Dates form the backbone of written history. But where do these dates come from? Many different calendars were used in the ancient world. Some of these calendars were based upon observations or calculations of regular astronomical phenomena, such as the first sighting of the new moon crescent that defined the beginning of the month in many calendars, while others incorporated schematic simplifications of these phenomena, such as the 360-day year used in early Mesopotamian administrative practices in order to simplify accounting procedures. Historians frequently use handbooks and tables for converting dates in ancient calendars into the familiar BC/AD calendar that we use today. But very few historians understand how these tables have come about, or what assumptions have been made in their construction. The seven papers in this volume provide an answer to the question what do we know about the operation of calendars in the ancient world, and just as importantly how do we know it? Topics covered include the ancient and modern history of the Egyptian 365-day calendar, astronomical and administrative calendars in ancient Mesopotamia, and the development of astronomical calendars in ancient Greece. This book will be of interest to ancient historians, historians of science, astronomers who use early astronomical records, and anyone with an interest in calendars and their development.

The Romney Marsh / Dungeness Foreland depositional complex comprises an extensive tract of marshland and associated sand and gravel barrier deposits, located in the eastern English Channel. This monograph presents the results of a programme of palaeoenvironmental investigation aimed at improving our understanding of this internationally-significant coastal landform. The focus is on the evidence for landscape change during the late Holocene, from c. 3000 BC onwards, and on identifying the local, regional and global driving mechanisms responsible for the changes observed. The research details the results from two related projects, each funded as part of English Heritage's Aggregate Levy Sustainability Fund scheme. The first project concerns the late Holocene evolution of the port of Rye, located in the southeast part of the complex, and the second the depositional history of the gravel foreland. Topics explored include the vegetation and land-use history of the study area, methodological issues relating to the collection and interpretation of radiocarbon dates from coastal lowlands, the role of compaction in influencing landscape and sea-level change, and the effects of medieval storms on coastal flooding and landscape change. This monograph is intended for students and researchers interested in Holocene coastal evolution and sea-level change, coastal vegetation history and land-use history, and the development of new techniques for reconstructing past environmental change in coastal lowlands.

This is the catalogue to an outstanding collection of Medieval art from a private collection. Ranging from paintings and sculpture to stained glass, manuscripts and caskets, many of the objects presented here are of absolute rarity, some are previously unpublished and - until recently - unknown.Of particular interest are: the recently discovered Anglo-Saxon Chrismatory, the first significant piece of its kind to come to light in well over a century; the walnut Casket painted with Illustrations of the Prise d'Orange, uniquely dating from the thirteenth century and a miracle of survival; the beautiful, ninth-century Byzantine Silk Samite of Confronting Birds; and the panel of The Dream of Joseph which formed part of the programme of stained glass installed at the Abbey of St-Denis in the twelfth century - considered one of the most important of all monuments of medieval art.

This fascinating portrait of the Society of Antiquaries of London, founded in 1707, assesses the impact that individual Fellows and the Society as a whole have had in influencing the way we visualise and understand the past. There are, for example, essays on the Society's pioneering role in recording monuments and antiquities for posterity, in establishing the scientific and empirical basis of archaeological studies, in replacing Biblically based timeframes with a clearer understanding of deep time measured in millions of years, in drawing up the first legislation protecting ancient monuments, and in funding and publishing the great excavations of the last one hundred years, from Stonehenge, Maiden Castle, Richborough and Sutton Hoo to Aksum (Ethiopia) and Mons Porphyrites (Egypt). All the papers represent fresh and original scholarship and they tell us much about the Society's achievements (and some of the accompanying conflicts between personalities and ideas) over three hundred years. They are based on diaries, letters, minute books and confidential government papers and on portraits that chart the changing image of the antiquary from a figure of fun to heroic seeker of forgotten people and civilizations. Visions of Antiquity reveals astonishing echoes across time - from the repeated and continuing attempts to record all ancient buildings and monuments to the continuity of the title 'antiquary' to describe scholars who build bridges between different branches of knowledge based on the study of material remains of the past and of a Fellowship whose numbers have included prime ministers, bishops, peers and parliamentarians, as well as radicals and free thinkers, such as William Morris and many of the founders of modern conservation.

It is difficult to imagine modern archaeology without radio-carbon dating, geophysics, analytical chemistry, or the input of the social and historical sources. Archaeology is inevitably an interdisciplinary enterprise, perhaps more so than any other field. But with the ever-increasing specialisation of modern research in general, it becomes more and more difficult to communicate across disciplinary doundaries; this is one of the major challenges modern archaeology faces today. This volume is the outcome of a two-day conference held at the University of Oxford that focused on the opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinary approaches to archaeology.

The papers in this book result from a conference held in Istanbul in 2004, and are the product of collaboration between the British Academy Black Sea Initiative (BABSI) and the City and Regional Planning Department of Istanbul Technical University. They cover a period from the first appearance of human settlers in the Black Sea region to the present day, and all emphasize the significance of the Black Sea itself as a source of unity, linking communities and histories in a wider regional context, extending westward along the Danube basin, northward into the Ukraine and south Russia, east into the Caucasus and southward over the Anatolian hinterland. A major introductory paper re-examines the evidence for the Black Sea flood hypothesis. A group of four papers evaluate new evidence for the economic and cultural relationships between Greeks and native populations in the Black Sea region from the seventh to the fourth centuries BC. The next group of studies is concerned with the interconnectedness of the Black Sea between medieval and modern times, highlighting Seljuk and Ottoman trade, and the roles of the ports of Odessa and Trabzon. Four papers deal with the economic and social development of the Turkish Black Sea region in recent times. The final section places Black Sea history in a long perspective both from a cultural and a political viewpoint.

The papers published in this volume were presented at a seminar on 'Recent Developments in Research and Management at World Heritage Sites' held at the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London. This was part of the Wiltshire-Malta World Heritage Exchange Project funded by the European Union AER Centurio Programme. While most of the papers focus on prehistoric and megalithic sites in Wiltshire and Malta, others consider education, cultural landscapes, research strategies, and a Neolithic landscape in China. The common threads linking the papers are the influence of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, the importance of research in the understanding and management of World Heritage Sites, and the importance of building consensus through partnership and involvement in the management of World Heritage Sites.

Pre-state ceremonial monuments, rich mortuary arrangements, forts, walled settlements and temples: all these occur in a narrow stretch of the Euphrates River valley prior to the rise of Carchemish, one of the major capital cities of the Ancient Near East. This well-illustrated book examines recently discovered evidence from the hinterlands of archaeologically inaccessible Carchemish in its regional context. Amongst the 18 contributors Tony Wilkinson characterizes the neighbouring regions of Carchemish, Guy Bunnens elaborates on a site hierarchy within the valley and Gioacchino Falsone appraises unpublished records from excavations at Carchemish itself. These material culture studies are important for those interested in the emergence of complex societies that do not conform to the Mesopotamian paradigm.

This collection of essays looks beyond the focus of existing works on ancient travel and its documentation, to examine its social and cultural implications. For travel (and the reasons behind it) offers a window on to many features of ancient societies - sense of place, perceptions of space, administration, relations with foreign powers, engagement with other cultures, and representation of homelands. Also of import is the study of ancient geographical knowledge, as well as ancient travel writing (an increasingly popular genre today), its popularity and purpose. All of the papers presented here show that ancient travel was considerably more widespread than is often assumed.

This volume presents the geoarchaeological analysis of the Aboukir Bay by the Smithsonian Institute. This study outlines the reasons for the submergence of the ancient coast line through detailed analysis of geological core samples.

This volume of thirteen essays came out of a conference in December 2004 at Bristol University, to celebrate the career of Mick Aston on the occasion of his retirement. They reflect his enthusiam for landscape and monastic archaeology in particular, and range in time from prehistory to the nineteenth century. Mick's ability to communicate archaeology to the masses has rightly seen him earn the title of 'The Ambassador of British Archaeology'.

The excavations at St Peter's church, Barton-upon-Humber, between 1978 and 1984 have yielded the largest collection of human remains in the UK, dating from the late tenth century to the mid-nineteenth. The twin aims of the project were to understand the architectural history and setting of this complex, multi-period building (Volume 1), and to recover a substantial sample of the population for palaeopathological study (Volume 2). An extensive programme of historical and topographical research also took place in order to set the archaeological evidence firmly in context. The parish registers, which extend back to the mid-sixteenth century, were transcribed, and these provide an important demographic overview of the population. The cemetery evidence revealed that the population is entirely secular, representing a cross-section of all levels of society living in the town and its hinterland. In total, 2,750 inhumations were examined, but there were also thousands of disarticulated bones - approximately three tons in weight - which could only be given the briefest examination. Those who were buried at St Peter's were subject not only to the normal visitations of disease and trauma but suffered an outbreak of the plague in 1593, when about a fifth of the population was lost. Taking the long view over the entire period, however, it is striking how many of the marks of health and vigour, popularly supposed to have changed substantially between the middle ages and the Victorian era, have remained relatively constant. Together, the two volumes provide fascinating insights into that mainstay of settlement - the small English market town.

‘Where have they come from? Where did you find them?’ These are some of the first questions we hear when people see medieval works of art like those assembled in this catalogue. Art from this period has been collected for at least 200 years, yet there is a perception that if it is not locked away in a monastery it has found its home in a museum long ago. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is the richness and variety of what still lies unclaimed by history that makes this material so interesting.The canon of what in medieval art is considered excellent was established long ago. Recent decades have witnessed a vigourous re-evaluation of this legacy and some of its keystones have begun to loosen. For example, the pre-eminence of Italian painting over that of Northern Europe is being questioned, and classes of objects once treated as peripheral, like stained glass, are moving back to centre stage. Works of art we could not see or knew nothing about are becoming visible, and it is exciting to reveal items to a wider public in this album.

Archaeological rescue excavations in Southwark between 1983 and 1990 uncovered parts of the London house of the medieval bishops of Winchester. The archaeological evidence, mainly from the east part of the site, is supplemented by detailed documentary evidence. The property developed from the mid 12th century into a palatial residence, based around an inner and an outer courtyard, and enclosed by a boundary wall. In the 14th-century palace, a great hall, service rooms and kitchens occupied the north range, household and servants were accommodated around the other sides of the inner courtyard, while the bishop had his own apartments, chapel and garden. A passage below the hall gave access from the inner courtyard north to the wharves and river. Storerooms, workshops and stables lined the east boundary wall, with gardens in the west half of the enclosure. A parliamentary survey of 1647 describes the layout of the bishop's palace, which was sketched c.1644 by Hollar for his Long View of London . The site remained in the bishops' ownership until the 1640s and it was returned to them after the Civil War, but a multiplicity of tenants and subtenants occupies the palace; by 1720 it was 'disused and very ruinous'. The medieval bishop's palace became tenements and small industrial storage units; in the 19th century large warehouses were built. Fire in 1814 revealed the surviving medieval masonry of the hall and service range, and the hall's west gable wall with its rose window remains a prominent landmark today.

This report presents the results of over 40 years of excavation, historic building survey and documentary research that has been carried out by Oxford Archaeology and others at the site of the Cistercian house of Rewley, a chantry founded in 1280. It became an abbey and stadium providing accommodation for monks studying at the university, and can therefore claim to be one of Oxford's earliest colleges. The railway station that subsequently occupied the site in 1851 followed the design of the Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition, and was the last surviving representative of that internationally important building.

This edited volume provides a full report on the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site of WF16, southern Jordan. Very few sites of PPNA date have been excavated using modern methods, so this report makes a very significant contribution to our understanding of this period. Excavations have shown that the site contains a highly dynamic use of architecture, and the faunal assemblage reveals new information on the processes that lead to the domestication of the goat.