Henges are circular earthwork monuments built from the 32nd-17th centuries BC throughout the British Isles. Seen as a discrete monument ‘type’ since the early 1930s, they comprise a morphologically-varied group of sites. Excavations of henges have demonstrated them to be multi-phase sites which were repeatedly returned to, reused and rebuilt over thousands of years. The earthworks so often seen as the defining feature of henge sites are increasingly recognised as a ‘late’ addition to existing sites which were already long-established as significant places in the landscape. The key aim of this thesis is to ‘de-henge’ henges, removing the focus from the final morphology of monuments to instead consider how henge sites were used and transformed throughout their lives. It reinterprets henge sites in Scotland, a previously neglected corpus of sites, using a biographical approach to understand the significance of the transformations effected at henge sites over time, and consider aspects of both tradition/continuity, and change/innovation over time. Henge sites are interpreted as places of commemoration where people encountered, mediated and re-negotiated their pasts and present. The research explores relationships with the past and the creation of memory at henge sites during the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age in Scotland. It is argued that this occurred through monument construction, destruction, rebuilding and reuse; but can be best understood by focusing not only on monumental architecture, but also on the (re)use of materials and material culture, the control and manipulation of sensory experiences of (monumental) spaces, and the relationships between henge sites and other spheres of prehistoric life and death, such as house architecture, farming practices, uses of fire and the burial of (fragments of) people and objects. The thesis discusses these themes through comparison of the biographies of case study sites from Scotland, and contextualises these with reference to henge sites elsewhere in the British Mainland. The reinterpretations of Scottish henges presented in the thesis, and the approaches used, represent a contribution not only to the study of henge monuments, but also have implications for the interpretation and understanding of prehistoric monumentality more generally.

This thesis incorporates a reassessment of Roman pottery from non-Roman contexts in southern Scotland to investigate the complex processes of interaction between Romans and provincial societies. Modern theoretical constructs form the interpretive framework for the discussion to explore how Roman objects functioned in their new social settings. A detailed database has identified a total of 168 sites containing c. 1766 Roman pottery sherds and other objects, while Roman non-ceramic objects have been recovered from an additional 234 sites. The insertion of this data into the ArchGIS program has produced detailed distribution maps to graphically display material spreads and facilitate the identification of material foci. A lack of clearly definable central nodes suggests that the concept of elite access to and control over incoming Roman exotica may be inadequate explanations for the complex and multifarious processes by which the material culture of Empire moved through provincial communities. The hillfort at Traprain Law, East Lothian, is often used to epitomise elite restriction of prestige goods (Hunter 2009) and a detailed study of the Roman ceramics from Traprain is used as a case study (see Chapter 9) to determine the viability of this model. The incorporation of robust and demonstrably appropriate social theories is suggested as an effective means of investigating these processes in a region that conventional wisdom has traditionally deemed to be marginal. The concept of Romanisation is critically deconstructed in favour of a more nuanced approach to the issue of culture contact. Modern postcolonial approaches, most of which have been applied predominantly to Mediterranean colonial situations, are tested against the data to determine their suitability in the context of the aggressive territorial expansionist policies of Rome in northern Britain. These paradigms consider the different ways in which Roman and frontier societies may have experienced the same events and how these communities selectively adopted, adapted or reused foreign material culture. The effects of the conquest are shown to have been differently experienced in Scotland compared to other parts of the Empire and the research proposes methods of recognising the active participation of local people in past events. Rather than viewing northern societies as passive recipients of the imposition of oppressive Roman cultural values, an attempt is made to strip away widespread Romanocentric biases inherent in traditional approaches to the subject. The research adopts a bottom-up approach to the material remains to determine the demonstrable realities of interaction between Romans and northerners, the chronologically restricted and geographically variable extent of contact over time and the role of material culture in negotiating such contact as well as potential resultant cultural transformations. A detailed contextual analysis of Roman pottery from non-Roman contexts has confirmed the variable character of contact across time and space. The study further recognises the potentially lengthy curation of culturally significant objects and traces material biographies to determine alternative social functions of Roman objects in their new cultural settings through their contexts of deposition. Roman objects are confirmed as being appropriated into local ritual and ideological practices, having been subjected to culturally specific physical and symbolic redefinition and structured votive deposition. The research also confirms the heterogeneous, inter and intra regionally variable character of local contact with the Empire and serves as model against which the data from other frontier regions can be tested.

This thesis explores two key themes: (1) the social, cultural and economic changes in the Roman provinces of Spain during the last half of the first century BC and the early first century AD, and the direct effect that Augustus had in driving these developments; (2) the significance that the provinces of Spain had for Augustus and Rome. Initially we assess the exploitation of the Cantabrian War for the military image of Augustus, suggesting that the conflict played a crucial role in bolstering the position of the princeps following the Civil Wars and the constitutional arrangements reached with the senate up to 27. From here in turn we consider the manner in which Augustan action within Iberia impacted upon the literary and visual depictions of the peninsula. The thesis also highlights the fiscal imperatives that acted as a driving force behind the growth in urbanisation, the widespread promotion of privileged status and the provincial reorganisations of Augustus. Following this, the surge in monumentalisation across Hispania’s towns and cities is treated, placing a renewed emphasis on the role of the Augustan regime in encouraging, if indirectly, these processes. An assessment of the impact of Augustan rule on the upward mobility of the Spanish elites follows, highlighting patronage and wealth as the twin pillars of Spanish advancement and suggesting that the first princeps is instrumental in laying the groundwork for the expanding promotion of Spaniards during the reigns of his immediate successors. Finally, the thesis concludes with an overview of the nascent imperial cult in Spain, suggesting in the first instance that the imposition of the cult in the north-west aided the suppression of the recalcitrant tribes and may very well have impacted upon Augustan policies in similarly unstable areas such as Germany and Gaul; and secondly, that whilst direct compulsion cannot be countenanced, Augustus’ dissemination of civic organisation created a framework within which elite competition ensured the rapid proliferation of the imperial cult throughout the towns and cities of Spain and the western provinces.

The aims of this research are to provide a comprehensive review of the available evidence for the socio-economic structure of the Urartian kingdom (of the 9th-6th centuries BC) and by doing so, to analyse and critique previous interpretations of the subject. Although there has been intensive research on different aspects of the Urartian kingdom, mainly chronological studies or excavations and surveys that cover different parts of what was once the lands of the kingdom, unlike previous studies this research presents a systematic review of the geographical, archaeological and textual evidence of the Urartian (and Assyrian where relevant textual evidence is available) as well as original ethnographic observations in order to analyse the socio-economic and administrative organisation of the Urartian kingdom. After reviewing and evaluating the history of research of Soviet, Turkish and Western scholars on various aspects of the Urartian kingdom, I move on to investigating the available economic resources in the region and the movement of commodities such as the produce of arable agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy, and craft activities undertaken by Urartian society. The next step, in order to understand the management of these economic resources, is to examine the administrative organisation of the state including the Urartian concept of kingship and the king’s role in administration, construction activities, the administrative division of the kingdom, and the income generated by warfare. It is concluded that the Urartian state economy was heavily dependent on agriculture and animal husbandry. Military expeditions generated substantial income in the form of livestock and prisoners of war. Further wealth was accumulated by tribute, taxation and metallurgical activities. However, how these factors combined into a single economic system has been variously interpreted by individual scholars in response to their contemporary theoretical and political context.

Despite the large amount of historical church archaeology carried out within English churches, the relevance of British regional variations to conclusions reached has only been recognized relatively recently (Rodwell 1996: 202 and Yates 2006: xxi). This offered opportunities to consider possible meanings for the evolving post-Reformation furnishing arrangements within Manx churches. The resultant thesis detailed the processes involved whilst examining changes made to the Anglican liturgical arrangements inside a number of Manx and Welsh churches and chapels-of-ease between 1634 and 1925 from previously tried and tested structuration, and sometimes biographical, perspectives for evidence of changes in human and material activity in order to place Manx communities within larger British political, religious and social contexts. Findings challenged conclusions reached by earlier scholarship about the Commonwealth period in Man. Contemporary modifications to material culture inside Manx churches implied that Manx clergymen and their congregations accepted the transfer of key agency from ecclesiastical authorities to Parliamentary actors. Thus Manx religious practices appeared to have correlated more closely, albeit less traumatically, with those in England and Wales during the same period than previously recognized, although the small size of this study could not discover the geographical extent of disarray within Island parishes. Amendments made to the material culture after 1665 which indicated the status quo was soon re-established in Man probably reflected a shared, compliant paradigm. Alternatively, in England and Wales the official exclusion of dissidents from the Church of England in 1662, visible in the landscape in Nonconformist chapels from the beginning of the eighteenth century, signalled the beginnings of the Church’s loss of full judicial authority. In Man, hierarchical acceptance of moderate religious dissidence within the Anglican Church after the Restoration of the Monarchy, traditional cultural practices, and changed relationships between clergy and parishioners visible materially within the two Island parishes studied, reflected the Manx Church’s more successful strategy to maintain power. A number of sections within chapters focused on material evidence of the unusual relationships between Castletown communities and their parish church between 1704 and 1925. Consideration of seating arrangements also highlighted the effects onto various Manx communities of the sale of the Island to England in 1765. Throughout, the contents of the Welsh churches provided informative, comparative contexts that informed the hermeneutic processes undertaken. To conclude, generally this project placed previously unexplored material culture within wider church archaeology and revealed regionally-specific habitus, human agency, and material activity and trends. The structuration approach taken identified a number of issues suitable for publication, and raised unanswered questions that would benefit from further research.

War captives are generally thought to have comprised the main portion of the Roman slave supply during the Republic. Likewise, the result of mass enslavement through continuous war has been interpreted as a principle factor in the agricultural evolution in Italy from the second century BC which saw a significant increase in large plantation style farming (latifundia). The misconception of a male bias in agricultural labour has put a heavy influence on the need for an external supply of slaves rather than through reproduction. However, an analysis of documentary evidence suggests that wartime enslavement was more limited. Problems in supervising, transporting, and trading large numbers of slaves, as well as competing markets elsewhere in the Mediterranean, made immediate absorption of captives as slaves into the central Italian economy problematic. Furthermore, the vast majority of wartime enslavements occurred following the capture of cities, where larger numbers of civilian prisoners were taken, mostly comprising women, children and slaves. Ancient sources frequently exaggerated the number of war captives and often neglected to elaborate on the fate of those taken in war. Many modern historians have been far too quick to assume that prisoners were enslaved, which has given a disproportionate view of the importance of the contribution of war captives to the slave supply and their effect upon the growing slave population at Rome during the Republic. Such assumptions have left critical analysis wanting and, as a result, war captives have been largely neglected by Roman historians. This study attempts to address the gap in our analysis of these crucial practices in antiquity and to offer an explanation of how the taking of war captives was impacted by Rome’s changing socio-political and economic structures during the Republic.

This study examines the distribution of high-status materials and archaeological and artefactual evidence of their production in the settlements known as royal cities during the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt (c.1550-1069 BC). The research focusses on the sites of Amarna, Gurob and Malqata, but also incorporates Qantir/Pi-Ramesse for comparison. The industries considered as relevant for inclusion within this thesis are those of glass, faience, metal, sculpture and textiles. No systematic and comprehensive discussion of the intra-urban distribution of high-status goods, their production or role as a marker of the nature of royal cities has been undertaken to date. The approach of using spatial analysis as a means to detect patterns of artefact distribution throughout entire suburbs has not been done in this form before and it has been proved successful in this thesis, although the methodological approach to each settlement necessarily varies, depending on the nature and quality of the available data. This thesis also includes new and unpublished data from survey and excavations at the site of Gurob, as well as critical and detailed reviews of the archaeology and material remains at several other sites. Apart from an introduction and a conclusion, the thesis comprises two main analytical and discussion chapters: The introduction outlines the aims and objectives, in addition to the theoretical and historiographical background to this thesis. In addition, it presents the sources used and methods employed. It furthermore provides some definitions and terminology used in the following chapters. The spatial and artefactual analysis chapter discusses the distribution of the artefactual evidence of glass-working, faience-production, metal-working and sculpture-production, as well as the finished products, and the evidence of textile-working, for both Amarna and Gurob. Using a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) model incorporating a database of all relevant finds and a vector grid, distribution patterns are plotted and spatially and statistically analysed. This was not possible for Malqata, however, and therefore that section contains a detailed discussion of all information available on the nature of the production of glass and faience objects throughout the site. This chapter highlights patterns of artefact distributions throughout the three settlements, attempting the reconstruction of infrastructures. The third chapter analyses workshops and factories in urban settlements in more detail. It includes a presentation of the archaeological remains at sites O45.1 and IA1 at Amarna and Gurob, highlighting parallels in layout and function. The chapter then focuses on archaeological analysis of artefactual assemblages from selected groups of houses at Amarna and Malqata, highlighting their industrial diversity. The thesis concludes by summarising the results from both chapters, and using these to address the research questions asked in the introduction. This chapter uses the preceding data analysis to define three broad types of workshops: (1) the large, purpose-built (often royal) workshops, (2) the larger houses involved in manufacture, but with limited specialism, and (3) those working on a household-level with a low skill set. Based on the results from the analysis, a series of organisational models has been proposed, one for each industry, including the control of raw materials and the redistribution of half-finished and finished objects and their consumption.

Ritual is an issue of wide importance in archaeological discourse and interpretation of the past. An understanding of ritual connects the traces of activities preserved in the archaeological record to the embodied experiences of human practice. Very few theorists have proposed methods to approach ritual, and those methodologies that do exist (e.g. Renfrew 1985; Richards and Thomas 1984) suffer from irreconcilable weaknesses. One of the primary methodologies for looking at ritual in prehistory -called Structured Deposition- has been developed in conjunction with evidence from the British Neolithic, and has barely been applied beyond this narrow field. The lack of models available for archaeologists studying ritual must be rectified, and, as previously proposed models and definitions have been inadequate in scope, there is a real need for a new method and model. This thesis introduces a new methodology in the archaeology of ritual, using the Neolithic of the Near East as a case study. Through a focus on the methodological element of studying ritual, a subsidiary goal of a better understanding of ritual in the Near East can be reached. Other subsidiary goals are to provide a logically valid basis from which to attempt interpretation as well as a better definition of ritual as it is used in archaeology, in order to solidify an approach to ritual that can take into account symbolic activity without succumbing to subjectivist criticism. The starting point for the new methodology is the idea of Structured Deposition, one way British archaeologists have tried to incorporate discussions of ritual despite a dearth of evidence. In brief, Richards and Thomas (1984) began with the premise that ritual activity involves formalized and repetitive behaviour. They then analysed the spatial patterning of particular forms of deposition, and concluded that certain deposits were too formal to be utilitarian. Just as ritual is not a single category, but a collection of categories with similar attributes, so too is structured deposition polythetic (See Needham 1975). Garrow (2012) places the many kinds of structured deposition on a continuum, naming the poles after the two most commonly discussed forms of structured depositions: “odd deposits” and “material culture patterning.” This conception of structured deposition as polythetic helps to overcome the current theoretical reluctance to differentiate between description and interpretation. Not only does structured deposition cover a great many aspects of ritual activity, it also allows for the correlation of activities that had previously been studied in isolation. Another advantage to the translation of structured deposition to a useful package to be deployed with respect to Near Eastern evidence is that the concept is only the starting point of the model. Alison Wylie reminds us that the orienting concepts do not determine what is found as analysis progresses (2002: 167). As such, many “odd deposits” or “patterning” events may not be considered as the result of intentional, or ritual, activity at the end of the interpretation process according to this new methodology. This reflects upon the contextual nature of the methodology, especially crucial with the sparse excavation and survey evidence from many Near Eastern sites. In chapters 2 and 3 of this thesis I explore previous approaches and conceptualizations of ritual and of meaning on the archaeological record. In chapter 4 I introduce issues in Near Eastern prehistory that are crucial to an understanding of the emergence of new forms of ritual activity, as they both frame and support current academic discussions of ritual. The methodologies used to approach these topics are described and critiqued in chapter 5, and a new model is introduced. The first step of the new model is to contextualize the evidence from the site, attempting to understand standard practices during the major phases. Deviation from the standard practices may be the result of intentional ritualization of objects, buildings, areas, colours or deposits. Quantification of the attributes of the potentially ritualized deposit allows for statistical comparisons, then a consideration of possible avenues of symbolization. The final step, interpretation, ties together all of the previous elements of the methodology to arrive at a conclusion as to the ritual significance of a deposit. In chapter 6, this new model was applied to 640 deposits spanning the time contemporary with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic from Anatolia, Upper Mesopotamia, and the Levant. Statistically significant results were obtained from both inter- and intra- regional comparisons, as well as chronological juxtaposition of depositions. The quantity and depth of the results, described in chapter 7, underline the usefulness and relevance of this new methodology with which to approach ritual in the Ancient Near East.

Ever since Vere Gordon Childe’s seminal work on The Dawn of European Civilization (Childe 1925), it has been widely accepted that European agriculture originated in Southwest Asia. Exactly how farming spread to Europe from its origins in Southwest Asia remains, however, a matter of debate. Much of the argument has revolved around the manners of spreading of the Neolithic, whether through colonisation, acculturation or a combination of both. Far less attention has been given to the actual content of the Neolithic pattern of existence that spread into Europe. In my thesis, I review one particular type of content, practices, defined by reference to the theories of social action as normative acts or ways of doing. Practices are marked out by repetitive patterns in the material record, such as burnt houses for the practice of house-burning. Accordingly, practices are inferred, rather than instantiated, from their material expression, using information about the context and the sequence of stratigraphic events. Beyond farming practices, the Neolithic witnessed the inception of a new set of residential and construction practices, pertaining to the way in which houses were built, lived in and discarded at the end of their use-lives. This research tracks each of five main areas of practices from their origins in the Near East: house ‘closure’, house replacement, residential burial, spatial organisation in the rectangular house and agglutination. The aim is to examine whether some of the more distinctive Near Eastern practices, such as the deliberate infilling of houses at ‘closure’, the vertical superimposition of houses, the burial of the dead under active households, the spatial division of the main room into two flooring areas and the agglutination of houses in cellular house patterns, spread into Europe. I find that this older habitus of practices, which was involved in upholding a static repetition, house upon house, of the same pattern of existence, did not spread or only marginally into Europe. Over the course of the 7th millennium BC cal., however, it was superseded by another habitus of practices with a focus on collective action, which had wider relevance and appeal. The sequence of Çatalhöyük East, which spans both horizons of practices, serves as a guide to examine the broader dynamics of change in this period. My thesis claims, on the basis of inference drawn from compiling together a database of 848 radiocarbon dates from 59 sites, uniformly re-calibrated and displayed with the same confidence interval in an interactive interface, the 14C Backbone, that there was a two-thousand year lag, plus or minus a few hundred years, between the advent of Neolithic economy on the Central Anatolian Plateau and in the Aegean Basin. As it stands, the Western Anatolian Neolithic, which starts at or shortly before 6,500 BC cal., matches the Southeast European sequence more than it does the Southwest Asian one. New research in Western Anatolia suggests that there is ground to link up Thessaly and Macedonia with the Lake District and the Aegean coast of Anatolia, and Thrace with the Eastern Marmara region, regarding the advent of Neolithic practices.

The objective of this thesis is to place the pottery used by people in 17th and 18th century Worcester into context, flowing from a desire to see the archaeological study of pottery placed within the wider study of material culture. It develops a model for doing so by addressing both a corpus of pottery drawn from a number of sites in the city and a sample of probate inventories covering the century 1650-1750. This century is of interest in local ceramic studies because it is transitional between a period in which the prime provider of pottery for the whole region was the Malvern industry, and the later period of industrial scale manufacture and distribution in Staffordshire. The thesis begins by reviewing possible theoretical approaches to the study of pottery and adopting a standpoint based on a phenomenological view of material culture as embodied experience, as opposed to the idealist representation of meaning. Since an implication of this standpoint is that the experience of past people encompassed more than the use and possession of pots, the subsequent Chapter explores the physical development of Worcester over the century under review. The next section then embarks on the consideration of 11 groups of pottery drawn from six sites in the city. Each group is considered and interpreted in turn, in its archaeological context, before the resulting data is combined to form images of the ceramic ‘repertoire’ for each of three Stages covering the century. A product of this process is the draft of a Type Series for later early modern pottery in Worcester. A sample of probate inventories taken at ten year intervals is then considered, and images of household material culture developed for three similar temporal Stages. Finally information from both the archaeological study and the analysis of inventories is combined imaginatively in ‘walking through’ three houses, one for each Stage, in order to experience, at least vicariously, the place of pottery in each. The model thus endeavours to establish for a particular locality both the nature of the ceramic repertoire for the period under review, using a development of ‘traditional’ archaeological methodology, and the position within particular households which it appears to have occupied. This approach combines the archaeological study of pottery, often pursued in isolation, with the detailed consideration of related historical data, in a way which illuminates both and can be further refined and applied elsewhere.