Since the 1930s, archaeologists have excavated over 300 mosaics at Antioch and its environs. This essay explores the developments and historiography on Antioch’s mosaics as well as new methodological approaches.

This chapter explores the rise to prominence of Antioch from a nondescript colony to a royal capital.

The materiality of Hellenistic Antioch is confined to a few highly weathered monuments. Nevertheless, the early city plan and urban décor enable the understanding of the urban topography in the following centuries.

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.