Such associations are lacking in the archaeological view of grave location and the identification of human remains, in part because there is not normally access to documentary sources, such as the wills, to indicate otherwise. In this study the author sets out to show that identity is the source of all human action and that it is translated into physical space and time by the exercise of individual will. Examples are taken from wills to illustrate some of the ways in which the personal connection between action and identity impinges on all the material evidence, both positive and negative, that may be unearthed in the archaeological excavation of grave sites.

This monograph presents a study of Indigenous economies in traditional Larrakia country, the Darwin coastal region of northern Australia, during the Late Holocene period. Subsistence and settlement patterns of this period are revealed through archaeological investigation of shell mounds, which dominate the study area and have long been a topic of scholarly interest both internationally and in Australia. Addressed are cultural, environmental and taphonomic aspects of mound formation and the implications of inter and intra-midden variability for interpretations of chronological change in hunter-gatherer economic systems, particularly with regard to theories of Holocene intensification in the Australian literature. In this work, therefore, the author explores the question of why people built mounds of shell and why they then stopped this practice that had continued for millennia.

Paris Monographs in American Archaeology 29As exemplified in this bibliographical essay, that includes about 2000 references, prehispanic ball courts and ballgames in Mesoamerica have been the focus of numerous studies, while the discovery of ball courts and related artifacts is continuous. In the last few weeks before completing this work, the author received information concerning two new discoveries - a newly recognized panel depicting a ballgame at the Maya site of Quirigua (Guatemala), and a third ball court within the Tenochtitlan sacred precinct under the National Palace in Mexico. These are just two of the most recent additions to a long list of bibliographical references, on a very controversial theme, that characterizes Mesoamerica and other related areas.

Edited by Evan Peacock, Cliff Jenkins, Paul F. Jacobs, and Joseph GreenleafThe southeastern United States is home to the richest, most diverse freshwater mussel faunas on the planet, and Mississippi is no exception in this regard. Until fairly recent times, however, only qualitative lists of taxa were available and/or sampling was unsystematic and spotty. More recent work has taken place in waterways that have been significantly impacted by erosion, other forms of water pollution, and impoundment in modern times. Thus, even the best modern studies could benefit from a better knowledge of ranges and community characteristics as they existed prehistorically, when human impact, though present, was minimal. We present herein a robust synthesis of pre-industrial mussel distributions and, to a lesser degree of precision, relative abundances in the state.

This study discusses a poorly understood period of late prehistory, the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age transition, in a little researched area of central southern Britain where there seems to be an unusual concentration of sites, many anomalous, the Vale of Pewsey in central eastern Wiltshire. The aims of this research include: To identify the spatial and temporal distribution of prehistoric human activity in the Vale of Pewsey by non intrusive fieldwork techniques; To analyse the scale and character of LBA/EIA activity in the Vale and critically compare those findings to evidence of contemporary activity from other areas of Southern England. Within this analysis to assess whether or not the Vale, with its massive middens/settlements of the period, constituted an exceptional area within Southern England; To characterize the changing nature and form of interaction between the groups active in the Vale and those present in the neighbouring chalklands of Salisbury Plain and the Marlborough Downs during the 2nd and early 1st millennia BC; To define the relationship between the various types of LBA/EIA site found in the Vale in terms of chronology, activity and meaning.

In this extensive study, the author aims at a comprehensive analysis of funerary archaeological evidence in Early Iron Age Capua, the ancient city in the modern province of Caserta, Campania, southern Italy, situated some 25 km north of Naples. The main difficulty results from the entity of the burials, which includes different burial grounds belonging to three different cemeteries, in turn investigated by different methods and times; the information about them is often incomplete and that conditions the critical interpretation. Another problem is that the sample is composed of a majority of 2nd local phase burials and this condition might alter the outline with a faked under representation of the tombs of the 9th century BC: in fact, only in 2005-2006 most of "Nuovo Mattatoio" necropolis, the main first Capuan phase graveyard, was excavated and works (excavation and restoration) are ongoing. However, the examined 1st phase graves well symbolize the development of community in the pre-protourban period. Among the main goals of this research is a comprehensive re-examination of relative and absolute chronology for the early Capuan phases. Another goal is to shed some light on our knowledge of the amount of archaeological contexts identified over the last fifty years by subjecting the material to statistical analysis, which necessitated an alternative reading of the problem of diachronic and synchronic development in the society investigated.

This study presents a completely new classification system for Egyptian watercraft models based on their nautical construction attributes. It is based on a full analysis and catalogue (which is included as an appendix) of all 586 known examples.

There is evidence to suggest that the South Molle Island stone quarry in the Whitsunday Islands, central Queensland coast, has been used by the indigenous inhabitants of the region from at least 9,000 BP to the present. A comprehensive technological characterisation of the quarry has demonstrated that a range of manufacturing behaviours was conducted on-site, from the initial extraction of the raw material, through to the final stages of artefact retouch. This research has demonstrated that the antiquityof backed artefacts and the timing of high production rates of backed artefacts occurs earlier in the Whitsunday region than elsewhere in southern Australia. In the Whitsunday Islands backed artefact production has been shown to be present from the beginning of the Holocene and to have been an important technological element in the early Holocene. Another understanding of backing technologies in Australia can be developed in light of this recognition of regional variation.

Proceedings of the Session 'From microprobe to spatial analysis - Enclosed and buried surfaces as key sources in Archaeology and Pedology'. European Association of Archaeologists 12th Annual Meeting Krakow-Poland. 19th to 24th September 2006Edited by Kai Fechner, Yannick Devos, Mathias Leopold and Jörg Völkel

Paris Monographs in American Archaeology 27There has been a phenomenal increase in the literature published about the ancient, historical, and modern Maya between 2000 and 2010. This volume provides bibliographic coverage for the literature pertaining to the ancient and modern Maya of southern Mexico and northern Central America published between 2000 and 2010. Coverage is somewhat selective, being based on materials accessioned into the collection of the Library of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The scope of the literature in the bibliography includes archaeology, cultural/social anthropology, biological/ physical anthropology, linguistics, ethno- history, and related disciplines such as art history, ecology, and so forth

Conference Proceedings, ¿ód¿, Poland, 5th-7th September 2007This World Archaeological Congress Inter-Congress was held at the University of Lódz, Poland in September 2007. One of the conference aims was to explore the role of ethnoarchaeology in generating ideas and theories which focus on wider underlying trends linked to cultural relativism and/or universals, rather than direct analogy.

The research presented in this volume derives from the combination of two different projects. The first was undertaken on commission by the Department of Archaeology and the History of Art of the University of Siena whilst the second was run directly by the Faculty of Medieval Archaeology of the same university. In the summer of 2003, SPEA Autostrade a company operating in the motorway infrastructure development sector engaged a team of researchers from the University of Siena and the Archaeological cooperative ASTRA to evaluate the archaeological impact of a project to build the so-called 'braccio tirrenico' between Rosignano Marittimo (province of Livorno) and Civitavecchia (province of Viterbo), intended to complete the A12 motorway along Italy's Tyrrhenian coast. The team of archaeologists from Siena was given the task of studying the proposed routes between Pescia Romana and Rosignano, whilst those from the ASTRA cooperative undertook a similar study in Lazio. The long stretch between the Tuscany-Lazio border and Rosignano Marittimo was subdivided into different segments, each of which was then assigned to a single team. One of the areas at greatest archaeological risk from the construction of this new motorway was the stretch between Talamone and Grosseto where very little archaeological research had previously been undertaken.

King Æthelred II (978-1016), known as 'the Unready', is a relatively unknown English monarch. The exploration of Æthelred's reign in this volume complements a study undertaken by the author in an earlier book about the Scandinavian invasions of England during Æthelred's reign; a study which followed the careers of the Danish warlords Swein Forkbeard and Thorkell the Tall to explain the complex relationship between Scandinavian armies and the English establishment. The Ætheling Æthelred, who was to reign as 'Æthelred II, king of the English, emperor of all the peoples of Britain' from 978 until 1016, was born c.968. Chronicle evidence suggests a date between March and July of that year. Although it is convenient to use the word 'England' to describe the territory ruled directly by King Æthelred and his father, Edgar, it is worth remembering that Æthelred regarded himself as the ruler of 'peoples'; hence he was king of the English and emperor [basileus] of all the peoples of Britain.

The first in a series of five volumes of inventories of 'First Neolithic Sites' in Europe. The series will consist of I) Bulgaria, II) Romania, III) Eastern Hungary, IV) Eastern Slovakia, V) Southeastern Poland. The main themes of each volume will be: 1) General information about cultural evolution at the onset of the Neolithic, 2) Additional data on cultural and economic problems specific for a given region, 3) A list of radiometric dates, 4) A catalogue of sites in alphabetical order.

Does community archaeology work? Worldwide over the last decade, there has been a boom in projects utilising the popular phrase 'community archaeology'. These projects take many different forms, stretching from the public-face of research and developer-funded programmes to projects run by museums, archaeological units, universities and archaeological societies. Many of these projects are driven by the desire for archaeology to meet a range of perceived educational and social values in bringing about knowledge and awareness of the past in the present. They are also motivated by the desire to secure adequate funding for archaeological research. However, appropriate criteria and methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of these projects have yet to be designed. This research sets out a methodology based on self-reflexivity and ethnology. It focuses on community excavations, in a range of contexts both in the UK and US and assesses the values these projects produce for communities and evaluates what community archaeology actually does.

A study with catalogue of the 'ushabti' (funerary figurines) from the Egyptian Museum, Florence.

Archaeological excavation at the Brayford Centre 2000In June 2000, a small excavation was carried out by Northamptonshire Archaeology on land on the north bank of Brayford Pool, Lincoln (eastern England), in the area of medieval Baxtergate. The earliest horizons were identified in two cores taken from deposits in the base of the trench. Environmental analysis of the cores, assisted by two radiocarbon dates, showed that peat began to accumulate along the Pool margins in the late Bronze Age, probably developing into a fen carr type habitat. A change from woody to fibrous peat in the late prehistoric or Roman period implies a significant change in the local environment, possibly associated with the use of the foreshore as a 'hard' to serve the Roman military and then the colonia in the 1st century AD. Peat continued to accumulate until around the late 7th century AD, when the ground appears to have dried out sufficiently to encourage marginal settlement in the area. Within the trench, archaeological remains, broadly dating to the 11th and 12th centuries AD, were found beneath a thick layer of modern demolition rubble. The medieval remains comprised features typical of 'backyard' activity, such as cess and general refuse pits, and ditches and gullies which probably functioned as plot boundaries and drains. Thetentative remains of a partitioned timber building, possibly used as a latrine and/or an animal byre, were also found. This activity was interspersed with a series of layers, probably associated with attempts to reclaim land along the northern edge of Brayford Pool or placed to protect the bank of the Pool from erosion. Environmental evidence was used to characterize the medieval deposits in order to assist in determining the function of the features, as well as providing information about the local environment at this time. Later medieval and post-medieval horizons had been totally destroyed by 19th and 20th-century development.With contributions from John Carrott, Margaret J. Darling, Karen Deighton, Rowena Gale, John Giorgi, Alison Locker, Michelle Morris, James Rackham, David Smith and Jane YoungIllustrations by Jacqueline Harding and Pat Walsh

Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 78The primary aim of this study of The Luangwa Valley (eastern Zambia), is to assess the integrity of the archaeological record in reference to geomorphological effects to determine what remains of the human behavioural record. To achieve the primary aim of this research an archaeological landscape survey was conducted, and a geomorphological survey built into the project design.

This study focuses on Qasr al-Buleida ('the countryside castle [or] palace' in Arabic), a small hamlet located six kilometres to the northeast of the modern village of Ghor al-Mazra'a on the Dead Sea Plain. The hamlet comprises the archaeological remains of five free-standing, fortified architectural complexes, as well as a number of agricultural features that include two aqueducts, a dam or reservoir and terracing. Together, these structures form the 'Qasr al-Buleida settlement', an entity which has not been previously studied nor published in entirety. Through survey and excavation conducted over two field seasons (2002 and 2004), the aim of this investigation of Qasr al-Buleida has been to determine the chronology, cultural history and function of the settlement as a network of fortifications that served a defensive and economic purpose, augmenting the Roman-Byzantine limes Arabicus, as well as an agricultural one. Analysis of the radiocarbon, numismatic and ceramic material recovered from the stratified deposits of excavations carried out at the five QB sites has now revealed that they were occupied between the fourth and sixth centuries C.E., a period when all evidentiary classes overlap.

In this work the author describes the animal husbandry practices and the use of wild resources in early modern Tornio (northern Finland) based on zooarchaeological evidence. The animal bone assemblages from Tornio have not previously been published or reported, and the urban animal husbandry practices and the use of wild resources have not been analysed archaeologically, apart from a preliminary analysis of the seventeenth-century faunal materials from two plots. The author uses these results to consider the connections between animals and urban social interaction, and the changing human-animal and human-environmental relationships in early modern Tornio. In this sense, the study also contributes to the understanding of the emerging modern worldview and social order in the northern European periphery during the early modern period.

Baldassarre Giardina's book is the fruit of many years of research. Since the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century and the historical and archaeological studies of E. Allard, L.A. Veitmeyer and He. Thiersch, little work has been done on the subject of lighthouses. No up-to-date or systematic scholarly research has been produced until now. Drawing on the rich accumulation of existing research, the author has in addition brought together evidence from historical and literary sources from the ancient, medieval and modern periods. Together with this, he has researched new evidence, data and scientific discoveries, and from these he has assembled a framework that sheds light on hitherto unpublished aspects of these structures, identifying their archaeological and typological characteristics. With this book, the author has given us a systematic exploration of the subject, its results arranged in such a way as to demonstrate the earliest form of these structures and their evolution in time.

The intention of this work is to explain how bone was used as a raw material on the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego (Argentina). Three main lines of research are followed by the author: 1) The determination of the mechanical properties of bones used for tools; 2) the proposal and evaluation of a model derived from a Darwinian Evolutionary Theory; 3) metric and morphological analysis of Fueguian bone tools. The temporal scale chosen for this work is from the earliest arrival of humans on the island - archaeologically recorded as some 10,000 years bp, up to the 19th century. As a way of approaching this work, and in order to be able to discuss the model which will be proposed in Chapter 6, a history of Bone tool research (with a special focus on Europe, where the main trend in such studies was developed) is presented in Chapter 2. The following chapters are devoted to specifying and analyzing the way in which these factors appear in Tierra del Fuego. Firstly (Chapter 3), the mechanical properties of bone material are referred to. In Chapter 4 the environmental and geological setting of Isla Grande is presented. In Chapter 5 a synthesis of all that is known about the Fuegian populations from an archaeological point of view is presented. Chapter 6 develops the theoretical framework used for the study. A bone raw material model is discussed and methods and materials employed are discussed in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 gives results of the determination of mechanical properties of Tierra del Fuego bones. Chapter 9 gives the results of tool morphological analysis, and Chapter 10 discusses these results. Conclusions and further paths for research follow in Chapter 11.

Proceedings of the International Round-Table Conference, June 2005, St-Petersburg, RussiaThis book presents the proceedings of the international round-table conference held from 23-25 June 2005 at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. The topics related to the culture, history and archaeology of Archaic Greece. Attention was also devoted to questions of exhibiting ancient Greek monuments in museums.

A study of the plans and architectural details of the important 5th - 9th century Cappadocian churches.