One of the most puzzling phenomena of the European Bronze Age, is that many communities buried or otherwise hid large numbers of valuable bronze objects, but never returned to retrieve them. This book focuses on the metal finds of one small European region, the southern Netherlands and the adjacent part of North Belgium.Fontijn considers the question of why so many elaborate bronze objects have been found in watery locations in this landscape, such as rivers, streams, and marshes, while so fe...

Megalith building constitutes not only a past, but also a recent phenomenon, which is still practised today. The documentation and interpretation of recent megalith building traditions is offering potential aid in the interpretation of prehistoric monuments. Fieldwork in Sumba and Nagaland set up a frame to answer questions such as: Who is buried in the megalithic tombs and what kind of commemoration is connected to megalithic monuments? How are socioeconomic characteristics of the associated...

Technology refers to any set of standardised procedures for transforming raw materials into finished products. Innovation consists of any change in technology which has tangible and lasting effect on human practices, whether or not it provides utilitarian advantages. Prehistoric societies were never static, but the tempo of innovation occasionally increased to the point that we can refer to transformation taking place. Prehistorians must therefore identify factors promoting or hindering innov...

At the end of the 5th millennium BCE, some of the vastest settlements of the time emerged on the forest steppe north of the Black Sea. The largest of these sites were found between the Southern Bug and Dnieper river. There they occur only tens of kilometres apart and are assumed to be partly coeval. The Trypillia 'mega-sites' reached sizes of up to 320 hectares with up to 3000 buildings in one place. During their peak times as many as 11.000 people could have lived in one of those settlements.

But how did people come together in these Trypillia 'mega-sites' with several thousand dwellings? How long were such sites inhabited, and how many people lived there? Were these settlements the first towns, preceding the Mesopotamian development? To address these questions, this book presents the results of the investigations at the Maidanets'ke 'mega-site'...

This volume is a collection of 19 articles in three sections reporting on recent research on the archaeology of shipwrecks, harbours, and maritime landscapes in the Mediterranean region. The shipwrecks section looks at excavated vessels from Mazotos, Modi Island, the port of Rhodes, Naples, and Narbonne, as well as a sailing reconstruction of the Ma‘agan Mikhael ship.

The harbours section includes articles on areas from the Levant to Seville looking at a variety of harbour defence systems a...

The adoption of agriculture is one of the major developments in human history. Archaeological studies have demonstrated that the trajectories of Neolithisation in Northwest Europe were diverse. This book presents a study into the archaeology of the communities involved in the process of Neolithisation in the Lower Rhine Area (5500-2500 cal BC). It elucidates the role played by the indigenous communities in relation to their environmental context and in view of the changes that becoming Neolit...

Interdisciplinary study on the role of earthquakes in the eastern Mediterranean.Does the "Minoan myth" still stand up to scientific scrutiny? Since the work of Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos (Crete, Greece), the romanticized vision of the Cretan Bronze Age as an era of peaceful prosperity only interrupted by the catastrophic effects of natural disasters has captured the popular and scientific imagination. Its impact on the development of archaeology, archaeoseismology, and earthquake geology in ...

The construction of a new metro line through the heart of Amsterdam in 2003-2018 – the North/South Line – gave us access to a unique archaeological site: the riverbed of the Amstel. Almost 700,000 archaeological finds were made there, all of which are linked with the history of Amsterdam between 1300 and 2000. In 2018, a photographic catalogue of 13,000 finds entitled Stuff was published, telling the visual story of the objects and materials that have been used in Amsterdam over the centu...

This volume collects papers on the pre-Corded Ware horizon in central Europe and adjacent areas (i.e. from c. 3500 – 2800 BC). This phase is very patchily researched, partly also because certain kinds of evidence, notably domestic architecture and burials, are rare or absent in many regions. This has occasionally been interpreted as signs of a major crisis and population bottleneck, which in turn facilitated the migration of new populations from the steppe, bringing with them amongst others...

This book explores the cost, expressed in labour, of constructing fortifications during the Late Bronze Age in Greece (ca. 1600 – 1050 BCE). The underlying question for this study is whether the cost of large scale constructions, built with large, unwieldy blocks, may have overstretched the (economic) capabilities of communities, leading to their collapse.

In order to determine the labour costs, the building process is deconstructed and for each sub-process, the costs are determined. The co...