The wealth of excavation in Cyprus conducted across a period of nearly a century and a half has revealed much evidence of ancient building of all functional categories. This picture extends over a vast range of time (ca. 10,000 years) since Cyprus is probably the place where the earliest substantial building known, the Neolithic round house style is better presented than anywhere else in the world. It is the aim of this book to set forth and document the building tradition which hitherto has received no detailed exposition. The book will fill several gaps in the library shelves at one and the same time: architectural history that presents all the archaeological evidence.

This volume investigates how the structure and use of space developed and changed in cities, and examines the role of different societal groups in shaping urbanism. Culturally and chronologically diverse case studies provide a basis to examine recent theoretical and methodological shifts in the archaeology of ancient cities. The book's primary goal is to examine how ancient cities were made by the people who lived in them. The authors argue that there is a mutually constituting relationship between urban form and the actions and interactions of a plurality of individuals, groups, and institutions, each with their own motivations and identities. Space is therefore socially produced as these agents operate in multiple spheres.

Building construction is the subject of this third part of the Ancient Building Technology set dealing with the history of building and building materials). Beginning with the formulation of a project it goes on to discuss preliminary site surveying and setting out, followed by building site development and its attendant installations, and then examines the disposition of the various building materials in building construction from pre-history to the end of antiquity.

The wealth of excavation of ancient buildings in the past 50 years and the resulting flood of publications has created a demand for a survey of building practice in antiquity. This two-volume work deals with the techniques of setting together the fabric of ancient buildings: the manual and mechanical operations involved; the materials, tools and equipment used. "Ancient" here means from very first beginnings (origins) to the end of Late Antiquity (i.e. about 600 A.D.); as manifested geographically in the Old World of Europe and the Middle East (not sub-Saharan Africa, Further Asia, the Far East or New World). Building (the product and the process) is limited to architectural building and looks at the technology of civil engineering only where it introduces novelties. Technology here means the system of techniques used in the process of building construction rather than the science or theory of building. The 10 chapters of this first volume are intended to give a general perspective of animal building in the light of evolutionary biology, then of building in the Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Levanto-Aegean, Achaemenid, Greek, Roman, Late Antique -Early Christian / Byzantine / Sassanian contexts (with a weighting towards the lesser known prehistoric beginnings and late antique end). The second volume will focus on the technical details: materials of construction, structural systems, principles of construction and forms of construction.