Lunar calendars suffer from an inherent uncertainty in the length of each month and the number of months in the year. Variable atmospheric conditions, weather and the acuity of the eye of an observer mean that the first sighting of the new moon crescent can never be known in advance. Calendars which rely on such observations to define the beginning of a new month therefore suffer from this lack of certainty as to whether a month will begin on a given day or the next. The papers in this volume address the question of how ancient and medieval societies lived with the uncertainties of a lunar calendar. How did lack of foreknowledge of the beginning of the month impact upon administration, the planning of festivals, and historical record keeping? Did societies replace the observation of the new moon crescent with schematic calendars or calendars based upon astronomical calculations and what were the ideological and practical consequences of such a change? The contributors to this volume address these topics from the perspectives of a variety of Ancient Near Eastern, Jewish, Ancient and Medieval European, Asian and American cultures.

Block M is a substantial architectural complex comprising three large buildings at the heart of the Minoan town of Palaikastro. With traces of activity stretching back to the Prepalatial period, and occupation in the Protopalatial period, Block M sees its most intensive use in the Neopalatial period, in the 17th century BC. This period sees widespread construction, followed by two severe destruction horizons: the first seismic, the second associated with the Theran eruption, by which time the Block may already have been in ruins. Its subsequent history is very different from that usually encountered elsewhere in the town - it became an open area used only for the dumping of refuse in two abandoned wells, without widespread reoccupation in the LM II-III periods. This volume presents the results of excavations conducted by the British School at Athens, which uncovered these extensive remains in the late 1980s, 1990s and 2003. These investigations have helped to elucidate the character of this important town during the Middle and early Late Bronze Ages, and offer valuable evidence for relations between eastern Crete and sites in the centre of the island such as Knossos.

Excavations at the adjacent sites of Gorham's Cave and Vanguard Cave have yielded a rich combination of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental finds covering a timespan of over 100,000 years. This volume deals with the primary results of the 1995-1998 excavations at both caves. The 24 chapters by leading specialists cover a range of topics from information concerning the nature and sequence of Middle Palaeolithic Neanderthal occupations to the reconstruction of the environmental context of these activities, based on proxy indicators such as sediments, charcoal, amphibians, reptiles, avifaunal remains, and small and large mammals. The Gibraltar evidence provides a rare insight into the lives of Neanderthals in a western Mediterranean coastal setting. It also presents site information on some of the last Neanderthal populations and the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition.

This collection of essays and tributes to Glynn Isaac marks the 26th anniversary of Glynns premature death on October 5th, 1985. These contributions document the work of many of Glynns colleagues students and collaborators, and reflect their continuing respect for a great scholar

The main concern of this volume is the multi-layered concept of ethnicity. Contributors examine and contextualise contrasting definitions of ethnicity and identity as implicit in two perspectives, one from the classical tradition and another from the prehistoric and anthropological tradition. They look at the role of textual sources in reconstructing ethnicity and introduce fresh and innovative archaeological data in reconstructing ethnicity, either from fieldwork or from new combinations of old data. Finally, in contrast to many traditional approaches to ethnicity, they examine the relative and interacting role of natural and cultural features in the landscape in the construction of ethnicity. The volume is headed by the contribution of Andrea Carandini whose work challenges the conceptions of many in the combination of text and archaeology. He begins by examining the mythology surrounding the founding of Rome, taking into consideration the recent archaeological evidence from the Palatine and the Forum. Here primacy is given to construction of place and mythological descent. Anthony Snodgrass, Robin Osborne, Tim Cornell and Christopher Smith offer replies to his arguments. Overall, the nineteen papers presented here show that a modern interdisciplinary and international archaeology that combines material data and textual evidence - critically - can provide a powerful lesson for the full understanding of the ideologies of ancient and modern societies.

Acts of a workshop held at the Danish Institute of Athens in collaboration with the INSTAP Study Center for East Crete, 27-29 June 2007.

Materiality and Social Practice investigates the transformative potential arising from the interplay between material forms, social practices and intercultural relations. Such a focus necessitates an approach that takes a transcultural perspective as a fundamental methodology and, then a broader understanding of the inter-relationship between humans and objects. Adopting a transcultural approach forces us to change archaeology's approach towards items coming from the outside. By using them mostly for reconstructing systems of exchange or for chronology, archaeology has for a long time reduced them to their properties as objects and as being foreign. This volume explores the notion that the significance of such items does not derive from the transfer from one place to another as such but, rather, from the ways in which they were used and contextualised. The main question is how, through their integration into discourses and practices, new frameworks of meaning were created conforming neither with what had existed in the receiving society nor in the area of origin of the objects.

In 2008, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Council for British Archaeologys Wessex group, archaeologists gathered in Southampton to review what we have learnt from the huge amount of research carried out in the region during the past 50 years and to identify the challenges for the next half-century. The conference was also a chance for those involved to tell the exciting story of discovery from their own, personal angle. The contributors to this volume include many of the UKs most influential archaeologists of the later 20th century, making this book an overview not only of the history of Wessex, but of the development of archaeological thinking and techniques during this period. Interspersed amongst these papers are profiles of the regions most influential sites and the memories of some of its leading characters.

The present publication is concerned with the rock art from two sections of the Nile Valley in Lower Nubia surveyed in the scope of the UNESCO-organised salvage campaign by the Czechoslovak Institute of Egyptology (Charles University in Prague). It has two main objects, first to complete the catalogue of the rock art documented or localised in the two sections of the Czechoslovak concession with hitherto unpublished rock-art surfaces and occurrences (both petroglyphs and rock paintings) and, second, to provide a critical revision of the data published in Katalog der Felsbilder aus der Tschechoslowakischen Konzession in Nubien (edited by F. Váhala and P. Červíček, Prag 1999). With a view to presenting the results of the critical revision, made on the basis of the field documentation gathered by the Czechoslovak expedition and deposited in the archive of the Czech Institute of Egyptology (Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague), all rock-art data – both unpublished and published – are arranged in the present volume in a tabular form. Tables 1–4 containing the description and revision of the rock-art data from the two sections of the Czechoslovak concession in a succession from north to south and, as distinct from Katalog, separately for each bank of the Nile, are accompanied by introductory notes on the formation of the corpus, hitherto unpublished distribution maps of the completed and revised corpus, 155 hitherto unpublished black-and-white photographs, and four colour plates with the sheets of the colour scale used for the recording of patina difference or colour value of preserved paints. With the two objects accomplished, the present publication constitutes a kind of manual to the rock-art corpus from the Czechoslovak concession in Lower Nubia and is to be regarded, together with Katalog, as the complete and authoritative source of data for evaluation of the significance of the evidence from the two sections of the Nile Valley in Lower Nubia.

This volume present a detailed study of the thin, usually rectangular, pieces of pierced fine stone that occur in inhumation graves of Beaker date mainly of the second half of the third millennium cal BC. These objects are considered to be archer's bracers or wristguards. The study forms part of a more wide-ranging research project to identify more accurately the significance of burial assemblages from Beaker and Early Bronze Age contexts in England and Wales. The key objective is to produce a detailed analysis of the nature and function of these grave goods, beginning with the bracers, and to test the hypothesis that many of the artefacts were originally designed for use as components of ritual costume or as equipment for use in religious acts and ceremonies. The volume includes an illustrated database of all recorded bracers.

Corrstown in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, is a highly important Bronze Age site. This came to light during excavations carried out by Archaeological Consultancy Services Ltd on behalf of the Northern Ireland Environment Agency in 2002-2003, the results of which are detailed here. A total of 74 Middle Bronze Age roundhouse platforms was identified and organised into pairs or short rows, the majority of which appeared to be contemporary. The Corrstown village represents a site type hitherto unknown in Britain and Ireland, where the standard settlement pattern consists of roundhouses occurring in relative isolation or in small conglomerations. A two-tier network of roads and pathways also serviced the village: one large cobbled roadway and a second probable roadway (perhaps left un-surfaced) were identified along with a multitude of smaller paths leading from the entrances of the houses onto the roadways. The large cobbled road extended beyond the village perimeter, indicating connectivity with the wider landscape. The artefact assemblage from the site was dominated by domestic pottery (over 9,000 sherds) and lithics over 165,000 pieces). A small assemblage of stone axes and moulds was also retrieved. Radiocarbon analysis indicated that the village had three phases, an initial growth phase (commencing after c.1550 BC), followed by a considerable occupation phase (lasting up to 200 years) and a decline phase (commencing c.1150 BC). Early medieval occupation was also observed at Corrstown and the results are included as an appendix. Another Bronze Age settlement site, also excavated by Archaeological Consultancy Services, is also included as an appendix. It is hoped that this volume represents a beginning of the study of the Corrstown village, a site of national and international significance that urges archaeologists to reconfigure the settlement structure and associated social patterns of the Bronze Age.

The rise to prominence of pits within narratives of the British and Irish Neolithic is well-documented in recent literature. Pits have been cropping up in excavations for centuries, resulting in a very broad spectrum of interpretations but three main factors have led to the recent change in our perception and representation of these features: a broad shift in people's expectations as to what a Neolithic settlement should be; the development of the concept of 'structured deposition', within which pits have played a key role; and a dramatic rise in the number of pits actually known about. Development-led archaeology, and the often very large areas its excavations expose, has simply revealed many more pits. The 15 papers in this volume explore these inter-related factors and present new thoughts and interpretations arising from new analysis of Neolithic pits and their contents.

It can be argued that elements of European heritage can be identified not only as a national strategy of the present but also as a process in prehistory - the cultural and political transformations of the third millennium BC in European prehistory sparking off this process. These transformations initiated the processes and mechanisms that led up to the complex political, social and cultural institutions of the first half of the second millennium BC. From this time on, an authentic historical continuum leading towards present-day society can be identified. The papers in this anthology provide an up-to-date survey of trends in Bell Beaker research, with a focus on western and northern Europe, as well as developments in the northern and eastern Scandinavian and Baltic regions. The geographical focus, along with the interpretative perspective, hopefully demonstrates some of the progress in understanding the histories of third millennium Europe.

This is last in a series of fascicules publishing the British Museum's programme of research excavations at Grimes Graves, Norfolk. Research into flint mines such as Grimes Graves, one of the largest Neolithic flint mine complexes in Europe, offers a fascinating glimpse into the practical knowledge and skills of humans at that time. This fascicule considers the miners' methods as well as their motivation and the uses to which the finished products were put. Ian Longworth was formerly Keeper of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities at the British Museum, Gillian Varndell is a curator of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum and Jacek Lech has a professorship at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.

This publication presents the results of archaeological investigations by Pre-Construct Archaeology at Laurel Farm to the south-east of Norfolk. An extraordinarily long and complex history of occupation and exploitation was revealed, dating back to the Lower Palaeolithic. The site was also visited in the Upper Palaeolithic by hunter-gatherer communities who used the shelter provided by the roots of an upturned tree to knap flint into blades and tools. Tree-throw hollows continued to be significant features in the landscape and, in the Early Neolithic, a remarkable deposit of pottery and flint was placed into a pair of adjacent hollows . Around 4,500 years ago, use of the area changed with the construction of a substantial ring-ditch, probably the remains of a ploughed-out round barrow. From the late Anglo-Saxon into the early Medieval period the area was used for the early stages of iron extraction and production - processes which have rarely been identified archaeologically. There is evidence that ore was quarried, washed and roasted to remove impurities. Mousehold Heath continued to be visited for its natural resources, with gravel quarries and brick kilns exploiting the natural clays, until pressures on agricultural production towards the end of the eighteenth century resulted in the enclosure of the landscape.

The Yarnton landscape, extending from the floodplain of the Thames up onto the higher Second Gravel Terrace, has witnessed a long history of topographic and vegetational change linked to human activity. Settlements on the edge of the Second Gravel Terrace were occupied throughout the Iron Age and Roman periods. Associated with the middle Iron Age settlement was a small cemetery of some 35 crouched inhumation burials. Further burials were made in the Roman period. The Roman settlement is marked by its ditched enclosures and small paddocks suggesting intensive stock management, although the presence of an extensive surrounding field system shows that arable agriculture was also intensive, at least in the early Roman period.