Papers in Italian Archaeology VII: The Archaeology of Death


Book Description

This volume collects more than 60 papers by contributors from the British Isles, Italy and other parts of continental Europe, and North and South America, focussing on recent developments in Italian archaeology from the Neolithic to the modern period.




The Peoples of Ancient Italy


Book Description

Although there are many studies of certain individual ancient Italic groups (e.g. the Etruscans, Gauls and Latins), there is no work that takes a comprehensive view of each of them—the famous and the less well-known—that existed in Iron Age and Roman Italy. Moreover, many previous studies have focused only on the material evidence for these groups or on what the literary sources have to say about them. This handbook is conceived of as a resource for archaeologists, historians, philologists and other scholars interested in finding out more about Italic groups from the earliest period they are detectable (early Iron Age, in most instances), down to the time when they begin to assimilate into the Roman state (in the late Republican or early Imperial period). As such, it will endeavor to include both archaeological and historical perspectives on each group, with contributions from the best-known or up-and-coming archaeologists and historians for these peoples and topics. The language of the volume is English, but scholars from around the world have contributed to it. This volume covers the ancient peoples of Italy more comprehensively in individual chapters, and it is also distinct because it has a thematic section.




The end of the lake-dwellings in the Circum-Alpine region


Book Description

After more than 3500 years of occupation in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, the many lake-dwellings around the Circum-Alpine region ‘suddenly’ came to an end. Throughout that period alternating phases of occupation and abandonment illustrate how resilient lacustrine populations were against change: cultural/environmental factors might have forced them to relocate temporarily, but they always returned to the lakes. So why were the lake-dwellings finally abandoned and what exactly happened towards the end of the Late Bronze Age that made the lake-dwellers change their way of life so drastically? The new research presented here draws upon the results of a four-year-long project dedicated to shedding light on this intriguing conundrum. Placing a particular emphasis upon the Bronze Age, a multidisciplinary team of researchers has studied the lake-dwelling phenomenon inside out, leaving no stones unturned, enabling identification of all possible interactive socioeconomic and environmental factors that can be subsequently tested against each other to prove (or disprove) their validity. By refitting the various pieces of the jigsaw a plausible, but also rather unexpected, picture emerges.




The Etruscan World


Book Description

The Etruscans can be shown to have made significant, and in some cases perhaps the first, technical advances in the central and northern Mediterranean. To the Etruscan people we can attribute such developments as the tie-beam truss in large wooden structures, surveying and engineering drainage and water tunnels, the development of the foresail for fast long-distance sailing vessels, fine techniques of metal production and other pyrotechnology, post-mortem C-sections in medicine, and more. In art, many technical and iconographic developments, although they certainly happened first in Greece or the Near East, are first seen in extant Etruscan works, preserved in the lavish tombs and goods of Etruscan aristocrats. These include early portraiture, the first full-length painted portrait, the first perspective view of a human figure in monumental art, specialized techniques of bronze-casting, and reduction-fired pottery (the bucchero phenomenon). Etruscan contacts, through trade, treaty and intermarriage, linked their culture with Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily, with the Italic tribes of the peninsula, and with the Near Eastern kingdoms, Greece and the Greek colonial world, Iberia, Gaul and the Punic network of North Africa, and influenced the cultures of northern Europe. In the past fifteen years striking advances have been made in scholarship and research techniques for Etruscan Studies. Archaeological and scientific discoveries have changed our picture of the Etruscans and furnished us with new, specialized information. Thanks to the work of dozens of international scholars, it is now possible to discuss topics of interest that could never before be researched, such as Etruscan mining and metallurgy, textile production, foods and agriculture. In this volume, over 60 experts provide insights into all these aspects of Etruscan culture, and more, with many contributions available in English for the first time to allow the reader access to research that may not otherwise be available to them. Lavishly illustrated, The Etruscan World brings to life the culture and material past of the Etruscans and highlights key points of development in research, making it essential reading for researchers, academics and students of this fascinating civilization.




Between Town and Monastery. Peasant economy in the first millennium AD


Book Description

Approaches to early medieval peasantry are often polarized, either enhancing the benefits brought by the weakening of aristocratic dominance or emphasizing the limited prospects for peasant development in the absence of a solid extra-regional trade network. This study offers a long-term overview of the peasant economy throughout the 1st millennium AD in the Upper Volturno Basin, between the town of Isernia and the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno. The reader is presented with data collected from two archaeological surveys, and is invited to scrutinize changes in settlement patterns, ancient land use and ceramic distributions while the main economic center shifted from town to monastery. These proxies of economic performance offer a vantage point to reconstruct the history of agrarian production and of exchange networks in Central Italy, opening a novel outlook on peasant social dynamics at a time when the Roman economic system transitioned into the feudal system. The results show that the “golden age of peasants” was an age of experimentation, forcing to reconsider the role of the peasantry in the making of the feudal economy.




Archaic and Classical Greek Sicily


Book Description

Ancient Greek migrants in Sicily produced societies and economies that both paralleled and differed from their homeland. Explanations for these similarities and differences have been hotly debated. On the one hand, some scholars have viewed the ancient Greeks as one in a long line of migrants who were shaped by Sicily and its inhabitants. On the other hand, other scholars have argued that the Greeks acted as the main source of innovation and achievement in the culture of ancient Sicily, a culture that was still removed from that of mainland Greece. Neither of these positions is completely satisfactory. What is lacking in this debate is a basic framework for understanding ancient Sicily's social and economic history. Archaic and Classical Greek Sicily represents the first ever systematic and comprehensive attempt to synthesize the historical and archaeological evidence, and to deploy it to test the various historical models proposed over the past two centuries. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines classical and prehistoric studies, texts and material culture, and a variety of methods and theories to put the history of Greek Sicily on a completely new footing. While Sicily and Greece had conjoined histories from the start, their relationship was not one of periphery and center or of colony and state in any sense, but of an interdependent and mutually enriching diaspora. At the same time, local conditions and peoples, including Phoenician migrants, also shaped the evolution of Sicilian Greek societies and economies. This book reveals and explains the similarities and differences between developments in Greek Sicily and the mainland, and brings greater clarity to the parts played by locals and immigrants in ancient Sicily's impressive achievements.




Religion and its History


Book Description

Religion and its History offers a reflection of our operative concept of religion and religions, developing a set of approaches that bridge the widely assumed gulf between analysing present religion and doing history of religion. Religious Studies have adapted a wide range of methodologies from sociological tool kits to insights and concepts from disciplines of social and cultural studies. Their massive historical claims, which typically idealize and reify communities and traditions, and build normative claims thereupon, lack a critical engagement on the part of the researchers. This book radically rethinks and critically engages with these biases. It does so by offering neither an abridged global history of religion nor a small handbook of methodology. Instead, this book presents concepts and methods that allow the analysis of contemporary and past religious practices, ideas, and institutions within a shared framework.




Ceramics, Cuisine and Culture


Book Description

The 23 papers presented here are the product of the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and approaches to the study of kitchen pottery between archaeologists, material scientists, historians and ethnoarchaeologists. They aim to set a vital but long-neglected category of evidence in its wider social, political and economic contexts. Structured around main themes concerning technical aspects of pottery production; cooking as socioeconomic practice; and changing tastes, culinary identities and cross-cultural encounters, a range of social economic and technological models are discussed on the basis of insights gained from the study of kitchen pottery production, use and evolution. Much discussion and work in the last decade has focussed on technical and social aspects of coarse ware and in particular kitchen ware. The chapters in this volume contribute to this debate, moving kitchen pottery beyond the Binfordian ‘technomic’ category and embracing a wider view, linking processualism, ceramic-ecology, behavioral schools, and ethnoarchaeology to research on historical developments and cultural transformations covering a broad geographical area of the Mediterranean region and spanning a long chronological sequence.




Meetings of Cultures in the Black Sea Region


Book Description

As a theme, Meetings of Cultures in the Black Sea Region: Between Conflict and Coexistence arouses strong feelings. From the remotest Antiquity, the indigenous and nomadic non-Greek populations of the Pontic region were persistently viewed as one of the major Others, first of all by Mediterranean Greeks. And because the region geographically was located as a bridge between Europe and Asia it was, and still is, also part of a Europe/Asia discourse of dichotomy. As far back in time as Antiquity Western self-understanding and identity formation has been shaped not least through its colonial experiences. Until recently, such colonial experience has led to a very static picture in our analysis of colonial encounters. However, as a result of post-colonialism, post-modernism and now globalization our conception of colonization has undergone a rapid and far-reaching conceptual change. Gone are the days when the Black Sea region was seen as a sea of barbarian wilds enlightened by small flicks of Greek civilization along the coast. Settling the Black Sea region was a challenge for the Greeks. Compared with the Mediterranean, this happened relatively late, and the attempt of settling the land was not always equally successful. In fact, frequently the power balance was in favour of the indigenous population. Nevertheless, the cultivation of the land and the establishment of exchange systems must have been beneficial for all participants in the exchange network. In this volume, the acts of an international, interdisciplinary conference held at Sandbjerg Manor House, Denmark in January 2006 are published. 19 contributions by scholars from Denmark, France, Georgia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Russia, and Ukraine give a profound discussion of various topics such as the physical arena of the colonial encounters as spaces of identity; the layout of land and protection of cities; the dynamics of the cultural exchange; the perception of how it was to be Greek in the Pontic realm, and finally the reciprocal strategies exerted by the Greeks and Scythians in Olbia as described in Herodotos' Fourth Book of his Histories. Through the many-sided contributions it is also revealed, how self and other is two sides of the same coin - yesterday, today and, tomorrow.




Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome


Book Description

Classicists have long wondered what everyday life was like in ancient Greece and Rome. How, for example, did the slaves, visitors, inhabitants or owners experience the same home differently? And how did owners manipulate the spaces of their homes to demonstrate control or social hierarchy? To answer these questions, Hannah Platts draws on a diverse range of evidence and an innovative amalgamation of methodological approaches to explore multisensory experience – auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory and visual – in domestic environments in Rome, Pompeii and Herculaneum for the first time, from the first century BCE to the second century CE. Moving between social registers and locations, from non-elite urban dwellings to lavish country villas, each chapter takes the reader through a different type of room and offers insights into the reasons, emotions and cultural factors behind perception, recording and control of bodily senses in the home, as well as their sociological implications. Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome will appeal to all students and researchers interested in Roman daily life and domestic architecture.