Can slaving and enslavement be seen as a significant transformative phenomena in Iron Age Europe and, if so, how would this affect the interpretation of (old and new) archaeological evidence? This exploratory study of the dynamics of Iron Age slaving and enslaving in Northwest Europe contributes to a complex but neglected topic.

Materialising the Roman Empire defines an innovative research agenda for Roman archaeology, highlighting the diverse ways in which the Empire was made materially tangible in the lives of its inhabitants. The volume explores how material culture was integral to the processes of imperialism, both as the Empire grew, and as it fragmented, and in doing so provide up-to-date overviews of major topics in Roman archaeology. Each chapter offers a critical overview of a major field within the archaeology of the Roman Empire. The book’s authors explore the distinctive contribution that archaeology and the study of material culture can make to our understanding of the key institutions and fields of activity in the Roman Empire. The initial chapters address major technologies which, at first glance, appear to be mechanisms of integration across the Roman Empire: roads, writing and coinage. The focus then shifts to analysis of key social structures oriented around material forms and activities found all over the Roman world, such as trade, urbanism, slavery, craft production and frontiers. Finally, the book extends to more abstract dimensions of the Roman world: art, empire, religion and ideology, in which the significant themes remain the dynamics of power and influence. The whole builds towards a broad exploration of the nature of imperial power and the inter-connections that stimulated new community identities and created new social divisions.

Can slaving and enslavement be seen as a significant transformative phenomena in Iron Age Europe and, if so, how would this affect the interpretation of (old and new) archaeological evidence? This exploratory study of the dynamics of Iron Age slaving and enslaving in Northwest Europe contributes to a complex but neglected topic.

This study explores what we as people can do with our bodies, what we can use them for, and how we can alter and understand them. With analysis based on artefacts found in graves, anthropomorphic images, and written sources, it considers the ways in which human groups from the Neolithic to the Migration Period have perceived and treated the body.

This Element volume provides an up-to-date synthesis of the archaeology of the Roman conquest, combining new theoretical and methodological approaches with the latest fieldwork results. Recent advances in conflict archaeology research are revolutionising our knowledge of Rome's military campaigns in Western and Central Europe, allowing scholars to reassess the impact of the conquest on the indigenous populations. The volume explores different types of material evidence for the Roman wars of conquest, including temporary camps, battlefields, coinage production, and regional settlement patterns. These and other topics are examined using four case studies: Caesar's Gallic Wars, the Cantabrian and Asturian Wars, the Germanic Wars of Augustus, and the Roman conquest of Britain. By focusing on the 'dark sides' of the Roman expansion and reclaiming the memory of the conquered, the Element aims to contribute to a more holistic understanding of the processes of incorporation and integration into the Roman Empire.

"Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, "gray-eyed Thracians" of the distant north to the "dark-skinned Ethiopians" of the far south (as the poet Xenophanes would describe around 540 BCE), Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece's 'racial imaginary'-a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy-emerged out of the context of cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors over the Archaic and Classical Periods. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the 'exotic' provenance of their goods to consumers; it might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports. Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative. But at in the early Classical Period-as Achaemenid Persia loomed, and as Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor-such images coalesced into the charged, idea of the barbaros, 'barbarian.' Drawing from the historiography of trade in the eighteenth century Atlantic world, Racialized Commodities adopts the model of 'commodity biography' to investigate the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. Starting in the period c. 700-450 BCE, Part 1 focuses on the earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, in Greek art. Part 2, which concentrates on the period between 550-300 BCE, seeks to explain how and why negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians were so widespread in ancient Greece"--

The Oxford Handbook of the European Iron Age presents a broad overview of current understanding of the archaeology of Europe from 1000 BC through to the early historic periods, exploiting the large quantities of new evidence yielded by the upsurge in archaeological research and excavation on this period over the last thirty years. Three introductory chapters situate the reader in the times and the environments of Iron Age Europe. Fourteen regional chapters provide accessible syntheses of developments in different parts of the continent, from Ireland and Spain in the west to the borders with Asia in the east, from Scandinavia in the north to the Mediterranean shores in the south. Twenty-six thematic chapters examine different aspects of Iron Age archaeology in greater depth, from lifeways, economy, and complexity to identity, ritual, and expression. Among the many topics explored are agricultural systems, settlements, landscape monuments, iron smelting and forging, production of textiles, politics, demography, gender, migration, funerary practices, social and religious rituals, coinage and literacy, and art and design.