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Against the background of the interest in ancient Mediterranean connectivity and globalization, the present volume examines local places and local communities. Exploring the interplay between the local and the global, the focus shifts from long-distance connections and 'global' trends to the local dimensions of Mediterranean interactions, highlighting how local contexts engaged with their long-distance counterparts. Given the transformative nature of this period and region, our focus is firmly on the western Mediterranean during the first half of the first millennium BCE. Discussions of the local places and local communities of the Iron Age West Mediterranean are wrapped around the twin notions of agency and locality. We argue that everyday local agency produces locality in an ongoing dialectic, ranging from collaboration to struggle, with globalizing influences and colonial forces. The eighteen West Mediterranean case studies are organized around the themes of 'Indigeneity and locality', 'agency and empowerment' and 'practice and production'.
The western tradition of coinage began in Asia Minor around 650 BCE and from there the idea spread quite rapidly to other parts of the Mediterranean. This book describes and evaluates developments in coinage down to the period of the Persian Wars, ending in 479. Early coinage was not monolithic. The new medium of exchange proved attractive to a variety of rulers and societies – kings, dynasts, tribes, city–states with varying forms of governance. The physical characteristics of the coins produced were another source of difference. Initially there was no fixed idea of what a coin should look like, and there were several experiments before a consensus emerged around a small, circular metal object with a design, or type, on both sides. This book provides students with an authoritative introduction, with all technical terms and methodologies explained, as well as illustrations of over 200 important coins with detailed captions.
The Roman world was a rural world. Most of the Roman population lived in the countryside and had their immediate rural surroundings as their social and economic frame of reference. For much of the Roman period, rural property provided the basis for political power and urban development, and it was in rural areas that the agricultural crops that sustained an expanding empire were grown and many of the most important Roman industries were situated. Rural areas witnessed the presence of some of the most durable symbols of Roman imperial hegemony, such as aqueducts and paved roads. It was mainly here that native and Roman traditions collided and were negotiated. This volume, containing 30 chapters by leading scholars, leverages recent methodological advancements and new interpretative frameworks to provide a holistic view, with an empire-wide reach, of the importance of Roman rural areas in the success of ancient Rome.
This Element introduces a methodological framework that positions itself between site-specific archaeological investigations and broader regional approaches characteristic of historical and landscape archaeology. While traditional archaeological studies often focus on detailed analyses of individual sites, and regional studies aim to identify large-scale patterns and long-term processes, the proposed method bridges these scales through the calculation of the minimum mobility space linked to settlements or production centers. This concept enables the delineation of the effective area of influence or resource exploitation surrounding a site, thereby offering a more nuanced perspective on how past communities organized and interacted with their immediate landscapes. The approach incorporates diverse environmental and historical variables, including geology, soil types, and topographical constraints, to reconstruct the spatial logic behind site location and land use. It employs a suite of analytical techniques such as cost-surface analysis, statistical modeling, and historical-geographical integration.
Literary and archaeological evidence suggests that the Roman world was profoundly unequal. What did this mean in material terms for people at the bottom of the social hierarchy? Astrid Van Oyen here investigates the lived experiences of non-elite people in the Roman world through qualitative analysis of archaeological data. Supported by theoretical insights from the material turn, development economics, and feminist studies, her study of precarity cuts across the experiences of workers, the enslaved, women, and conquered populations. Van Oyen considers how precarity shaped these people's relation to production, consumption, time, place, and community. Drawing on empirically rich archaeological data from Roman Italy, Britain, Gaul, and the Iberian Peninsula, Van Oyen challenges long-held assumptions and generates new insights into the lives of the non-elite population. Her novel approaches will inspire future studies, enabling archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists to retrieve the unheard voices of the past.
In Late Bronze Age Greece, Mycenaean authorities commissioned impressive funerary monuments, fortifications, and palatial complexes, reflecting their advanced engineering and architectural skills. Yet the degree of connectivity among Mycenaean administrative centers remains contested. In this book, Nicholas Blackwell explores craft relationships by analyzing artisan mobility and technological transfer across certain sites. These labor networks offer an underexplored perspective for interpreting the period's geopolitical dynamics. Focusing on iconic monuments like the Lion Gate relief, the refurbished Grave Circle A, and the Treasury of Atreus, Blackwell reconsiders the topographical and political evolution of Mycenae and the Argolid in the 14th-13th centuries BCE. Notable stone-working links between the Argolid and northern Boeotia also imply broader state-level relationships. His analysis contributes fresh ideas to ongoing research into the organization of the Mycenaean world.
The Element reconstructs economic developments in the crucial phase of State formation in Mesopotamia, from the 4th to early 3rd millennium BCE, trying to understand how interrelating environmental, social, economic, and political factors in the two main areas of Mesopotamia profoundly changed the structures of societies and transformed the relations between social components, giving rise to increasing inequality and strengthening political institutions. The interrelation between economic changes and state formation and urbanization is analyzed. Mesopotamia represents a foundational case study to understand the processes that transformed the function of economy from being an instrument to satisfy community needs to become a means of producing “wealth” for privileged categories. These processes varied in characteristics and timescales depending on environmental conditions and organizational forms. But wherever they took place, far-reaching changes occurred resulting in emergent hierarchies and new political systems. Reflecting on these changes highlights phenomena still affecting our societies today.
Once considered a period of poverty and isolation, devoid of impressive material culture, the Iron Age is now regarded as a pivotal era. It witnessed how the ancient Greeks lost and regained literacy, created lifelike figural representations and monumental architecture, and eventually established new and complex civic polities. The Companion to the Greek Iron Age offers an up to date account of this critical epoch of Greek antiquity. Including archaeological surveys of different regions, it presents focused discussions of the Early Iron Age cultures and states with which Greek regions had contacts and which are integral for understanding cultural developments in this formative period. They include Cyprus, Syro-Anatolia, Italy, and Egypt, regions in which, as in Greece, the Early Iron Age is diverse and unevenly documented. Offering a synthesis of the key developments, The Companion to the Greek Iron Age also demonstrates how new archaeological and theoretical approaches have enlarged and clarified our understanding of this seminal period.
This Element is about the interacting socio-ecological relationships of a contemporary Aboriginal foraging economy. In the Western Desert of Australia, Martu Aboriginal systems of subsistence, mobility, property, and transmission are manifest as distinct homelands and networks of religious estates. Estates operate as place-based descent groups, maintained in both material egalitarianism (sharing, dispossession, and immediate return) and ritual hierarchy (exclusion, possession, and delayed return). Interwoven in Martu estate-based foraging economies are the ecological relationships that shape the regeneration of their homelands. The Element explores the dynamism and transformations of Martu livelihoods and landscapes, with a special focus on the role of landscape burning, resource use practices, and property regimes in the function of desert ecosystems.
This Element approaches large game hunting through a social and symbolic lens. In most societies, the hunting and consumption of certain iconic species carries deep symbolism and is surrounded by ritualized practices. However, the form of these rituals and symbols varies substantially. The Element explores some recurring themes associated with hunting and eating game, such as gender, prestige, and generosity, and trace how these play out in the context of egalitarian versus hierarchical societies, foragers versus farmers, and in different parts of the world. Once people start herding domestic livestock, hunting takes on a new significance as an engagement with what is now defined as the Wild. Foragers do not make this distinction, but their interactions with prey animals are also heavily symbolic. As societies become more stratified, hunting large animals may be partly or entirely reserved for the elite, and hunting practices are elaborated to display and build power.
Theophrastus' so-called Metaphysics presents a series of difficulties for various accounts of first principles, including Platonist ones but also – and especially – Aristotle's. Hence, many scholars think that Theophrastus abandons some of his teacher's core commitments, such as the prime mover or natural teleology. Other interpreters, by contrast, emphasize the aporematic character of the work and do not take Theophrastus to be truly critical of Aristotle. In the author's view, neither reading captures the character of the treatise. For, as argued in this Element, Theophrastus probes the Aristotelian account of first principles in earnest. But this is not to say that he abandons it. Rather, Theophrastus is an internal critic of an Aristotelian framework to which he himself is committed but of which he thinks that it requires further elaboration.
The Archaeology of the Tibetan Plateau offers a comprehensive survey of past and recent research on the prehistory of the plateau, from its early peopling to the eve of the foundation of the Tibetan Empire in the 7th C. The first English language book-length study of the Tibetan past, it is organized around eight chapters that describe modern and ancient environments, historical speculations about ancient Tibet by mystics, fascists, and contemporary scholars, evidence of the first peoples to live and thrive on the plateau, the arrival of the domesticated plants and animals that transformed the subsistence economy, and the emergence of early forms of status and prestige. The book concludes with a discussion of how the past informs environmental conservation and heritage preservation and explores how archaeological data are used by the Chinese state to create an alternative vision of the Tibetan past at odds with indigenous Tibetan perspectives.
The emergence of social complexity is at the heart of archaeological inquiry, but to date, there has been insufficient global comparative analysis of this phenomenon. This volume offers archaeologists and other social scientists reconstructions of past societies in all parts of the world, some of which challenge currently popular accounts. Using recently developed analytical approaches robust enough to yield compatible results from disparate datasets, the reconstructions presented here rest on fresh comparative analysis of archaeological data from 57 regions. They reveal the highly varied pathways to social complexity in ways that make it possible to see previously conflicting ideas as complementary. The analytical approaches and the full datasets are presented in detail in the book as well as an online data base. Offering new insights into the forces that have shaped human societies for millennia, this study provides a deeper understanding of the ways in which archaeology uses the material remains of past societies to reconstruct how they were organized.
Egypt and the Levant witnessed complex transformations across the Bronze Age. Beyond the rise and collapse of powerful cities and states were the long-distance connectivities that enabled the movements of people and animals, and the interlinked exchanges of commodities and ideas. By the Late Bronze Age, these connectivities exhibited markers of globalisation. This Element considers how such markers emerged and developed in the preceding centuries. Focussing on the Third to mid-Second Millennium BCE, it brings together recent research on socio-political developments and cross-cultural interactions to give an overview of the transforming networks linking Old to early New Kingdom Egypt and EB III to LB I Levantine communities. In doing so, the Element incorporates approaches that move away from imperialist structures of exchange to consider how dynamic networks were negotiated and maintained across periods of socio-political change.
Past climate fluctuations significantly shaped human ways of life. This Element reconstructs the Southern Levant climate (ca. 1300–300 BCE) using high-resolution, well-dated paleoclimate records. Results show a 150-year arid phase ending the Late Bronze Age, likely driving the collapse of eastern Mediterranean complex societies. The Iron Age I saw a return to humid climate conditions, fostering highland settlement expansion and supporting the rise of the biblical kingdoms. This was one of the region's most profound cycles of collapse and revival. During Iron Age II, climate conditions were moderate, similar to today. The Achaemenid period began with brief aridity, followed by renewed humidity. Pollen evidence, along with additional data such as charcoal remains, was employed to trace environmental changes, including variations in the composition of natural vegetation. Human impacts on the environment were also identified, including fruit tree cultivation, deforestation, overgrazing, the introduction of new plant species, and landscape terracing.
Sovereign Heritage Crime: Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past explores why autocracies intentionally exacerbate anxieties associated with an aggrieved ethnoterritorial minority's tangible heritage. Since discriminatory domestic campaigns of state-sponsored erasure are political choices, this theoretical study proposes to understand them as sovereign heritage crimes. This framework predicts that heritage securitisation - constructing disquieting material memories into ontological threats - enables legitimacy-deficient yet affluent autocracies to pursue 'performance legitimacy' by delivering a real or imagined 'permanent security'. Since this state crime is both enabled and exposed by traditional and emerging technologies, the study also explores their dual use for human rights and wrongs. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
How does archaeoastronomy assist archaeologists in comprehending the past of human societies? Archaeoastronomy is an interdisciplinary field that combines scientific principles and astronomical measurements to enhance our understanding of ancient cultures. Its interdisciplinary character appears by blending areas of the natural sciences, such as astronomy, physics, mathematics, and even geology or biology, with others of the social sciences and humanities, such as archaeology, history, prehistory, geography, or anthropology. Throughout this Element we are going to see what archaeoastronomy is about, how it works, and what topics it is applied to, for which we are going to introduce a series of concepts from astronomy, mathematics, and other disciplines.