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This book provides the first modern synthesis of the archaeology of Skye and Western Isles: a region with some of the finest and best-preserved archaeological monuments in Europe. Our understanding of the region has been transformed in recent years through the results of new archaeological excavations, field surveys, and reassessments of earlier work from the nineteenth century onwards. From the ritual monuments of the Neolithic period, notably the great stone circles at Calanais in Lewis, to the spectacular Iron Age brochs and wheelhouses of the Iron Age, the exceptional preservation of key monuments offers insights into the broader currents of British and European prehistory. In later periods, the arrival of the Vikings in the Outer Hebrides is marked by a series of important archaeological discoveries casting new light on the nature and extent of cultural change. As well as covering the periods before the emergence of detailed written history, the book also addresses the archaeology of later periods, exploring the history of human settlement and society from earliest prehistory to the Clearances.

Using evidence of historical changes in landscape, community life, and material culture from a coal mining company town in the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeast Pennsylvania, Michael Roller introduces an archaeological approach to the structural violence on workers, citizens, and consumers that developed across the twentieth century. The study begins with an analysis of a moment of explicit violence at the end of the nineteenth century, an event known as the Lattimer Massacre, in which as many as nineteen immigrant miners were shot by a posse of local businessmen. From this touchstone, material history and theoretical contexts across the twentieth century are documented in a manner both locally specific and broadly generalizable. Historical archaeology is used strategically, opportunistically, and dialectically, supported, amplified, and illuminated by archival and ethnographic research, spatial analysis, and social theory. In the process, attention is brought to contradictions, ironies, and absences in our understandings of this formative era in labor history. This study illuminates the development of systematized violence and soft forms of social control enacted by the collusion of state and capital through materialities such as infrastructure, urban redevelopment, mass consumerism, governmentality, biopolitics, and the shifting boundaries of sovereign power. Varied in its use of sources, the study returns again and again to the material life and the shifting landscapes of the company towns and shanty enclaves of the region, as well as the violence of the Massacre. This archaeology of the recent past shows us the unconscious material foundations for present social troubles.

The emergence of village-communities profoundly transformed social organization in every part of the world where such societies developed. Contributors to The Archaeology of Villages in Eastern North America employ archaeological and historical evidence to explore the development of villages among eastern North American indigenous societies of the deep and recent past. Rich data sets from archaeology and contemporary social theory are employed to document the physical attributes of villages, the structural organization and aggregation of such entities, what it means to be a villager, cosmological and ritual systems, and how villages were entangled with one another in regional networks. The result is a volume which highlights the similarities and differences in the historical trajectories of village formation and development in eastern North America, as well as the larger processes by which villages have the power to affect large-scale social transformations.

This book is the first study of the material culture of Egypt during the period of Achaemenid Persian rule (ca. 526-404 B.C., also known as the ‘27th Dynasty’). Previous studies have characterised this period either as ephemeral and weak or oppressive and harsh. These characterisations, however, are based on the perceived lack of evidence for this period, filtered through ancient and modern preconceptions about the Persians. This book challenges these views in two ways: first, by assembling and analyzing the archaeological remains from this period, including temples, tombs, irrigation works, statues, stelae, sealings, drinking vessels and coins; and second, by using that material to study both the nature of Achaemenid rule, and how the people living in Egypt experienced that rule. The archaeological perspective permits the study of people from all walks of life, not just the elites who could afford to commission statues and; rather, by looking at the decisions made about material culture by a wide range of people in Egypt, it is possible to understand both how the Persians integrated Egypt into their empire, and how various individuals understood their roles in society during the course of this integration. It is thus a study of both imperialism and identity.

The book studies Neolithic burial in Britain by focussing primarily on evidence from caves. It interprets human remains from 48 Neolithic caves and compares them to what we know of Neolithic collective burial elsewhere in Britain and Europe. It provides a contextual archaeology of these cave burials, treating them as important evidence for the study of Neolithic mortuary practice generally. It begins with a thoroughly contextualized review of the evidence from the karst regions of Europe. It then goes on to provide an up to date and critical review of the archaeology of Neolithic funerary practice. This review uses the ethnographically documented concept of the ‘intermediary period’ in multi-stage burials to integrate archaeological evidence, cave sedimentology and taphonomy. Neolithic caves, environments and the dead bodies within them would also have been perceived as active subjects with similar kinds of agency to the living. The book demonstrates that cave burial was one of the earliest elements of the British Neolithic. It also shows that Early Neolithic cave burial practice was very varied, with many similarities to other Neolithic burial rites. However, by the Middle Neolithic, cave burial had changed and a funerary practice which was specific to caves had developed.

Ceramics of Ancient America analyzes ceramics specifically from ancient America to add new layers to our understanding by emphasizing new perspectives and a multidisciplinary approach from the fields of archaeology, art history, and anthropology. Scholars have studied ceramic objects in these disciplines using various methodologies. So far, however, no publication has combined these different scholarly approaches to analyze Pre-Columbian ceramics to understand aspects of many different ancient societies across the Americas. This book thus will provide a much-needed compendium, survey, and synthesis of current scholarship of New World ceramics by drawing on a combination of three different disciplines. This volume will help students and scholars alike better understand and appreciate ceramics as one of the vital forms of communication within small social units, and across cultural and political boundaries. Although three different disciplines have approached the study of ceramics using different methodologies, this book will be the first to utilize them in a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary way to contribute to a more complete picture of Pre-Columbian ceramics and their place in society. The study of ceramics has already been recognized as a fundamental tool for understanding Pre-Columbian beliefs about daily life, reconstructing social systems, and assessing inter- and intra- cultural political relationships. The contributors to this book, however, explore social implications, iconography, trade, variations of regional style, innovation, ritual, and political meanings from numerous cultures in North, Central, and South America that are relevant to the study of ceramics anywhere, but particularly in ancient America.

The sensational discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamun's tomb, close on the heels of Britain's declaration of Egyptian independence, accelerated the growth in Egypt of both Egyptology as a formal discipline and of 'pharaonism'—popular interest in ancient Egypt—as an inspiration in the national struggle for full independence. Emphasizing the three decades from 1922 until Nasser's revolution in 1952, this follow-up to Whose Pharaohs? looks at the ways in which Egypt developed its own archaeologies—ancient Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Coptic, and Islamic. Each of these four archaeologies had given birth to, and grown up around, a major antiquities museum in Egypt. Later, Cairo, Alexandria, and Ain Shams universities also joined in shaping these disciplines. The closely-related history of tourism—including Thomas Cook & Son, Nile steamers, and the famous Shepheard's Hotel—also receives careful attention. For Egyptians, developing their own expertise in fields dominated by the French, Germans, and British was often also an expression of nationalism. Egyptians who valued archaeology also had to defend it against the minority of their compatriots for whom pharaonic antiquity represented only alien and idolatrous darkness before the dawning of Islam. In 1952, Nasser's revolution put an end to ninety-four years of French direction of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and four years later the Suez War rang down the curtain on British colonialism in Egypt.

In 1932, at an ancient military outpost on the Euphrates, excavators unearthed a series of wall paintings. A procession of veiled women, a soldier with sword drawn, a woman at a well. The space was designed for religious rituals, but whose? As a crossroads for travelers, the city of Dura-Europos had buildings honoring gods of Greece, Rome, Persia, and Judea. These archaeologists soon realized, though, that they were looking at the earliest preserved Christian building—a “house church” from about the year 250. The World’s Oldest Church shines a flashlight once again on the murals of the earliest Christian building. Michael Peppard’s research at the nexus of Bible, art, and ritual shows that many familiar interpretations of the church require historical and theological reevaluation. While updating scholarship on all aspects of the building, he advances bold re-identifications of the female figures on the church’s walls. What if the veiled women were going not to a tomb, but to a wedding? What if the woman at a well was not a repentant sinner, but a spotless virgin—the Virgin Mary herself? Contrary to commonly held assumptions about early Christian initiation, Peppard contends that the rituals here did not primarily embody notions of death and resurrection. Rather, the central motifs were victory, healing, incarnation, and especially marriage. He attends to how the presence of ritual in a given space affects our interpretation of its art. In other words, the meaning of what appears on these walls may become clear only when we imagine what happened between them.

Migrations in Late Mesoamerica gathers scholars from different disciplines to address the role of migration during the most tumultuous centuries of Mesoamerican prehistory (A.D. 500–1500). Ethnohistoric, linguistic, biological, and archaeological data coupled with visual imagery and hieroglyphic texts associate the final millennium of Mesoamerican prehistory with the political, economic, and social changes that often unmoored populations from ancestral lands. Independent investigations into these topics have repeatedly discerned the movement of social groups at their core, but migration itself has rarely been the central focus of theoretical analysis. The ongoing rehabilitation of migration as a subject for study now allows prehistorians to re-examine its relationship to other areas of social life. An introductory chapter isolates characteristics of migration that distinguish it from other forms of human mobility, and it argues that migration must be analyzed in conjunction with the other social processes in which it is embedded. Select representatives from archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, ethnohistory, epigraphy, and art history present contributions on migration dynamics, causes and impacts, indigenous perceptions of migration, and the methods and assumptions we use when identifying or analyzing our specific cases.

Using archaeology as a tool for understanding long-term ecological and climatic change, this volume synthesizes current knowledge about the ways Native Americans interacted with their environments along the Atlantic coast over the past 10,000 years. Leading scholars discuss how the region’s indigenous peoples grappled with significant changes to shorelines and estuaries, from sea level rise to shifting plant and animal distributions to European settlement and urbanization. Together, they provide a valuable perspective spanning millennia on the diverse marine and nearshore ecosystems of the entire eastern seaboard—the icy waters of Newfoundland and the Gulf of Maine, the Middle Atlantic regions of the New York Bight and the Chesapeake Bay, and the warm shallows of the St. Johns River and the Florida Keys. This broad comparative outlook brings together populations and areas previously studied in isolation. Today, the Atlantic coast is home to tens of millions of people who inhabit ecosystems that are in dramatic decline. The research in this volume not only illuminates the past but also provides important tools for managing coastal environments into an uncertain future.

Over his long and illustrious career as Lecturer, Reader and Professor in Edinburgh University (1961-1976), Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge (1976-2001) and currently Fellow of the McDonald Institute of Archaeology at Cambridge, Anthony Snodgrass has influenced and been associated with a long series of eminent classical archaeologists, historians and linguists .In acknowledgement of his immense academic achievement, this collection of essays by a range of international scholars reflects his wide-ranging research interests: Greek prehistory, the Greek Iron Age and Archaic era, Greek texts and Archaeology, Classical Art History, societies on the fringes of the Greek and Roman world, and Regional Field Survey. Not only do they celebrate his achievements but they also represent new avenues of research which will have a broad appeal.

The Sasanian Empire (third-seventh centuries) was one of the largest empires of antiquity, stretching from Mesopotamia to modern Pakistan and from Central Asia to the Arabian Peninsula. This mega-empire withstood powerful opponents in the steppe and expanded further in Late Antiquity, whilst the Roman world shrunk in size. Recent research has revealed the reasons for this success, notably population growth in some territories, economic prosperity and urban development, made possible through investment in agriculture and military infrastructure on a scale unparalleled in the late antique world. This volume explores the empire’s relations with its neighbours and key phenomena which contributed to its wealth and power, from the empire’s armed forces to agriculture, trade and treatment of minorities. The latest discoveries, notably major urban foundations, fortifications and irrigations systems, feature prominently. An empire whose military might and urban culture rivalled Rome and foreshadowed the caliphate will be of interest to scholars of the Roman and Islamic world.

This book explores the archaeological and epigraphic evidence for Greek colonies in Central Asia in the Hellenistic period, in the aftermath of the campaigns of Alexander the Great. In communities such as the Graeco-Bactrian city of Ai Khanoum, the descendents of colonists interacted with their neighbours, and created dynamic new cultures and identities. Utilising a wide range of sources – documentary texts, inscriptions, archaeological remains, coins, Chinese and Greek historical writings - this work argues

The product of a decade of research, The Iranian Expanse is a study of the natural and built environments of power in Persia and the ancient Iranian world from the consolidation of the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BCE to the fall of the Sasanian Empire in the seventh century CE. It analyzes the formation and development of some of the most enduring expressions of power in Persia and the ancient Iranian world: palaces, paradise gardens and hunting enclosures, royal cities, sanctuaries and landscapes marked with a rich history of rock art and ritual activity. It explores how these structures, landscapes and urban spaces constructed and transformed Iranian imperial cosmologies, royal identities, and understandings of the past. While previous studies have often noted startling continuities between the traditions of the Achaemenids and the art and architecture of medieval or Early Modern Islam, they have routinely downplayed or ignored the tumultuous millennium between Alexander and Islam. The first study of its kind, the Iranian Expanse shows how the Seleucids, Arsacids and Sasanians played a transformative role in the development of a new Iranian royal culture that impacted early Islam and the wider Persianate world of such dynasties as the Il-Khans, Safavids, Timurids and Mughals.