The famous 'Silk Roads' have long evoked a romantic picture of travel through colourful civilizations that connected the western and eastern poles of Eurasia, facilitating the exchange of exotic luxury goods, peoples, pathogens and ideas. But how far back can we trace such interaction? Increasing evidence suggests considerable time-depth for Trans-Eurasian exchange, with the expanding urban networks of the Bronze Age at times anticipating later caravan routes. Tying the Threads of Eurasia app...

At the end of the 5th millennium BCE, some of the vastest settlements of the time emerged on the forest steppe north of the Black Sea. The largest of these sites were found between the Southern Bug and Dnieper river. There they occur only tens of kilometres apart and are assumed to be partly coeval. The Trypillia 'mega-sites' reached sizes of up to 320 hectares with up to 3000 buildings in one place. During their peak times as many as 11.000 people could have lived in one of those settlements.

But how did people come together in these Trypillia 'mega-sites' with several thousand dwellings? How long were such sites inhabited, and how many people lived there? Were these settlements the first towns, preceding the Mesopotamian development? To address these questions, this book presents the results of the investigations at the Maidanets'ke 'mega-site'...

This study considers the detailed archaeological and documentary records of Cyprus and Ugarit (Syria) to gain new insights into the long-term relations between two of the best known, well-connected polities in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean.

I engage with concepts such as maritime space and spheres of interaction, merchants and mercantilism, actors and agents. Some background on both Ugarit and Cyprus is presented, followed by examination of the common material features of both (e....

This volume collects papers on the pre-Corded Ware horizon in central Europe and adjacent areas (i.e. from c. 3500 – 2800 BC). This phase is very patchily researched, partly also because certain kinds of evidence, notably domestic architecture and burials, are rare or absent in many regions. This has occasionally been interpreted as signs of a major crisis and population bottleneck, which in turn facilitated the migration of new populations from the steppe, bringing with them amongst others...

The Winthir Collection is one of the few identified skeletal collections from the 19th century, offering a rare insight into the lives of 245 individuals recovered from a long-forgotten section of Winthir Cemetery in Munich, southern Germany. Now housed in the State Collection for Anthropology in Munich, these remains have been analysed through an interdisciplinary project that combines historical and osteological research.

For each individual, historical data such as demographics, cause of ...

Pile dwellings have been explored over a vast region for a number of decades now. This has led to the development of different ways, methods, and even schools of under-water and peat-bog excavation practices and data analysis techniques under the influence of different research traditions in individual countries. On the one hand, these and other factors can limit our understanding of the past, whilst on the other hand they can also open up further avenues of interpretation.

By collecting the ...

Multimodality – the integration of different semiotic resources in communication – plays a key role in the way people convey meaning. While much of the research has focused on multimodal communication in modern European and Anglo-Saxon cultures, the diverse visual and textual compositions of ancient civilizations have been less explored.

This book presents the findings of a working group on multimodal communication in Ancient Egypt and explores the multimodal nature of Egyptian artifacts...

There is little evidence of the routes connecting Amerindian communities in the Caribbean prior to and just after 1492. Uncovering possible canoe routes between these communities can help to explain the structure, capabilities, and limitations of the physical links in their social and material networks. This book evaluates how routes connecting islands indicate the structure of past inter-island networks, by using computer modeling.Computer modeling and least-cost pathway analysis is a popula...

This book deals with the question how communities across Europe during the later 3rd millennium BC adopt and transform the Bell Beaker phenomenon differently. By looking at these processes of change from the perspective of settlements and settlement material culture, an interpretation is given to the development of this phenomenon that is alternative to the currently prevailing migration models.

Instead, the author uses social theories on the spread of innovations, the development and functio...

In which chronological, spatial, and social contexts is gender a relevant social category that is noticeable in the archaeological material? How can transformations in social gender relations and identity be recognized archaeologically? Is the identity of prehistoric people defined by gender? If so, what is the accompanying cultural context? What about gender equality among the scientists working in archaeology? In what degree are research teams, as well as their scientific approaches, biased...