People and spaces have always been connected by routes: paths, trails, roads – on land, on water and sometimes even through the air, over hill and dale as well as over wooden planks, pavement and asphalt. Humans and animals followed them. The routes directed the circulation of raw materials and goods. They determined the paths on which humans fled from misery and danger, and they constituted the physical and imagined veins of networks between communities. All these cultural and biological c...

The collection of essays in this book focuses on the highlands of Iran in pre-modern times, reaching from the Paleolithic to the medieval period. What holds the diverse contributions together is an issue that is closely related to debates in our own times: crises and how societies in the past dealt with them. We start from the premise that general circumstances in the fractured topographic structure of the Iranian highlands led to unique relations between ecological, social, economic and poli...

Religious heritage has long been within the scope of academia, but very little research has been conducted on the heritagization of Catholic monasteries. This is remarkable considering the longstanding historical presence and social impact of these institutes that, in recent times, have also become well-visited spiritual centers and much-cherished heritage objects.

This book addresses this lacuna. It does so through examining the heritagization process of De Heilige Driehoek (The Holy Triang...

This volume collects different case studies of rediscovery of Christian antiquities between 1860-1930 in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, in order to stimulate reflections about the impact of these rediscoveries on our culture in a period of great political transition.

By turning the light on lesser-known stories on a wider European and Mediterranean horizon (Greece, Holy Land, Eritrea, Malta, Norway), this book gives a strong contribution to the history of Christian archaeology. All arti...

“What Does This Have to Do with Archaeology?” is a collection of essays published on the occasion of Reinhard Bernbeck’s 65th birthday. The distinguished archaeologist Reinhard Bernbeck from the Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology at Freie Universität Berlin is an internationally highly esteemed colleague. This commemorative volume (Festschrift) reflects his great influence on many different areas of archaeological research from the Neolithic in Central Asia to contemporary archaeolo...

This volume collects different case studies of rediscovery of Christian antiquities between 1860-1930 in Spain, in order to stimulate reflections about the impact of these rediscoveries on our culture in a period of great political transition.

By turning the light on lesser-known stories on a national horizon, this book gives a strong contribution to the history of Christian archaeology. All articles deal with many topics of the field (museology, cultural heritage protection law, history of r...

Olivier Nieuwenhuyse was a remarkable archaeologist whose work has transformed the study of later Neolithic societies in West Asia and he has inspired many colleagues and former student in their own pursuit of archaeology. Through the analysis of material culture his aim was to reconstruct social meanings and practices of societies in the deep past. In this volume a series of colleagues and friends pay tribute to the scholarship of Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, who died much too young, and presents a...

Although household goods are a well-establish topic in Medieval and Early Modern archaeology, more recent research is overcoming simple typological and technological aspects and pointing to broader approaches, which relates to the understanding of goods’ production, consumption strategies, other economic activities and structures of social organization. Thus, the understanding of past societies and cultures relies heavily in the study of their household goods to understand people, groups an...

This book is a significant contribution to the field of survey pottery studies, which is not frequently theorised, and could also serve as a guide and provide inspiration to archaeologists designing their own survey projects and methodologies.

Landscape archaeology has heavily relied on pedestrian survey as a field method for more than half a century. In most field projects, archaeological ceramics constitute the lion’s share among the finds and the amount of collected sherds is overwhelmi...

Why do we collect? Where does the urge to collect come from? This book explores the phenomenon of collecting in various contexts. Collecting is an illustration of a strong human-thing entanglement. It can be caused by psychological incentives that are deeply rooted in human doubts and anxieties. It is also related to building a pleasant, unthreatening, and even paradisical, environment to compensate for the uncertainties of everyday life.

The chapters in this book range from psychological per...