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23990 results in Ancient history

Page 546 of 1200

  • 33 - An Entangled Past: Island Interactions, Mortuary Practices and the Negotiation of Identities on Early Iron Age Cyprus

  • from Life and Death
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 571-584

  • Summary

    This chapter concerns domestic architecture and its occupants in Mediterranean France during the Iron Age. Houses provide crucial information about protohistoric households and society, as they constituted the focus of daily life and stood at the centre of economic, cultural and social activities. The earliest houses in southern Gaul coexisted with those built in wattle and daub. The appearance of new settlement-patterns, architectural forms and building techniques have often been interpreted as related to colonial encounters. Some evidence indicates a substantial continuity in the use of space from the Late Bronze Age onwards. During the early fifth-century BC in Arles, housing blocks have been brought to light in the Jardin d'Hiver area, where houses were made up of a large courtyard. Courtyards or more generally uncovered spaces constituted an important feature of domestic-life in southern Gaul from the early Iron Age onwards. The central courtyard houses differed from their protohistoric counterparts in both ground plan and conception of space.

  • 31 - From the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First: Understanding the Bronze Age Argaric Lifecourse in the Mediterranean ‘Far West’

  • from Life and Death
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 540-553

  • Summary

    Iberian houses display a wide variety of plans, sizes and uses of space. This variety of types, together with their household items and equipment, make up the available data for analysing the various levels of the family and social organisation of the Iberians. In the Iberian area of Valencia, a settlement hierarchy has been described on the basis of both site size and settlement layout and function. A range of settlement types have been excavated in the territories of the towns of Edeta and Kelin. This chapter talks about an Oppidum of La Bastida de les Alcusses, and difference between rural and urban houses, between peasants and craftsmen and even between owners and non-owners. Settlement in the hinterland of the towns and large oppida was made up of fortified sites, such as villages, hamlets, farms and fortlets, and a large number of non-fortified sites of an evidently rural nature such as farms and wineries.

  • 12 - Colonisations and Cultural Developments in the Central Mediterranean

  • from Mobility, Migration and Colonisation
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 215-229

  • Summary

    This chapter concerns the interactions of several east Mediterranean regions with their southern and northern neighbors during the formative period of literate civilization in the Near East, between the mid-fourth and mid-third millennia BC. These regions such as the Anatolian Euphrates valley, the northwest Levant, and the southern Levant, reside at the edges of the core regions of political and cultural innovation during this period of time. During the late fourth millennium BC, all of them came into early contact with one of the core cultures, Uruk Mesopotamia or Egypt, and all were affected, during the early third millennium BC, by the spread of the Kura-Araks cultural tradition, generally thought to have originated in the southern Caucasus and eastern Anatolia during the second half of the fourth millennium BC. Representing the southwestern extremity of the Kura-Araks cultural province, the southern Levant exhibits a chronologically truncated and culturally distant expression of the features described in more northerly regions.

  • 37 - Cult Activities among Central and North Italian Protohistoric Communities

  • from Ritual and Ideology
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 635-649

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the Iron Age archaeology of Cyprus, from the end of the Late Bronze Age (LBA) to the start of the Cypro-Archaic period, ca. 1200-700 BC. First, it considers how the material culture of mortuary practices was actively involved in the multiple social and spatial dynamics, including maritime connections, migrations, colonial encounters and intra-island interactions, that occurred with the collapse of larger, regional palatial societies at the end of the Late Bronze Age. The chapter mainly focuses on the mortuary landscape of Cyprus's East Coast, such as Enkomi, Salamis and Palaepaphos, during the LBA-Early Iron Age. The power of elite groups began to change as the geographical, social and political landscapes shifted; this is reflected in new, hybridised burial practices at Cypro-Geometric period I Salamis. Finally, the chapter explores how the emergence of a city-kingdom was strongly influenced by the prevailing sociopolitical environment at Salamis at the start of the IA.

  • 14 - Migration, Hybridization, and Resistance: Identity Dynamics in the Early Iron Age Southern Levant

  • from Hybridisation and Cultural Encounters
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 252-265

  • Summary

    This chapter confronts the systemic divide in modern scholarship that separates Aegean prehistory from Classical archaeology and considers its ramifications. In so doing, the problems of periodization, absolute chronology, and regionality are tackled. The relative chronology of the early Iron Age is based on painted pottery, the most abundantly preserved item of material culture that has been subjected to closest scrutiny. The chapter discusses four critical developments in the history of Greece during the early Iron Age that were to have an impact on the Mediterranean. Among these were overseas travel and settlement, exchange of commodities and the literacy revolution. The contrast between palatial and non-palatial Greece in the Bronze Age mirrors the contrast, in the early Iron Age, between the Greek polis, on the one hand, and the polis-less tribal states based on kinship, on the other. The chapter also presents the schematic language family trees of Naveh and Sass.

  • 7 - Corridors and Colonies: Comparing Fourth–Third Millennia BC Interactions in Southeast Anatolia and the Levant

  • from Mobility, Migration and Colonisation
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 111-138

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the cultural adaptations to the particular environment of the human groups that inhabited the Balearic Islands in the Bronze Age. Previous studies of the cultural dynamics in the early prehistoric Balearic Islands have mostly been based on architecture, artefact typologies and radiocarbon dates. First, the chapter offers an alternative approach based on metallurgical and faunal studies, which are recent innovations in Balearic archaeology. These shed light on local strategies for exploiting mineral and animal resources and on contacts within and beyond the archipelago. The chapter contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the major transformation of Balearic prehistory that heralds the so-called Talayotic period in Majorca and Menorca and that is not only defined by more complex social organization but is also characterised by as many similarities as differences between the two islands. The evidence points to two processes underway in the Late Bronze Age: a demographic growth and a slight increase in the external contacts.

  • 36 - Ritual as the Setting for Contentious Interaction: From Social Negotiation to Institutionalised Authority in Bronze Age Cyprus

  • from Ritual and Ideology
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 619-634

  • Summary

    This chapter takes a macro-scale perspective of the mortuary record of the second millennium BC, the Early-Middle Bronze Age of southern Iberia. It considers three Bronze Age culture areas that are most commonly considered separately: the Iberian southwest, the southeast or Argaric, North Africa and the role of the Mediterranean as a geographic space and an ecological regime. The chapter discusses important themes that transcend the regional focus of Iberia and North Africa, such as the long use and reuse of tombs, the contributions of bioarchaeology toward understanding the lives of ancient peoples. It also examines how the living transformed the dead through ritual practices during the Early and Middle Bronze Age of southern Iberia. Finally, the chapter discusses the construction of the burial chamber, the manipulation of the body, and the offering of goods to accompany the deceased. Ceramics and metal weapons and tools were generally placed with the deceased in the Middle Bronze Age.

  • Materiality, Memory and Identity

  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 317-394

  • Summary

    This chapter presents the main characteristics of cult activities during four succeeding phases of development of ethnoarcheological studies of ritual, including Early Bronze Age, Middle Bronze Age, Late Bronze Age (LBA), and Early Iron Age, in protohistoric central and northern Italy. The cult activities of the Early and Middle Bronze Age seem to recall the pre-religious phase of Lèvy-Bruhl, as the archaeological record has produced much evidence of rituals but none of a belief in superhuman beings. The LBA is characterised is characterised by a widespread appearance of cremation burials. The ritual importance of water is also evident from the complex of walls and altars around the Mittelstillersee, a lake in the Renon area north of Bozen. The second half of the eighth century BC saw the emergence of the first proto-urban centres and first civic-sanctuaries in many Etruscan and Latial proto-urban centres.

  • 32 - Crossing Borders: Death and Life in Second Millennium BC Southern Iberia and North Africa

  • from Life and Death
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 554-570

  • Summary

    During the first millennium BC, the geography of southwest Iberia, its coasts and internal territories were the set for a complex historical process that involved indigenous populations, Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians that resulted in the ethno-cultural mosaic about which Greek and Roman authors have reported. This chapter focuses on connection routes, forms of contacts and interaction between landscapes and human groups and the different levels of socio-economic and politico-ideological complexity that developed over time. It begins with the Tyrian foundation of Gadir, as this town would later become the centre of an extensive network of inter-regional relations, articulated around primary centres such as Huelva, lower Guadalquivir, as well as coastal and interior peripheries such as south-central Portugal, Extremadura, southern Meseta and upper Guadalquivir. The chapter explains the sixth-century crisis and its impact on coastal southwest Iberia. In time, the entire southwest was reoriented towards Rome and underwent profound political, socioeconomic and cultural reorganisations usually captured by the term Romanisation.

  • 8 - The Anatolian Context of Philia Material Culture in Cyprus

  • from Mobility, Migration and Colonisation
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 139-156

  • Summary

    Using the concept of the maritory, this chapter explores the degree, extent and social significance of material connections between the island worlds of the south-central Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Of all the ways that islands make a difference in a study about ancient human mobility, two are the most important: first, that throughout prehistory, contact between the island group of the central Mediterranean and the rest of the world was entirely through the medium of maritime connections; second, that the sea was the medium which could both isolate the islanders from and bring them into contact with their closest neighbours. The chapter considers three principal cycles of object/human/knowledge mobility that touch on the central Mediterranean over the longue duree, conscious of the fact that the difficulty to pigeonhole archaeological data and processes in neat periodisation schemes should assist constructive generalizations.

  • 3 - Early Island Exploitations: Productive and Subsistence Strategies on the Prehistoric Balearic Islands

  • from Insularity and Connectivity
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 40-56

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the cultural adaptations to the particular environment of the human groups that inhabited the Balearic Islands in the Bronze Age. Previous studies of the cultural dynamics in the early prehistoric Balearic Islands have mostly been based on architecture, artefact typologies and radiocarbon dates. First, the chapter offers an alternative approach based on metallurgical and faunal studies, which are recent innovations in Balearic archaeology. These shed light on local strategies for exploiting mineral and animal resources and on contacts within and beyond the archipelago. The chapter contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the major transformation of Balearic prehistory that heralds the so-called Talayotic period in Majorca and Menorca and that is not only defined by more complex social organization but is also characterised by as many similarities as differences between the two islands. The evidence points to two processes underway in the Late Bronze Age: a demographic growth and a slight increase in the external contacts.

  • 22 - Stone Worlds: Technologies of Rock Carving and Place-Making in Anatolian Landscapes

  • from Materiality, Memory and Identity
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 379-394

  • Summary

    This chapter explores practices of rock carving on the Anatolian peninsula from a diachronic perspective, with special emphasis on the Late Bronze Age and Early-Middle Iron Ages. Linking together the materiality of monuments, rock-carving technologies and issues of landscape imagination, it focuses on the commemorative rock reliefs across the Anatolian landscape. The monuments of concern range from Hittite and post-Hittite commemorative rock reliefs to Urartian, Phrygian and Paphlagonian practices of carving the living rock for cultic, commemorative and funerary purposes. The chapter also critiques the specialised art historical and epigraphic approaches to rock reliefs and rock-cut structures, which portray them as stand-alone monuments and show a certain disregard for their micro-geographical context. Finally, it contributes to studies of landscape and place in Mediterranean archaeology by promoting a shift of focus from macro-scale explanations of the environment to micro-scale engagement with located practices of place-making.

  • 2 - Inside Out? Materiality and Connectivity in the Aegean Archipelago

  • from Insularity and Connectivity
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 25-39

  • Summary

    The Mediterranean is made up of continental littoral and large islands; archipelagos are restricted to the Balearics, the northeast Adriatic and the Aegean. The ancient Greek geographical term 'peraia' describes the territory beyond the limits of a certain area, usually separated by water. First, this chapter discusses the status of the Cyclades as an archipelago in relation to its nearby continental littorals of the Greek and Anatolian mainlands, and the miniature continent of Crete. Second, it presents a diachronic approach that seeks to chart the changing patterns of connectivity between the Cyclades and these areas throughout the course of the Bronze Age. In the late Early Bronze Age (EBA), the seascapes and islandscapes at the heart of the archipelago see influence from the Anatolian mainland. Finally, the chapter discusses anatolianisation, mycenaeanisation and minoanisation, and the Cyclades in the Dark Ages and the Early Iron Age.

  • 11 - Before ‘the Gates of Tartessos’: Indigenous Knowledge and Exchange Networks in the Late Bronze Age Far West

  • from Mobility, Migration and Colonisation
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 196-214

  • Summary

    Two main and opposing models have typically dominated the interpretation of the Phoenician Archaic colonisation phenomenon. The first one is a Marxist and Polanyian model, which maintains that Phoenician colonization was an enterprise conducted by the palace of Tyre and Gadir, its representative in the far west, whose main objectives were to disperse the excess population from the Levant, and to exploit the Tartessian territory by a workforce from the indigenous elites. The second one is agrarian model. This chapter presents evidence of people or imports such as wheelmade pottery, Aegean-type ship in the Laxe Auga dos Cervos Petroglyph, the SW Warrior stele, and local handmade stroke-burnished and painted pottery, in the Eastern Mediterranean before colonization. Wheelmade pottery is known in Later Bronze Age (LBA) pre-Phoenician contexts, which could be placed between the thirteenth and mid-ninth centuries BC in Iberia.

  • 10 - Greece in the Early Iron Age: Mobility, Commodities, Polities, and Literacy

  • from Mobility, Migration and Colonisation
  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 178-195

  • Summary

    The late second millennium BC on Sardinia is among the most dynamic and vital periods in the island's history, when Nuragic society undergoes massive changes. This chapter examines this perplexing period, drawing on the evidence of imports and the built environment to construct a picture of a still inward-turning society whose emergent elites were unsuccessful at overcoming a tradition of acephalous cohesion. The chapter focuses on the best provenanced and best dated of Aegean imports and imitations, Cypriot-style goods, amber, Iberian imports, the Aegean-style pots, the copper oxhide ingots, and two amber bead types such as the Tiryns and Allumiere beads. The Cypriot-style metals, for which it is virtually impossible to confirm if they are imported or locally made, belong to the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC, with some objects dating to the tenth century BC. While some Cypriot-style oxhide ingots have been found in the south, they cluster more in the central zone.

  • Mobility, Migration and Colonisation

  • Edited by A. Bernard Knapp, University of Glasgow, Peter van Dommelen, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    12 January 2015, pp 109-248

  • Summary

    This chapter contrasts the remarkable scarcity of visual imagery during the Early Bronze Age (EBA) of the southern Levant with the wealth of such imagery in the Chalcolithic period. The change between these two periods is not only associated with the disappearance of visual arts, but is manifest as well in the abandonment of settlements and the formation of a smaller number of new ones, either in the same places or at other locations The chapter discusses two cases, the Judean Desert and the Golan, which coupled with the observations regarding the abrupt end of the Chalcolithic mentalité and the disappearance of visual expressions, suggest that this period ended with multiple iconoclastic events, followed by a major symbolic reformation. The violent iconoclastic events that took place during the transition from the Chalcolithic to the EBA paved the way for a new aniconic discourse adopted by the people of southern Levantine society for centuries.

Page 546 of 1200