Excavations at Chalk Hill, Ramsgate in south-eastern Britain were primarily aimed at investigating the remains of a possible early Neolithic causewayed enclosure visible on aerial photographs. However, the monument could not in fact be categorised as a causewayed enclosure, but instead represented a type of early Neolithic ritual monument unique to the British Isles.The earliest significant features recorded on the site dated to the early Neolithic (roughly 3700-3600 cal BC). They took the fo...

Jan Herman Insinger was a well-known character in the history of Egyptology, mainly because his name has been linked forever with a famous demotic wisdom papyrus now in Leiden. Although he is mentioned by many of his contemporaries, biographical notes on Insinger rarely surpass a few lines and can be quite inaccurate. However, a lot of information can be gathered from the Archives of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and other sources, both published and unpublished ones. These doc...

Questions about the cultural exchange of both knowledge and material goods are just as topical today as in years gone by. These questions have gained increasing attention from scholars since the 1980s when the term 'transfers cultures' by historians arose. However, this book provides a completely new approach in this context by interdisciplinary investigation of cultural exchanges based on chosen objects from shipwrecks and land, significant written documents and verifiable transfer of knowle...

Past Landscapes presents theoretical and practical attempts of scholars and scientists, who were and are active within the Kiel Graduate School "Human Development in Landscapes" (GSHDL), in order to disentangle a wide scope of research efforts on past landscapes. Landscapes are understood as products of human-environmental interaction. At the same time, they are arenas, in which societal and cultural activities as well as receptions of environments and human developments take place. Thus, env...

Papyrus Leiden I 343 + 345 is one of the most extraordinary manuscripts providing a deeper insight into magic and medicine in Ancient Egypt.The main part of the papyrus deals with the ancient Near Eastern disease demon Sāmānu, who is well known from Sumerian and Akkadian incantations and medical texts. In addition, a broad range of other conjurations and spells against any pain and feet swelling are included. The papyrus also contains two curious spells dealing with 'falling water from the ...

As reflected in the title "From Microcosm to Macrocosm: Individual households and cities in Ancient Egypt and Nubia", both a micro-approach introducing microhistories of individual sites according to recent archaeological fieldwork incorporating interdisciplinary methods as well as general patterns and regional developments in Northeast Africa are discussed.This combination of research questions on the micro-level with the macro-level provides new information about cities and households in An...

This book looks at how archaeologists in the early 21st century are dealing with the challenges and opportunities presented by development in archaeologically sensitive urban centres. Based on a session held at the 2017 EAA conference in Maastricht, the volume features case studies from across Europe and beyond - including Norway, Lithuania, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy and Israel. The chapters look both at individual projects and large...

Stone Age researchers spend a lot of time studying and documenting lithic artefacts. Since it is impossible to study all these artefacts physically, they often rely on images. Drawings are often the most informative because the lines and symbols in these drawing contain technological information which tells the audience how the artefact depicted was made. Conversely, making these drawings is an excellent way of learning to recognise and understand this technological information.In a distant p...

Did ancient Europeans truly believe in an active after-life, as modern Europeans would like to think they did? What purpose did grave-goods actually serve? Are archaeology and the historical sciences in general able to shed, once and for all, a curse placed upon them at their inception as research disciplines in the early nineteenth century? Searching for answers to these questions is the aim of this book which has been written on the basis of widely spread, typical components of grave-goods....

This book presents a group of small and inconspicuous barrows that were recently discovered in the forest of Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. They are part of an extensive barrow landscape of which little was yet known. Fieldwork carried out in and around them yielded a wealth of new data. It was discovered that even the most inconspicuous and heavily damaged mound of this group still contained many special features.This special place was anchored around a site that probably had a particular signi...