From the eighteenth century, the material environment of the southern Scottish Highlands underwent radical change. This material change formed part of a wider process of social change known as Improvement. In this, a re-ordering of space within the house and throughout the wider landscape was intimately linked to change in the daily routines of the farming population and, thus, to change in the ways in which people related to each other. Prior to Improvement, people routinely experienced their world as part of the community of the farming township or as part of the family. Houses, settlements, and fields were organised in such a way as to maintain these forms of experience. Against this background, an ideology of clanship, that is of a wider community, and concepts of hereditary tenure appeared as common sense. Improvement sought to re-order routine in such a way as to privilege experience of the world as an individual, apart from the community and the family. With this achieved, an ideology of the individual and concepts of private property would in turn be privileged. Improvement sought, in this way, to introduce capitalism to the countryside of the southern Highlands. This thesis is in part an exploration of this process of Improvement through two case studies, in Kintyre and in Kilfinan parish. Changes to the material environment and to routine practice are traced for these areas; the intellectual context of Improvement, the Scottish Enlightenment, is discussed as the source of inspiration and justification for Improvement on the landowners part; and the specific motives of the various Improving landowners are explored as the process is restored to its specific social and historical contexts. However, to conceive of Improvement as imposed by a small group of landlords on a passive population is to misunderstand the dynamics of that process. As such, the penultimate chapter focuses on understanding how that population accepted, rejected or manipulated their landlord's initiatives in negotiating their position as occupants of the land. Improvement in practice took on specific local forms that were primarily defined in relation to the question of land rights. The narratives of Improvement constructed in what is to follow are of more than parochial interest. They form part of the global story of the emergence of capitalism and capitalist society. A major aim of this thesis is to consider how we should go about writing social histories and archaeologies of capitalism. There are two main conclusions that will be drawn. First, that capitalism (an ideology of the individual made knowable in routine practice) should be differentiated from capitalist society (where capitalism is widespread, but not necessarily universally or homogenously accepted). This distinction allows us to perceive alternative forms of social relationship within capitalist societies. In accepting the distinction, writing histories of capitalism involves considering how capitalism emerges and interacts with those alternative forms of social relationship in particular historical situations. The second main conclusion is that, in accepting the definition of capitalism given above, archaeology has a significant role in understanding capitalist societies as it has the material environment and routine practice as one of its basic concerns. It is in those environments and through that practice that the conditions allowing or denying acceptance of the ideology of the individual are created.

The research in this dissertation concerns methods and theories involved in the analysis and interpretation of burials related to wars and other conflict situations. Its core is a conflict interment model that I developed to facilitate the identification of material differences in burials that will help in understanding burial circumstances (e.g., whether a death occurred in direct conflict on the battlefield, as a direct consequence of battlefield injuries or other trauma, or as an execution, or was unrelated to the conflict; and whether the subsequent burial was by a ‘friendly’, ‘neutral’ or ‘hostile group’). These is a great need for such a model, because exhumations tend to focus on the recovery of remains – while assuming the circumstances of death and burial – and therefore lack the structured methods and procedures that might provide additional information about what actually took place. I analyse nine datasets from seven different conflict episodes spanning the 15th century to the late 20th century. The reason for using data from different centuries, types of conflict, culture, and grave type (or level of a particular type of grave) is to test the applicability of the model to: a) known grave types, in order to discern any common elements to be found in friendly, neutral, or hostile interments; and b) unknown grave types, in order to tentatively identify those responsible for interment and the circumstances surrounding the burials. The model takes account of both normative (cross-cultural) and situational behaviours in the death and burial process, and includes variables dealing with body positioning, cause of death, presence or absence of mutilation, burial container, and ritual markers including clothing and grave goods. The ultimate goal is to develop an approach to burials in archaeology applicable in a wide variety of recent, historic and, possibly prehistoric contexts.

Offering a social approach to landscape through the systematic study of communication routes, this study redresses the balance between previous social, historical and data driven archaeological studies of roads, paths and communication routes, while providing landscape survey projects with the techniques through which to address social interaction on a regional scale. Research on roads, paths and communication routes completed over the past 50 years focuses on the technology of road building, descriptive historical accounts of roads, and anthropological investigations that focus mainly on the role of communication routes in movement, memory and landscape. Unlike these previous studies, this research addresses communication routes as socially embedded material culture. Since the 1970s many archaeologists working in the Mediterranean have employed regional survey techniques in order to investigate broader patterns of human activity in the landscape. Communication routes are notoriously absent from these survey projects. Interaction is instead extrapolated from topographical information and sherd densities. In the current climate of landscape archaeology where interdisciplinary regional survey projects employ ever more complex and insightful GIS systems in the attempt to understand social landscapes, the absence of communication data appears glaringly obvious. Within this thesis I argue that the importance of roads and paths goes beyond the places they may or may not connect or intersect. Instead, roads and paths are products of daily practices that reaffirm, redefine and reproduce social and cultural relations. Through the intensive survey of communication routes in three distinct regions in Cyprus, (North Palekhori, Mandres and the Akamas Peninsula Survey Zones), I gained a greater understanding of the interplay between human activity, expressions of identity, land use and settlement from the Roman to the British Colonial period. iii Although the morphology and structural features of roads, paths and communication routes vary between these survey zones the underlying themes involved in the construction, maintenance and use of communication routes cut across geography and time. This thesis pushes the boundaries of landscape archaeology and survey methodologies to address: human-land relations, traditions of road and path building, the role of roads and paths in the negotiation of power and the entwined nature of communication routes and perceptions of landscape.

This study concerns the social and political organization of the early medieval kingdom of Fortiu which occupied present day Strathearn in eastern Scotland. Archaeological and historical sources are used to examine the develoent of the administrative structure at the root of the Medieval state of Scotland. There are three main aspects to this study. First, the historical evidence bearing on social organization in early medieval Britain and Ireland is used in conjunction with archaeological evidence for economic activity to produce a generalized model of early medieval society suitable for Pictland. Second, the archaeological evidence of settleent in Strathearn, both upstanding sites and cropmark sites revealed by aerial photography, is examined as a means of assessing the character of Pictish settlement systems, their agricultural practices and, ultimately, Pictish social organization. The third line of enquiry is to compare the archaeological evidence with the details of docinentary evidence. This is done at two levels: the archaeology around specific ll documented sites is discussed in relation to that evidence and then a broader assessment is made of the evidence with respect to the pre-feudal administrative structures. It is argued that during the Pictish and early Scottish periods as the polities in the east grew more state-like the importance of kin-based social relations diminished and protofeudal social bonds became increasingly important. However, throughout the period land tenure and agricultural production retained central to the maintenance and reproduction of social and political relations . Archaeological evidence is essential for an historically sound study of these develoents.

Glass is one of several early modern industries where the development from small-scale workshop to large-scale industry offers a valuable insight into wider socio-economic trends. Previously, medieval and early modern forest (wood ash) glass has been studied using a range of analytical techniques. However, characterisations of production centres and exchange systems for forest glasses are difficult to verify, in part because very few examples of raw glass from furnace sites have been investigated. The necessity for an independent means of provenancing glass used in the study of exchange systems is clear. Compositional analysis can provide evidence for the raw materials used and can sometimes provide compositional groupings specific to sites. However, strontium, neodymium and oxygen isotope determinations can actually provenance the glass by linking the geological ages, or sources, of raw materials to production sites. The potential of using Sr and O isotopes in the study of plant ash glasses has recently been established (Henderson et al., J. Archaeol. Sci., 32, 2005). Using EPMA-WDS over 179 raw glass samples from 12 English production sites in operation between the 14th and 17th centuries have been analysed. These analyses have shown compositional types which are relatable to the region or, in some cases, the period of production. Over 60 archaeological glass, raw material and model glass samples from these sites have also been analysed using mass spectrometry to determine strontium, neodymium and oxygen isotope ratios. The isotopic analyses have also been very effective in showing differences between sites, even those within the same region. This thesis will argue that the combination of these techniques offers a promising new way of provenancing archaeological glass and provide an insight into the organisation of production at this time.

This dissertation analyses the spatial and contextual organisation of thermal structures (hearths and ovens) on thirty excavated Neolithic sites from Macedonia and Western Thrace throughout the Neolithic period in Greece in diverse habitation environments (tells, flat-extended sites and lake-side sites). Unpublished material from two settlements, Avgi and Dispilio in Kastoria, will also complement this study. This dissertation raises the question of how communities were organised and how different forms of habitus or different kinds of entanglements tell us something of daily life and the formation of social identities. My principal field of research lies in the social interfaces developed around consumption practices in diverse spatial contexts in the course of everyday life. Key questions of this study involve the overall emergence and dispersal of social and cultural traditions in time and in space through the examination of different spatial and material entanglements. My analysis clarifies that intra-site spatial organisation in the area studied does not directly correspond with settlement types. The examination of archaeological data showed that similar configurations of social space can be found in dissimilar settlement types. My study demonstrates that cultural ‘assemblages’ in prehistory do not correspond to geographically broad united community groups but instead they show local diversity and social complexity. Instead of being modelled as unified, monolithic ‘cultures’, people seem to have come together around a sequence of chronologically and geographically focused forms of local identities. A local-scale examination of intra-site spatial patterns from Neolithic Macedonia and Western Thrace demonstrated that, although different settlement types are recorded within particular geographical regions, comparable organisation of space among contemporary sites indicates the development of similar social structures.

A large number of dry caves scattered across the mountainous Santa Barbara backcountry, in south-central California, have yielded a unique collection of indigenous artefacts. The xeric environmental conditions in these caves have resulted in exceptional preservation of perishable materials; and the assemblage contains items such as wooden bullroarers, feather bands, deer bone whistles, basketry and curated plant materials. A significant proportion of this material appears to have been deposited in the colonial period (AD 1769 – late 19th century). This region was occupied primarily by the indigenous Chumash people, semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers who were characterised by their complex political organisation, diverse subsistence base, and rich ceremonial tradition. Indigenous life was plunged into turmoil from AD 1769 when the Spanish missionisation programme heralded the start of the colonial period. Over the next hundred years Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American colonisers dramatically changed the economic, political and ecological landscape of south-central California. The majority of archaeological studies pertaining to the Chumash have focused on the prehistoric period. Most previous colonial-period studies have concentrated on the missions and closely adjacent indigenous sites where colonial influence was strongest. The study of cache caves and their artefacts provides a novel opportunity to explore indigenous practices during the turbulent colonial period within the more autonomous context of the Santa Barbara hinterland. This thesis provides the first collation of all the data relating to cache cave sites and their associated artefacts in the Santa Barbara hinterland. This information has been used to provide a basic chronological and geographic framework, and in turn, to propose models for indigenous caching practices in the Santa Barbara hinterland. These caching models are explored in terms of value systems in order to consider processes of indigenous resistance and acculturation during the colonial period.

The migration of the Armenian people into Cilicia in the late 11th century AD was caused by an agreement of several Armenian princes with the Byzantine emperor to leave their homelands to the north in return for imperial military appointments in Cappadocia, Mesopotamia, and Cilicia. Following the defeat of the emperor, Romanos Diogenes, at Manzikert by the Seljuk Turks in 1071, however, the Byzantines gradually lost control of these territories, allowing the Armenians to establish more or less independent chieftaincies there. This culminated in 1198 in the establishment of an Armenian kingdom in the region of Cilicia, which lasted until the Mamluk conquest in 1375. A dearth of historical sources makes it difficult to establish a definite framework for the political history of the period. This doctoral thesis focuses on the origins, development, and spatial distribution of fortified sites in the Armenian Kingdom (1198-1375). Through the examination of known and newly identified castles, this work increased the number of sites and features to be associated with the Armenian Kingdom. Furthermore, it examines the historical landscape of medieval fortifications and analyzes their relationship with several variables, such as nearby un-surveyed rural settlements. Despite the abundance of archaeological remains, little work had focused on the Armenian heritage. In his 1987 book, Robert Edwards argued that the organization of the Armenians in Cilicia represented the triumph of a non-urban strategy. According to Edwards military architecture developed as a primary alternative to urban organization. It is my aim with this work to refine his ideas with new archaeological evidence. It is an attempt to develop a comprehensive and flexible model that explains the role of the military fortifications not as just the product of one particular strategy. Although many of the sites are still relatively well preserved, the project is also timely, as the continuing expansion of the population into the Cilician Highlands is causing archaeological remains to be plundered for building material.

For much of the twentieth century, Romano-Celtic syncretism has been considered an unproblematic fusion of polytheistic belief systems assumed to preserve prehistoric Celtic religion and yet also provide a key form of evidence for the assimilative process of Romanisation. However, given the abrupt disjunction in ritual practice and especially changes in material form, Chapter 1 proposes that the evidence from the Roman period and its relationship to pre-conquest religion needs to be re-evaluated, not assumed. A reconsideration of syncretic or 'native' religion in Roman Britain will be accomplished by focusing on the usual categories of Roman period artefactual evidence, including iconography, inscriptions, ritual sites and votive offerings. The wealth of religious material from the frontier zones of Central Britain will be repositioned within a discussion of ritualised practices, hybridised identities and contextualised landscapes. Chapter 2 will outline how the study of the Roman conquest and colonisation of Britain has affected the study of religion and especially Romano-Celtic syncretism. Previous approaches will be reviewed, as well as the implications of post-colonial theory. Chapter 3 will develop a holistic methodology for studying ancient religion building on theoretical approaches of contextualisation, ritualisation and hybridisation. The general tendency in archaeological discourse to separate the evidence for ritual practice and religion from the wider socio-cultural background compounds the specific problems arising from imperial colonisation and ethnic dichotomies. Considering the socioeconomic, sociopolitical and landscape context of ritual practice provides an integrated methodology for interpretation that has the potential to over-ride dichotomies such as Roman and Native or ritual and practical. Chapter 4 will begin with one of the timeless interpretations of ancient religion, which is a concern with fertility. This paramount ritual motivation is often framed in general terms, but this chapter will demonstrate that more specific interpretations can be offered by examining the socio-economic context of ritual practice. The relationship between sheep husbandry, pastoralist production and iconographic expression in Roman Britain will help contextualise the fertility interpretation of the genii cucullati, associated matres, and the divine couple of Mercury and a goddess with a vessel. Chapter 5 considers the regionalised distribution of votive altars dedicated to the local deities of the Hadrian's Wall frontier zone. A case study of inscriptional practice on the 61 votive altars dedicated to the variously spelled theonym of Vitiris will explore identity and the socio-political context of ritual practice. Discussions of religion in Roman Britain barely consider Vitiris despite being the most popular local cult from the frontier zone and in terms of inscriptional evidence second only to Jupiter for all of Roman Britain. A floruit in the late second and early third century AD and the multi-cultural milieu of the northern frontier provide the socio-political context for the local cult of Vitiris. Chapter 6 considers the landscape context of ritual practice and evidence for votive deposition from both pre-and post conquest Central Britain. The landscape context of votive deposits, especially votive altars, and other 'stray' finds from non-military contexts, have not received great attention from Roman studies. A reliance on classical and early medieval texts has led to interpretations of Celtic religion as a natural religion with frequent emphasis on the essential sacred nature of water. A frequent focus on watery contexts in the archaeological study of hoarding and votive deposition has also created binary distinctions in interpretation between wet and dry contexts. However, there would have been considerably more complexity to the bodies of knowledge associated with these important ritualised practices. A variety of spatial scales will be used to contextualise material culture that has often been labelled as 'stray' finds. Examining this material through wider, regional, topographic and hydrographic analysis will allow more to be said about the context of deposition, and show the long-term ritualisation of the landscapes of Central Britain. The final chapter will summarise the inter-dependence of, and interaction between, society, the economy, and the landscape, generating the holistic methodological approach of vernacular religion. As befits a wide-ranging study of religious material in an imperial context, Chapter 7 will shift to a British and western provincial scale in order to place the local and regional case studies into their wider context. The contextual categories allow analysis to shift from everyday socio-economic practices, to life-span concerns and identity construction of socio-political context, to the landscape and longue duree. Following these themes from prehistory into the post-conquest period will acknowledge not just continuity, abandonment and assimilation, but also adaptation, innovation, and renovation; renewal as the complex "reconciliation of tradition and innovation" (Woolf 2001a: 182). Through a careful critical evaluation of vernacular religion, Roman archaeology has a chance to move beyond the dichotomies of religious syncretism - not by using vernacular descriptively as a simple replacement of 'native', but by considering the context specific processes of hybridisation and ritualised practice.

Settlement is an inevitability of human presence in a landscape; a collection of houses indicates settlement, but so too does a field system - the farmers must live somewhere. Wherever there are people there will be settlement, from large concrete and glass urban centres to the tented impermanence of a nomads' camp. Settlement is a result of the human presence, but remains a sterile idea without some discussion of the community. Certainly settlement can be studied without community, but it remains an abstract assembly of parts unless the people that constructed or occupied it are taken into account. A single settlement is home to numerous communities that continuously form, divide and reform in response to the changing practical and social situations that everyday life presents. Before any settlement is established a series of decisions has to be made with due consideration of an area's topography and natural resources, as well as existing settlements in the landscape and any established social, economic or political systems. Physical considerations such as a settlement's location and extent, or the definition of its boundaries, can be viewed individually, but are more usefully considered in conjunction with one another so that a settlement is treated as a working unit that is part of a wider system, rather than an abstract collection of components. This thesis approaches questions of settlement and community in historic Cyprus - from the late Roman period to the end of the Ottoman period - through a presentation of the experience and results of fieldwork I carried out in 2003. The fieldwork comprised a survey project specifically conceived, planned and executed by myself for my PhD research. It focused on three discrete areas of Cyprus: Akrotiri, a low-lying area salt marsh, batha and cirtus groves in the south of the Island; an area of agriculture and coastal maquis on the west coast, north of Peyia; and the Nikitari village territory, which stretches from the southern margins of the Mesaoria up into the lower reaches of the Troodos mountains. The topographical cross section evident in my chosen areas gave me the opportunity to study the diversity of settlement across most of the range of habitats of the island, from the coast, through the plains, scrub and foot hills, to all but the highest reaches of the Troodos mountains. My experiences in the landscape undoubtedly influenced my observation, recording and interpretation of material evidence in the field, and are a vital, if elusive element of my data. I have exploited their influence to make my presentation the landscape I perceived coherent and vivid. Whilst they could not give me a complete understanding of the experiences of erstwhile occupants of the settlements I have studied, my own experiences do lead me toward it through and appreciation of the landscape and the considerations necessary for anyone living, working or travelling in it. Through my data I examine the location of settlements in the landscape and their changing distribution over time, before endeavouring to identify evidence for community amongst the physical remains in the landscape.