St. Eustatius, a small island in the northeastern Lesser Antilles, was one of the busiest ports in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Contested between the Dutch, French, and English, the island attracted thousands of ships a year and became one of the most cosmopolitan places in the New World. Moreover, the island played an important role in the American War of Independence (1775-1783), during which large quantities of arms, ammunition, and gunpowder were shipped to the fledgling United ...

The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age saw many developments in metalworking, social structure, food production, nutrition, and diet. At the same time, networks in Europe intensified and human impact on the environment changed in character. What influence did these transformations have on daily life? Which proxies can researchers use to study these topics?

This volume presents scientific contributions from different fields of expertise within modern archaeology in order to investigate past living ...

The early-modern Venezuelan Caribbean did not lure seafarers with the saccharine delights of cane sugar but with the preserving qualities of solar sea salt. In this book, the historical archaeological study of this salty commodity offers a unique entryway into the hitherto unknown maritime mobilities and daily lives of the seafarers who camped at the saltpans of Venezuelan islands from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, cultivating and harvesting the white crystal of the sea.

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Normaal gesproken vormt deze bundel de neerslag van de laatste metaaltijdendag. Op 20 oktober 2023 was de metaaltijdendag te gast in Tiel, en werden de resultaten van het grootste onderzoek Tiel-Medel gepresenteerd. De onderzoekers hadden begrijpelijk wel genoeg geschreven over Tiel, en in deze bundel zijn dan ook geen bijdragen over Tiel te vinden. Wat wel te vinden is, is een breed scala aan bijdragen over objecten en nederzettingen, van speerpunten tot spiegels, en van compacte dorpen tot ...

The main goal of this volume is to look at social groups involved in economic activity other than members of the palace-based institutions and “elites” in Late Bronze Age Mycenaean Greek societies. The palaces and elites are the usual subject of studies of ancient economies, often from a top-down approach, but here we consider a fuller range of the members of a society, their organization, their institutions, and their contributions to the economies of those societies from bottom-up appro...

While terrestrial archaeology has engaged with contemporary philosophy, maritime archaeology has remained in comparative disciplinary – or subdisciplinary – isolation. However, the issues that humans face in the Anthropocene – from global warming to global pandemics – call for transdisciplinary cooperation, and for thinking together beyond the confines of the human-centered philosophical tradition. Growing areas such as the “blue humanities” and “oceanic thinking” draw directl...

Across Western Asia, the astonishing increase in the availability of durable ceramic containers in the seventh millennium BCE had significant societal repercussions – so much so that vital social, economic, and symbolic activities became dependent upon the availability of pottery containers. These early ceramic containers, however, established themselves alongside flourishing pre-existing container traditions, with vessels made in a wide range of materials including clay, bitumen, basketry,...