A collection of sixteen papers focusing on the economic activities of prehistoric, Classical, Hellenistic and Roman Crete. The wide-ranging papers discuss the economy of prehistoric Crete, social development, production and symbolism in the pre-Palatial and Palatial periods, economic activities and social development in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, coinage and minting and relationships with other polities of the Aegean and east Mediterranean.

This volume, featuring sixteen contributions from leading Roman historians and archaeologists, sheds new light on approaches to the economic history of urban craftsmen and traders in the Roman world, with a particular emphasis on the imperial period. Combining a wide range of research traditions from all over Europe and utilizing evidence from Italy, the western provinces, and the Greek-speaking east, this edited collection is divided into four sections. It first considers the scholarly history of Roman crafts and trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on Germany and the Anglo-Saxon world, and on Italy and France. Chapters discuss how scholarly thinking about Roman craftsmen and traders was influenced by historical and intellectual developments in the modern world, and how different (national) research traditions followed different trajectories throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second section highlights the economic strategies of craftsmen and traders, examining strategies of long-distance traders and the phenomenon of specialization, and presenting case studies of leather-working and bread-baking. In the third section, the human factor in urban crafts and trade-including the role of apprenticeship, gender, freedmen, and professional associations-is analysed, and the volume ends by exploring the position of crafts in urban space, considering the evidence for artisanal clustering in the archaeological and papyrological record, and providing case studies of the development of commercial landscapes at Aquincum on the Danube and at Sagalassos in Pisidia.

The last several decades have seen a dramatic increase in interest in the Roman period on the island of Crete. Ongoing and some long-standing excavations and investigations of Roman sites and buildings, intensive archaeological survey of Roman areas, and intensive research on artifacts, history, and inscriptions of the island now provide abundant data for assessing Crete alongside other Roman provinces. New research has also meant a reevaluation of old data in light of new discoveries, and the history and archaeology of Crete is now being rewritten. The breadth of topics addressed by the papers in this volume is an indication of Crete’s vast archaeological potential for contributing to current academic issues such as Romanization/acculturation, climate and landscape studies, regional production and distribution, iconographic trends, domestic housing, economy and trade, and the transition to the late-Antique era. These papers confirm Crete’s place as a fully realized participant in the Roman world over the course of many centuries but also position it as a newly discovered source of academic inquiry.

Russell provides an examination of the production, distribution, and use of carved stone objects in the Roman world. Focusing on the market for stone and its supply, he offers an assessment of the practicalities of stone transport and how the relationship between producer and customer functioned even over considerable distances.

This 2002 book explores social memory in the ancient Greek world using the evidence of landscapes and monuments.

The idea that societies and rulers express their power through monumental architecture is not a new one, but this collection of essays, the result of a 2002 conference in Leuven, takes the arguement back to the very beginnings of monumental architecture in the Bronze Age Near East and Aegean, to ask if this process can be linked to a particular ...

The Plain of Phaistos presents the results on an interdisciplinary regional field project (1984-1987) carried out on the island Of Crete. This volume traces the changing patterns of settlement and cycles of social complexity from the Late Neolithic period to the present day within the heartland of the state of Phaistos. The authors and contributors publish geological, archaeological, environmental, botanical, historical and ethnographic studies that establish the regional identity of the Western Mesara. Using a combination of empirical, processual and post-processual theoretical approaches, the volume investigates a central problem - how and why did the Bronze Age and Classical states arise at Phaistos?