Chapter 7 explores the archaeological record of the plateau on the eve of the formation of the Tibetan Empire in the 7th century. Written records produced by Tibetan and Chinese scribes become more helpful in interpreting the Tibetan past.

This chapter asks how and when people living precariously put down roots in a Roman empire characterized by high degrees of movement and connectivity. Considering cases of forced displacement (of mining communities and towns), forced immobilization (of the enslaved), and migrant labour, it concludes that precarity was marked not by either staying or moving, but by dissonant relations to place, whether staying in a place but not truly living there, trying to remain at home in a place despite radical change wrought by a conqueror, or refusing to take root in a place that was inescapable in practice.

Describes the principles and application of a wide range of soft-ionization techniques which can be used to characterize larger molecular species, up to proteins and metabolites. This is the area which has grown most rapidly since the publication of the first edition.

This consolidates several chapters in the first edition into one which discusses analytical techniques which have fallen out of favour. Since, however, these techniques have produced many thousands of analyses on archaeological material it considers the issues around using legacy data for modern research.

This chapter uses differences in building techniques as a springboard for considering the ways in which people in positions of, respectively, privilege and precarity imagined the future. It resists the in-built tendency of archaeological typologies to place supposedly poor material culture outside of history and instead shows how the experience of people living precariously was marked by the chronic stress of anticipating a future that demanded reaction.

On January 9, 2013, Cesare Esposito was not happy. The sixty-five-year-old artist, a longtime resident of Rome’s Monti district, had just been evicted from his residence. The heart of Monti essentially covers Rome’s eastern hills (Quirinal, Viminal, Cispian, Esquiline, and Oppian) and the valleys formed between them as the landscape stretches downhill and westward toward the ancient Forum (Plate 0.1; Map 0.1). Esposito’s family had lived here for generations, and he had thrived in the neighborhood that had been one of the areas of Rome most associated with artists and artisans of all sorts for centuries. But Esposito’s connection to Monti has meaning beyond his family history there. He is the artist in charge of one of the highest-profile ceremonies in Monti’s annual calendar: the celebration of the Miracle of Madonna della Neve at the papal basilica of S. Maria Maggiore, which looms over the central part of Monti from the top of the Cispian hill. Every year on August 4, the ceremony recalled the miraculous snowfall that occurred on that same date in 352 CE, when a rich patrician was directed by the Virgin Mary in his dream to construct a basilica where fresh snow fell that morning. The bishop Liberius, upon being informed of this dream, said that he had had the same one, so he marked out a floor plan for the basilica on the ground of the Cispian where snow – somehow in the heat of the late summer – had indeed fallen. Esposito directs the annual reenactment of this snowfall, which entails blasting artificial snowflakes from the roof of the basilica, and he has devoted his artistic efforts from time to time to numerous other church or civic celebrations across the city for decades. But now, Esposito said, he sleeps in the archaeological ruins of the ancient imperial fora that enclosed the lowest part of Monti, forced to look upon Monti and his former residence from the street. Esposito had been fighting the city to keep his apartment and studio since 2006, but he had now suffered the final defeat. Only by selling all of his belongings could he afford to get it back.