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...

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 ...

A defining fixture of our contemporary world, video games offer a rich spectrum of engagements with the past. Beyond a source of entertainment, video games are cultural expressions that support and influence social interactions. Games educate, bring enjoyment, and encourage reflection. They are intricate achievements of coding and creative works of art. Histories, ranging from the personal to the global, are reinterpreted and retold for broad audiences in playful, digital experiences. The med...

The archaeological study of quarries focuses mainly on the reconstruction of the extraction process, while rock-hewn spaces have often been approached from the point of view of architectural styles or art-history. Nevertheless, a holistic structural approach to the study these spaces could allow a better understanding of the agency of those who carved the stone.

Stone quarries and rock-cut sites have rarely been included in global studies of historical landscapes and few are the forums dedic...

Jebel Aruda, a prominent mountain ridge overlooking the Taqba Dam lake in northern Syria, was the location of a remarkable settlement that flourished between c. 3300 and 3100 BC during the so-called Uruk period. For the inhabitants the sacredness of this high place, evidenced by the discovery of a large temple complex, seems to have taken precedent over its impractical location far above the valley of the Euphrates River. The site was destroyed under unknown circumstances, leaving behind the ...

The volume in hand throws light on historical encounters with troubled pasts in contemporary Dutch and Greek historiography. Contributors, experts in their respective research fields with a wide range of scholarly publications, eschew dominant national accounts, deconstruct top-down narratives, and situate the historical subject(s) at the centre of the analysis.

Troubled pasts are the outcome of local, national and international conflicts, of the continuous quest for growth and dominance, of...

The research presented in this book results from an international interdisciplinary research program in Hayonim cave (Israel) from 1992 to 2000, directed by Prof O. Bar-Yosef (Harvard University) and L. Meignen (CNRS, France), and focusing on a long archaeological sequence dated to circa 300-140 000 years ago. The intensive fieldwork and research following it allowed us to document an essential period of human history in the Levant: the end of the Lower Palaeolithic and Early Middle Palaeolit...

Dorestad was the largest town of the Low Countries in the Carolingian era. As a riverine emporium on the northern edge of the Frankish Empire, it functioned as a European junction, connecting the Viking world with the Continent. In 2019, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden hosted its quinquennial international congress based around Dorestad, located at present-day Wijk bij Duurstede. This third edition, ‘Dorestad and its Networks’, coincided with the fiftieth birthday of finding ...

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, ...