This paper presents results from the Neutron Activation Analysis of 362 samples of Protogeometric and Geometric pottery from the Aegean and the Mediterranean. The focus is on sampled pots whose origin can be located through good reference material such as clays or misfired pottery from kilns. These analysed samples were clustered in already defined geochemical groups, usually named after the first letters of their place of origin (e.g. EuA for Euboea, DelA for Delphi), or in new groups determined through this study (e.g. KlazE for Klazomenai, SinA for Sindos). The geochemical variability of the earliest Greek pottery overseas challenges previous perceptions about the alleged dominance of certain wares such as Euboean and Corinthian in early Greek and Phoenician colonial contexts.

This chapter examines the boundary-breaking spatial and social dynamism of animalian entities embodied within LB I–LB II polychrome murals of Crete and Thera. In these innovative paintings, animalian entities engaged with both painted and lived contexts, taking on novel manners of involvement in Aegean sociocultural spaces; some established new aspects of creaturely identity and relation. We begin with three animalian entities considered – boar’s tusk helmets, ox-hide shields and ikria – examining how their presence in murals further challenged long-standing parameters of two-dimensional representation. Here discussion broadens to consider how renderings of various animals in Minoan frescoes charged and unsettled the fabric of powerful built spaces. Innovations in color, scale and the creation of spatial depth approached the ways animalian bodies were experienced in the round. Simultaneously, details of the frescoes kept the painted creatures, and the spaces they occupied, tautly embroiled in the structured order of the wall. We close by considering how polychrome frescoes could foster radical newness in animals’ identities, focusing on renderings of blue simians. This blueness, regardless of whether originally intended to approximate biological hues, engendered distinct status for simians in the Aegean, with fascinating connections to renderings of young peoples.

The AD 637 Islamic conquest of Antioch has been typically held as the city’s swan song. Conversely, this article shows that the new realities of power ushered in a new phase in the life of the city and lingered on the memory and myth of the city of Seleucus Nicator.

No ancient church of Antioch survives: the cruciform church of Kaoussié, Machouka, Seleucia’s martyrion, and a medieval church in Daphne are the scanty examples of a tradition of rich ecclesiastical architecture that punctuated Antioch’s cityscape. This chapter offers a comprehensive catalogue of ecclesiastical buildings known through the textual sources and piecemeal archaeological evidence.

This chapter examines how movable renderings of animals contributed to sociopolitical experience in Minoan Crete, with close attention to zoomorphic vessels. Beginning in the Prepalatial period, we examine a group of clay body-form vessels that could stand independently. While typically labelled “anthropomorphic,” the vessels’ identities are more complex: their forms do not neatly suggest a particular species, and their affordances as objects are integral to what they are and how they are experienced. Through analysis of their unique corporeal characters and depositional circumstances, I argue that these figures could have been experienced as distinct productive agents, who participated in cultivating community space between Prepalatial tombs and settlements. Next, looking forward, we consider how animalian vessels continued to contribute to Cretan social venues, while subtle changes to how they embodied animals could imply profound shifts in their presence and performance. From the late Protopalatial, we see rhyta rendered as bodiless animal heads, most bovine. Unlike the Prepalatial vessels, these appeared dramatically dependent on living people to become productive, placing emphasis on human action. I contextualize these rhyta with a problematization of palatial-era politico-environmental developments and changes in social performance and “cattle culture.”

Antioch lies on an active fault line; countless earthquakes have impacted the city and its built environment. This article addresses the geomorphology of the region as well as Antioch’s endemic resilience.

This chapter explores the superimposition of Roman law and order on provincial and municipal politics.

The Emperor Julian’s momentous sojourn in Antioch is a key theme in the discourse of Christianity and paganism in the Greek East. This chapter chronicles the events and climate of 362 and 363 CE on the shores of the Orontes, not least highlighting Julian’s utopia of Antioch "city of marble."

From the early second millennium AD more hierarchically organised societies marked by the rise of southern Africa’s first states developed in the north of southern Africa, culminating in Great Zimbabwe and its successors. This chapter outlines the processes involved, including the roles played by hunter-gatherer communities (for example at K2 and Mapungubwe) and the histories of farming societies on their periphery (notably those of Zimbabwe’s Nyanga Highlands). Much of this research is new and the past two decades have also seen challenges emerge to the importance previously accorded Indian Ocean trade in accounting for the emergence of social complexity, to the historical relationships between major centres (K2, Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami), and to understandings of the internal organisation, chronology, size, and functioning of those sites. Discussing these debates – particularly those relating to the settlement organisation of Great Zimbabwe and other stone-walled sites and the social implications of this – involves considering how far political action should be understood in terms of Indigenous, rather than Western, concepts.

This chapter begins by highlighting southern African archaeology’s importance at a global level, stressing the enormous time-depth over which hominins have been present in the region, the diversity of its archaeological record, and the contributions that this has made and continues to make to broader debates within archaeology and anthropology. Next, it indicates key changes made here relative to the first edition of this book in 2002 and then identifies the main sources of evidence available for reconstructing southern Africa’s past. These include archaeology, palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental science, ethnographic data, historical linguistics, genetics, and oral and written histories. The chapter then introduces the overall structure of the book, ending with a discussion and justification of some key matters of nomenclature regarding how southern Africa’s varied inhabitants have been/should be called. Guidance is also given on matters of orthography relative to sounds not used in English.

Livestock first entered southern Africa a little over 2,000 years ago and by the mid−1600s Khoe-speaking herders were widely distributed across the western third of the region. Debates over how pastoralist societies developed and how and by what routes livestock were introduced have been transformed over the past two decades by significant major fieldwork projects, a growing number of detailed genetic and linguistic studies, and new interpretative frameworks partly inspired by deeper acquaintance with pastoralist practice in East Africa. Important advances have also been made in understanding Khoe rock art, the chronology of pottery, and the relevance of disease in constraining the southward spread of livestock. This chapter reviews these developments, while also grappling with the thorny question of how, if at all, forager and herder societies can be differentiated archaeologically and what form relations took between those who kept domestic livestock and those who did not. Questions of identity (ascribed and asserted) and the degree of coherence to be expected between genetic, linguistic, ethnographic, historical, and archaeological sources come to the fore.