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James F. Strange was a pioneering New Testament archaeologist and Distinguished University Professor in Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, where he taught from 1972 until his death in 2018. His personal letters from the field, written over the nearly five decades in which he excavated in Israel, illuminate the intersection of his scholarship in Christian Origins and post-Biblical Judaism with his deep faith in a personally knowable, loving God. They comprise a collection of entertaining, insightful, and sometimes poignant stories about the people on his dig, explanations of archaeological findings, and glimpses into the social workings of modern-day Israel.
Animals, Ancestors, and Ritual in Early Bronze Age Syria: An Elite Mortuary Complex from Umm el-Marra, edited by Johns Hopkins professor Glenn M. Schwartz, is a final report of the excavation of Tell Umm el-Marra in northern Syria, conducted in 1994-2010. It is likely the site of ancient Tuba, capital of a small kingdom in the Early and Middle Bronze periods, in the Jabbul plain between Aleppo and northern Mesopotamia. Its study advances our understanding of early Syrian complex society beyond the big cities of Antiquity. Of particular importance in the Early Bronze excavations are the results from the site necropolis, tombs of high-ranking persons containing objects of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli. Separate installations hold kungas (donkey x onager hybrids), sometimes along with human infants. This site provides the first archaeological attestation of the kunga equids, unique in the archaeology of third-millennium Syria and Mesopotamia.
This volume covers the transition period stretching from the reign of Justinian I to the end of the 8th century, focusing on the experience of individuals who lived through the last decades of Byzantine rule in Egypt before the arrival of the new Arab rulers. The contributions drawing from the wealth of sources we have for Egypt, explore phenomena of stability and disruption during the transition from the classical to the postclassical world.
The transition from the Neolithic period to the Copper Age in the northern Balkans and the Carpathian Basin was marked by significant changes in material culture, settlement layout and organization, and mortuary practices that indicate fundamental social transformations in the middle of the fifth millennium BC. Prior research into the Late Neolithic of the region focused almost exclusively on fortified 'tell' settlements. The Early Copper Age, by contrast, was known primarily from cemeteries such as the type site of Tiszapolgar-Basatanya. This edited book describes the multi-disciplinary research conducted by the Koros Regional Archaeological Project in southeastern Hungary from 2000-2007. C...
Dedicated to their teacher, Abraham L. Udovitch, his students offer in this volume a chronologically, geographically and thematically wide range of papers united by an emphasis on a close reading of primary sources and the juxtaposition of different genres of narratives.
This volume offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the destructions that allegedly occurred at sites across the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age, and challenges the numerous grand theories that have been put forward to account for them. The author demonstrates that earthquakes, warfare, and destruction all played a much smaller role in this period than the literature of the past several decades has claimed, and makes the case that the end of the Late Bronze Age was a far less dramatic and more protracted process than is generally believed.
A historical look at the early evolution of global trade and how this led to the creation and dominance of the European business corporation Before the seventeenth century, trade across Eurasia was mostly conducted in short segments along the Silk Route and Indian Ocean. Business was organized in family firms, merchant networks, and state-owned enterprises, and dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Arabic traders. However, around 1600 the first two joint-stock corporations, the English and Dutch East India Companies, were established. Going the Distance tells the story of overland and maritime trade without Europeans, of European Cape Route trade without corporations, and of how new, large-scale...
This volume is one of the most important works on ancient Athens in the last fifty years. The focus is on the early city, from the end of the Bronze Age--ca. 1200 BCE--to the Archaic period, when Athens became the largest city of the Classical period, only to be destroyed by the Persians in 480/479 BCE. From a systematic study of all the excavation reports and surveys in central Athens, the author has synthesized a detailed diachronic overview of the city from the Submycenaean period through the Archaic. It is a treasure trove of information for archaeologists who work in this period. Of great value as well are the detailed maps included, which present features of ancient settlements and cemeteries, the repositories of the human physical record. Over eighty additional large-scale, interactive maps are available online to complement the book.
Kirikongo is an archaeological site composed of thirteen remarkably well-preserved discrete mounds occupied continually from the early first to the mid second millennium AD. It spans a dynamic era that saw the growth of large settlement communities and regional socio-political formations, development of economic specializations, intensification in interregional commercial networks, and the effects of the Black Death pandemic. The extraordinary preservation of architectural units, activity areas and industrial zones provides a unique opportunity to discern the cultural practices that created stratified mounds (tells) in this part of West Africa. Building from a new detailed zooarchaeological ...
Paso de la Amada, an archaeological site in the Soconusco region of the Pacific coast of Mexico, was among the earliest sedentary, ceramic-using villages of Mesoamerica. With an occupation that extended across 140 ha in 1600 BC, it was also one of the largest communities of its era. First settled around 1900 BC, the site was abandoned 600 years later during what appears to have been a period of local political turmoil. The decline of Paso de la Amada corresponded with a rupture in local traditions of material culture and local adoption of the Early Olmec style. Stylistically, the material culture of Paso de la Amada corresponds predominantly to the pre-Olmec Mokaya tradition. Excavations at ...