This paper examines the economic and other social relations that emerged in the colonial landscape of the northern Aegean through a new approach to pottery production, exchange and consumption. Our analytical data about pottery origins allow a new reconstruction of the exchange networks between the northern and central Aegean. The chapter suggests that the gradual increase in non-local pottery use along the northern Aegean shores and certain changes in local pottery production cannot be taken as a result of any growing colonial agency. They are interpreted instead as the low residue of locally driven transformations in the economic organisation of the northern Aegean. The new analytical data support a recently expressed view that these advances represent a pull factor of migration from central Greece towards its so-called northern Aegean periphery.

In its capacity as the principal city on the east coast of the Mediterranean, Antioch was an important center of both minting and coin circulation during the fourth through seventh centuries. Moreover, as the launching site for military expeditions against the Persians and, eventually, the Arabs, Antioch served as the temporary capital for emperors and other military leaders stationed there and as a distribution point for soldiers’ salaries and other monetary activities.

This chapter looks at the establishment of farming communities in the east of southern Africa within the broader context of agropastoralist expansion south of the Equator and the spread of Bantu languages. Much of the literature on this topic depends heavily on analysis of ceramic design and arguments linking variation in this to variation in broad ethnolinguistic affiliations. The cultural-historical framework based on this is discussed, but alternative methods of ceramic classification are also explored, while the antiquity and utility of the Central Cattle Pattern settlement structure and its cognitive associations are critically assessed. In their dependence on a direct historical approach that is projected far back into the past both questions provide an agriculturalist counterpoint to the use of Bushman ethnography for understanding archaeological hunter-gatherer societies. Beyond these more theoretical concerns, Chapter 10 also emphasises the role of metallurgy, the social relations and subsistence base of early farming societies, the start of their engagement with Indian Ocean trade networks, and their interactions with pre-existing forager communities.

Jews were among the founders of Antioch and contributed greatly to the social and material evolution of the city. How they adjusted to the imperial agendas of Late Antiquity, as well as their characterization in the textual record are the main objects of inquiry.

This chapter describes the topography and monuments of Antioch as known through the textual sources and archaeological investigations. The earthquakes that shattered the city on various occasions are also foregrounded.

Antioch’s circuses and theaters are well known; however, how they gradually became locus to faction rivalries and hotbeds for civic strife is brought into focus by this chapter.

Neither southern Africa’s archaeology nor its history or contemporary social and political structure can be understood without reference to its experience of colonialism and conquest or of the resistance to this. This chapter therefore looks at the archaeology of Portuguese exploration and subsequent settlement in Mozambique, as well as at the much more expansive colonisation of southern Africa set in motion by the establishment of a Dutch East India Company (VOC) base at Cape Town in 1652. It traces the spread of European settlement into the region’s interior, the emergence of new creolised populations on and beyond the frontiers of that settlement, the institutionalisation of the social, economic, and political structures that led to apartheid, and – crucially – the resistance of Indigenous societies to this. Chapter 13 also discusses the Mfecane and the emergence of the Zulu, Basotho, Ndebele, and Swazi states, among others, to emphasise their contemporaneity and potential connections with European settler expansion and to encourage comparative study of processes of state formation, migration, and population incorporation common to both.

The use of Aegean pottery – comprising a few drinking vases – is rather limited in the Iron Age cemetery of al-Bass in Tyre despite the large number of investigated tombs. This finding stands in contrast to the evidence recovered from the excavations at the settlement site of Tyre, on the ancient island, where a broad range of typologically variable Greek ceramics came to light. Nevertheless, the imported wares at the settlement seem to be represented by even lower percentages than those at the cemetery. This paper aims to analyse this discrepancy through various perspectives that include examination of typology, functionality, social dynamics and economics. The conclusions drawn from this analysis suggest that these non-local artefacts did not significantly alter the way in which the community of Tyre consumed wine. Instead, their deposition in burial and possibly other social contexts can be associated with issues of social status manipulation.

Just as the archaeology of the Zimbabwe Culture’s later phases (the Torwa and Mutapa states) can be understood as an exercise in historical archaeology structured by dialogue between the evidence of material culture and that of oral and written histories, so too can the recent past of farming communities and their neighbours south of the Limpopo. Here (and extending into modern Botswana), the archaeological record of the past several hundred years is that of the ancestors of today’s Sotho/Tswana, Nguni, Tsonga, and Venda peoples. This chapter therefore looks at the expansion of farming populations on to the temperate grasslands of South Africa’s interior; the multiple interactions between farmers, pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers (something also increasingly informed by genetics); early contacts with European traders on southern Africa’s Indian Ocean coast; the creative potential of cattle, metals, and other indigenous resources to generate power and wealth; the emergence of more complex societies and denser patterns of settlement; and the construction of new built landscapes that are only now beginning to be understood in detail (notably in Mpumalanga and Gauteng).

This paper summarises some of the results obtained from Neutron Activation Analysis of early Greek pottery that was sampled in the Mediterranean. It provides an overview of analytical evidence about the provenance and geochemical clustering of major pottery wares such as the Protogeometric and Geomtric transport amporas and K-22 or common pottery types such as PSC, chevron, Thapsos and Aetos 666 bowls. Their historical implications include aspects of specialisation in pottery production, modes of technology transfer, appropriation and exchange of ‘colonial’ pottery types. Finally, this concluding chapter presents new insights into the economic and cultural relations among remote communities in the Mediterranean, and the chronological implications of our pottery analysis on the correlation of Phoenician and Greek migrations.

The opulence of Antioch and Daphne’s houses is well known; how new theoretical and methodological approaches help us evaluate this complicated archaeological record is the focus of this chapter.