For many past and present societies, pottery forms an integral part of material culture and everyday practice. This makes it a promising case example to address human-thing-relations on a more general level, as well as social life itself. Humans organise their lives not only by engaging with materials and things but also by oscillating between movement and stasis. In these various rhythms of mobility - from daily subsistence-based movements to long-term migrations - things like ceramic vessel...

'Ritual Failure' is a new concept in archaeology adopted from the discipline of anthropology. Resilient religious systems disappearing, strict believers and faithful practitioners not performing their rites, entire societies changing their customs: how does a religious ritual system transform, change or disappear, leaving only traces of its past glory? Do societies change and then their ritual? Or do customs change first, in turn provoking wider cultural shifts in society? Archaeology possess...

As the papers in this volume testify, digital scholarly editing is a vibrant practice. Scholarly editing has a long-standing tradition in the humanities. It is of crucial importance within disciplines such as literary studies, philology, history, philosophy, library and information science, and bibliography. In fact, digital scholarly editing represents one of the longest traditions in the field of Digital Humanities - and the theories, concepts, and practices that were designed for editing i...

Many are no larger than a fingertip. They are engraved with symbols, magic spells and images of gods, animals and emperors. These stones were used for various purposes. The earliest ones served as seals for making impressions in soft materials. Later engraved gems were worn or carried as personal ornaments - usually rings, but sometimes talismans or amulets. The exquisite engraved designs were thought to imbue the gems with special powers. For example, the gods and rituals depicted on cylinde...

This book explores a complex relational assemblage, a collection of 1481 Pacific artefacts brought together by Captain Edward Henry Meggs Davis, during the three voyages of HMS Royalist between 1890-1893. The collection is indicative not just of a period of colonial collecting in the Pacific, but also the development of ethnographic collections in the UK and Europe. This period of history remains present in the social and cultural lives of many Pacific Islanders today.

Using the collections as...

In 2012, a chance encounter between a curator and a century-old expedition journal occurred in the archives of a Cambridge museum. The journal was written by a young anthropologist, Paul Denys Montague, and recorded his travels in the South Pacific Islands of New Caledonia in 1914, where he became fascinated with the culture of the local Kanak people. Returning to Cambridge at the outbreak of World War One, Montague deposited his journal and a collection of Kanak objects in the Museum of Arch...

Colourful surface treatments form an integral element of vernacular and élite architecture of ancient societies. This is also true for the various regions of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 2nd millennium B.C.E., where elaborate wall paintings furnished temples, tombs, palatial buildings, and in general more elaborate houses. From a present-day perspective, these rich images provide invaluable insights into past realities as well as interconnections between different visual systems. However...

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 fourth of four volumes which present the results of that campaign. It includes investigati...

This volume of Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia focuses on how local communities in prehistory define themselves in relation to a bigger social world.

Communities from the deep past managed to make a living in landscapes we tend to perceive as inconvenient, build complex and elaborate monuments with relatively simple tools, and by shaping their landscape carved out a place for themselves in a much bigger social world. The contributions in this volume underscore how small worlds can be big at ...

Ancient Egyptians always had an intense and complex relationship with animals in daily life as well as in religion. Despite the fact that research on this relationship has been a topic of study, gaps in our knowledge still remain. This volume presents well over 30 contributions that explore Human-Animal relationships from the Predynastic to the Roman period.

The essays cover topics such as animal husbandry, mummification, species-specific studies, the archaeology and economy of the animal cult...