Books

Roman Frontier Archaeology – in Britain and beyond gathers contributions by some 30 leading archaeologists and historians in honour of Paul Bidwell. In a wide-ranging career Paul has been one of the leading excavators and pottery specialists of his generation, admired for his ground-breaking work both in the south-west and the military north of Roman Britain.

Contributions reflect the wide range of Paul Bidwell’s interests. Studies of samian pottery use, coins, carved stone pinecones, multi-piece bone dice and agricultural strategies shed light on the economy and everyday life of a Roman frontier province. For the civil southern part of the province there are studies of place-names and various aspects of the public baths of the Roman cities, as well as the impact of changing sea-levels on coastal topography. A number of contributions focus on the problems of the military north and Hadrian’s Wall, including studies of the nineteenth century antiquarian pioneers and assessments of the purpose of the Wall, the possibility of destructive attacks by an enemy, the way in which Roman forts were designed, and the use of Iron Age tradition military gear by the Roman army. The papers also take us beyond Britannia to consider developments on and beyond Rome’s Eastern, Danube and North African frontiers.

The collection will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in either the civil or military aspects of Roman Britain, or the frontiers of the Roman empire.

Paul Bidwell (1949-2022)
Tragically Paul Bidwell died after a short illness in November 2022 soon after being presented with this book by his friends and colleagues. What was conceived as a gesture to honour Paul has become, in effect, a monument to one of the most respected Roman archaeologists of his generation, and a testament to the wide range of his archaeological interests and achievements.

Outside the north gate of Venta Belgarum, Roman Winchester, a great cemetary stretched for 500 yards along the road to Cirencester. Excavations at Lankhills from 1967 to 1972 uncovered 451 graves, many elaborately furnished, at the northern limits of this cemetery, and dating from the fourth century A.D. This book, the second in a two-part study of Venta Belgarum, which forms the third volume of Winchester Studies, describes the excavations of these burials and analyses in detail both the graves and their contents. There are detailed studies and important re-assessments of many categories of object, but it is the information about late Roman burial, religion, and society which is of special interest.

“The ancient Buddhist art of Gandhāra was rediscovered from the 1830s and 1840s onwards in what would become the North-West Frontier of British India. By the end of the century an abundance of sculptures had been accumulated by European soldiers and officials, which constituted the foundations for a new field of scholarship and internationally celebrated museum collections. Both then and since, the understanding of Gandhāran art has been impeded by gaps in documentation, haphazard excavation, forgery, and smuggling of antiquities. Consequently, the study of Gandhāran archaeology often involves the evaluation and piecing together of fragmentary clues. In more subtle ways, however, the modern view of Gandhāran art has been shaped by the significance accorded to it by different observers over the past century and a half. Conceived in the imperial context of the late nineteenth century as ‘Graeco-Buddhist’ art – a hybrid of Asian religion and Mediterranean artistic form – Gandhāran art has been invested with various meanings since then, both in and beyond the academic sphere. Its puzzling links to the classical world of Greece and Rome have been explained from different perspectives, informed both by evolving perceptions of the evidence and by modern circumstances.

From the archaeologists and smugglers of the Raj to the museums of post-partition Pakistan and India, from coin-forgers and contraband to modern Buddhism and contemporary art, this fourth volume of the Classical Art Research Centre’s Gandhāra Connections project presents the most recent research on the factors that mediate our encounter with Gandhāran art.”

John J. Dobbins, Professor of Roman Art and Archaeology, taught at the University of Virginia in the Department of Art from 1978 until his retirement in 2019. His legacy of research and pedagogy is explored in A Quaint & Curious Volume: Essays in Honor of John J. Dobbins. Professor Dobbins’ research in the field of Roman art and archaeology spans the geographical and chronological limits of the Roman Empire, from Pompeii to Syria, and Etruria to Spain. This volume demonstrates some of his wide-reaching interests, expressed through the research of his former graduate students. Several essays examine the city of Pompeii and cover the topics of masonry analysis, re-examinations of streets and drains, and analyses of the heating capacity of baths in Pompeii. Beyond Pompeii, the archaeological remains of bakeries are employed to elucidate labor specialization in the Late Roman period across the Mediterranean basin. Collaborations between Professor Dobbins and his former students are also explored, including a pioneering online numismatic database and close examination of sculpture and mosaics, including expressions of identity and patronage through case studies of the Ara Pacis and mosaics at Antioch-on-the-Orontes. A Quaint & Curious Volume not only demonstrates John Dobbins’ scholarly legacy, but also presents new readings of archaeological data and art, illustrating the impact that one professor can have on the wider field of Roman art and archaeology through the continuing work of his students.

The fifth Volume of the Edition of the Collected Works of Viktor Frankls unites Frankl’s writings, notes, lectures and interviews on the border area of psychology, psychiatry, and religion.

Der vorliegende Themenband bringt zwei Teildisziplinen zusammen: die Variationslinguistik (Dialektologie) und die klinische Linguistik (Logopädie).

Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe reconstructs plant food processing at this key Pre-Pottery Neolithic (9600-8000 BC) site, with an emphasis on cereals, legumes and herbs as food sources, on grinding and pounding tools for their processing, and on the vessels implied in the consumption of meals and beverages. Functional investigations on grinding and pounding tools and on stone containers through use-wear and residue analyses are at the core of the book. Their corpus amounts to more than 7000 objects, constituting thus the largest collection published so far from the Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia. The spectrum of tools and of processed plants is very broad, but porridges made of cereals, legumes and herbs, and beers predominate over bread-like food. The find contexts show that cooking took place around the well-known monumental buildings, while the large quantity of tools suggests feasting in addition to daily meals.

“The Plague Cemetery of Alghero (Sardinia, Italy, 1582-1583) presents a bioarchaeological analysis of the individuals exhumed from the cemetery of Alghero, which is associated with the plague outbreak that ravaged the city in 1582-1583. This cemetery revealed a particular burial typology, consisting of long and narrow trenches, each containing multiple inhumations, which attests to a catastrophic event, such as an epidemic with high mortality in a short period of time. Given the rarity of human remains from epidemic contexts buried in trenches, the skeletal sample from Alghero represents valuable material. In fact, no other Italian plague cemeteries have been examined through a detailed bioarchaeological analysis, and the study thus serves as a model for future research.

The author examines a series of parameters, starting from the demographic profile of the sample –181 individuals from 15 trenches – and taphonomic analysis, and then analysing stature, dental pathologies, stress indicators, degenerative joint disease, entheseal changes and other pathologies. The study is intended to illuminate a cross section of 16th century Sardinian society in a coastal city through a holistic view, which interweaves the documentary evidence for plague, funerary responses and the health status of the population. The main objective is therefore to shed light on a population which lived during a period of plague, revealing lifestyles, activity patterns and illnesses and providing a significant contribution to the bioarchaeology, palaeopathology, and archaeology of the Italian territory.”

Obsidian Across the Americas draws attention to recent obsidian studies in the Americas and acts as a reference for archaeologists and scholars interested in material culture and exchange. Moreover, it provides a wide range of case studies in obsidian characterization, material application, and theoretical interpretations in the Americas.

The limited geographic occurrence and relatively homogenous nature of obsidian have made the material ideal for archaeometric studies. Since Cann and Renfrew’s seminal paper in 1967 on the compositional analysis of obsidian in the Mediterranean, analytical techniques have improved, identification and characterization of sources have increased, and applications have broadened geographically and theoretically to address various socio-cultural activities and behaviours around the world. While many previous publications have focused on different aspects of obsidian characterization, this volume uniquely presents obsidian compositional studies from across the Americas that have relied on the instrumentation housed in the Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum of Natural History. The case studies, which feature materials from North American, Mesoamerican, and South American geological sources, explore the ways in which obsidian analyses have been used to investigate interactions, socio-economic exchanges, and socio-cultural change at multiple scales in the past.

Normative, Atypical or Deviant? Interpreting Prehistoric and Protohistoric Child Burial Practices, the tenth volume in the SSCIP monograph series, explores the response of the living when dealing with the death of a child. This response is strongly connected to belief systems and concern for the fate of the deceased in the afterlife. The funerary rituals for each culture generally follow a prescribed format that will both satisfy the needs of the dead and ensure there are no negative consequences for the living. But how do we interpret burials that do not adhere to the recognised formula for their society? Can we find evidence that such differences involved positive or, indeed, negative emotions? Should atypical rites for children actually be considered normal since they are typical for their age cohort, differing only from those of adults, and perhaps simply reflect adult-centric interpretations of the past? The papers within the volume discuss these issues by focusing on juvenile burial practices in Europe and the Near East during recent prehistory and protohistory. The interpretation of normative, atypical or deviant is interrogated based on the context of the burials and the intentionality of the practice.

This study analyses the phenomenon of marriages between kin in the various relevant discursive and conceptual, legal and political, administrative and bureaucratic, familial and household-organizational, sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts. These were interwoven so as to lead all the way from villages and local parishes to the Roman Curia, and from widower’s households and local municipal offices to the Imperial Court Chancellery in Vienna. The focus on how kinship was administrated opens up an approach to processes by which the state and the church, as well as the state and the regions, were integrated during an era that, in this respect, would prove to be historically decisive.

The Neolithic settlement of Aknashen (Ararat valley, Armenia): excavation seasons 2004-2015 is the first monograph devoted to the Neolithic period in Armenia. The research is based on an Armenian-French project, in which specialists from Canada, Romania, Germany and Greece also participated. The volume concerns the natural environment, material culture and subsistence economy of the populations of the first half of the 6th millennium BC, who established the first sedentary settlements in the alluvial plain of the Araxes river. The thickness of the cultural layer of Aknashen (almost 5m), the extent of the excavated areas and the multidisciplinary nature of the research, confer great importance upon this site for the study of the Neolithic, both in Armenia and in the South Caucasus as a whole. The publication examines the similarities and differences that exist between the sites established in the 6th millennium in the basins of the rivers Araxes (Armenia) and Kura (Georgia and Azerbaijan), as well as parallels with contemporary cultures in Southwest Asia. It also examines questions concerning the characterisation and periodisation of the Neolithic in the central part of the South Caucasus, the emergence of a production economy (pottery, animal husbandry, etc.) and the Neolithisation of this region.

Mirrors of Salt publishes the proceedings of the First International Congress on the Anthropology of Salt, which took place at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi (Romania). The impact of salt on the development of human communities, from the Neolithic to the present, has generated a huge number of specialized studies. However, scientific research has become so atomized that the primordial importance of the mineral has been lost, creating a need for a holistic, comprehensive vision of the dimensions generated by salt. This can only be achieved through anthropology. The anthropology of salt encompasses the entirety of human behavior, i.e. cognitive, spiritual, pragmatic, and social reactions to salt, and provides a holistic view of its role in the evolution of human communities. The anthropology of salt thus brings salt studies from an ancillary position to an autonomous discipline. The papers in this volume are organized into six sections: theory, archaeology, history, ethnography/ ethnoarchaeology/ethnohistory, linguistics, and literature. Topics include salt in Greek and Roman antiquity, as well as from Cameroon, Georgia, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, Spain, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, the USA and Venezuela. The congress was organized within the project The Ethnoarchaeology of the Salt Springs and Salt Mountains from the Extra-Carpathian Areas of Romania, financed by the Government of Romania (CNCS – UEFISCDI) (2011-2016). Its theoretical novelty and geographical range render Mirrors of Salt a unique study of the world’s most-used non-metallic mineral.

“Megaliths of the World brings together the latest research on megalithic monuments throughout the world. Many of these sites are well known, others less familiar, yet equally deserving of close attention. Megalithic monuments in different regions of the world are far from being a single unified phenomenon, having varied chronologies, and diverse origins, but they all share a certain family resemblance through their common characteristic: the deployment of large stones. No fewer than 150 researchers have contributed 72 articles and inserts, providing a vital region-by region account of the megalithic monuments in their specialist areas, and the current state of knowledge.

The insights offered in these volumes emphasize the particular character and significance of these apparently inanimate stones. The use of such large blocks must surely have been an expression of power or prestige, yet the size and materiality of the stones themselves opens up new perspectives into the meaning and symbolism of these monuments, the places from which the blocks were derived, and the way they were manipulated and shaped.

Megaliths of the World takes the reader on a fascinating journey, offering new insights through encounters with megaliths and megalithic traditions that will often be new and unfamiliar. Highlighting salient themes, it provides a compendium of detailed information that will be vital to anyone interested in the phenomenon of megalithic monumentality.”

Today the Upper Thames Valley is a region of green pastures and well-managed farmland, interspersed with pretty villages and intersected by a meandering river.
The discovery in 1989 of a mammoth tusk in river gravels at Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, revealed the very different ancient past of this landscape. Here, some 200,000 years ago, mammoths, straight-tusked elephants, lions, and other animals roamed across grasslands with scattered trees, occasionally disturbed by small bands of Neanderthals.
The pit where the tusk was discovered, destined to become a waste disposal site, provided a rare opportunity to conduct intensive excavations that extended over a period of 10 years. This work resulted in the recording and recovery of more than 1500 vertebrate fossils and an abundance of other biological material, including insects, molluscs, and plant remains, together with 36 stone artefacts attributable to Neanderthals. The well-preserved plant remains include leaves, nuts, twigs and large oak logs. Vertebrate remains notably include the most comprehensive known assemblage of a distinctive small form of the steppe mammoth, Mammuthus trogontherii, that is characteristic of an interglacial period equated with marine isotope stage 7 (MIS 7).
Richly illustrated throughout, Mammoths and Neanderthals in the Thames Valley offers a detailed account of all these finds and will be of interest to Quaternary specialists and students alike.

“Lyde Green Roman Villa, Emersons Green, South Gloucestershire was excavated between mid-2012 and mid-2013 along with its surroundings and antecedent settlement. The excavations took place as part of the Emersons Green East Development Area, funded through the mechanism of commercial archaeology by Gardiner & Theobald LLP. The results of the stratigraphic analysis are given here along with specialist reports on the human remains, pottery (including thin sections), ceramic building material, small finds, coinage and iron-working waste. Six open-area excavations allowed the archaeologists the rare opportunity to trace a substantial part of the site’s layout. Three ancillary buildings within the villa compound, including a bathhouse, were excavated. Evidence of advanced water management was uncovered in the form of lead piping, ceramic drain tiles and an enigmatic stone structure built into a canalised spring line. The villa’s economy included stock raising, crop processing and iron and textile production. The settlement appears to have originated in the mid-1st century AD, or slightly earlier. “