This is the account of a remarkable excavation. It started with a modest dig on an unremarkable tell in Jordan. The name of the tell does not occur in the Bible, and no ancient town of any importance was to be expected under the rubble. The excavator Henk Franken had not yet made a name for himself within the archaeological community.

And yet, from 1960 onwards history was being (re)written at Tell Deir Alla. To discover the secrets of the tell, the expedition team defied cold, rain and storm...

Religion in the ancient world, and ancient Egyptian religion in particular, is often perceived as static, hierarchically organised, and centred on priests, tombs, and temples. Engagement with archaeological and textual evidence dispels these beguiling if superficial narratives, however. Individuals and groups continuously shaped their environments, and were shaped by them in turn. This volume explores the ways in which this adaptation, negotiation, and reconstruction of religious understandin...

The terracotta figurines from Akragas (Agrigento) with their chubby faces, splendid furniture, and rich adornments, depict a prosperous life in the late sixth and early fifth century BCE. The extensive jewellery on the figurines contains strikingly large fibulae appliques fastening pectoral chains with several sorts of pendants. They are modelled after existing items. The form of the jewellery items changed fast, influenced by different peoples and changing fashions, which can be compared wit...

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 function...

Soviet archaeological research in southern Turkmenistan revealed a series of small Late Neolithic and Aeneolithic villages strung along the streams that emerge from the Kopet Dag and water the narrow foothill zone separating the mountains from the Kara Kum desert. A commonly accepted premise of their work was that these communities garnered their technological knowledge if not their populations from regions to the south and west in present-day Iran.

Since 2010 we have reinvestigated one of the...

Early Settlers of the Insular Caribbean: Dearchaizing the Archaic offers a comprehensive coverage of the most recent advances in interdisciplinary research on the early human settling of the Caribbean islands. It covers the time span of the so-called Archaic Age and focuses on the Middle to Late Holocene period which - depending on specific case studies discussed in this volume - could range between 6000 BC and AD 1000. A similar approach to the early settlers of the Caribbean islands has nev...

The two tombs dealt with in this book were discovered in 2007 and 2010 by the Leiden Expedition in the New Kingdom necropolis of Saqqara. Both date to the transition period between the reign of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten and the return to orthodoxy under his successor Tutankhamun. They are valuable additions to the growing corpus of funerary architecture from the Memphite cemeteries, yet they are quite different.

Ptahemwia was a royal butler, presumably in the Memphite palace. The wall-rel...

The majority of humanity have lived out their lives in a 'rural' context, and even in our increasingly urbanised world almost half of the global population still live in rural areas. In the European Iron Age, the vast mass of the population clearly lived in small hamlets and farmsteads, and this overarching 'rurality' is important for understanding these societies. While there has been a pronounced focus in recent archaeological research on patterns of centralisation and urbanisation, there i...

This is the account of a remarkable excavation. It started with a modest dig on an unremarkable tell in Jordan. The name of the tell does not occur in the Bible, and no ancient town of any importance was to be expected under the rubble. The excavator Henk Franken had not yet made a name for himself within the archaeological community.

And yet, from 1960 onwards history was being (re)written at Tell Deir Alla. To discover the secrets of the tell, the expedition team defied cold, rain and storm...

For many centuries, scholars and enthusiasts have been fascinated by Stonehenge, the world's most famous stone circle. In 2003 a team of archaeologists commenced a long-term fieldwork project for the first time in decades. The Stonehenge Riverside Project (2003-2009) aimed to investigate the purpose of this unique prehistoric monument by considering it within its wider archaeological context.This is the third of four volumes which present the results of that campaign. It reports on surveys an...