This PhD thesis investigates how the successors to the first ruler of an amalgamation of Serb lands, the Raškan Serb Veliki Župan, Stefan Nemanja, sought to create legitimacy for what otherwise may have been the passing successes of one local chieftain. The question is approached through the Lives of Nemanja written by his sons, Prvovenčani and Sava, whose tasks were to stabilise the immediate succession and consolidate the longer lasting power of the dynasty. Through a close reading of the two Lives, the thesis identifies and compares the motifs used by the authors to portray Nemanja as a saintly ruler divinely inspired by God to 'lead and unite' his people. Without an existing Serbian literary tradition, the thesis investigates how the authors found inspiration, looking first at the European-wide phenomenon of holy rulers and their associated texts, before considering the general literary environment surrounding the Raškan Serbs, to place the writing of Nemanja's Lives into context. The motifs highlighted in the Lives are compared with those in a selected group of texts, potentially available to the authors, to identify possible models which each other may have copied, adapted or transformed. The secondary objectives of the two authors, ruler and monk, will also be touched on bearing in mind the secular and sacred image of Nemanja being portrayed.

This PhD thesis provides a commentary for the prefatory epistle and the opening twenty epigrams of Martial Book 12. The texts will be analysed through an interpretative method and focus will be placed upon intra- and intertextual references in order to orientate the work within the broader framework of Ancient literature. Beyond the concentration upon literary allusions, attention will be paid to metrical and philological concerns in order to distinguish Martial’s particular techniques and innovations from conventional or generic usages. Each text will be accompanied with a translation and an introductory essay, which will focus upon the structure, style and content of the text, in order to provide a clear and unambiguous interpretation for each work. A supplementary thematic essay will also be supplied, when it is necessary to pursue particular points that cannot be catered for in the lemmatised entries or the initial essay on the content and structure of each text.

This work provides a study of corpse positioning as an aspect of mortuary practice. The positional representation of the dead body is fundamental to the perception of death and the deceased, but this aspect of burial treatment has been overlooked and under-theorised in archaeological and anthropological scholarship. With an aim to explore the significance of the positioning of the corpse and its place within wider debates surrounding dying and death, this research examines burial positioning in inhumation graves in early Anglo-Saxon England, c AD 400–750. Bringing together 3,053 graves from 32 cemeteries, this thesis combines statistical methods, artistic reconstructions, typological analysis, grave artefacts, osteological data, literary sources, and representational art to produce a new and challenging examination of funerary remains. This work has identified a positional norm of supine deposition, extended legs, and arms positioned according to one of seven ‘main types’. Patterns and variations in burial positions were manifested as an interplay between conformity to this positional norm and variations beyond it: from the individual level to regional practices, and in relation to long-term changes through the early Anglo-Saxon period. The arrangement of the cadaver was intimately linked with the deceased’s social identity and relationship with other people, mediated by the bodily engagements that took place between the living and the dead in the mortuary performances. The positions of corpses can be argued through this new evidence to be comparable as a source to human representations in art, revealing a wider gestural repertoire in the early medieval world. This work has offered new and exciting insights into living and dying in early medieval England, and has set new agendas for studying body positions from archaeological contexts. This has far-reaching methodological and interpretive implications for the study of death and burial, in the past as well as the present.

This PhD aims both at demonstrating that archaeological remains could and should be socially interpreted and at revising our - sometimes simplified - perspective on the socio-economic stratification of medieval villages. This project is based on the example of the excavations situated at Trainecourt (Grentheville - Calvados) where an “aristocratic” house had been established in the centre of the hamlet. Thus, a method has been developed to grasp village elites, of whom we know some details thanks to medieval written sources but who had hardly been studied in medieval archaeology. By using a comparative approach that draws a parallel between both French and English archaeological data and scientific perspectives; by adopting the theoretical frame offered by the Social Archaeology; by studying the social processes (the distinction, coming closer to, the performance) that are expressed by patterns of consumption in the settlement; by examining aristocratic sites (manor houses, moated sites, castles, etc.), we managed to establish a list of thirty-four archaeological indicators revealing an outstanding social identity. They are grouped in three categories: the use of space, the morphology of the settlement and a specific lifestyle. This repertoire was then compared to rural sites (villages, hamlets, etc.) situated on both sides of the Channel Sea, to emphasize some details of social stratification. As a whole, elite units have been spotted out in seven villages or hamlets and socio-economic hierarchies established for a dozen more.

This thesis investigates the development of the landscape surrounding the Eastern Vākāṭaka ritual centre of Rāmṭek in central India. The research aims to contextualise the site of Rāmṭek through the use of landscape archaeology, to explore its relationship to rural settlement and thus go beyond the existing preoccupation with the isolated study of its monumental remains. The results of the survey are used to construct a hypothetical case study for the development of the Early Historic landscape in this region. This narrative of landscape development is connected to the region’s socio-economic development under the Vākāṭakas, which will be related to the wider context of Early Historic to Early Medieval change in India. The survey develops existing methodologies to suit the environment encountered on fieldwork and subsequently a preliminary approach to data analysis is presented. Through landscape survey and ceramic seriation, broad phases of development can be determined. Based on a significant increase in material evidence from the Early Historic period, it is argued that this phase witnessed changes in religious, political and socio-economic spheres. Whilst these developments are only securely related to the over-arching Early Historic period, there is evidence to suggest that the Vākāṭakas influenced development following their establishment of the ritual site and occupation of the area as a dynastic centre. The survey results demonstrate a prosperous local economy as opposed to deurbanisation and economic decline, which is popularly associated with the period of Vākāṭaka rule. The Eastern Vākāṭaka data is then referred to the wider context of the nature of Early Historic to Early Medieval urbanism in the Indian subcontinent. It is argued that ‘urbanism’ may have been expressed differently in this period resulting in low-density networks of productive settlements or conurbations.

The aim of this thesis is the reconstruction of Early Historic networks in South Asia and beyond. The methodology engaged focusses on image analysis techniques being applied to two South Asian ceramics, Arikamedu Type 1 (also referred to as Rouletted Ware) and Arikamedu Type 10. The secondary aim of this thesis is to identify and investigate stylistic variances across these ceramics within the spatial and temporal boundaries of this research. The two ceramics in this study were initially recorded at Arikamedu, South India in the excavations led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler (Wheeler et al. 1946). The majority of the previous research has focused on the physical aspects of the ceramics in an attempt to provenance the types, for example thin section analysis by Krishnan & Coningham (1997) and chemical analysis by Ford et al. (2005), however, confirmation of the provenance has not been achieved. This thesis focuses on the decorative features of the ceramics for analysis and interpretation. The data extracted will, on interpretation, aim to demonstrate the spatial and temporal variances within Rouletted Ware and Arikamedu Type 10, and allow the proposal of networks in the Indian Ocean and beyond, during the South Asian Early Historic period.

Sex and age identification of human skeletal remains is essential in forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology and palaeodemography, and estimations rely on the use of proven methods. Many methods exist and are generally applied to skeletons from all time periods and geographic locations, despite studies suggesting that there are differences in the expression of traits characteristic of males and females and that ageing rates vary within and between populations. The aim of this project was to study variation in ageing and sexual dimorphism in six documented collections from different geographic locations and/or time periods. Age and sex methods were tested on adult skeletal remains dating from the 17th to 20th century from Canada, England, South Africa, and Portugal. Ageing methods used were focused on the fourth rib’s sternal end, cranial sutures, pubic symphysis and auricular surface. A more subjective age estimate for each individual was also produced, using informal skeletal age indicators alongside formal methods. Sex determinations were based on pelvic and skull morphology, and metrical analysis. Differences were found between some collections in terms of the distribution of age phases and mean ages per phase. Similarly, distributions of sexually dimorphic traits were found to differ between some of the collections. In terms of overall age estimates, the subjective age estimates were significantly better than estimates based only on formal ageing methods, and intraobserver error tests suggest that user experience was important. The magnitude of such differences and their implications for bioarchaeology, forensic anthropology and palaeodemography are discussed.

In a period when complex systems of Bronze Age social life and urban communities were well-established in the Aegean and Anatolia, the southeast corner of the Balkans, commonly known as Thrace, appears to have remained largely unaffected. Nevertheless, the presence of a few similar artefacts between the latter and the first two regions during the 2nd millennium BC has provoked scholars to propose various forms of cultural encounter. This has diverted the research focus in Thrace from a thorough examination of local characteristics and, along with the lack of much systematic study, has limited our understanding of internal social patterns of development. Moreover, the existing partition of the area among Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey and repeated amendments to borders throughout the 20th century has further constrained synthetic archaeological investigations. Bearing in mind that modern political divisions do not necessarily coincide with any prehistoric social pattern, this thesis approaches the Late Bronze Age (LBA) in Thrace from an alternative contextual and geographic perspective. More than a hundred LBA sites have now been identified in the area of modern day Bulgaria, and there is a wealth of complementary information from north-eastern Greece, with a contrasting possible gap in Turkish Thrace. In this dissertation, a new, detailed cross-border examination of the local ceramics calls into question existing culture-historical constructs such as the ‘Plovdiv-Zimnicea’ culture and offers a chronologically structured analysis of local pottery sequences. Complementary multivariate spatial analysis of the site distribution reveals settlement patterns with different micro-regional characteristics. As a result, the study highlights clusters of attributes and cycles of micro-regional interaction and independence at this key location of potential Eurasian articulation. Ultimately, a general pattern of isolation in the final phases of the Bronze Age can be recast by considering a combination of both persistent vectors of long-range contact and also a high degree of local cultural diversity.

The thesis seeks to discern possible reasons for the reappearance of stamped wheel-turned pottery in fourth-century Roman Britain; to establish whether the stamp motifs demonstrate regional or local variations; to attempt to identify sources of inspiration for the motifs; and lastly to test whether it is possible to demonstrate the ongoing usage of motifs from the fourth century to the fifth and sixth. It has grown out of work for the Archive of Anglo-Saxon Pottery Stamps (or AASPS, a project to record every stamp impression on early Anglo-Saxon ceramics). I became interested in ‘Romano-Saxon’ pottery when making casts for AASPS. It soon became apparent that Romano-Saxon pottery was only a small section of the fourth-century stamping tradition and this PhD gave me the opportunity to study it in depth. The first chapter describes past research in this area and the third considers what is known of the history of Britain in the fourth century, while Chapter 2 explains the methods used in the analyses. Chapter 4 presents earlier episodes of stamped pottery to demonstrate that they did not inspire the fourth century’s potters. Chapter 5 considers the production centres from which this pottery came and endeavours to identify when they ceased production. Chapter 6 introduces the Corpus of Stamped Pottery, presented in Volume 2. Chapter 7 analyses the distribution of wares while Chapter 8 analyses the distribution of specific motifs in the two periods. Chapter 9 considers pottery production in the post-Roman period and compares and contrasts motif usage. Chapter 10 presents some case-studies of motifs in the hope of clarifying whether their use may have some symbolic meaning. The conclusions are that there are major regional differences in usage in both periods, but that at some specific sites the ongoing employment of motif/s can be reasonably demonstrated.

This research progresses knowledge of Anglo-Saxon non-elite rural settlements through the study of material culture. Forty-five rural settlements occupied throughout the Anglo-Saxon period (c. 5th-11th centuries) and geographically representative of Anglo-Saxon settlement in England were selected for study. Comparative analyses of the material culture assemblages and settlement data from these sites was evaluated from four main research perspectives: the archaeological contexts and distributional patterns of material culture at the sites; range and character of material culture; patterns of material culture consumption; and material culture as evidence for the economic reach of rural settlements. Site distributional analysis of the material culture provides evidence of depositional practices and refuse methods undertaken at the settlements, demonstrating that artefacts are predominantly found in the fills of common features including buildings, pits and ditches. The cataloguing of the material culture determines the types and demand for artefacts at the settlements, showing that assemblages are dominated by domestic/household items and utilitarian/ manufacturing equipment. The examination of material culture as indicative of cultural and behavioural practices reveals that domestic undertakings, manufacturing, utilitarian and agricultural/cultivation activities are the most common patterns of consumption exhibited at the settlements. The study of economic trends at the settlements as evidenced by material culture highlights engagement in the exchange, trade and travel networks of Anglo-Saxon England with local through to international reach. The analysis of material culture from Anglo-Saxon rural sites illuminates myriad aspects of settlement life including social, cultural, economic and production activities undertaken, the use, supply and demand of resources, and hierarchical structures. The study has crucially highlighted the multifaceted character of many rural communities, demonstrating that these settlements were integral elements of the political, social and economic structures of Anglo-Saxon England.