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The public baths, functioning as a hygienic and social center, were among the most important public spaces in the Roman world. While ancient texts give scholars some indication of the social backdrop of the public baths, these records, written by upper class males, are largely silent on the activities of women, children, and the lower classes (cf. Allison 2007a:343, 346). As a result, scholars have only a partial understanding of the bath's social role in the lives of the ancient Romans. Archaeological assemblages of objects which the Romans lost or left behind in the baths are an under-utilized resource for information on this social environment. To examine the social environment of the Roman baths, my dissertation collects published and unpublished artifact data from 27 public and military baths in Italy and the western Roman Provinces, including Britannia, Lusitania, Raetia, and Germania Superior. 13 baths, whose assemblages are definitively linked with use of the baths ("primary assemblages"), will serve as the basis for this study, while artifacts from the other 14 baths, whose contexts are less clear ("secondary assemblages"), will serve as a comparative sample. These small finds provide data on the social environment of the Roman baths, specifically the genders, ages, classes, and activities of bathers. To interpret these finds, I turned to Roman small finds scholarship (e.g. Eckardt and Crummy 2008; Allason-Jones 2011), which together with site publications and finds catalogues, provides a starting place for determining the primary function of various objects. Studies which link artifacts with genders, ages, and classes (Nevett 1999; Allison 2004a, 2006a; Allison et al. 2005) serve as a model for my methodology for associating objects with social groups, which incorporates data from ancient texts, burials, and art. Using three different data sets to attribute a gender, age, and class to these objects helps to ameliorate the shortcomings of each, and I interpret associations between social groups and artifacts across multiple datasets as an accurate reflection of the connections that the Romans themselves saw between different objects and people. Having associated artifacts with activities, genders, ages, and classes, I examined the primary assemblages from the main 13 baths to determine which activities took place and where, as well as the genders, ages and classes of the individuals using each bath. These artifacts, supported by the secondary assemblages, confirmed many current scholarly views on Roman baths, such as the prominence of social display and eating and drinking, and provided new information about activities, including cloth-working and medical procedures, and how these spaces were used, including room multifunctionality and the presence of women and children in military baths. Since my sample includes a number of urban public and military baths from a variety of provinces and time periods, I also analyzed their artifact assemblages for information on temporal and geographic variations in Roman urban public and military baths. Across bath types, dates, and locations, a number of activities appear as regular parts of the bathing environment, and even less commonly represented activities are not isolated to a region, time period, or bath type. The lack of strong regional, temporal, or typological variation in artifact assemblages may indicate that the social environments of urban public and military baths differed little throughout the Roman period and across the empire.

The thesis is focused on the finds of glass and faience which are to be found in the form of beads and pendants, vessels, inlays, game pieces, bracelets and a "window" in the bottom of a ceramic urn. The most common are glass and faience beads. Their occurrence increases in the Late Roman Period substantially when new ornament styles come into being as well. Because of the predominant cremation rite, the knowledge is limited for the poor condition as a large amount of glass artefacts was deformed. In view of the fact that the majority of the beads originates from the classical antiquity world, they represent a vast number of imported goods, which may have been traded in Barbaricum as well. The long necklaces reflect obviously the higher social status of buried women. Nevertheless, the same statement cannot be considered to be applicable for lower numbers of beads in graves. Even some male graves with beads are known. The elite milieus are indicated also by the glass vessels, rather rare in the Roman Period Bohemia, the inlays on brooches or rings, as well as the game pieces. The Roman glass bracelets represent a rare sort of artefacts in Barbaricum. It is also possible to encounter some residues of the Iron Age glass, mostly on the settlements. Keywords glass - faience - Roman Period - imports - Bohemia

Lämningar från mer än 230 romerska amfiteatrar har hittats sprida runt om i alla av det romerska imperiets provinser. Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att skapa en förståelse för amfiteatrarnas betydelse för det romerska riket, genom att studera var de är lokaliserade och det fynd som har gjorts i dem. De flesta arbeten som redan gjorts i ämnet är gjorda på amfiteatrarnas konstruktion eller på separata amfiteatrar. Genom litteraturstudier av 23 amfiteatrar är syftet att få en större överblick över ämnet. Resultatet visar på att amfiteatrarna låg på militära, politiska och ekonomiskt strategiska platser och ofta i utkanten eller utanför staden. Fynd från amfiteatrarna visar att huvudstrategin bakom byggandet av amfiteatrarna var att kontrollera imperiets folk. / Remains of more than 230 Roman amphitheatres have been found scattered around the provinces of the Roman Empire. The purpose of this essay is to create an understanding of the importance of amphitheatres to the Roman Empire, by studying where they are located and the archaeological finds that have been made in them. Most of the work already done on the subject has been done on the construction of the amphitheatres. Through literature studies of 23 amphitheatres, the aim is to get a greater overview of the subject. The results show that the amphitheatres were located in military, political and economic strategic locations and often on the outskirts or outside the city. Finds from the amphitheatres show that the main strategy behind the construction of the amphitheatres was to control the people of the empire.

No / This paper explores the interpretation of the deposition of artefacts in Ireland from c. 2500 to c. 800 bc, combining a contextual analysis with post-processual ideas about materiality, artefacts, and their biographies. Hoards, single and burial finds are shown to be complementary strands of the depositional record and the result of deliberate deposition. It is argued that both the symbolic value of these items as well as economic and practical rationales determine the depositional mode. The paper attempts to infer social practices and rules that determined the differential treatment of materials and object types. The main structuring factor in the depositional record is the type-specific meanings of individual artefacts, which embody social identities beyond the utilitarian function of the object. The act of deposition facilitates and legitimates the literal and symbolic transformation of artefacts and the concepts they embody. The need for a separation between ritual and profane interpretation is removed, as deposition is understood as the reflection of prehistoric concepts rather than labelled according to modern notions of functionality. It is also argued that both dry and wet places are meaningful contexts and that different forms of wet landscapes were conceptualised differently.

The aim of this thesis is to on one hand give a good overview of finds found in gotlandic stonefoundationhouses (kämpgravar) that were commonly built during the Iron Age and on the other hand investigate the possibility of separating some houses from others and trace social stratification and hierarchies based on the finds. The items of special interest for this goal were those that could be connected to wealth such as drinking objects, Roman objects and objects made of silver and gold. This investigation has shown that on Gotland it actually existed some, often enormous, houses that had a special tendency to hoard exotic valuables. The real standout houses on this subject are the one in Stavgard and the recently excavated building in Hellvi. A secondart goal was to investigate the possibility to date the buildings based on the finds, which was found to be very problematic. (Two years master’s thesis in Archaeology) / Det huvudsakliga målet med denna uppsats är dels att ge bra överblick över fynden som påträffats i de gotländska stengrundshusen (kämpgravar) som byggdes flitigt under järnåldern och att dels se om det är möjligt att separera vissa hus från andra och spåra social stratifikation och hierarkier baserat på fyndmaterialet. De föremål som var av speciellt intresse för detta mål är de som kan kopplas till rikedom såsom exempelvis exotiska dryckesföremål, romerska föremål och föremål av ädelmetall. Undersökningen har visat att det på Gotland faktiskt fanns en del, ofta enorma, hus som hade en speciell benägenhet att hamstra exotiska dyrgripar. De riktiga utstickarna på det här temat är huset känt som Stavgard och även den nyligen undersökta byggnaden i Hellvi. Båda hade rika mängder av dryckesobjekt såsom glaskärl och dryckeshorn och en del, för ön, unika romerska föremål. Ett sidomål var att även undersöka möjligheten att datera husen baserat på fynden, vilket visade sig vara högst problematiskt. (Master-uppsats i Arkeologi)

This master thesis investigates the phenomenon of men with filed (modified) teeth in Scandinavia during late Iron Age. More than 100 buried men with filed teeth have up till now been discovered. Of these, 92 are included in my analysis. Burials containing men with filed teeth have been discovered on Gotland, in Skåne, Uppland, Västergötland and Öland in Sweden, on Fyn in Denmark and in one mass grave in Dorset, England. Most of the men derive from burials on Gotland.   The men with filed teeth have hitherto mostly been studied from an osteoarchaeological approach. Instead, this study regards the burial contexts in which they were found. In order to study this, I have compiled a data base in which available information about these men and their burial contexts have been gathered. The term ¨burial context¨ in this essay refers to the grave finds and the aspects of the burial itself, as well as the landscape in which it is situated.   The aim of the study is to try to determine what unites, and separates, the men with filed teeth; what can be said about the dating of their occurrence, the men’s origin/provenance and what social status and occupation they may have held.

At the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene, between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, humans began to spread throughout North America and into many areas of Florida. These first Floridians are known as Paleoindians, and their culture is largely defined by their lithic assemblage, which includes the well known Clovis point. As the Pleistocene ice age came to a close glaciers melted, rivers experienced a drastic increase in water volume and the landmass of Florida began to shrink as the sea level in the Gulf of Mexico rose. This event likely submerged many early Paleoindian sites in coastal areas, and the only sites known now are usually found in river valleys. This research will examine the distribution of Paleoindian sites in the Apalachicola River Valley of northwest Florida in terms of environmental characteristics, namely distance to river and site elevation. Using data from known sites and from four artifact collectors, this research will show that Paleoindian sites cluster along the Chipola River, the major tributary of the Apalachicola River, and will also argue that it is far more beneficial for archaeologists to work with artifact collectors and document their vast amounts of data than to shun them and deem their data questionable and their methods unethical.

This research focuses on artefactual assemblages from temples in the south-east and east of England from 50 BCE to 250 CE. In order to evaluate these data, which primarily consists of faunal remains, coins, and items of personal adornment, quantitative methods to perform intra-site and inter-site analyses are utilised. As a result of the analyses conducted, a range of social practices were identified, including those specific to individual temples, and those that were shared to varying degrees across the breadth of the study area. The study also examines how a site’s unique environmental and political conditions characterised the assemblages of each temple. Moreover, it reveals that the pre-Roman Eastern and Southern kingdoms continued to influence the nature of practices on temple sites into the Roman period, and that the impact of Roman conquest was much less persuasive as might be expected from previous research on religion in Roman Britain. The conclusions of this study emphasise the significant future potential of the finds evidence to illuminate studies of religion in the Roman empire, as well as highlighting the diverse nature of religion in early Roman Britain.

This work is devoted to the contacts between North-Western Rus' and Scandinavia in the early Middle Ages. The work pays attention to disclosure of the nature of the Scandinavians stay in the territory of Rus'. This is done through the description and evaluation of the archaeological finds in the most important economic centers along the trade routes of the Middle Ages. Information on research in the territory of Russia and found objects is taken from the modern Russian scientific publications. In the work the modern vision of the presence of Scandinavian immigrants is disclosed. The result is the recognition of northerners as permanent inhabitants in several economic centers along with the Finno- Ugric and Slavic population. Keywords Scandinavia, North-West of Russia, archaeological finds, trade and craft centers, early Middle Ages