In the Dutch archaeological community, the Roman Villa of Maasbracht has become famous for the beautiful remains of murals that have survived to this day. Almost all of this material was found in the infill of the stone cellar, a veritable time capsule that has been excavated with much patience and care.

The first field campaign in 1981 consisted of some four trial trenches excavated by members of the local archaeological society. These yielded amongst others foundation trenches of walls and f...

In many societies monuments are associated with dynamic socio-economic and political processes that these societies underwent and/or instrumentalised. Due to the often large human and other resources input involved in their construction and maintenance, such constructions form an useful research target in order to investigate both their associated societies as well as the underlying processes that generated differential construction levels. Monumental constructions may physically remain the s...

The fifth millennium is characterized by far-flung contacts and a veritable flood of innovations. While its beginning is still strongly reminiscent of a broadly Linearbandkeramik way of life, at its end we find new, inter-regionally valid forms of symbolism, representation and ritual behaviour, changes in the settlement system, in architecture and in routine life. Yet, these inter-regional tendencies are paired with a profusion of increasingly small-scale archaeological cultures, many of them...

The Ancient Egyptian Footwear Project (AEFP) is a multidisciplinary, ongoing research of footwear in ancient Egypt from the Predynastic through the Ottoman Periods. It consists of the study of actual examples of footwear, augmented by pictorial and textual evidence.This volume evaluates, summarises and discusses the results of the study of footwear carried out by the AEFP for the last 10 years (which includes the objects in the major collections in the world, such as the Egyptian Museum in Ca...

The idea that the past was an era with long periods of little or no change is almost certainly false. Change has always affected human society. Some of the catalysts for change were exogenous and lay in natural transformations, such as climate change or plant and animal diseases. Others came from endogamous processes, such as demographic change and the resulting alterations in demographic pressure. They might be produced by economic changes in the agrarian economy such as crop- or stock-breed...

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...

In this book the much-debated problem of political organization in Mycenaean Greece (ca. 1400-1200 BC) is analysed and contextualised through the prism of archaeology and contemporary textual (Linear B, Egyptian and Hittite) evidence.

From the early 14th century BC onwards, Hittite texts refer to a land Ahhiya(wa). The exact geographic position of this land has been the focus of academic debate for more than a century, but most specialists nowadays agree that it must have been a Hittite desig...

Until comparatively recently, there has been little attempt to produce a detailed study of the architectural make-up of multi-roomed mastaba tombs and the implications of these observations for understanding the ways in which this type of tomb was really used. No thorough and comprehensive investigation has ever been dedicated to the building techniques, materials and design of mastabas or, indeed, who built them.

"The Architecture of Mastaba Tombs" considers the architectural components of t...

In many societies monuments are associated with dynamic socio-economic and political processes that these societies underwent and/or instrumentalised. Due to the often large human and other resources input involved in their construction and maintenance, such constructions form an useful research target in order to investigate both their associated societies as well as the underlying processes that generated differential construction levels. Monumental constructions may physically remain the s...

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 second of four volumes which present the results of that campaign. It includes studies of ...