Sharing Knowledge & Cultural Heritage (SK&CH), First Nations of the Americas, testifies to the growing commitment of museum professionals in the twenty-first century to share collections with the descendants of people and communities from whom the collections originated. Thanks to collection histories and the documenting of relations with particular indigenous communities, it is well known that until as recently as the 1970s, museum doors - except for a handful of cases - were shut to indigenous peoples.This volume is the result of an "expert meeting" held in November 2007 at the National Museum of Ethnology (NME) in Leiden, the Netherlands. Since then SK&CH projects have developed. The NME invited leading indigenous as well as non-native professional experts in the field from the Americas and Europe to explore and discuss case studies based on fieldwork, collecting material culture and/or work with indigenous communities in Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, North America and Central and South America.

The Death of Archaeological Theory? addresses the provocative subject of whether it is time to discount the burden of somewhat dogmatic theory and ideology that has defined archaeological debate and shaped archaeology over the last 25 years. Seven chapters meet this controversial subject head on, also assessing where archaeological theory is now, and future directions. John Bintliff questions what theory is and argues that archaeologists should be freed from 'Ideopraxists', or those who preach that a single approach or model is right to the exclusion of all others. Marc Pluciennik again questions what we mean by archaeological theory and argues that the role of intellectual fashion is underestimated. He predicts pressure from outside archaeology to redirect our dominant theories towards genetic and human impact theory. Kristian Kristiansen argues that theory cannot die, but it can change direction and sees signs of a retreat from the present post-modern and post-processual cycle towards a more science based, rationalistic cycle of revived modernity. To Mark Pearce the most striking thing about the present state of archaeological theory is that there is no emerging paradigm to be discerned; he proposes that Theory is not dead, but has instead become more eclectic and nuanced. Two papers offer a different perspective from other areas of the world; Alexander Gramsch examines the issue from the German tradition and shows that in Central and Eastern Europe not only has Anglo-American Theory had limited impact, but current discussions on the future of method and theory offer a broader view of the discipline in which older traditions are seen to form the foundation. Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus demonstrate that American archaeologists do not foresee the death of a genuinely archaeological theory (which they believe has never existed) but fear the real catastrophe would be the death of anthropological theory, because some anthropology today has become decidedly anti-scientific, rejecting not only the controlled comparison and contrast of cultures, but also the use of generalisation, both of which are crucial to theories and models and without which the longue durée will always be invisible.

Oceans Odyssey 2 presents the results of the discovery and archaeological survey of ten deep-water wrecks by Odyssey Marine Exploration. In the Western Approaches and western English Channel, a mid-17th century armed merchantman, the guns of Admiral Balchin's Victory (1744), the mid-18th century French privateer La Marquise de Tourny and six German U-boats lost at the end of World War II are examined in depth. From the Atlantic coast of the United States, the Jacksonville 'Blue China' wreck's British ceramics, tobacco pipes and American glass wares bring to life the story of a remarkable East Coast schooner lost in the mid-19th century. These unique sites expand the boundaries of human knowledge, highlighting the great promise of deep-sea wrecks, the technology needed to explore them and the threats from nature and man that these wonders face. Challenges to managing underwater cultural heritage are also discussed, along with proposed solutions for curating and storing collections.

Comparative Archaeologies scrutinises current thinking on the dynamics and historical trajectories of complex societies in the American Southwest (AD 900-1600) and the Iberian Peninsula (3000-1500 BC) through a focused comparison of five themes: Histories, Landscapes, Bodies, Gender, and Art. Leading archaeologists from North America and Europe - drawing on diverse intellectual traditions - engage in this innovative form of comparative archaeology which recognizes both the historicities of past societies of similar forms and the social embeddedness of archaeological practice and theory.

This volume presents the rich, but under-utilised and in parts inaccessible, archival historic aerial imagery, traditional photographs and those captured from satellites, for the exploration and management of cultural heritage. An unparalleled resource, for archaeologists and all with an interest in landscapes, images spanning the second half of the 20th century provide an unrivalled means of documenting and understanding change and informing the study of the past. Case studies, written by leading experts in their fields, illustrate the applications of this imagery across a wide range of heritage issues, from prehistoric cultivation and settlement patterns, to the impact of recent landscape change. Contemporary environmental and land use issues are also dealt with, in a volume that will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, geographers and those in related disciplines.

Learning and teaching languages in an online environment is one of contemporary education's great challenges. The challenge is made particularly difficult because language learners benefit from a social constructivist approach in which individual learners learn by doing together - negotiating meaning in collaborative interaction. The open source revolution in technology has opened up the possibility of communal efforts to develop technological solutions to such pedagogical challenges. This volume brings together reports from the Covcell Project which developed collaborative tools for the learning management system, Moodle, with papers relating to a range of other tools for online language teaching, in a number of domains including language for special purposes, foreign language equivalency certification, cultural learning practices and oral skills development.

How did ancient Europeans materialise memory? Material Mnemonics: Everyday Practices in Prehistoric Europe provides a fresh approach to the archaeological study of memory. Drawing on case studies from the British Isles, Scandinavia, central Europe, Greece, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula that date from the Neolithic through the Iron Age, the book's authors explore the implications of our understanding of the past when memory and mnemonic practices are placed in the center of cultural analyses. They discuss monument building, personal adornment, relic-making, mortuary rituals, the burning of bodies and houses and the maintenance of domestic spaces and structures over long periods of time. Material Mnemonics engages with contemporary debates on the intersection of memory, identity, embodiment, and power and challenges archaeologists to consider how materiality both provokes and constrains the mnemonic processes in everyday life.

Unclassical Traditions: Alternatives to the Classical Past in Late Antiquity is the first of two collections of essays by leading scholars discussing the nature and extent of the late-antique engagement with its classical heritage. This issue has long been at the heart of modern historical debate and, as this volume demonstrates, it was no less a matter of concern among authors and audiences in the period itself. From the Chronological Tables of Eusebius of Caesarea to the Brevarium of Festus and from the imperial panegyric to the Byzantine liturgy, eight papers explore how the persistence, dominance and normative nature of the classical tradition in its various forms could be negotiated, undermined, ironised or even flatly denied. Whether in the hands of Christian bishops such as Ambrose of Milan or Basil of Caesarea, or in the poetry of Ausonius or in the lives of the saints, many central aspects of late-antique culture here emerge as the product of a combination of authoritatively classical and avowedly unclassical traditions.

This volume grew out of an interdisciplinary discussion held in the context of the Leverhulme-funded project 'Changing Beliefs in the Human Body', through which the image of the body in pieces soon emerged as a potent site of attitudes about the body and associated practices in many periods. Archaeologists routinely encounter parts of human and animal bodies in their excavations. Such fragmentary evidence has often been created through accidental damage and the passage of time - nevertheless, it can also signify a deliberate and meaningful act of fragmentation. As a fragment, a part may acquire a distinct meaning through its enchained relationship to the whole or alternatively it may be used in a more straightforward manner to represent the whole or even act as stand-in for other variables. This collection of papers puts bodily fragmentation into a long-term historical perspective. The temporal spread of the papers collected here indicates both the consistent importance and the varied perception of body parts in the archaeological record of Europe and the Near East. By bringing case studies together from a range of locations and time periods, each chapter brings a different insight to the role of body parts and body wholes and explores the status of the body in different cultural contexts. Many of the papers deal directly with the physical remains of the dead body, but the range of practices and representations covered in this volume confirm the sheer variability of treatments of the body throughout human history. Every one of the contributions shows how looking at how the human body is divided into pieces or parts can give us deeper insights into the beliefs of the particular society which produced these practices and representations.

This monograph contains the joint proceedings of the first two conferences organised by the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology. It contains 23 papers that cover land-based and underwater excavation and survey in the area of the North-Western Nile Delta, principally concerning the cities of Alexandria and Heracleion-Thonis, as well as studies of aspects of the material culture from these sites.

Memory can be both a horrifying trauma and an empowering resource. From the Ancient Greeks to Nietzsche and Derrida, the dilemma about the relationship between history and memory has filled many pages, with one important question singled out: is the writing of history to memory a remedy or a poison? Recently, a growing interest in and preoccupation with the issue of memory, remembering and forgetting has resulted in a proliferation of published works, in various disciplines, that have memory as their focus. This trend, to which the present volume contributes, has started to occupy the dominant discourses of disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, history, anthropology and archaeology, and has also disseminated into the wider public discourse of society and culture today. Such a condition may perhaps echo the phenomenon of a melancholic experience at the turn of the millennium. Archaeology and Memory seeks to examine the diversity of mnemonic systems and their significance in different past contexts as well as the epistemological and ontological importance of archaeological practice and narratives in constituting the human historical condition. The twelve substantial contributions in this volume cover a diverse set of regional examples and focus on a range of prehistoric and classical case studies in Eurasian regional contexts as well as on the predicaments of memory in examples of the archaeologies of 'contemporary past'. From the Mesolithic and Neolithic burial chambers to the trenches of World War I and the role of materiality in international criminal courts, a number of contributors examine how people in the past have thought about their own pasts, while others reflect on our own present-day sensibilities in dealing with the material testimonies of recent history. Both kinds of papers offer wider theoretical reflections on materiality, archaeological methodologies and the ethical responsibilities of archaeological narration about the past.

Archaeology, as the discipline that searches to explain the development of society by means of material remains, has been avoiding the big issues involved with its research agenda. The topic of social evolution is concealed by anxiety about previous paradigmatic malpractice and the primary archaeological division of the world in culture areas still suffers from the archaic methods by which it was established. Archaeological inference of developing societies is weighed down by its choice of particularism within agency approaches and overtly reductionist due to the prevalence of statistical, classificatory and biological approaches. This book addresses these issues through a perspective on the spatial analysis of the built environment. As one of the principal properties of our dataset, as well as being the first materialisation of sociality, such spatialities are suggested to be a fundamental key for enabling an understanding of the developing social identity of places, regions and areas. In order to arrive at a truly social inference of spatial datasets, archaeology's usual analysis working from material remains towards socio-cultural interpretations needs to be inverted. The vantage point of this study consists of aprioristic social theory. It constructs its arguments through an epistemological foundation comprising a selection of essential ideas regarding the three constitutive axes of developing societies: time, human action and human space. As it recognises the inherent position of these axes combined in the discipline of human geography, a historical comparison of these two disciplines presents the angle from which plausible theoretical advancements can be made. The core of the book explores selected works of human geographers Allan Pred, Benno Werlen and Andreas Koch against the backdrop of theories like structuration or systems theory, phenomenology, action theory, and to a lesser extent Actor Network Theory and autopoiesis. From this follows its own theoretical proposal called the social positioning of spatialities. On this basis hypotheses for methodological opportunities are discussed, establishing a research agenda. Firmly placing its efforts in current paradigmatic debates in the discipline, this study offers archaeological theorists an incentive to leave the safety of materially bound science and adapt an alternative perspective. It is an attempt to put archaeology back in the forefront of the social theoretical debates it should contribute to.

This monograph presents a translation, commentary and interpretation of the bilingual monumental Stele of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II, which stood in the temple district of Heracleion-Thonis in the north-western Nile Delta of Egypt. The six metre high stele was erected sometime between either 141/140 and 131 or 124 and 116 BC and was discovered during the excavations of the European Institute of Underwater Archaeology. Unfortunately immersion in the sea has damaged the surface of the stele and little of the Greek text can be made out. Nevertheless much of the hieroglyphic portion of the document can be read and interpreted. It is laid out in traditional style complete with a royal protocol and eulogy and contains information about the local affairs of the priests of Heracleion.

Henri Duday is Director of Research for CNRS at the University of Bordeaux. The Archaeology of the Dead is based on an intensive specialist course in burial archaeology given by Duday in Rome in November 2004. The primary aim of the project was to contribute to the development of common procedures for excavation, data collection and study of Roman cemeteries of the imperial period. Translated into English by Anna Maria Cipriani and John Pearce, this book looks at the way in which the analysis of skeletons can allow us to re-discover the lives of people who came before us and inform us of their view of death. Duday throughly examines the means at our disposal to allow the dead to speak, as well as identifying the pitfalls that may deceive us.

The study of tree-rings (dendrochronology) provides a key resource for determining dates for archaeological and other contexts where wood/charcoal is present (and so cultural chronology), and for investigating past climate and environment. In the central and east Mediterranean region Peter Ian Kuniholm is synonymous with dendrochronology and dendroarchaeology. He led the creation of numerous tree-ring chronologies for the region (from forests, buildings, archaeological sites), and demonstrated the enormous potential and power of dendrochronology to a range of topics. This rich collection of papers by an international authorship, deriving from a conference held at Cornell University in honor of Peter Kuniholm, provides wide-ranging and up-to-date discussions and assessments on a number of key topics concerning the chronology and environment of the central to east Mediterranean and Near East and the field of dendrochronology. This includes controversy - with a set of papers addressing the current debate over the dating of the great Santorini/Thera volcanic eruption in the mid second millennium BC; and famous sites and finds, including a report on the absolute dating of the extraordinary Uluburun ship of the late 14th century BC, and papers concerned with the dating and interpretation of important sites and topics such as Gordion, Akrotiri on Thera, the rise and fall of the Hittite empire, and the Anatolian Iron Age. Other papers explore the history, scope and potential of dendrochronology in the Mediterranean region. The debate over what happened around AD536-540 gets a look in also, along with papers exploring the relevance of dendrochemical approaches to identifying past environmental events (such as major volcanic eruptions), and a review of work on timberline dynamics and climate change in Greece.

This book contains a detailed account of the earliest research carried out on the Dutch megalithic tombs. Dating from the Middle Neolithic these Stone Age monuments have continually triggered people's imagination. The earliest theories about their origin involved mythical creatures such as giants and witches. This richly illustrated book tracks the different ideas and theories through time and is a treasure for all those interested in Stone Age monuments and the history of Archaeology as a discipline. Contains a complete catalogue of all Dutch megalithic tombs and a summary and an appendix in German.