Ancient Egyptian elites invested immense cultural and economic efforts in preparing for their afterlives. However, the diversity of choices open to them is often overlooked. These choices included tomb size, tomb location, and architectural design, as well as tomb decoration, and the selection of certain grave gifts. Their choices depended on financial means, but also on contemporary fashion, among other factors. Ancient sites were visited by the living to commemorate and rejuvenate human anc...

One day, sometime around 1700 BC, a bronzesmith made the first sword. This marked a technological turning point, giving rise to an arms race that has never since ceased. Soon, over a vast area between the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of weapons were manufactured. They were used in combat, then laid to rest, whole or broken, often during complex rituals that are still hard for us to understand.

Through the sword, the Bronze Age brought war into being. The warrior became an impo...

Nicolaus Westendorp (1773-1836) was een dominee in Nederlandse romantische traditie. Zo als veel van zijn collega’s begon hij zijn literaire leven als dichter. Hoewel het dominee zijn altijd zijn hoofd doel bleef werd hij landelijk bekend als oudheidkundige.

Als kind van de Nederlandse Romantiek stond hij met zijn voeten in het Verlichtingsdenken. Oudheidkunde was voor hem een praktische studie waarmee het net ontstane koninkrijk der Nederlanden een stevige basis kon krijgen. Het diende er ...

This popular-science book tells the story of one of the most important, but least known major archaeological sites in Europe: Doggerland. Few people know that the beaches along the North Sea lie on the edge of a vast lost world. A prehistoric landscape that documents almost a million years of human habitation and lay dry for most of that time.

Doggerland is where early hominids left the first footprints in northern Europe, more than 900,000 years ago. Later, for hundreds of thousands of year...

The Late Bronze Age from about 1600 to 1150 BCE was a time of unprecedented economic activity in human history based on the supply and production of the eponymous alloy bronze on an almost industrial scale. The supply networks for copper and tin during this period stretched over large parts of western Eurasia and included long distance maritime transport.

The palatial centres of Mycenaean Greece were positioned at a unique geographical interface between the cultural hotspots of the eastern Me...

Any activity requires the expenditure of energy, and the larger the scale of the undertakings, the more careful and strategic planning in advance is required. In focusing on labouring by humans and other animals, the papers in this volume investigate through a wide range of contexts how past people achieved their multiple daily tasks while remaining resilient in anticipation of adverse events and periods.

Each paper investigates the resource requirements of combined activities, from conducti...

Many new results on Middle and Late Bronze Age Laconia are presented in this volume, stemming from recent excavations by the Greek Archaeological Service as well as ongoing excavations, surveys and material studies by foreign schools and individual scholars. Among discussed settlements are the sites of Pellana, Palaiopyrgi, Geraki, Pavlopetri and Vrysika and also the island Kythera. The newly discovered palatial site at Ayios Vasileios is also elaborately discussed in various papers, includin...

In a process analogous with the impact of aerial photography on landscape archaeology, marine geophysics is locating the remains of thousands of shipwrecks across the seabed of the globe. This research project set out to establish whether all of the shipwrecks in a given geographic region could be identified by name through the mutual study of the 3D models of the shipwrecks, alongside the historic text of shipping losses in the same area.

All of the 273 shipwrecks in a 7,500sqm study area in...

The modelling and representation of prehistoric hunter-gatherer behaviours is largely influenced by the investigation of sites with high archaeological visibility, due to the presence of large amounts of knapped lithics, which generally survive the ravages of time. As a consequence, behaviours which were not, or to a limited extent, associated with stone tools are underrepresented in archaeological narratives about hunter-gatherer lifestyles, which, however, have characterised most of the hum...