Understanding the past requires understanding how it has been created. This is not simply about improving methodologies, but also the theoretical approaches employed and the broader socio-political framework within which they are applied. This chapter therefore delineates major developments in southern African archaeology from its nineteenth-century origins to the present, situating them with respect to the region’s wider history and the broader social and political context in which they emerged. It also considers how archaeological research was constrained by, but simultaneously challenged, structures of racial oppression during the twentieth century, differences in the experience of southern Africa’s states (including research disparities within and between them), some of the key paradigms within which archaeological research is currently conducted, and the problems encountered in making archaeology accessible to all sections of society. Another theme concerns the theoretical and methodological challenges that archaeologists face when invoking the ethnographies of southern Africa’s recent or contemporary inhabitants to help understand the past revealed by their research.

Through close analyses of a wide range of Minoan animalian things, we have explored the specificity of their involvements in the experiences of people, and how those engagements contributed to the unique character of sociocultural life in the Aegean, on various levels. Here we draw out key points from across the foregoing analyses. Special attention has come to the objects’ inter-corporeal relationships with living humans and the connections that would have been realized through the objects’ particular qualities—connections with other animals, things, and spaces. Such relations were afforded through different dynamics, including bodily juxtaposition, cultivation of formal assonance, the sharing of specific features (e.g., a forward gaze), and embodiment with the same substances, as well as through similarities in size, composition (e.g., in friezes), and contextualization. Moreover, by working beyond an implicit focus on the design of the objects, to instead emphasize people’s actual experiences with them, we have opened the space for appreciating how both intended and unintended associations involving these complex things were in play together. We should view these not as alternative lenses on the objects, but as forces working concurrently, and upon one another, in the creative realizations that the animalian objects were.

Introduction to the book

Antioch is the first place where Christians congregated. This chapter will explore the establishment of Antioch’s Christian community, as well as its leadership and connections with other churches.

Hellenistic Antioch remains poorly known. Yet the later city’s visual repertoire, whether through emblemata, entire tessellated surfaces, or sculpture in the round is a recursive celebration of a shared Hellenistic past.

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.