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246 results in Archaeology of Europe and The Near and Middle East

Page 1 of 13

Ancient Assyrians
  • Identity and Society in Antiquity and Beyond
  • Jonathan Valk
  • Published online:
    09 October 2025
    Print publication:
    23 October 2025
  • In this book, Jonathan Valk asks a deceptively simple question: What did it mean to be Assyrian in the second millennium bce? Extraordinary evidence from Assyrian society across this millennium enables an answer to this question. The evidence includes tens of thousands of letters and legal texts from an Assyrian merchant diaspora in what is now modern Turkey, as well as thousands of administrative documents and bombastic royal inscriptions associated with the Assyrian state. Valk develops a new theory of social categories that facilitates an understanding of how collective identities work. Applying this theoretical framework to the so-called Old and Middle Assyrian periods, he pieces together the contours of Assyrian society in each period, as revealed in the abundance of primary evidence, and explores the evolving construction of Assyrian identity as well. Valk's study demonstrates how changing historical circumstances condition identity and society, and that the meaning we assign to identities is ever in flux.

Leadership in the Ancient World
  • Concepts, Models, Theories
  • Edited by Melina Tamiolaki
  • Published online:
    14 September 2025
    Print publication:
    16 October 2025
  • Leaders abounded in the ancient world, from kings, pharaohs, emperors, tyrants, politicians, and orators to generals, minor officials and intellectuals. This book opens fresh perspectives on leadership by examining under-explored topics, posing new questions and revisiting old concepts. In particular, it seeks to shift attention from constitutional issues stricto sensu (such as kingship, monarchy, tyranny, etc.) or, more productively, to prompt a re-examination of these issues through the lens of leadership. The volume includes chapters on a range of cultures from across the ancient world in order to promote comparative reflection. Key questions include whether some models of good and bad leadership were universal among ancient cultures or exhibited differences? Why did a certain culture emphasise one leadership quality while another insisted on another? Why did only some cultures develop a theoretical discourse on leadership? How did each culture appropriate, define, redefine (or react) to existing concepts of leadership?

The Archaeology of Pastoralism, Mobility, and Society
  • Beyond the Grass Paradigm
  • Emily Hammer
  • Published online:
    04 September 2025
    Print publication:
    18 September 2025
  • Though mobile pastoralists were long a significant component of many societies in Eurasia and Africa, scholars have long considered them to be materially and documentarily 'invisible.' The archaeological study of pastoralism across these regions has relied on ethnographic analogies and environmentally deterministic models, often with little or no data on historically specific herding communities. This approach has yielded a static picture of pastoralism through time that has only recently been challenged. In this book, Emily Hammer articulates a new framework for investigating variability in past pastoral practices. She proposes ways to develop a more rigorous relationship with pastoralist ethnographies and illustrates new archaeological and scientific methodologies for collecting direct data on herding, mobility, and social complexity in the past. Hammer's approach to the archaeology of pastoralism promotes efforts to dismantle the legacy of evolutionary classifications of human societies, which have drawn sharp distinctions between farmers and herders, and to investigate how diverse non-agricultural and mobile groups have shaped complex society and environment.

The Peopling of the Caucasus
  • Early Human Settlement at the Crossroads of Continents
  • Aram Yardumian, Theodore G. Schurr
  • Published online:
    21 January 2025
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • Located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the Caucasus region has played a critical role in the dissemination of languages, ideas, and cultures since prehistoric times. In this study, Aram Yardumian and Theodore Schurr explore the dispersal of human groups in the Caucasus beginning in the Palaeolithic period. Using evidence from archaeology, linguistics, and anthropological genetics, they trace changes in settlement patterns, cultural practices, and genetic variation. Highlighting the region's ecological diversity, natural resources, and agricultural productivity, Yardumian and Schurr reconstruct the timings and likely migration routes for human settlement following the Last Glacial Maximum, as well as the possible connections to regional economies for these expansions. Based on analysis of archaeological site reports, linguistic relationships, and genetic data previously published separately and in different languages, their synthesis of the most up to date evidence opens new vistas into the chronology and human dynamics of the Caucasus' prehistory.

The Bible Among Ruins
  • Time, Material Remains, and the World of the Biblical Writers
  • Daniel Pioske
  • Published online:
    11 October 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023
  • Biblical writers lived in a world that was already ancient. The lands familiar to them were populated throughout by the ruins of those who had lived two thousand years earlier. References to ruins abound in the Hebrew Bible, attesting to widespread familiarity with the material remains by those who wrote these texts. Never, however, do we find a single passage that expresses an interest in digging among these ruins to learn about those who lived before. Why? In this book, Daniel Pioske offers the first study of ruination in the Hebrew Bible. Drawing on scholarship in biblical studies, archaeology, contemporary historical theory, and philosophy, he demonstrates how the ancient experience of ruins differed radically from that of the modern era. For biblical writers, ruins were connected to temporalities of memory, presence, and anticipation. Pioske's book recreates the encounter with ruins as it was experienced during antiquity and shows how modern archaeological research has transformed how we read the Bible.

Urban Life in the Distant Past
  • The Prehistory of Energized Crowding
  • Michael E. Smith
  • Published online:
    15 March 2023
    Print publication:
    30 March 2023
  • In this book, Michael Smith offers a comparative and interdisciplinary examination of ancient settlements and cities. Early cities varied considerably in their political and economic organization and dynamics. Smith here introduces a coherent approach to urbanism that is transdisciplinary in scope, scientific in epistemology, and anchored in the urban literature of the social sciences. His new insight is 'energized crowding,' a concept that captures the consequences of social interactions within the built environment resulting from increases in population size and density within settlements. Smith explores the implications of features such as empires, states, markets, households, and neighborhoods for urban life and society through case studies from around the world. Direct influences on urban life – as mediated by energized crowding-are organized into institutional (top-down forces) and generative (bottom-up processes). Smith's volume analyzes their similarities and differences with contemporary cities, and highlights the relevance of ancient cities for understanding urbanism and its challenges today.

Heritage, Ideology, and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe
  • Contested Pasts, Contested Presents
  • Edited by Matthew Rampley
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 February 2023
    Print publication:
    15 March 2012
  • Essays looking at heritage practices and the construction of the past, along with how they can be used to build a national identity.

Image and Ornament in the Early Medieval West
  • New Perspectives on Post-Roman Art
  • Matthias Friedrich
  • Published online:
    14 January 2023
    Print publication:
    16 March 2023
  • Scholarship often treats the post-Roman art produced in central and north-western Europe as representative of the pagan identities of the new 'Germanic' rulers of the early medieval world. In this book, Matthias Friedrich offers a critical reevaluation of the ethnic and religious categories of art that still inform our understanding of early medieval art and archaeology. He scrutinises early medieval visual culture by combining archaeological approaches with art historical methods based on contemporary theory. Friedrich examines the transformation of Roman imperial images, together with the contemporary, highly ornamented material culture that is epitomized by 'animal art.' Through a rigorous analysis of a range of objects, he demonstrates how these pathways produced an aesthetic that promoted variety (varietas), a cross-cultural concept that bridged the various ethnic and religious identities of post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean worlds.

Death and the Body in Bronze Age Europe
  • From Inhumation to Cremation
  • Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
  • Published online:
    22 December 2022
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023
  • This volume offers new insights into the radical shift in attitudes towards death and the dead body that occurred in temperate Bronze Age Europe. Exploring the introduction and eventual dominance of cremation, Marie-Louise Stig Sørenson and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury apply a case-study approach to investigate how this transformation unfolded within local communities located throughout central to northern Europe. They demonstrate the deep link between the living and the dead body, and propose that the introduction of cremation was a significant ontological challenge to traditional ideas about death. In tracing the responses to this challenge, the authors focus on three fields of action:  the treatment of the dead body, the construction of a burial place, and ongoing relationships with the dead body after burial. Interrogating cultural change at its most fundamental level, the authors elucidate the fundamental tension between openness towards the 'new' and the conservative pull of the familiar and traditional.

Ancient Gordion
  • Lisa Kealhofer, Peter Grave, Mary M. Voigt
  • Published online:
    23 September 2022
    Print publication:
    08 September 2022
  • Ancient Gordion has long been recognized as a key Iron Age site for Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean. Archaeological research has revealed much about its sequence of occupation. However, as yet no study has explored the underlying drivers of political and economic change at this site. This volume presents an overview of the political and economic histories supporting emergent elites and how they constructed power at Gordion during the Iron Age (1200-300 BCE). Based on geochemical and typological analysis of nearly 2000 Late Bronze Age to Hellenistic ceramic samples, the volume contextualizes this primary dataset through the lens of ceramic production, consumption, exchange and emulation. Synthesizing site data sets, the volume more broadly contributes to our understanding of the pivotal role of groups and their economic, social, and ritual practices in the creation of complex societies.

Plant Domestication and the Origins of Agriculture in the Ancient Near East
  • Shahal Abbo, Avi Gopher, Gila Kahila Bar-Gal
  • Published online:
    12 March 2022
    Print publication:
    24 March 2022
  • The Agricultural Revolution – including the domestication of plants and animals in the Near East – that occurred 10,500 years ago ended millions of years of human existence in small, mobile, egalitarian communities of hunters-gatherers. This Neolithic transformation led to the formation of sedentary communities that produced crops such as wheat, barley, peas, lentils, chickpeas and flax and domesticated range of livestock, including goats, sheep, cattle and pigs. All of these plants and animals still play a major role in the contemporary global economy and nutrition. This agricultural revolution also stimulated the later development of the first urban centres. This volume examines the origins and development of plant domestication in the Ancient Near East, along with various aspects of the new Man-Nature relationship that characterizes food-producing societies. It demonstrates how the rapid, geographically localized, knowledge-based domestication of plants was a human initiative that eventually gave rise to Western civilizations and the modern human condition.

Archaeology, Nation, and Race
  • Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel
  • Raphael Greenberg, Yannis Hamilakis
  • Published online:
    12 March 2022
    Print publication:
    17 March 2022
  • Archaeology, Nation, and Race is a must-read book for students of archaeology and adjacent fields. It demonstrates how archaeology and concepts of antiquity have shaped, and have been shaped by colonialism, race, and nationalism. Structured as a lucid and lively dialogue between two leading scholars, the volume compares modern Greece and modern Israel – two prototypical and influential cases – where archaeology sits at the very heart of the modern national imagination. Exchanging views on the foundational myths, moral economies, and racial prejudices in the field of archaeology and beyond, Hamilakis and Greenberg explore topics such as the colonial origins of national archaeologies, the crypto-colonization of the countries and their archaeologies, the role of archaeology as a process of purification, and the racialization and 'whitening' of Greece and Israel and their archaeological and material heritage. They conclude with a call for decolonization and the need to forge alliances with subjugated communities and new political movements.

Palaeolithic Europe
  • A Demographic and Social Prehistory
  • Jennifer C. French
  • Published online:
    27 October 2021
    Print publication:
    09 December 2021
  • In this book, Jennifer French presents a new synthesis of the archaeological, palaeoanthropological, and palaeogenetic records of the European Palaeolithic, adopting a unique demographic perspective on these first two-million years of European prehistory. Unlike prevailing narratives of demographic stasis, she emphasises the dynamism of Palaeolithic populations of both our evolutionary ancestors and members of our own species across four demographic stages, within a context of substantial Pleistocene climatic changes. Integrating evolutionary theory with a socially oriented approach to the Palaeolithic, French bridges biological and cultural factors, with a focus on women and children as the drivers of population change. She shows how, within the physiological constraints on fertility and mortality, social relationships provide the key to enduring demographic success. Through its demographic focus, French combines a 'big picture' perspective on human evolution with careful analysis of the day-to-day realities of European Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities—their families, their children, and their lives.

Power from Below in Premodern Societies
  • The Dynamics of Political Complexity in the Archaeological Record
  • Edited by T. L. Thurston, Manuel Fernández-Götz
  • Published online:
    08 October 2021
    Print publication:
    21 October 2021
  • This volume challenges previous views of social organization focused on elites by offering innovative perspectives on 'power from below.' Using a variety of archaeological, anthropological, and historical data to question traditional narratives of complexity as inextricably linked to top-down power structures, it exemplifies how commoners have developed strategies to sustain non-hierarchical networks and contest the rise of inequalities. Through case studies from around the world – ranging from Europe to New Guinea, and from Mesoamerica to China – an international team of contributors explores the diverse and dynamic nature of power relations in premodern societies. The theoretical models discussed throughout the volume include a reassessment of key concepts such as heterarchy, collective action, and resistance. Thus, the book adds considerable nuance to our understanding of power in the past, and also opens new avenues of reflection that can help inform discussions about our collective present and future.

A History of World Egyptology
  • Edited by Andrew Bednarski, Aidan Dodson, Salima Ikram
  • Published online:
    01 June 2021
    Print publication:
    27 May 2021
  • A History of World Egyptology is a ground-breaking reference work that traces the study of ancient Egypt over the past 150 years. Global in purview, it enlarges our understanding of how and why people have looked, and continue to look, into humankind's distant past through the lens of the enduring allure of ancient Egypt. Written by an international team of scholars, the volume investigates how territories around the world have engaged with, and have been inspired by, ancient Egypt and its study, and how that engagement has evolved over time. Chapters present a specific territory from different perspectives, including institutional and national, while examining a range of transnational links as well. The volume thus touches on multiple strands of scholarship, embracing not only Egyptology, but also social history, the history of science and reception studies. It will appeal to amateurs and professionals with an interest in the histories of Egypt, archaeology and science.

Mobile Technologies in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond
  • Edited by C. N. Duckworth, A. Cuénod, D. J. Mattingly
  • Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    03 September 2020
  • The ancient Sahara has often been treated as a periphery or barrier, but this agenda-setting book – the final volume of the Trans-Saharan Archaeology Series – demonstrates that it was teeming with technological innovations, knowledge transfer, and trade from long before the Islamic period. In each chapter, expert authors present important syntheses, and new evidence for technologies from oasis farming and irrigation, animal husbandry and textile weaving, to pottery, glass and metal making by groups inhabiting the Sahara and contiguous zones. Scientific analysis is brought together with anthropology and archaeology. The resultant picture of transformations in technologies between the third millennium BC and the second millennium AD is rich and detailed, including analysis of the relationship between the different materials and techniques discussed, and demonstrating the significance of the Sahara both in its own right and in telling the stories of neighbouring regions.

Urbanisation and State Formation in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond
  • Edited by Martin Sterry, David J. Mattingly
  • Published online:
    23 March 2020
    Print publication:
    26 March 2020
  • The themes of sedentarisation, urbanisation and state formation are fundamental ones in the archaeology of many diverse parts of the world but have been little explored in relation to early societies of the Saharan zone. Moreover, the possibility has rarely been considered that the precocious civilisations bordering this vast desert were interconnected by long-range contacts and knowledge networks. The orthodox opinion of many of the key oasis zones within the Sahara is that they were not created before the early medieval period and the Islamic conquest of Mediterranean North Africa. Major claims of this volume are that the ultimate origins of oasis settlements in many parts of the Sahara were considerably earlier, that by the first millennium AD some of these oasis settlements were of a size and complexity to merit the categorisation 'towns' and that a few exceptional examples were focal centres within proto-states or early state-level societies.

Herodotus in the Long Nineteenth Century
  • Edited by Thomas Harrison, Joseph Skinner
  • Published online:
    13 March 2020
    Print publication:
    26 March 2020
  • Herodotus in the Long Nineteenth Century traces the impact of Herodotus' Histories during a momentous period in world history - an era of heightened social mobility, religious controversy, scientific discovery and colonial expansion. Contributions by an international team of specialists in Greek historiography, classical archaeology, receptions, and nineteenth-century intellectual history shed new light on how the Histories were read, remembered, and re-imagined in historical writing and in an exciting array of real-world contexts: from the classrooms of English public schools and universities to the music hall, museum, or gallery; from the news-stand to the nursery; and from the banks of the Nile to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. They reveal not only how engagement with Herodotus' work permeated nationalist discourses of the period, but also the extent to which these national and disciplinary contexts helped shape the way both Herodotus and the ancient past have been understood and interpreted.

Consciousness, Creativity, and Self at the Dawn of Settled Life
  • Edited by Ian Hodder
  • Published online:
    22 February 2020
    Print publication:
    05 March 2020
  • Over recent years, a number of scholars have argued that the human mind underwent a cognitive revolution in the Neolithic. This volume seeks to test these claims at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey and in other Neolithic contexts in the Middle East. It brings together cognitive scientists who have developed theoretical frameworks for the study of cognitive change, archaeologists who have conducted research into cognitive change in the Neolithic of the Middle East, and the excavators of the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük who have over recent years been exploring changes in consciousness, creativity and self in the context of the rich data from the site. Collectively, the authors argue that when detailed data are examined, theoretical evolutionary expectations are not found for these three characteristics. The Neolithic was a time of long, slow and diverse change in which there is little evidence for an internal cognitive revolution.

The Textile Revolution in Bronze Age Europe
  • Production, Specialisation, Consumption
  • Edited by Serena Sabatini, Sophie Bergerbrant
  • Published online:
    20 November 2019
    Print publication:
    21 November 2019
  • Textile production and the introduction of wool and woolen textiles represented a great revolution in Bronze Age Europe at the dawn of the second millennium BC. The available contemporary written sources from the Mediterranean and Near East suggest that textile production had a strong impact on the cultural, social, and economic life. In most parts of continental Europe, however, archaeological material alone can help us understand the details relating to textile production and its wider importance to early societies. This book provides new insights on patterns of production, specialization, and consumption of textiles in Europe throughout the Bronze Age. Assembling a diverse array of studies on various aspect of the textile production and economy, the essays, specially written for this volume, provide a wide range of scientific data as well as archaeological evidence. They also show the great potential of examining early textile production through the use of innovative methodologies and diverse perspectives.

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