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What is Hadrian's Wall made of, where did this material come from and how has it been reused in other buildings in the communities that emerged in the centuries after the Roman Empire? By studying the fabric of Hadrian's Wall using a geological approach combined with archaeological methods, is it possible to refine our answers to these questions? This study describes how the relationship between the geology of the Walls landscape and its fabric may be used to further understand the Wall and presents a significant set of new geological and archaeological data on the Walrsquo;s stones from across the length of the Wall. This data set has been collected in two complementary ways. First as a citizen-science project, where volunteers from local communities were trained to visually characterize sandstones and resulting in data collecting on large numbers of the Wall’s stones along the length of the Wall. Secondly, analytical research was used to gather in scientific data for a selected sets of rocks and stones. Geochemical data was captured using an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, and petrographic observations made using a petrographic microscope and thin sections. The combined methods provide a framework for geological analysis of the Wall supported by robust data. It builds on earlier work on Roman quarrying and stone preparation highlighting not only stone sources, but the criteria for choosing stone, stone preparation methods, and the implied routes to the Wall. At the heart of this study lies the ability to uniquely identify different sandstone types. Geological methods used to achieve this are explored, as are the ways in which the sandstones form. This highlights both the possibilities and limits of this approach.

First English language assessment and discussion of the ebb and flow in development and decline of pre-industrial urban sites in western Thessaly from the 4th century BCE to the middle Ages.This book explores urbanism in Antiquity from an archaeological perspective, focusing on the area of western Thessaly in central Greece. Presenting all the available evidence for ancient urban sites in the region, the study outlines and discusses the origins, development, and decline of urbanism in the area.The archaeological evidence shows that urban sites in western Thessaly developed from the mid-4th century BCE, with at least 25 identified contemporaneous cities spread over the area. These cities appear to have been planned and organised from the onset, with regular street-grids, fortification systems and water supply works, but were generally short-lived, typically existing for only five–six generations. Most of the sites were completely or nearly completely abandoned as settlements in the early 2nd century BCE, often with evidence of violent destruction, and only a handful survived as smaller regional centres under the Roman administration. Restorations of the former urban sites and especially their fortifications occur towards the end of Antiquity, especially the first half of the 6th century CE, but re-occupation appears again to have been short lived, as only three cities survived into the Middle Ages.From a regional perspective, the study shows that the rise and fall of urbanism itself did not necessarily cause complete socio-political disruption, but rather reflect changes in regional and supra-regional political organisation. On a global scale, the study exemplifies the political nature of the pre-Industrial city, its synthetic rather than organic role in agrarian societies, and the cyclic nature of urbanity in history.The book contains an extensive catalogue, presenting each site with photographs, topographical sketches, and complete bibliography.

An innovative series of case studies looking at the significance, meaning and social context of costume and textiles used in dance among a variety of ancient cultures and civilisations.Dress is at the core of dance. It adorns dancers, defines various roles and forms symbolic expressions that, for example, either bind people together or opposes them. It is a communicative tool that gives crucial information for understanding the dance as well as the culture and the sociological effects of a group of people. As such, dress transcends how it is seen visually to address what is being communicated. Nonetheless, studies in ancient dance have rarely taken clothing into consideration.Therefore, this publication gathers articles that give new perspectives and insights on ancient dances and their ancient textiles. Comprehension of ancient dance benefits from investigations undertaken through the lens of dress. And research on ancient dress is understood through its relation to body movement and performative rituals, thus reinforcing the progressive integration of an anthropological and sociological dimension into historical analysis of ancient textiles. For the first time, the two-way transfer of knowledge between dance studies and costume studies is connected via an innovative approach. Among the issues that are specifically addressed are the movement design of dress for dance, its sensory experience, gender and identity, reenactment and reception.The chronological range of the publication is limited to the ancient world (3rd millennium BC to 5th century AD), and the geographical definition is meant to be broad in order to promote a comparative approach and cross-cultural dialogue, as well as discourse between fields and disciplines.

The study of Roman urbanism – especially its early (Republican) phases – is extensively rooted in the evidence provided by a series of key sites, several of them located in Italy. Some of these Italian towns (e.g. Fregellae, Alba Fucens, Cosa) have received a great deal of scholarly attention in the past and they are routinely referenced as textbook examples, framing much of our understanding of the broad phenomenon of Roman urbanism. However, discussions of these sites tend to fall back on well-established interpretations, with relatively little or no awareness of more recent developments. This is remarkable, since our understanding of these sites has since evolved thanks to new archaeological fieldwork, often characterised by the pursuit of new questions and the application of new approaches. Similarly, new evidence from other sites has since prompted a reconsideration of time-honoured views about the nature, role and long-term trajectory of Roman towns in Italy. Tracing its origins in the Laurence Seminar on Roman Urbanism in Italy: recent discoveries and new directions, which took place at the Faculty of Classics of the University of Cambridge (27–28 May 2022), this volume brings together scholars whose recent work at key sites is contributing to expand, change or challenge our current knowledge and understanding of Roman urbanism in Italy. The individual chapters showcase some of the most recent methods and approaches applied to the study of Roman towns, discussing the broader implications of fresh archaeological discoveries from both well known and less widely known sites, from the Po Plain to Southern Italy, from the Republican to the Late Antique period (and beyond).

Clachtoll broch is one of the most spectacular Iron Age settlements on the northern mainland of Scotland. When it became clear that the structure was threatened by coastal erosion, community heritage group Historic Assynt launched a major program of conservation and excavation works designed to secure the vulnerable structure and recover the archaeological evidence of its occupation and use. The resulting excavation provided evidence of a long and complex history of construction and rebuilding, with the final, middle Iron Age occupation phase ending in a catastrophic fire and collapse of the tower by the early years of the first century AD. The internal deposits span perhaps 50 years of the brochsquo;s final occupation and were remarkably well preserved, with no evidence for secondary re-use or disturbance after the fire. As a result, the excavation provides a remarkable snapshot of life in Iron Age Scotland, with an artifact assemblage attesting to daily agricultural life as well as long-range contacts that sets the broch within a wider Atlantic community. Specialist analysis of the artifactual and palaeoenvironmental evidence coupled with detailed analysis of the structure in its local geographical context combine to provide a major new contribution to the archaeology of north-west Scotland, with wider implications for our understanding of late prehistoric society in northern Britain.This report comprises the results of the archaeological investigations at Clachtoll, compiled by a team of archaeologists and specialists from AOC Archaeology Group, and brings together evidence from a range of specialist analyses as well as environmental and landscape investigations.

Writing in the ancient Mediterranean existed against a backdrop of very high levels of interaction and contact. In the societies around its shores, writing was a dynamic practice that could serve many purposes – from a tool used by elites to control resources and establish their power bases to a symbol of local identity and a means of conveying complex information and ideas. This volume presents a group of papers by members of the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) research team and visiting fellows, offering a range of different perspectives and approaches to problems of writing in the ancient Mediterranean. They focus on practices, viewing writing as something that people do within a wider social and cultural context, and on adaptations, considering the ways in which writing changed and was changed by the people using it.

The Greco-Roman world is identified in the modern mind by its cities. This includes both specific places such as Athens and Rome, but also an instantly recognizable style of urbanism wrought in marble and lived in by teeming tunic-clad crowds. Selective and misleading this vision may be, but it speaks to the continuing importance these ancient cities have had in the centuries that followed and the extent to which they define the period in subsequent memory. Although there is much that is mysterious about them, the cities of the Roman Mediterranean are, for the most part, historically known. That the names and pasts of these cities remain known to us is the product of an extraordinary process of remembering and forgetting stretching back to antiquity that took place throughout the former Roman world. This volume tackles this subject of the survival and transformation of the ancient city through memory, drawing upon the methodological and theoretical lenses of memory studies and resilience theory to view the way the Greco-Roman city lived and vanished for the generations that separate the present from antiquity.This book analyzes the different ways in which urban communities of the post-Antique world have tried to understand and relate to the ancient city on their own terms, examining it as a process of forgetting as well as remembering. Many aspects of the ancient city were let go as time passed, but those elements that survived, that were actively remembered, have shaped the many understandings of what it was. In order to do so, this volume assembles specialists in multiple fields to bring their perspectives to bear on the subject through eleven case studies that range from late Antiquity to the mid-twentieth century, and from the Iberian Peninsula to Iran. Through the examination of archaeological remains, changing urban layouts and chronicles, travel guides and pamphlets, they track how the ancient city was made useful or consigned to oblivion.

Britain is internationally renowned for the high quality and exquisite crafting of its later prehistoric grave goods (c. 4000 BC to AD 43). Many of prehistoric Britain's most impressive artefacts have come from graves. Interred with both inhumations and cremations, they provide some of the most durable and well-preserved insights into personal identity and the prehistoric life-course, yet they also speak of the care shown to the dead by the living, and of people’s relationships with 'things'. Objects matter. This book's title is an intentional play on words. These are objects in burials; but they are also goods, material culture, that must be taken seriously. Within it, we outline the results of the first long-term, large-scale investigation into grave goods during this period, which enables a new level of understanding of mortuary practice and material culture throughout this major period of technological innovation and social transformation. Analysis is structured at a series of different scales, ranging from macro-scale patterning across Britain, to regional explorations of continuity and change, to site-specific histories of practice, to micro-scale analysis of specific graves and the individual objects (and people) within them. We bring these different scales of analysis together in the first ever book focusing specifically on objects and death in later prehistoric Britain. Focusing on six key case study regions, the book innovatively synthesises antiquarian reports, research projects and developer funded excavations. At the same time, it also engages with, and develops, a number of recent theoretical trends within archaeology, including personhood, object biography and materiality, ensuring that it will be of relevance right across the discipline. Its subject matter will also resonate with those working in anthropology, sociology, museology and other areas where death, burial and the role of material culture in people’s lives are key contemporary issues.

According to one narrative, that received almost canonical status a century ago with Francis Haverfield, the orthogonal grid was the most important development of ancient town planning, embodying values of civilization in contrast to barbarism, diffused in particular by hundreds of Roman colonial foundations, and its main legacy to subsequent urban development was the model of the grid city, spread across the New World in new colonial cities. This book explores the shortcomings of that all too colonialist narrative and offers new perspectives. It explores the ideals articulated both by ancient city founders and their modern successors; it looks at new evidence for Roman colonial foundations to reassess their aims; and it looks at the many ways post-Roman urbanism looked back to the Roman model with a constant re-appropriation of the idea of the Roman.

The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualize cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodization and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine’s foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterized by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travelers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities’ pasts live on in their presents.

This first volume, presenting research carried out through the Exeter: A Place in Time project, provides a synthesis of the development of Exeter within its local, regional, national and international hinterlands. Exeter began life in c. AD 55 as one of the most important legionary bases within early Roman Britain, and for two brief periods in the early and late 60s AD, Exeter was a critical centre of Roman power within the new province. When the legion moved to Wales the fortress was converted into the civitas capital for the Dumnonii. Its development as a town was, however, relatively slow, reflecting the gradual pace at which the region as a whole adapted to being part of the Roman world. The only evidence we have for occupation within Exeter between the 5th and 8th centuries is for a church in what was later to become the Cathedral Close. In the late 9th century, however, Exeter became a defended burh, and this was followed by the revival of urban life. Exeter’s wealth was in part derived from its central role in the south-west’s tin industry, and by the late 10th century Exeter was the fifth most productive mint in England. Exeter’s importance continued to grow as it became an episcopal and royal centre, and excavations within Exeter have revealed important material culture assemblages that reflect its role as an international port.

Despite the flourishing of epichoric studies on the Archaic Greek scripts in the 1960s, embodied by archaeologists Lilian Hamilton Jeffery and Margherita Guarducci, most scholarship on early alphabetic writing in Greece has focused on questions around the origin of ‘the Greek alphabet’ instead of acknowledging the diversity of alphabetic systems that emerged in Geometric and Archaic times. The present book proposes to bring back the epichoric approach by focusing on the different ways in which the earliest epigraphic evidence represents the spoken Greek dialects. However, instead of continuing the palaeographic methodology of previous studies, this analysis follows the latest trends in grapholinguistics, more specifically the methodology of comparative graphematics. By examining the grapheme-phoneme relationships across Greek-speaking regions, it is possible to recognize that diversity and to draw connections with neighboring contemporaneous alphabets, such as those for Phrygian, Eteocretan and Etruscan. This work, carried out within the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) project, aims to contribute towards the conceptualization of the so-called epichoric scripts as independent alphabets, as well as their framing within the ecology of ancient Mediterranean writing systems. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

This volume provides an ambitious synopsis of the complex, colourful world of textiles in ancient Mediterranean iconography. A wealth of information on ancient textiles is available from depictions such as sculpture, vase painting, figurines, reliefs and mosaics. Commonly represented in clothing, textiles are also present in furnishings and through the processes of textile production. The challenge for anyone analysing ancient iconography is determining how we interpret what we see. As preserved textiles rarely survive in comparable forms, we must consider the extent to which representations of textiles reflect reality, and critically evaluate the sources. Images are not simple replicas or photographs of reality. Instead, iconography draws on select elements from the surrounding world that were recognisable to the ancient audience, and reveal the perceptions, ideologies, and ideas of the society in which they were produced. Through examining the durable evidence, this anthology reveals the ephemeral world of textiles and their integral role in the daily life, cult and economy of the ancient Mediterranean.

The Eastern Fertile Crescent region of western Iran and eastern Iraq hosted major developments in the transition from hunter-forager to farmer-herder lifestyles through the Early Neolithic period, 10,000-7000 BC. Within the scope of the Central Zagros Archaeological Project, excavations have been conducted since 2012 at two Early Neolithic sites in the Kurdistan region of Iraq: Bestansur and Shimshara. Bestansur represents an early stage in the transition to sedentary, farming life, where the inhabitants pursued a mixed strategy of hunting, foraging, herding and cultivating, maximizing the new opportunities afforded by the warmer, wetter climate of the Early Holocene. They also constructed substantial buildings of mudbrick, including a major building with a minimum of 65 human individuals, mainly infants, buried under its floor in association with hundreds of beads. These human remains provide new insights into mortuary practices, demography, diet and disease.

Between 1975 and 1984 almost the entire area of the Roman fort of Segedunum in Wallsend was excavated under the direction of Charles Daniels, senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Newcastle University. It is these excavations which form the subject of this publication. This comprehensive report on the structural remains (Vol. 1) and finds (Vol. 2) show clearly that Daniels’ work represented one of the most ambitious and prolonged programmes of fieldwork attempted on the northern frontier up to that point and has made Wallsend one of the most fully investigated of Roman forts in Britain. In most areas the remains were not excavated down to natural and so the remains revealed were predominantly those of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, with some late Roman features. Volume 1 describes first the stratigraphic sequences and excavation of the stone and timber buildings of the fort’s central range: the granary, hospital, headquarters (principia), commanding officer’s house (praetorium), the forehall fronting the principia and granary, and a long narrow building, perhaps a workshop, on the north side of the eastern via principalis. In the case of all but the praetorium these buildings were fully exposed. Later chapters cover the buildings in the northern third of the fort, revealed to be a group of six infantry barracks which underwent several phases of rebuilding and refurbishment including partial replacment by a stable block. Parts 4 and 5 examine the cavalry barracks in the southern part of the fort (retentura) and excavations of sections of the fort defences on all four sides, particularly of discrete structures such as towers and gates. Volume 2, on the predominantly 2nd–3rd century material culture from the site, looks at the stonework, pottery, coins and small finds recovered. The stonework and ceramic building material provides information on the appearance of the fort and include a very rare stone latrine seat and a bench support. The pottery comprises samian, mortaria, including a large collection stamped by Anaus, amphorae and coarse wares. Other clases of artefact occur in comparatively small numbers, including colourless glass tablewares of the second and third centuries, 295 coins and c. 1000 small finds including some post-Roman pieces. Finally there is a detialed assessment of animal bone assemblages from a cistern and the Commanding Officer’s house.

Newcastle upon Tyne is one of England’s great cities. Many think of it mainly as a product of the Industrial Revolution when abundant resources of coal, iron ore and water came together to create a Victorian industrial powerhouse. In fact, Newcastle’s long and proud history began in Roman times when Hadrian’s Wall marked the northernmost point of the Roman Empire.Newcastle became a thriving medieval port, with trading connections around the North Sea, the Atlantic, the Baltic countries and the Mediterranean. By the mid-17th century, Newcastle was not only a major European port, but was also becoming the pre-eminent exporter of coal fuelling the incipient industrial revolution. This volume brings together the archaeological evidence for occupation in the historic core of Newcastle between the prehistoric period and 1650. It places the evidence in the context of the evolving historical communities who made and occupied the site, and in the wider context of medieval and early modern European urban life.The volume synthesizes archaeological and historical evidence, highlighting material only known through excavation – like the early medieval use of the decaying Roman fort for a cemetery and probable church – as well as throwing new light on documented activities – like the way in which the waterfront was physically extended and consolidated to support trade from the 12th century onwards. Taking its name from a castle of national significance, planted after the Norman Conquest as a bulwark against Northern rebels and Scottish aggression, Newcastle was established as the king’s ‘Eye of the North’.

This volume is a critical assessment of the current state of archaeological knowledge of the settlement originally called Camulodunon and now known as Colchester. The town has been the subject of antiquarian interest since the late 16th century and the first modern archaeological excavations occurred in 1845 close to Colchester Castle, the towns most prominent historic site.The earliest significant human occupation recorded from Colchester dates to the late Neolithic, but it was only towards the end of the 1st century BC that an oppidum was established in the area. This was superseded initially by a Roman legionary fortress and then the colonia of Camulodunum on a hilltop bounded on the north and east by the river Colne. There is little evidence for continuing occupation here in the early post-Roman period, but in 917 the town was re-established as a burgh and gradually grew in importance. After the Norman Conquest, a castle was built on the foundations of the ruined Roman Temple of Claudius, and a priory and an abbey were established just to the south of the walled town.Although the town, as elsewhere, was affected by the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the English Civil War it remained essentially medieval in character until the 18th century. During the 19th century this process of change was accelerated by the arrival of the railway, industrialisation and the establishment of the military garrison.Since the 1960s Colchester has been subject to recurring phases of re-development, the most recent having ended only in 2007, which have had a significant impact on the historic environment. Fortunately the town is one of the best studied in the country.