Building on the experience of twenty-five years of fieldwork and archaeozoological analyses carried out during research projects in various regions of northern France, this book examines animal husbandry and hunting practices over the 5000 year period from the first sedentary groups to the more evolved societies, corresponding to the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age.

This approach is based on the processing of a very large amount of data, from sources as varied as settlements, assembly places, ...

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...

Vijftien jaar was Domitianus als keizer van Rome aan de macht (81-96). Na de onverwachte dood van zijn oudere broer Titus, die slechts twee jaar regeerde, was hij de logische troonopvolger. Domitianus zette op veel punten het beleid van zijn populaire vader Vespasianus (keizer tussen 69-79) en Titus (79-81) voort. Met succes: er heersten vrede, rust en stabiliteit op de meeste plaatsen in het Rijk. De handel en bedrijvigheid floreerden, ook al plukte niet iedereen daarvan de vruchten. Intusse...

This volume represents a bold attempt by the editors to bring scholars from distinct research orientations together, to discuss the interplay between the geographic and social dimensions of different kinds of interaction networks.

Within the humanities, networks afford an umbrella of approaches to the study of social relations and their patterning, both through qualitative and quantitative applications, with two main perspectives standing out: those centered on space and those concerned with ...

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...

For the first time seasonality is placed at the centre of the study of rural settlement. Using a Europe-wide approach, it provides a primer of examples, of techniques and of ideas for the identification and understanding of seasonal settlement. As such, it marks an important new step in the interpretation of the use of the countryside by historic communities linked to the annual passage of the year. The particular studies are introduced by an opening essay which draws wider conclusions about ...

La publication des actes du colloque « Mégalithismes et monumentalismes funéraires : passé, présent, futur » reprend les trois grands thèmes de ces rencontres internationales en offrant une large place aux études récentes du mégalithisme en Europe ainsi qu’à l’ethnoarchéologie et aux questions de valorisation et de conservation de ce patrimoine fragile.

Les contributions d’experts internationaux montrent tout l’intérêt de voir au-delà du monument afin de comprendre son ...

Towards the capstone of the European Bronze Age, in an area stretching from the Carpathians in the East to the North Sea in the West, vast cremation grave cemeteries occur that are perhaps better known as ‘urnfields.’ Today some 700 of these burial sites have come to light in the Netherlands alone.

In this corner of Europe, also known as the ‘Lower-Rhine-Basin,’ these cemeteries are often characterised by vast collections of small burial mounds under which the cremated remains of dec...

Towards the capstone of the European Bronze Age, in an area stretching from the Carpathians in the East to the North Sea in the West, vast cremation grave cemeteries occur that are perhaps better known as ‘urnfields.’ Today some 700 of these burial sites have come to light in the Netherlands alone.

In this corner of Europe, also known as the ‘Lower-Rhine-Basin,’ these cemeteries are often characterised by vast collections of small burial mounds under which the cremated remains of dec...

In Bronze Age Europe, an enormous amount of metalwork was buried in the ground and never retrieved. Patterns in the archaeological finds show that this was a deliberate practice: people systematically deposited valuable metal objects in specific places in the landscape, even in non-metalliferous regions. Although this practice seems strange and puzzling from our modern perspective, these patterns demonstrate that it was not simply a matter of irrational human behaviour. Instead, there were su...