A brilliant new account of one of the world’s most remote, mysterious and misunderstood places: Easter Island.

This book features a collection of papers produced in honour of Roger Matthews, Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Reading. Roger previously taught at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology (2001–2010), before which he served as the Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (BSAI, today BISI) in Baghdad and the British Institute at Ankara (BIA) in the 1980s and 1990s.

The volume honours Roger’s legacy by assembling interdisciplinary research by his students,...

Caught between the poles of remembering and forgetting, glorification and neglect, the abandoned mudbrick settlements (ḥārāt) of Oman are a vital object of conflicting processes of interpretation and negotiation. Adopting a diachronic perspective, the multi-disciplinary book’s chapters examine their past, present and future. The book presents approaches and results of archaeological, ethnographic, historical and sociological research on abandoned ḥārāt.

Oman’s landscape is dotted ...

This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the typology and chronology of pottery from Tepe Sadegh, located on the Sistan Plain of southeastern Iran. Tepe Sadegh, a suburban settlement situated 75 km southeast of Zabol and 13 km southwest of the prominent Bronze Age site Shahr-i Sokhta, serves as one of its satellite settlements. Shahr-i Sokhta, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the largest Bronze Age urban centres in the region, spans four distinct periods of occupation over ...

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 ...

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...

This collection of papers was compiled in celebration of the remarkable academic career of Professor Wil Roebroeks, who has established himself as one of Europe’s leading figures in Palaeolithic archaeology over the past three decades and founded the Human origins research group at Leiden University. The volume features a diverse array of chapters contributed by close colleagues, as well as former and current students, providing a thorough overview of the flourishing field of Palaeolithic a...

This volume presents various facets of recent archaeological investigations into Neolithic and Bronze Age societies in the Carpathian Basin spanning from the 7th and 2nd millennium BCE. It delves into population dynamics, settlement patterns, and the spread of the Neolithic way of life through methodological approaches such as demographic analysis and environmental modelling.

Moreover, the book explores social transformations and the development of inequalities, emphasizing the role of cultur...

Bodies are immanent element of socio-cultural negotiation. Since the 19th century, Egyptology has produced vast knowledge on the ancient Egyptian bodies (human, divine, animal), however, mainly by focusing on funerary aspects of ancient Egyptian culture. Different paradigm shifts and turns of the last few decades (hermeneutics, semiotics, social-constructivism, ontology etc.), echo through Egyptology, but are still not part of the dominant discourse. This is also the case for the so-called �...