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...

Au cours des quatre derniers siècles av. n.è. les sociétés d’Europe continentale de la culture dite de La Tène développent leur propre artisanat du verre. Cette période de mutations économiques et sociales saisissantes, où les centres urbains et les réseaux d’habitats hiérarchisés se déploient, connaît également une intensification et une diversification des productions artisanales et agricoles. De l’agriculture à la métallurgie, l’étude des spécialisations artisana...

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...

This book explores the interaction between animals, plants, and humans in ancient Egypt. It draws together different aspects of the bioarchaeology of Egypt: flora, fauna, and human remains. These come from sites throughout the country from Alexandria to Aswan, as well as material from museum basements.

The material presented here includes the results of new and previously unpublished excavations in the Delta and Thebes, in-depth studies of different species of animal mummies, an analysis of a...

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 ...

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...

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...

The Netherlands are internationally renowned for the archaeology of its wetland environments. The reclamation of the Flevoland Polders in the early half of the 20th century not only exposed hundreds of shipwrecks, but also remnants of prehistoric landscapes and traces of human occupation dating to Mesolithic and Neolithic times. Ultimately, this led to the ‘discovery’ of the Swifterbant Culture in the 1960s-1970s, and which was initially seen as a Dutch equivalent of the Ertebølle Culture.

Archaeological investigations conducted by the University of Groningen, and later also the University of Amsterdam, delivered important new data on the nature of the Swifterbant Culture. It became key in the discussion about the adoption of crop cultivation and animal husbandry by hunter-gatherers living in wetland environments. Also, the Swifterbant Culture became central in the debate on the meaning of archaeologically defined ‘cultures’, questioning relationships between social interaction and material culture. With the increase of urbanisation and infrastructural works, alongside changes in the Dutch Monuments Act, dozens of small and large-scale development-led investigations got initiated at the turn of the centur...

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...