This thesis discussed the morphological patterns of Ottomanization performed in the southern Balkans through the comparative study of four mainland cities, Dimetoka, Gümülcine, Siroz, Yenice-i Vardar spread along the multicultural Via Egnatia. Through the cross-disciplinary application of morphological and defterological concepts, we were able to trace existing and reconstructed forms back to their formative processes (as evident in a series of reconstructive maps) and to interpret them within the theoretical framework of structural rationalism. The advanced argument disproves the orientalistic reading of the Ottoman (Islamic) city as an irrational and chaotic morpheme and reconfirms Veinstein’s theory on the existence of a normative type for the Ottoman town that lays in the morphology of the Balkan cities. This thesis’ main contribution lies in defining that the identifier of ‘originality’ or ‘purity’ for this type derives from its particular geographical divisions. Accordingly, the coining of the type that we extended was reflective of these particular geographical divisions, as an obvious functional and formal analogy amongst the towns of this group. We thus concluded that the typological identification of the ‘original’ Ottoman town can be encapsulated in the Balkan-Anatolian type with a Byzantine kernel and an Ottoman fringe belt. This consists of a highly rationalized system of axes, with pivotal being that of the çarşıya, which functioned as the vehicle of infrastructural development.

Management of cultural heritage depends on ethical decisions. These ethical decisions will bestow the heritage with a value and will protect it by establishing legal frameworks. However, sometimes, these legal frameworks can have the opposite effect and damage the heritage if they are not continuously revised and updated according to the new ethical challenges of the development in the field of cultural heritage. Although underwater cultural heritage has a legislative element that protects it from the relatively minor threat of treasure hunters, it pays little attention to ethical concerns that expose the heritage to more serious menaces. This study proposes (contrary to the traditional view of land heritage management as an example to underwater heritage management) a new vision where underwater cultural heritage challenges principles that in land heritage management have been taken for granted: valuation, use, management and preservation. The work presents four case studies as models both for illustrating the key ethical issues and for offering solutions: the violin of the Titanic, ancient lead for particle physics experiments, watery graves and the effects of climate change on underwater cultural heritage. Finally this work explores themes of value, ethics and the process in which a common object becomes heritage.

The connecting premise of this study is that the explanation of human action, much of which involves conflict in various forms, is distinctive. It must address the singularity of actions (their attachment to specific moments) and its contingency (that different actions could plausibly have been taken instead). Both stem from the involvement of time in human action, such that its explanation must adopt the form of historiography. Part One argues that the authority of explanation in the physical sciences does not extend to human action as it derives from successful physical demonstration in experiment or industrial replication, not from special epistemological warrant, processes inapplicable to human action; that the distinguishing involvement of human consciousness and the will to act introduces a particular awareness of the passage of time that confers timeliness to actions, while precluding full knowledge of the consequences of actions; that the social nature of human action involves the emergence of diverse groups that generate complex divisions between ‘we’ and ‘they’ that form the basis for conflict over the consequences of action; that resolving the conflict of warfare produces collective agreements to avoid future conflict; that this conflict can reach considerable levels of brutality and lethality even outside warfare; and that moral codes that might constrain such conflict have limited effectiveness. Part Two illustrates the relevance of perspectives in reducing the complexities of reality to facilitate action, referring to categories appropriate to the emergence of Scottish Jacobitism in the late seventeenth and early eighteen centuries: dynastic, religious, economic and military. It also suggests how contingency could be addressed through conjectures about the actions that might have been taken but were not. Part Three suggests a basis in the role of expectations for the tendency of human perspectives on their context of action to change radically, and for actions to change accordingly as situations are seen ‘in a different light’. At various points in the study use is made of an analogy drawn between the adversarial advocacies presented at a trial by jury and the general explanation of human action. This illuminates both the fact that different perspectives on the same evidence can yield contrary explanations and that all explanation of human action necessarily confronts a problem of reflexivity: the perspectives of agents have to be represented through the perspectives of those seeking to explain their actions.

Recent studies of early Islamic Palestine have stressed the minimal impact of the Arab conquest on the Christian communities of the region. None, however, have sought to trace the trajectories of these communities beyond the eighth century. This thesis provides the first long-term study of the impact of the Arab conquest on monasticism and pilgrimage between 614 and 950. The study explores the changes to the physical landscape of monasteries and Christian cult sites, in terms of site abandonment and continuity, and situates these processes in the broader political and economic context of the Palestinian region between the seventh and tenth centuries. This thesis offers a systematic critique of current theories which view Palestinian monasticism and Christian pilgrimage as social entities dependent upon patronage from Byzantium and the early medieval west. Rather, it stresses the need for a more nuanced recognition of monastic communities and Christian cult sites as places closely interlinked with localised developments and the high degree of variation between communities in terms of patron economies and social transactions. This study demonstrates that these variances often provide the key to understanding the highly varied response of Palestinian monastic communities and Christian cult sites to early Muslim rule.

In the early Middle Ages, when settlers began to leave Scandinavia to find new homes for themselves and their families, they began a process that impacted their lives dramatically. Research on modern population movements has demonstrated that migration-induced stresses change the lives of immigrants, and shape how they adapt to their new homes. Migration affects societies and people in a number of ways: it changes family and household organisation; gender relations and roles shift; and general social and cultural structures are altered through the integration of different practices and beliefs. While the identification of the societal changes caused by migration has been the focus of research in a number of fields, it has yet to be directly addressed in archaeology. This thesis seeks to examine the ways in which various social identities were displayed through funerary rituals and the associated material culture in the Norse North Atlantic, and to identify how these changed through the course of migration. The analysis is conducted by comparing burial data collected from two regions of Norway, representing the homeland of the migrants, and Scotland and Iceland, representing two critical destination points. Approximately 500 graves are catalogued and assessed using multivariate statistics. Six case studies, selected from the study areas, are used for comparative purposes. The analysis of the overall data-set and the case study sites indicates that there are key differences between the homeland and the communities of the Viking diaspora. Moreover, the results indicate that the circumstances of migration, such as location, resource availability, and the presence of a local population, results in society changing in different, yet significant, ways: gendered burial practices are altered; new manifestations of traditional rites appear; and migrant identities emerge.

Traditional and well-established applications of airborne remote sensing to archaeology involve standard aerial photographic recording, either oblique or vertical, of archaeological phenomena visible as shadow, soil or cropmarks, all of which require particular conditions before they become visible. Cropmarks have made the most important contribution to archaeological site discovery and are the most complex of the phenomena, whose occurrence relies upon the differential availability of moisture to a crop growing over buried archaeological remains, reflecting different soil depths and precipitation, to create differential growth patterns in times of moisture stress. Consistently successful aerial photographic reconnaissance for cropmarks relies on dry weather and well-drained soils in arable agriculture. There is, thus, in Scotland a bias in the discovery of archaeological sites in favour of drier eastern districts, supporting arable agriculture, compared to the west with its wetter climate focussed on pastureland. Because cropmarks are linked to moisture stress in growing plants they are potentially detectable in bands outside the visible part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Although historically cropmark detection has used film, whose sensitivity closely approximates the human eye, hyperspectral scanning allows consideration of a wider range of different wavelengths, beyond the visible spectrum, many of which are more sensitive to changes in vegetation status. The main objectives of this research are to test to what extent hyperspectral and multispectral imagery can reveal otherwise invisible archaeological sites surviving as cropmarks; to assess the relative usefulness of the different sensors employed; and to investigate the potential of hyperspectral and multispectral imagery to augment cropmark detection rates in areas less conducive to their production. It uses a range of imagery (CASI 2, ATM and digital vertical photographic data) acquired by NERC ARSF from two case study sites in Lowland Scotland, one in the east and one in the west, selected to facilitate comparison between areas of good and poor cropmark production. Following processing, comparison and detailed analysis of this data, this thesis has demonstrated the high efficacy of this imagery in the identification of archaeological cropmarks; has established the most appropriate range of bandwidths and processing methods applicable to that imagery; has demonstrated its potential for the discovery of previously unrecognised archaeological sites in areas of lowland pasture; and has reinforced the value of systematic block coverage as compared to traditional ‘observer-directed’ archaeological aerial reconnaissance.

The people of early Iron Age Cyprus worshipped at sanctuaries where a sacred tree was the focus of their rituals. The tree was closely associated with a goddess thought to inhabit the natural landscape in which the fields and settlements grew, and in which the people lived and worked. This thesis explores why the tree of life was the central symbol of Cypriot Iron Age rituals, covering the period from the end of the Bronze Age to 500 B.C. Although the tree of the goddess has been studied as an artistic motif, and ceramic material from Cyprus has been studied scientifically, material carrying the motif has never been studied within a fully contextualised archaeology that queries its prevalence in Cypriot material culture, its role within the sanctuaries and necropolises of the city kingdoms and the meanings the material carried in those places. This research project addresses the complex, abstract, iconography of the Geometric and Archaic material in a methodical and theoretical manner, and with respect to the local and regional landscape settlement contexts from which it was recovered. The study takes a fresh, postcolonial approach and follows contextualizing, multiscalar methods towards an improved understanding of cultural structures, meanings and individual events. Old concepts of race and fixed groups are discarded in favour of a more nuanced approach that sees individual identities as constantly changing and material culture as both a driver and an indicator of social hybridisation. This research also serves as a vehicle to study a controversial transitional phase in East Mediterranean history, when the ancient agricultural empires gave way to the poleis and colonial systems of the maritime networks. Although the emergence of a ‘great divide’ between east and west has been postulated for this period, the alliances and cultural exchanges that preceded this transformation have not yet been adequately explored in mainstream academic histories. This research focussing on Iron Age Cyprus illuminates regional interaction between African, Levantine and Aegean cultures, and shows that the island existed within a continuous and contiguous cultural milieu that stretched from the Nile to Athens.

Many Cultural Heritage (CH) reconstructions today use black box rendering solutions with little regard to appropriate addition of lighting, material light reflectance properties or light transport algorithms. This may be in favour of faster computational performance or is simply not a priority (as long as the end result is visually convincing). This can lead to misrepresenting CH environments, both in their present and past forms. The handful of publications that do pay special attention to lighting, emphasise on case specific problems rather than attempting to generalise a rendering pipeline tailored to the needs of CH scenes. The dissertation presents a research framework to render CH scenes appropriately and novel approaches to document, estimate and accelerate global illumination for virtual archaeology purposes. First, three reconstruction case studies with an unbiased rendering pipeline in mind are presented. Second, a research framework to reverse-engineer the past (through high-fidelity rendering) is overviewed. Through this proposed framework, it is possible to create historically and physically accurate models based on input available today. The approach is an extension to the established Predictive Rendering pipeline by introducing a historical comparison component. Third, a novel method to preview appropriately lit virtual environments is presented. The method is particularly useful for CH rendition, extending Image-based Lighting to employ empirically captured illumination to relight interior CH scenes. It is intended as a fast high-quality preview method for CH models before a high-quality render is initiated, therefore also making it useful in a Predictive Rendering context. Finally, a study on uses of High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging specifically for CH documentation and display purposes is also presented. This includes the use of a novel prototype camera to illustrate a proof-of-concept on how to document vast dynamic ranges of light based on the needs of CH research using HDR video.

The thesis is introduced with a brief review of why industrialization and urbanization should be examined together and how this may best be done in the Scottish context. There is then a critical examination of the available sources, archaeological and documentary (including technical treatises), and a consideration of their integrated use. It is accepted that in examining a topic as diverse as this that not all the sources and topics avilable can be fully explored. Emphasis has been given to the physical implications of manufacturing from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. As a result documentary sources for the sixteenth century have not been dealt with in detail and the political and social history of craft incorporations have not been discussed.

It is a well-established fact that all human societies have coexisted with and are dependent upon animals and it is increasingly recognized that the study of human-animal relationships provides vital insights into past human societies. Still this is yet to be widely embraced in archaeology. This thesis has examined human-animal interdependencies to explore the social identities and structure of society in the Norse North Atlantic. Benefitting from recent research advances in animal studies and the ever increasing volume of archaeological reports from Norse period archaeological excavations the North Atlantic this thesis was able to develop previous scholarship and define directions for future research. The thesis explored the role of animals in human society in the North Atlantic to reveal the complex Norse societies that existed. It revealed through human interdependencies with animals that these societies were far from homogeneous and had their own distinct identities with the individual islands as well as across the North Atlantic. The thesis achieved this by examining several important discrete but interlinked themes. These themes were divided into four chapters that focused on the individual aspects. This included an examination of previous North Atlantic Viking Age scholarship, consideration of human construction and perception of landscape through archaeological excavations, investigation of the role of domestic animals in human social activities, and an exploration of the role of domesticated animals in beliefs. Although these are all connected the structure of the thesis was deliberately chosen to restrict repetition, although given the interconnected nature of human social identities, society and worldview this was not entirely possible. This thesis addressed some of the most fundamental questions in Norse archaeology. Notably, through examination of human-animal interdependencies, it provided a detailed insight into how Norse society understood and perceived the world, and consequently the structure of Norse society and social identities.