In the later Roman period the North Sea and Channel region was the scene of seaborne attacks, political crises, army reforms, Germanic invasions and changing imperial defence strategies. Literary evidence for this era is poor. On the other hand the Shore forts can yield highly significant information, but have been subject to little study in recent decades. At the Belgian coastal fort at Oudenburg large-scale excavations in the first decade of the 21st century revealed a strikingly well-prese...

Ancient Egyptian elites invested immense cultural and economic efforts in preparing for their afterlives. However, the diversity of choices open to them is often overlooked. These choices included tomb size, tomb location, and architectural design, as well as tomb decoration, and the selection of certain grave gifts. Their choices depended on financial means, but also on contemporary fashion, among other factors. Ancient sites were visited by the living to commemorate and rejuvenate human anc...

One day, sometime around 1700 BC, a bronzesmith made the first sword. This marked a technological turning point, giving rise to an arms race that has never since ceased. Soon, over a vast area between the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of weapons were manufactured. They were used in combat, then laid to rest, whole or broken, often during complex rituals that are still hard for us to understand.

Through the sword, the Bronze Age brought war into being. The warrior became an impo...

Plants have constituted the basis of human subsistence. This volume focuses on plant food ingredients that were consumed by the members of past societies and on the ways these ingredients were transformed into food. The thirty chapters of this book unfold the story of culinary transformation of cereals, pulses as well as of a wide range of wild and cultivated edible plants.

Regional syntheses provide insights on plant species choices and changes over time and fragments of recipes locked insi...

This popular-science book tells the story of one of the most important, but least known major archaeological sites in Europe: Doggerland. Few people know that the beaches along the North Sea lie on the edge of a vast lost world. A prehistoric landscape that documents almost a million years of human habitation and lay dry for most of that time.

Doggerland is where early hominids left the first footprints in northern Europe, more than 900,000 years ago. Later, for hundreds of thousands of year...

The Late Bronze Age from about 1600 to 1150 BCE was a time of unprecedented economic activity in human history based on the supply and production of the eponymous alloy bronze on an almost industrial scale. The supply networks for copper and tin during this period stretched over large parts of western Eurasia and included long distance maritime transport.

The palatial centres of Mycenaean Greece were positioned at a unique geographical interface between the cultural hotspots of the eastern Me...

Any activity requires the expenditure of energy, and the larger the scale of the undertakings, the more careful and strategic planning in advance is required. In focusing on labouring by humans and other animals, the papers in this volume investigate through a wide range of contexts how past people achieved their multiple daily tasks while remaining resilient in anticipation of adverse events and periods.

Each paper investigates the resource requirements of combined activities, from conducti...

This book is a presentation of the basic concept of social, environmental and cultural connectivity in past societies, as embodied in a diversity of disciplines in the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS. Thus, rather pragmatically driven ideas of socio-environmental connectivities are described, which form the basis of the Cluster of Excellence in its research.

A discussion of the fluidness of the term ‘connectivity’ and the applicability of the concept opens the arena for diverse interpretatio...

Many new results on Middle and Late Bronze Age Laconia are presented in this volume, stemming from recent excavations by the Greek Archaeological Service as well as ongoing excavations, surveys and material studies by foreign schools and individual scholars. Among discussed settlements are the sites of Pellana, Palaiopyrgi, Geraki, Pavlopetri and Vrysika and also the island Kythera. The newly discovered palatial site at Ayios Vasileios is also elaborately discussed in various papers, includin...