This paper examines a Greek Middle Geometric II pottery assemblage recovered during the Tunisian-Spanish excavations in the ancient city of Utica, Tunisia. The ceramics come from the deposit that sealed Well 200017, which further contained animal bones representing the remains of a ritual collective banquet. The ceramics are mainly of Phoenician, Libyan and Sardinian as well as Greek, Italic and Iberian origin. Most of the sherds come from bowls for consumption of food and drinks; there are also a few vessels for serving food and amphoras, while cooking vessels are very scarce. Based on our radiocarbon evidence, the context dates between 965–903 cal BCE, with a lower interval at 832 cal BCE. Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) was carried out on forty-five samples mainly of Geometric pottery in two campaigns. This paper presents the NAA results of the pottery from Utica’s well that were sampled during the first campaign in 2015.

The fourth century AD historian Ammianus Marcellinus remarked that “no wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in their deadly hatred of one another.” More to the point, the discussion of the nature of Christ drove a wedge within Christian communities in Antioch as elsewhere and ignited conflicts on a unprecedented scale. This chapter describes how the playing out of these debates had repercussions at all the levels of Antiochene society.

This chapter explores the essential aspect of water harvesting practices in Antioch, whether designed to tap into the Daphne springs to feed the aqueducts and baths or to impound runoff against floods. More subtly, the analysis documents the efforts of the royal and imperial agencies in controlling the city’s water infrastructure.

Ranging in date from ~3 mya to ~250 kya, this chapter examines the palaeontological and archaeological evidence for hominin evolution from the late Pliocene to the late Middle Pleistocene. It discusses southern Africa’s main fossil hominin sites, emphasising discoveries from the Cradle of Humankind since 2000, including Australopithecus prometheus, Australopithecus sediba, and Homo naledi. Further afield, attention is directed to the significance of work at sites like Wonderwerk and its expansion into long-neglected areas like the Eastern Cape. Key issues discussed include the problems created by continuing to use Linnaean taxonomy; identifying which hominin(s) made stone tools at any one time; the ecology and diet of individual hominin taxa; the role of tools (including fire) in hominin adaptations; the importance of understanding formation processes at both site and landscape scales; and transformations in material culture, including more sophisticated approaches for analysing lithic assemblages and new work on the transition to the Middle Stone Age. For all these topics, comparisons are drawn where relevant with East Africa and other parts of the world.

This paper examines the Protogeometric neck-handled type I transport amphoras at the sites of Elateia and Kynos in Locris, central Greece. Our NAA showed that these vases were imported to Locris most probably from the northern Aegean together with containers of other types such as belly-handled amphoras, which were all previously thought to have been local. The analytical evidence allows a new understanding of economic relations in the Aegean, especially between its northern and central parts. Finally, the PTAs from these sites represent evidence for their variable use in settlement and mortuary contexts such as those of the port site of Kynos and the cemetery of Elateia, where they were deposited as domestic refuse and burial gifts respectively.

The pattern of pottery consumption at the site of Koprivlen in south-eastern Bulgaria radically changed in the Early Iron Age after the appropriation and mass consumption of a ceramic ware of particular technology and of northern Aegean Geometric style. This ware, which was common in three micro-regions, around the Thermaic and Strymonic gulfs and also in the Nevrokop basin, and which probably originated in coastal Macedonia, was surprisingly more common in the remote inland site of Koprivlen than at any other site. This chapter explores issues of technology transfer and consumption of this conspicuous pottery, which is the most noticeable common cultural feature in the material culture of central, eastern and Pirin Macedonia during the Early Iron Age. Contextual analysis of this pottery demonstrates both copying and demic diffusion in its technology transfer and spatial differentiation in its consumption pattern.

A systematic review of the Classical, Late Antique, and Byzantine sources that underpin the study of Antioch.

This chapter explores intellectual responses to disasters and the creation and use of the disaster-divine wrath discourse as it spread from homilies to histories over time. It argues for centering human responses to disaster as the way forward using critical disaster theory.

Comparing the fourth-century writings of John Chrysostom and Libanius with the sixth-century writings of Severus of Antioch and John Malalas suggests that Jewish characters continued to play significant roles in Christian writings even as Jews themselves became less visible in the city of Antioch.

Amidst all of the ills that struck Antioch in the sixth century, the bubonic plague ranks high. This chapter addresses the actual entity of the pestilence, calling into question the reports in the ancient sources.

The sociocultural spaces of the “Minoan” Aegean were teeming with animal bodies. Many of these animals were alive, but many were not—and never had been; the latter are our focus here. Realized across a range of media, such as zoomorphic vessels, frescoes, and seal stones, animals’ bodies took on a rich diversity of material and spatial qualities that could afford distinctive interactive experiences that the notion of “representations” fails to capture. By recognizing both biological and fabricated entities as real embodiments of animals, which could coexist and interact in Aegean spaces, the nature of our discussion changes. We see that the dynamics of representation were caught up in a much wider field of relationships involving these crafted bodies, which characterized their engagements with people. Doing so moves us beyond questions of signification and intentional design, and toward a fuller recognition of people’s actual experiences of animalian bodies. Looking closely at a variety of venues, ranging from palatial courts to a modest house bench, our focus thus can turn to how the world of animalian things was a crucial part of social life in Aegean spaces, and how direct interactions with these other animal bodies were central, yet often overlooked and minimized, components of human relations with nonhuman beasts.

Examination of pottery production has always been of major importance for the understanding of colonial enterprise in the western Mediterranean during the Middle Geometric II period. Neutron Activation Analysis carried out on ceramics dating from this period to the Early Archaic period and exchanged between Pithekoussai, Kyme and the necropolises of the Valle del Sarno now elucidates the origin of some of the earliest Greek pottery used in the Phlegraean area. Analytical studies further demonstrate the complexity of Pithekoussan-Kymean pottery production and the modes of its consumption and diffusion in Campania and beyond. It was possible to ascertain the dominance of local over imported ceramic wares, and the high degree of specialisation achieved by the Phlegraean workshops from a very early phase. This allows us to clarify the dynamics of the contacts between the motherland and the colonial cities, and therefore between the colonies and the Indigenous and Etruscan hinterland.

The walls of Antioch are the only visible memento of the ancient city. Continuously repaired and reconfigured, they encompass at least eight different phases. How these defenses document the transformation of the city through the ages is the core issue.

Covering Marine Isotope Stages 3−2, this chapter tackles three main issues. First, it explores how hunter-gatherer societies across southern Africa coped with the challenges and opportunities of living in the highly variable ecological conditions that marked this period. Not just a matter of subsistence and diet, this is also a question of social interactions, knowledge, and how people related to the world around them. Crucially, the choices made operated in environments that may have been very different from those for which we have ethnographic accounts, demanding that we expand our interpretative frameworks beyond these. Second, Chapter 6 asks why the ‘cultural florescence’ of the Still Bay/Howiesons Poort is so starkly absent from almost the entirety of the material record across southern Africa between 59,000 and 12,000 years ago. Finally, it explores reasons for the profound change in stone-working traditions captured by the distinction between Middle Stone Age and microlithic Later Stone Age technologies. New fieldwork from throughout the region informs all these questions.

entities stand as crystallizations of a distinctly Aegean manner of animalian compositeness that is highly intuitive in its integration. These entities – the boar’s tusk helmet, ox-hide shield and ikrion (ship cabin) – embody this dynamic in an arrant fashion, since, while each is prominently animalian and bodily, they do not themselves take the shapes of animal physiques. Instead, they brought novel, conventional object-forms to animalian presences in the Aegean. By not standing as animals themselves, they starkly draw out the potent relational dynamics that could be realized between creatures, and between creatures and things. Discussion ultimately concerns the added complexity introduced to the statuses of these entities when rendered in movable representational media like glyptic and painted ceramics; particular attention comes to their frequent rendering in series. While seriation is often read as simplifying something’s status to the merely ornamental, I argue, instead, that articulation of shields, helmets and ikria in series imbued them with a peculiar, complex dynamism.