This chapter engages with Antioch’s church, highlighting pastoral figures and their role in leading the local community.

This paper examines the Greek Geometric pottery recovered during the Tunisian excavations by the Heritage National Institute at Utica. Skyphoi decorated with various motifs and dating to the Subprotogeometric IIIb/Middle Geomtric II and Late Geometric I periods represent the most common shape analysed by Neutron Activation Analysis. In the first place, the contexts where these pottery finds were used and deposited are placed under scrutiny. Following a typological examination, the study treats the use of these wares in their local context in association with handmade ceramics and pottery imported from other regions such as the eastern Mediterranean and Sardinia. The emphasis is thus put on the diversity of drinking and eating habits that indicate the multicultural nature of the first Phoenician community of Utica.

Only for the transition between the Pleistocene and the Holocene (c. 13,000−8,000 years ago) do we have a rich and chronologically relatively well-controlled record with which to explore the impacts on hunter-gatherer populations of the profound ecological changes associated with the shift from glacial to interglacial climates and through which to consider their own creativity at such a time. Previous archaeological work developed competing hypotheses to explain the shifts from microlithic to non-microlithic and back to microlithic (of a different kind) technologies during this period. These are considered here, along with potential evidence for patterns of social relations similar to those found in Bushman groups of the ethnographic present. At the same time, fuller publication of work from Elands Bay Cave allows further discussion of the value of John Parkington’s pivotal concept of ‘place’ and of the merits and disadvantages of employing ‘industries’ as building blocks for thinking about the hunter-gatherer past. New fieldwork in Lesotho reinforces this, along with the importance of deepening the relation between theory and the process of archaeological excavation itself.

The importation of an ensemble of Greek Geometric pottery found in the city of Huelva (south-west Spain) has been attributed to Phoenician trade. Conversely, thousands of Archaic ceramics of both Aegean and local origin must be linked to the establishment of Greeks and the allusions of ancient sources to the emporion of Tartessos. This article explores the domestic, ritual and other social contexts of that pottery’s use at that multicultural site.

This chapter considers the nature of state aid and intervention after earthquakes at Antioch between the Hellenistic period and Late Antiquity.

This chapter explores the lives and experiences of select Antiochene women, as they appear in the rich literary repertoire of Late Antiquity.

This introductory chapter sets out the aim of the project, which is to reassess the social and cultural relations between the Aegean and the Mediterranean through a new examination of some of the earliest Greek pottery finds overseas. The focus is on Protogeometric and Geometric ceramics from Greek and Phoenician colonies, certain Phoenician metropolises and further Indigenous sites in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, which were analysed by Neutron Activation. The analytical results are examined against the background of the social and economic relations that were generated through the production, exchange and consumption of the pottery finds under scrutiny.

This paper treats the contexts of eighteen Late Geometric and Subgeometric pottery fragments from Naxos, Sicily, analysed by Neutron Activiation Analysis. The results do not allow the definition of any local production of pottery of Euboean type at Naxos but provide new insights into the exchange of Geometric ceramic wares of local origin in southern Italy and Sicily. Most recent excavations elucidate the organisation of the earliest settlement. An almost-orthogonal intersection between two streets outlines a chequered urban layout already around 700 BCE. The coaeval enclosure with the bothros and hard-packed floor that occupies the south-west corner of the street intersection indicates the cult of some hero or ancestor. The finding of krater fragment Na 16 with the depiction of an anodos further implies the ritual properties of its context of deposition. Finally, the excavation under the hard-packed floor provides a glimpse of even earlier settlement phases associated with Sikel material culture.

This paper examines social and cultural contexts of consumption by bringing together notions of space and place, chiefly the social setting in which Sidonians used Greek pots. Earlier studies placed primary value on the morphology of this pottery with fine fabrics and decoration that attracted scholarly attention and was thought to have been similarly perceived in the past. We question here the use of Greek vessels as commodities of value, enhanced by their origin from a distant place and their rare representation in the eastern Mediterranean, and explore them as artefacts of special symbolism due to their contexts of consumption that has ritual implications.

The Neutron Activation Analysis of some of the earliest Greek pottery used in the Aegean and the Mediterranean provided results that did not allow the localisation of origin through evidence obtained from the analysis of reference material such as clays and kiln wasters. However, the grouping of our sampled pottery with other members of large geochemical groups allows their localisation through archaeological criteria such as ceramic distribution and concentration patterns. Furthermore, the geochemical groupings contribute to a better understanding of the organisation and economy of pottery production. This is achieved by means of new evidence about the continuity or discontinuity in the use of the same raw material, the correlation of certain pottery types and geochemical signatures and the typological-technological consistency of the newly formed groups.

The historical discourse of Antioch cannot be divorced from that of its twin-sister Seleucia, founded in the same year and dynamically linked to the city on the Orontes.

A richer, better-resolved dataset allows both ‘social’ and ‘ecological’ perspectives to be explored in greater detail than is possible for earlier periods. Themes discussed include regionalisation in material culture, the development of formal burial, shifts in exchange networks, changes in landscape use and subsistence, fluctuations in regional demography, and potential indicators of socio-economic intensification. This last point raises the question of how ‘complex’ southern Africa’s hunter-gatherer societies were and whether social and/or environmental constraints inhibited the emergence of food production using indigenous resources. Recent improvements in dating now offer the possibility of drawing southern Africa’s rich hunter-gatherer rock art into temporally anchored conversations with other components of the archaeological record. The chapter shows that Bushman ethnography strongly supports interpretations of that art in terms of beliefs and practices associated with shamanism, but that new theoretical work (notably studies employing the ‘new animism’) and further work on gender and initiation continue to expand how it can be understood.

This chapter looks at the profound advances made over the past two decades or so in our understanding of modern human origins, of how humans lived in southern Africa during Marine Isotope Stages 6−4, and of their cognitive capacities. While genetics and palaeontology cannot establish a central role for southern Africa in H. sapiens’ emergence, the region provides the most detailed early evidence anywhere for a wide range of complex behaviours that speak to the cognitive abilities of those responsible for them: art, jewellery, bone tools, archery, pigment manufacture, pyrotechnology, snaring and trapping of small game, etc. Much of this material is associated with the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort industries and the significance of this is discussed along with how southern Africa’s record relates to the wider Palaeolithic context in Africa and Eurasia. While underlining the importance of sites like Blombos, Border Cave, Klasies River, Pinnacle Point, and Sibhudu, the chapter emphasises the limitations of (near-)coastal/Fynbos Biome-oriented research and the increasing importance of fieldwork in other regions, such as Namaqualand, the southern Kalahari, and highland Lesotho.

A social history of Antioch under Justianian, amidst political turmoil and environmental downturns.