If you want to understand ancient Egypt, the Nile Delta is of key importance. Excavations and surveys in the Delta keep unearthing new information about how the ancient Egyptians lived, how they envisaged the afterlife and how they interacted with other cultures. The study of finds from the Delta gives us a glimpse into the beliefs and everyday life of the ancient Egyptians.

From 1979 to 2014 Willem van Haarlem worked on several archaeological sites in the Nile Delta, focusing on the excavati...

Were men the only hunters and producers of tools, art and innovation in prehistory? Were women the only gatherers, home-bound breeders and caregivers? Are all prehistoric female depictions mother goddesses? And do women and men have equal career chances in archaeology? To put it short, no. However, these are some of the gender stereotypes that we still encounter on a daily basis in archaeology from the way archaeologists interpret the past and present it to the general public to how they prac...

Barrows at the Core of Bronze Age Communities argues exactly that. Round barrows do not just represent the death side of Early Bronze Age communities placed in set-a-side ritual landscapes, but were instead central to existence in many ways. This study of the Rother Region, where the Weald meets the Wessex massif, reports the results of the People of the Heath project, 2014–18. It integrates a wealth of data from comprehensive field study of all relevant sites in the region with that from e...

Throughout the millennia and all over the world people have been killed by others, not only in wars and as a result of murders, but also in a ritualised way, often called human sacrifice. Much has been written about this, and research and discussion about ritual killing continue. This book offers contributions to this on-going discussion, by a re-evaluation of the term human sacrifice, arguing that not all forms of ritual killing can be considered to be sacrificial.

Experts from different dis...

In 2015 at Dalfsen (the Netherlands) archaeologists made an amazing discovery. They found a burial ground dating from the TRB-period (3000-2750 BC) comprising 141 burial pits. The TRB is dated in the last phase of the Middle Neolithic period and is well known for its megalithic monuments which are widespread through large parts of northern Europe.

Until recently few non-megalithic burial grounds were known and the find of the Dalfsen burials created new opportunities to study the mortuary rit...

This book explores the cost, expressed in labour, of constructing fortifications during the Late Bronze Age in Greece (ca. 1600 – 1050 BCE). The underlying question for this study is whether the cost of large scale constructions, built with large, unwieldy blocks, may have overstretched the (economic) capabilities of communities, leading to their collapse.

In order to determine the labour costs, the building process is deconstructed and for each sub-process, the costs are determined. The co...

This book brings together 30 papers by leading scholars in the field of usewear and residue analysis. This publication aims to revive the debate on the role of traceology (use-wear and residues) in multidisciplinary approaches that address archaeological questions. Many studies on technological aspects of material culture deal with specific material categories (e.g. flint, ceramics, bone), often in separate or isolated ways, and this division does not really reflect the integrated nature of t...

The ocean conceals secrets, ancient, modern, and future. Nic Flemming’s memoir recounts the life of a pioneer in ocean science. Each chapter describes a thread that structured his work: underwater cities, submerged Ice Age caverns dripping with stalactites, the limits to ocean exploitation, ocean climate change, prehistoric settlements on the continental shelf, ocean law, and safe scientific diving. Flemming is paralysed from the chest down and has used a wheelchair for the past 52 years; o...

This book explores the interaction between animals, plants, and humans in ancient Egypt. It draws together different aspects of the bioarchaeology of Egypt: flora, fauna, and human remains. These come from sites throughout the country from Alexandria to Aswan, as well as material from museum basements.

The material presented here includes the results of new and previously unpublished excavations in the Delta and Thebes, in-depth studies of different species of animal mummies, an analysis of a...

There has been an increasing archaeological interest in human-animal-nature relations, where archaeology has shifted from a focus on deciphering meaning, or understanding symbols and the social construction of the landscape to an acknowledgement of how things, places and the environment contribute with their own agencies to the shaping of relations.

This means that the environment cannot be regarded as a blank space that landscape meaning is projected onto. Parallel to this, the field of env...