This engaging and well-illustrated volume describes the excavations of a large urban sector, the so-called Triconch Palace, of the Adriatic seaport of Butrint. In so doing it adds to the new paradigm for the development of Roman towns in the Mediterranean. The book traces the changing nature of this rich and varied area - from 2nd-century Roman townhouses, to a 4th-century elite domus, to a Mid Byzantine trading area to late medieval allotments - and reveals the rhythms of Butrint and its Mediterranean connections. This is accompanied by discussions of the elaborate mosaic decoration of the palatial phase and their articulation of elite living, as well as of in-depth discussions of the implications of elite and domestic architecture in late antiquity and the Mid Byzantine period.

The site of 1 Poultry, excavated in the 1990s, is located near the Bank of England in the heart of the City of London. It lay immediately west of the point where the main east-west road through Roman London bridged the Walbrook stream and proved to be one of the most significant archaeological sites ever excavated in the City, with an unparalleled sequence of buildings, roads and open spaces. A timber drain of AD 47 beneath the main road is the earliest, securely dated structure yet known from Londinium and a pottery shop destroyed in the Boudican revolt gives a snapshot of life in AD 60/61. A 2nd-century AD writing tablet preserves the only evidence for the sale of a slave found in Britain to date, while the 3rd- and 4th-century buildings on the site provide a rare demonstration of the continuities and changes that occurred in Roman urban life. The key sequence from 1 Poultry provides the majority of the evidence but is augmented by findings from Docklands Light Railway sites at Bucklersbury, Lothbury and Lombard Street and other work at 72-75 Cheapside, 76-80 Cheapside, 36-37 King Street and Mansion House. Together, the sites provide a comprehensive record of the development of Londinium over the entire Roman period.

Since 1966, when James Diggle was elected to his Fellowship at Queen's College, Cambridge, his teaching and scholarly example have inspired many of his pupils to embark on their own academic careers. In this volume fourteen former pupils have contributed essays to mark his retirement. The contributions cover many of the diverse disciplines of Classics: Greek literature, Greek language, Latin literature, Textual Criticism, Greek and Roman Culture and the History of Scholarship. James Diggle has always excelled in the teaching of Greek and Latin composition and included are two offerings in Greek verse by former pupils. The volume concludes with a bibliography of the honorand's published writings.

Unclassical Traditions. Volume II: Perspectives from East and West in Late Antiquity is the second of two collections of essays by leading scholars discussing the nature and extent of the late-antique engagement with the classical past. Rather than concentrating on developments at the centre of empire (the focus of a previous volume, Unclassical Traditions I ), the aim here is to present a set of views from the margins: social, political, religious, literary, geographical and linguistic. Ranging from Armenian ecclesiastical histories, Egyptian alchemy and Jewish power politics, across the Mediterranean to the challenges raised by shifting circumstances in 5th-century North Africa and Ostrogothic Italy, the eight papers in this volume seek to establish the persistent importance of the classical tradition throughout a broadly defined late antiquity. Despite the divergent forms taken by these various responses, they are united by a common preoccupation with that still authoritative past. From these eastern and western perspectives - often peripheral and sometimes isolated - the classical past appears neither monolithic nor inflexible but as offering a set of assumptions or conventions that might be opposed or accepted, subverted or ignored or reworked into a striking variety of newly imagined worlds. Like its predecessor, this volume will be of interest to anyone concerned with the history, literature and culture of the later Roman empire. It stems from an international conference held in Cambridge in 2009, generously supported by the Faculty of Classics and the Henry Arthur Thomas Fund.

This volume of 15 papers is a tribute to Petros Themelis for his significant contribution to Greek archaeology and especially to the excavation, study and conservation to the ancient site of Messene in the Peloponnese. An international cast of scholars has contributed essays on a wide range of subjects (Greek sculpture, epigraphy and architecture), which reflect the interests of the honorand. New, previously unpublished material from Messenia, Athens and elsewhere is here presented for the first time. The geographical and chronological range of the contributions to this book extends from the Geometric period to the Roman Empire and from Macedonia to Crete and Magna Graecia.

Even after more than 250 years since its discovery, Pompeii continues to resonate powerfully in both academic discourse and the popular imagination. This volume brings together a collection of ten papers that advance, challenge and revise the present conceptions of the city's art, industry and infrastructure. The discussions of domestic art in this book, a perennial topic for Pompeian scholars, engage previously neglected subjects such as wall ornaments in domestic decoration, the sculpture collection in the house of Octavius Quartio, and the role of the covered walkways in luxury villa architecture. The famous cupid's frieze from the house of the Vettii is given a novel and intelligent reinterpretation. The place of industry at Pompeii, in both the physical and economic landscapes has long been overlooked. The chapters on building practice in inhabited houses, on the presence of fulling workshops in atrium houses, and on the urban pottery industry serve as successful contributions to a more complete understanding of the life of the ancient city. Finally, this volume breaks new ground in the consideration of the urban infrastructure of Pompeii, a topic that has won serious attention only in the last decades, but one that is playing an increasingly central role in Pompeian studies. The final three chapters offer a reassessment of the Pompeian street network, a scientific analysis of the amount of lead in Pompeian drinking water, and a thorough analysis of the water infrastructure around the forum that supported its architectural transformation in the last decades before the eruption of mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

This volume contains ten papers reflecting current aspects of the debate in theoretical Roman archaeology. They include papers on what the pottery finds from the Nepi Survey Project can tell us about how the local landscape was used and inhabited, poliadic deities in Roman colonies in Italy, Pompeii, the practice of the recycling of architectural materials and personal adornment concerning textile remains and brooches.

This volume investigates the archaeology of death and commemoration through thematically linked case studies drawn from the Classical world. These investigations stress the processes of burial and commemoration as inherently social and designed for an audience, and they explore the meaning and importance attached to preserving memory. While previous investigations of Greek and Roman death and burial have tended to concentrate on period- or regionally-specific sets of data, this volume instead focuses on a series of topical connections that highlight important facets of death and commemoration significant to the larger Classical world. Living through the dead investigates the subject of death and commemoration from a diverse set of archaeologically informed approaches, including visual reception, detailed analysis of excavated remains, landscape, and post-classical reflections and draws on artefactual, documentary and pictorial evidence. The nine papers present recent research by some of the leading voices on the subject, as well as some fresh perspectives. Case studies come from Thermopylae, the Bosporan kingdom, Athens, Republican Rome, Pompeii and Egypt. As a collected volume, they provide thematically linked investigations of key issues in ritual, memory and (self)presentation associated with death and burial in the Classical period. As such, this volume will be of particular interest to postgraduate students and academics with specialist interests in the archaeology of the Classical world and also more broadly, as a source of comparative material, to people working on issues related to the archaeology of death and commemoration.

Characterising urban life, City in Transition is the second volume reporting on the archaeology of the continuing excavation of Silchester Insula IX, taking the story down to the early 2nd century. In describing the evidence for the occupation of the 2nd and 3rd centuries it follows on from Life and Labour in Late Roman Silchester (2006), which published the late Roman occupation. Geochemical and micromorphological analyses inform the interpretation of the use of space within buildings and, together with the study of an abundant material culture and environmental record, provide a rich characterisation of the houses and their occupants. The report sheds important light on the urban condition, debating such themes as population density, status, occupation, diet and domestic ritual.

This volume examines conceptions, ideas and habits connected with children in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, focusing on the "dark sides of childhood" in the pre-modern world. The authors investigate the long-term attitudes of people, as well as ruptures in habits and customs. The book is divided into three parts. "Unwanted" deals with parents who were unable to bring up their baby and handed it over to other people or the cruel whims of destiny. "Disabled" addresses what we would label as children's illnesses since disability was a concept largely unknown to ancient people. "Nearly Lost" examines demons, viewed as destructive forces with the ability to destroy children or young people, sometimes by literally sucking their lives away. The articles are written by an international team of specialists from Belgium, Finland, Italy and the United States and were presented at conferences organised by the research project "Religion and Childhood. Socialisation from the Roman Empire to Christian World", funded by the Academy of Finland (2009-2012, directed by Dr. Katariina Mustakallio), at the University of Tampere, Finland.

This book explores the themes of memory and mourning from the Roman deathbed to the Roman cemetery, drawing subject matter from the literature, art, and archaeology of ancient Rome. It brings together scholarship on varied aspects of Roman death, investigating connections between ancient poetry, history and oratory and placing these alongside archaeological and textual evidence for Roman funerary and commemorative rituals. A series of case studies centred on individual authors and/or specific aspects of ritual behaviour, traces the story of Roman death: how the inhabitants of the Roman world confronted their mortality, disposed of the dead, remembered the dead and praised the dead, thereby enhancing our understanding of Roman society.

Research on the nature of cultural change in the Roman Empire has traditionally been divided between the Western and Eastern provinces. Papers in this volume aim to reunite the provinces by approaching the question of cultural change across the Empire through a range of material culture and historical sources focusing on the first 100 years of the foundation of a colony.

Understanding the calendars used by ancient and medieval cultures is essential to the writing of history. Equally important, however, is understanding the basis upon which our current knowledge of these calendars rests. This second volume of Calendars and Years explores the calendars of ancient and medieval China, India, the ancient Jewish world, the medieval Islamic world, and the Maya. Particular attention is given to the preserved evidence on which our understanding of these calendars lie, the modern historiography of their study, and the role of calendars in ancient and medieval society. Topics covered include the origin of the Chinese sexagenary cycle, evidence for the 364-day year in the ancient Jewish world, and the history of attempts to establish a correlation between Mayan dates and the Julian and Gregorian calendars. 176p, b/w illus (Oxbow Books 2011) Praise for Volume I: "Steele has assembled an essential foundation for the further study of calendariography and chronography in the ancient Near East and Egypt." Francesca Rochberg Journal for the History of Astronomy (November 2008) "It is a book from which there are absolute nuggets of incredible information to be mined." Peter A Clayton

During the Republican era, Rome was considered a demilitarized zone. Augustus's rule marked the first time soldiers were stationed in the capital of the Empire and it is therefore a crucial turning point between Republic and Principate. 10,000 to 40,000 soldiers now lived in Imperial Rome and they became an essential part of urban culture. The theme of this book is the urban Roman army in all its facets; it covers the complexities of its cultural appearance, its effect on the urban population, and the importance of civilian life in the capital. For the first time the written, archaeological and visual sources on the military in Rome are put together and present a comprehensive picture of the life and work of urban Roman soldiers. German Text.

This is one of the oldest preserved sagas in Icelandic and is compiled from Latin sources, mainly Bellum lugurthinum and Coniutario Catilinae by Sallustius and Pharsalia by Lucanus. The first section is on the Jugurthine wars and then Catilina and his gathering of men. In the later section, the conflict between Pompey and Julius Caesar is depicted. There are two versions of this saga that have been preserved. In this book, both of them are published letter by letter in compliance with the original text, supported by original Latin texts. The detailed introduction describes the main characteristics of the translation and all the manuscripts in the saga. Icelandic text.

The Archaeology of Fazzan is a major series of reports on the archaeology and history of Libya’s south-west desert region.This volume contains reports and analysis on a series of excavations carried out between 1958 and 1977 by the British archaeologist Charles Daniels, lavishly illustrated by site plans and numerous colour photographs – particularly of the rich artefact assemblages recovered. The publication will be high profile and a significant landmark in work seeking to record information about Libya’s long-term Saharan heritage. It will be an indispensable reference work to the nature of the Libya’s Saharan archaeology. The work will be of major value to the Libyan antiquities service and contracted archaeologists in concert with foreign oil companies, the NOC and the GMMR, and other similar major schemes.The key element of the story of Fazzan is the existence here of an early Libyan civilisation, the Garamantes, and the publication of the Archaeology of Fazzan volumes is putting in the public domain a rich dossier of information about their antecedents and descendants in this desert environment. This was a singularly important moment in Libya’s cultural history, with resonances also in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is great interest in the published volumes from specialists in Saharan, Sub-Saharan and Mediterranean archaeologists and historians as for the first time we can see in detail the effect of early Trans-Saharan links.