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...

The human past is unimaginable without the horse. From our ancestors hunting and painting horses in the Upper Palaeolithic, to the earliest riders, the rise of equestrian empires, and the critical role of horses in war, settler colonialism, and modern state formation, human history is undeniably equestrian. Because of the deep and varied entanglements between people and horses, the study of horses of the past is inherently, and increasingly, interdisciplinary. However, scholars often do not u...

In the rich archives of the Leiden Museum of Antiquities lies a fascinating manuscript dealing with the autopsy on an Ancient Egyptian mummy. This was performed in 1878 by the Museum’s curator Willem Pleyte. Thanks to Pleyte’s detailed procès-verbal, the mummy (which did not survive the dissection) can be reconstructed at least on paper. The name of the deceased has been inscribed on the mummy’s cartonnage, on some of the linen bandages, and on the Book of the Dead papyrus retrieved by...

St. Eustatius, a small island in the Lesser Antilles, has played an important role in Atlantic World history. Since its first permanent European settlement in 1636, the island changed hands 22 times between the Dutch, French, and English. As a result of the Dutch free trade policy, St. Eustatius became one of the Caribbean’s main transshipment centers in the eighteenth century. During the American War of Independence (1775-1783), large amounts of arms, ammunition, and gunpowder were shipped...

Although household goods are a well-establish topic in Medieval and Early Modern archaeology, more recent research is overcoming simple typological and technological aspects and pointing to broader approaches, which relates to the understanding of goods’ production, consumption strategies, other economic activities and structures of social organization. Thus, the understanding of past societies and cultures relies heavily in the study of their household goods to understand people, groups an...

In the second millennium BC, mining for copper ore on the Great Orme, Wales, created one of Europe’s largest surviving prehistoric copper mines. The ore from the mine was smelted into metal that was cast and worked into the rich variety of copper and bronze objects synonymous with the Bronze Age in Britain and Europe.

This book presents an original synthesis and reinterpretation of the complex prehistoric archaeology of the Great Orme mine. It uses previously unpublished data in a novel and...

How to investigate an archaeological site that became inaccessible? When the Egyptian Western Desert was closed for security reasons in 2016 just before the start of the first archaeological excavation at Umm al-Dabadib, in the Kharga Oasis, this question became the starting point for an unexpected journey in search of an alternative methodology.

Our multidisciplinary team, including Egyptologists, archaeologists, architects, historians, engineers, mathematicians, IT experts, botanists and hy...

In Bronze Age Europe, an enormous amount of metalwork was buried in the ground and never retrieved. Patterns in the archaeological finds show that this was a deliberate practice: people systematically deposited valuable metal objects in specific places in the landscape, even in non-metalliferous regions. Although this practice seems strange and puzzling from our modern perspective, these patterns demonstrate that it was not simply a matter of irrational human behaviour. Instead, there were su...

Before the introduction of Roman temples in the Low Countries, there used to be ‘open air cult places’ in the Iron Age. That is at least the assumption based on descriptions given by classical writers and several structures typified as sanctuaries that were excavated in France.

Several of these French sanctuaries portray long usage, modifications, disarticulated human remains, and depositions of animal bones and Iron Age weaponry. However, the regularly encountered rectangular structures...