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Few empires had such an impact on the conquered peoples as did the Roman empire, creating social, economic, and cultural changes that erased long-standing differences in material culture, languages, cults, rituals and identities. But even Rome could not create a single unified culture. Individual decisions introduced changes in material culture, identity, and behavior, creating local cultures within the global world of the Roman empire that were neither Roman nor native. The author uses Northwest Italy as an exemplary case as it went from a marginal zone to one of the most flourishing and strongly urbanized regions of Italy, while developing a unique regional culture. This volume will appeal to researchers interested in the Roman Empire, as well as those interested in individual and cultural identity in the past.
The Oxford Handbook of Pre-Roman Italy provides a comprehensive account of the many peoples who lived on the Italian peninsula during the last millennium BCE. Written by more than fifty authors, the book describes the diversity of these indigenous cultures, their languages, interactions, and reciprocal influences. It gives emphasis to Greek colonization, the rise of aristocracies, technological innovations, and the spread of literacy, which provided the urban texture that shaped the history of the Italian peninsula.
Among the various practices in antiquity designed for administrative control of storage facilities and archives is the stamped clay sealing applied to the wooden lock of a closed door. This specialized type of door-lock sealing is still quite rare in the archaeological record. The discovery during the 1992 excavation season of an exceptionally preserved clay door-lock sealing in the late Middle Bronze Age (MB III; 1590-1530 BCE) sacred precinct at Tel Haror, Israel, is the first to be identified in this region and the first to be recorded in a temple context and is the subject of this study. This unique find qualifies for a detailed description, and for a reconstruction of its lock, key and sealing, as well as a discussion of the locking mechanism system, following the pioneering research on the outstanding corpus of such sealings from Arslantepe, Malatya. In addition, the archaeological context of the sealing and its possible association with the temple will be discussed.
Scripts (writing systems) usually belong to specific languages and have temporal, spatial and cultural characteristics. The evolution of scripts has been the subject of research for a long time. This is probably because the long-term development of human thinking is reflected in the surviving script relics, many of which are still undeciphered today. The book presents the study of the script evolution with the mathematical tools of systematics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. In the research described, the script is the evolutionary taxonomic unit (taxon), which is analogous to the concept of biological species. Among the methods of phylogenetics, phenetics classifies the investigated taxa...
A landmark contribution to our knowledge of the Roman glass industry in the Western Mediterranean
Megalithism, or the art of using huge boulders to create sacred, pagan monuments and sites, still fascinates us today. How did Prehistoric man cut, transport, and place such enormous stones, some weighing up to 200 metric tons, without bulldozers, drills, and cranes? Yet primitive man, without the written word or wheel, created structures which still stupefy us in the 21st century, both due to their components and the precision used in positioning them. This book takes us back in time to the 5th-2nd millennia B.C. and helps us visualise the Stone Age world and its constructions - menhirs, dolmens, rows and circles of standing stones. Undoubtedly they were sacred places, used for pagan ritual...
Six main decorative styles have been tentatively distinguished in the Early-Middle Bronze age Capo Graziano incised pottery of the Aeolian Islands. This experimental study focuses on the analysis of 68 bowls from the islands of Lipari, Filicudi, Salina and Stromboli and from Milazzo in Sicily. The classification is based on motifs and styles, and integrates typology, technology, composition and decoration in their identification. The styles are linked to production centres showing different spatial and temporal variations and appear to reflect different dynamics: the expert “individual” craftsman, the design in fashion, the symbolic code or the fulfilment of specific functions. The evaluation of skill in application and variability in the concept are measured in order to assess the social implications in the production of the pottery. This interim investigation will continue to refine the chronology and to establish the decorative styles in other Aeolian Islands. It is possible that schematic elements in the decorative styles, such as undulating lines and metopes, reflect the maritime and insular environment of the Aeolian Islands.
The present article analyses the charred seeds and faunal remains from the Late Chalcolithic 2 (ca. 4200-3900 BCE) occupation at Arslantepe, in the Anatolian Malatya plain. Charred seeds are all found in situ, in a single room clearly interpretable as a kitchen on the basis of its installations and materials. Faunal remains are from all sealed and well stratified contexts dated to this period. The identification of species is here presented and evaluated within the broader framework of a reconstruction of primary economy at the site. Comparisons with later Late Chalcolithic agricultural and herding practices at the same site are made with the aim of investigating the changes undergone by the primary economy in the phases of increasing social complexity, along the path that brought to the origin of the first state systems in Upper Mesopotamia.
Case Bastione is a large settlement occupied from the Late Neolithic to the Bronze Age and lying within the western Erei uplands in the valley of the Morello river (central Sicily). The first excavation seasons (2007, 2009, 2013) investigated the Late Copper Age and Early Bronze Age layers (mid 3rd to mid 2nd mill. cal. BC). The campaigns have yielded extensive evidence of domestic structures, and also of a number of craft activities, such as textiles, pottery making, lithic production and possibly metallurgy. Data about the absolute and relative chronologies, based on radiometric dating and the typological analysis of the rich pottery complex, are discussed. Abundant zoological remains also highlight the role of animal husbandry in the subsistence strategies of the village community. The paper ends with a preliminary discussion of geomagnetic and archaeometric analyses carried out during the 2013 campaign.
The Kura Araxes, a cultural tradition of the late 4thand 3rd millennia BC, has recently become a focus of international archaeological research. It was first discovered in the mountains of the Taurus and the South Caucasus. From near the beginning of the tradition evidence suggests that populations bearing some of its hallmarks, black-burnished, handmade pottery and a ritual of the hearth, spread out over a wide region of the Taurus, Zagros, and Caucasus Mountains, and as far south as the area of the Sea of Galilee in the southern Levant. Recent research has questioned whether the simple narrative of a discreet homeland and unassimilated migrants fairly describes the ancient reality. One of the key dependent variables used to trace the prehistory of the Kura Araxes cultural tradition is pottery. This article discusses the cultural meaning and interpretive use of pottery, but also the limits of pottery style alone to reconstruct prehistory. It adds previously unpublished material from Veli Sevin’s surveys in Malatya and Elazığ provinces to the larger database for study of the Kura Araxes.