This volume is a collection of 19 articles in three sections reporting on recent research on the archaeology of shipwrecks, harbours, and maritime landscapes in the Mediterranean region. The shipwrecks section looks at excavated vessels from Mazotos, Modi Island, the port of Rhodes, Naples, and Narbonne, as well as a sailing reconstruction of the Ma‘agan Mikhael ship.

The harbours section includes articles on areas from the Levant to Seville looking at a variety of harbour defence systems a...

In life, the emperor Domitian (81-96 CE) marketed himself as a god; after his assassination he was condemned to be forgotten. Nonetheless he oversaw a literary, cultural, and monumental revival on a scale not witnessed since Rome’s first emperor, Augustus.

In tandem with an exhibition in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden and the Mercati Traianei in Rome, planned for 2021-2022, this volume offers a fresh perspective on Domitian and his reign. This collection of papers, produced by a gr...

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...

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...

Barkcloth or tapa, a cloth made from the inner bark of trees, was widely used in place of woven cloth in the Pacific islands until the 19th century. A ubiquitous material, it was integral to the lives of islanders and used for clothing, furnishings and ritual artefacts. Material Approaches to Polynesian Barkcloth takes a new approach to the study of the history of this region through its barkcloth heritage, focusing on the plants themselves and surviving objects in historic collections. This ...

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...

Bone tool studies are at a crossroads. A current path is to go beyond the concatenation of methods or concepts borrowed from other disciplines and aim instead at a truly integrated approach that is more in line with the objectives of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

The papers in this volume follow this direction by adopting various forms of dialogue and integration between old and new methods and approaches, including technological analysis, usewear analysis, typology, zooa...