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.

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.