Multimodality – the integration of different semiotic resources in communication – plays a key role in the way people convey meaning. While much of the research has focused on multimodal communication in modern European and Anglo-Saxon cultures, the diverse visual and textual compositions of ancient civilizations have been less explored.

This book presents the findings of a working group on multimodal communication in Ancient Egypt and explores the multimodal nature of Egyptian artifacts...

Ancient civilizations often developed near major rivers, like in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In Central Asia, the Murghab alluvial fan in southern Turkmenistan was central to the emergence of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), also known as the Oxus Civilization, during the third and second millennia BCE. The local alluvial fan was central for the productive agriculture at the basis of the region's urban centers and the wealth that accumulated in these societies.

This volume expl...

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...

Multimodality – the integration of different semiotic resources in communication – plays a key role in the way people convey meaning. While much of the research has focused on multimodal communication in modern European and Anglo-Saxon cultures, the diverse visual and textual compositions of ancient civilizations have been less explored.

This book presents the findings of a working group on multimodal communication in Ancient Egypt and explores the multimodal nature of Egyptian artifacts...

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...

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...