Recent Titles

This book is the first major study of Lydian material culture at Gordion and also the first published monograph on Lydian painted pottery from any site excavation. Richly illustrated, it provides a comprehensive definition and analysis of Lydian ceramics based on stylistic, archaeological, and textual evidence, while thoroughly documenting the material's stratigraphic contexts. The book situates the ceramic corpus within its broader Anatolian cultural context and offers insights into the impact of Lydian cultural interfaces at Gordion.

The Lydian pottery found at Gordion was largely produced at centers other than Sardis, the Lydian royal capital, although Sardian imports are also well attested and began to influence Gordion's material culture as early as the 7th century BCE, if not before. Following the demise of the Lydian kingdom, a more limited repertoire of Lydian ceramics demonstrably continued in use at Gordion into the Achaemenid Persian period in the late 6th and 5th centuries BCE.

The material was excavated by Professor Rodney Young's team between 1950 and 1973 and is fully presented here for the first time. Ongoing research in the decades following Young's excavations has led to a more refined understanding of Gordion's archaeological contexts and chronology, and, consequently, we are now able to view the Lydian ceramic corpus within a more secure stratigraphic framework than would have been the case if the material had been published shortly after the excavations.

This volume is the publication and analysis of the tomb of pharaoh Seneb-Kay (ca. 1650-1600 BCE), and a cemetery of associated tombs at Abydos, all attributable to a group of kings of Egypt's Second Intermediate Period. The tomb of Seneb-Kay has provided the first known king's tomb of pharaonic Egypt that included decorated imagery in the burial chamber. That evidence, presented in full-color and discussed in detail in the volume, allows us to identify this previously unknown ruler along with a group of seven similar tombs that can be attributed to an Upper Egyptian Dynasty that survived for approximately half a century during a period of pronounced territorial fragmentation in the Nile Valley.

This volume assembles leading Near Eastern art historians, archaeologists, and philologists to examine and apply critical contemporary approaches to the arts and artifacts of the ancient Near East.

Scholars of ancient metallurgy gain insights from individual artifacts as well as from synthetic overviews because debates can turn on details of particular objects from particular contexts. Therefore, it is important for archaeometallurgical studies to provide comprehensive catalogs that specify the attributes of individual objects as well as contexts and the technical studies undertaken on those objects. This fourth volume in the series is devoted to presenting the metallurgical evidence from Ban Chiang, Ban Tong, Ban Phak Top, and Don Klang in northeast Thailand in the form of detailed catalogs organized by sites, periods, and artifact types. All metal artifacts, metallic by-products, and crucibles from the four-site study are included. A catalog of analyzed prills is also included. The catalogs summarize all the contextual, metric, and analytical data from metallographic, elemental, and microhardness analyses. Illustrations and photomicrographs provide visual evidence for the study collection. These kinds of detailed catalogs form the raw material of technical and archaeological interpretation, enabling comparisons with other collections as well as allowing scholars to form their own conclusions independently of the interpretations of the authors.

This book presents the results of the first systematic archaeological study of Roman peasants. It examines the spaces, architecture, diet, agriculture, market interactions, and movement habitus of non-elite rural dwellers in a region of southern Tuscany, Italy, during the Roman period. Volume 1 presents the excavation data from eight non-elite rural sites including a farm, a peasant house, animal stall/work huts, a ceramics factory, field drains, and a site of uncertain function, here framed as individual chapters complete with finds analysis. Volume 2 examines this data synthetically in thematic chapters addressing land use, agriculture, diet, markets, and movement.

The results suggest a different, more sophisticated Roman peasant than heretofore assumed. The data suggests that Roman peasants particularly in the first century BC/AD built specialized sites distributed throughout the landscape to maximize use of diverse land parcels. This has important implications for the interpretation of field survey data, the estimate of rural demographics from that survey, and assumptions about the long-term changes to human settlement. It also points to an important moment of agricultural intensification in this period, a contention beginning to be supported by other studies. The project also identified sophisticated systems of land use, including crop rotation and an important investment in animal agriculture. This work presents the first systematic data from Roman Italy for rural consumption, tracking the fine wares made at a production site to local sites nearby. This supports the largely theoretical problematizing of the so-called consumer city model and suggests the potential importance of rural aggregate demand. Movement studies, based on finds from the sites themselves, describe a more mobile population than anticipated, engaged in quotidian and long-distance movement patterns, supported by the small but steady stream of imports and exports into and out of this seemingly liminal region. The book concludes by addressing the implications of this new data for major questions in Roman social and economic history.