A New Thiasos from Mylasa: Thiasitai Heroistai of Ouliades, Son of Euthydemos

Surviving visual culture from the early modern period that can be described as particularly Scottish in style is scarce. As a result, any evidence of such artistry is of national significance. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to a form of lettering which was used for the display of short inscriptions and initials in Scotland throughout the 16th century. Surviving examples are almost exclusively carved in relief in durable wood and stone. This distinctive letterform is drawn from the transitional styles which briefly appeared at the end of the 15th century as French artists and scribes transferred their allegiance from their traditional ornate Gothic capitals to the bold, simple Roman forms of the Renaissance. While a number of experimental letterforms fleetingly appeared elsewhere across northern Europe, Scottish scholars absorbed these new influences in France and developed them into a distinctive form which persisted in Scotland for over a century. After its first known appearance at the marriage of King James IV to Margaret Tudor in Edinburgh in 1503, the evidence suggests that the use of Scottish Lettering became confined to Aberdeen and the north-east, primarily in pre Reformation ecclesiastical applications. Following the Reformation, it became largely restricted to secular and funerary inscriptions.

Greek inscriptions form a valuable resource for the study of every aspect of life and death in the Greco-Roman world. They are primary witnesses to society's laws and institutions; social structures; public cults and private associations; and, of course, language. An to Greek Epigraphy provides students and classicists with the tools to take advantage of the social and historical weight of these treasures.The book begins by examining letter forms, ancient names, and ancient calendars, knowledge of which is essential in reading inscriptions of all kinds. B. H. McLean discusses the classification of inscriptions into their various categories and analyzes particular types of inscriptions, including decrees, honorary inscriptions, dedications, funerary inscriptions, and manumission inscriptions. Finally, McLean includes special topics that bear upon the interpretation of specific features of inscriptions, such as Greek and Roman administrative titles and functions.Well-organized and clear as well as insightful and original, McLean's Introduction to Greek Epigraphy is an excellent source for beginners, nonspecialists, and specialists alike. The volume will be useful to students and scholars studying epigraphy and to those who study politics, governmental organization, archaeology, and ancient history or culture.B. H. McLean is Professor of New Testament, Knox College, University of Toronto.

Archaeological research conducted at St. Michael’s Roman-Catholic Cathedral from Alba Iulia in the spring of 2011 revealed vestiges belonging to the Roman period, Middle Ages and Modern period. The research has been conducted within the project of restoration of the St. Michael’s Cathedral and of the Vauban Fortress of Alba Iulia. This study presents three stone pieces from the Roman times, re-used in constructions dating to the Medieval period and the beginning of the modern period. The first analyzed piece represents a funerary Roman inscription discovered in the ruins of a building dated to the 14th century. The text of the inscription refers to Marcus Granius Stabilianus, buried with two of his children (Marcus Granius Stabilianus and Grania Sabina). Based on the funerary inscription, the monument can be date between the first half of the 2nd century and the beginning of the 3rd century AD. The second piece represents the medallion of a funerary stele preserved in fragmentary state. The stele was discovered at the base of a lime kiln, generally dated in fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The medallion represents the deceased (male character) and his family. The last analyzed piece is a fragment of a Roman sarcophagus cover found in the foundation of the eastern pillar of the entrance into the Episcopal Palace’s courtyard. Every piece discussed in the present article was made of whiteyellow limestone.

Under the Mediterranean I: Studies in Maritime Archaeology

From 2014 on, the archaeological excavations of the Roman fort of Apsaros (Gonio, eastern Black Sea area) concentrated in the central area of early buildings, where a large architectural complex from the second half of the first to the first half of the secondcenturies AD was located. This structure probably was a praitorion, the residence of the garrison commander. There was an ancient looters’ pit discovered in one room; it appeared in relation to the construction works in the fort in the late second or early third century AD. The most outstanding find from this pit is a fragmented red slip beaker featuring a relief ornamentation. The beaker comprised an elongated conical body survived to the height of 8.8 cm and a ring-foot measuring 3.8 cm in diameter. The outer side of the vessel is ornamented with two rows of impressed ovals arranged as a chess-board pattern and divided by shallow incised horizontal lines. The vessel is unevenly fired: the clay is bright orange at the top and gray at the bottom. Bright orange slip covers the top of the beaker. No direct analogies to this find are known so far. The red slip beakers of a different shape and vase-like vessels with typical ornamentation of impressed ovals occurred among the products of the workshops from the second to fourth century AD located in northern Bulgaria. Similar vessels, also locally produced, appeared on the sites from the Roman period in the south-western Romania. It is considered that such vessels imitated the glass ware which existed in the same period. Although tumblers and beakers with oval designs on the walls were among the most widespread types of glass ware in Eastern and Northern Europe in the late third and early fourth century, their shape could not be considered the complete parallel to the find under study. The closest similarity appeared among the glass ware from the last quarter of the first to the second half of the second centuries AD, particularly conic beakers with a disc-foot ornamented with elongated ovals. The beaker discovered in Gonio probably dates from a similar period. The quality of the slip and the method of its application indicate that this vessel was possibly produced in the Black Sea area.

The flat cemetery of Frontovoe 3 was discovered in 2018 by a team of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Nakhimovskii district of modern Sevastopol, in the south-western area of the Crimean Peninsula. The site comprising 328 graves was excavated completely. The cemetery appeared ca. late first century AD and ceased to exist in the late fourth or early fifth century AD. The cemetery showed expressive spatial structure and contained eloquent assemblages with abundant grave goods allowing us to determine its chronological zones. This paper addresses the finds of silver crescent-moon-shaped pendants from graves 13 and 94. Similar ornaments occurred in burial assemblages in the Crimea and the northern Dagestan, Kalmykia, Lower Don area, and also in Sarmatian graves in the Great Hungarian Plain. The lunula pendants in question form a chronological reference point for the Pontic-Danubian antiquities in the Late Roman Period.

<p>A large archaeological excavation was undertaken in 2023 prior to the construction of the new Cambridgeshire Southern Police Station directly west of the village of Milton, 4km north-east of the historic core of Cambridge.</p> <p><br> </p> <p>The main features revealed were ditches that formed part of an extensive and complex series of intercutting late Roman period enclosures with associated boundary ditches, trackways, small timber structures, pits , waterholes or wells, a pond and an oven. Activity on the site probably began in the mid-3rd century AD, apparently peaked in the mid- to late 4th century AD and possibly extended into the 5th century AD.</p> <p><br> </p> <p>The remains indicate an intensive agricultural working area where activities related to the surplus production of grain and the penning/keeping and breeding of considerable numbers of domestic animals, principally cattle for traction activities such as ploughing and transport. This working area may well have formed part of a villa estate and evidence from the site and its vicinity indicates that a villa probably lay nearby—most likely in the unexcavated area immediately to the south.</p> <p><br> </p> <p>A wide array of Roman finds was recovered, including a large pottery assemblage, 68 coins, ironwork, copper-alloy objects, glass vessels. These suggested basic, utilitarian occupation and activity, although some objects suggest ‘higher-status’ occupation in the vicinity. Evidence for small-scale bone and antler working appeared to reflect the manufacture of pins and handles respectively. A poignant discovery was a burial of three infants of the same age, very likely triplets, in a pit cut into the inner side of an enclosure ditch, probably in the late 4th century AD.</p> <p><br> </p> <p>This agricultural working area/probable villa estate appears to have gone out of use around the end of the Roman period, <em>c.</em>AD 400 or shortly after, with enclosure and boundary ditches filled up at about this date. No features or finds of Anglo-Saxon date were recorded.</p> <p><br> </p> <p>The results raise important questions as to how land tenure and land use changed after Britain left the Roman Empire in AD 409. Was the estate confiscated or was it abandoned and left to fall out of use? By whom and why was the system of land allotment filled in and levelled? Did woodland regenerate or were larger fields created and still tilled or given over to grazing? Infilling of the ditches suggests that land divisions, and potentially ownership or tenure, were deliberately changed as new systems of control, governance, coercion and military-political dominance took hold.</p>

Heavy metals from urban runoff preserved in sedimentary deposits record long-term economic and industrial development via the expansion and contraction of a city's infrastructure. Lead concentrations and isotopic compositions measured in the sediments of the harbor of Ostia-Rome's first harbor-show that lead pipes used in the water supply networks of Rome and Ostia were the only source of radiogenic Pb, which, in geologically young central Italy, is the hallmark of urban pollution. High-resolution geochemical, isotopic, and 14C analyses of a sedimentary core from Ostia harbor have allowed us to date the commissioning of Rome's lead pipe water distribution system to around the second century BC, considerably later than Rome's first aqueduct built in the late fourth century BC. Even more significantly, the isotopic record of Pb pollution proves to be an unparalleled proxy for tracking the urban development of ancient Rome over more than a millennium, providing a semiquantitative record of the water system's initial expansion, its later neglect, probably during the civil wars of the first century BC, and its peaking in extent during the relative stability of the early high Imperial period. This core record fills the gap in the system's history before the appearance of more detailed literary and inscriptional evidence from the late first century BC onward. It also preserves evidence of the changes in the dynamics of the Tiber River that accompanied the construction of Rome's artificial port, Portus, during the first and second centuries AD.

This book is intended as an introduction to the archaeology of the easternmost regions of Greek settlement in the Hellenistic period, from the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BC, through to the last Greek-named kings of north-western India somewhere around the late first century BC, or even early first century AD. The Far East of the Hellenistic world a region comprising areas of what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the former-Soviet Central Asian Republics is best known from the archaeological remains of sites such as Ai Khanoum, which attest the endurance of Greek cultural and political presence in the region in the three centuries following the conquests of Alexander the Great. The chapters here survey the available evidence, including Latin, Greek, Chinese and Indian texts, as well as archaeology, survey the secondary literature, and ponder themes of identity, cultural contact and ethnicity.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the features of the graves that can be attributed to the second stage of Sarmatian settlement in Wallachia. The first stage of arrival of the Sarmatians in Wallachia can be dated in the last decade of the 1st century AD and the first decades of the 2nd century AD. The second stage of arrival of the Sarmatians in Wallachia, linked to the Marcomannic Wars, begins in the late 2nd century AD and continues during the following century. Sarmatians entered Wallachia not as enemies of the Roman Empire, but as allies always supervised by the Roman troops. A number of 153 graves can be linked with the second stage of Sarmatian settlement in Wallachia, whose territorial distribution, although extended in comparison with the first stage, does not uniformly cover the entire territory of Wallachia. The features of Sarmatian burials are discussed in detail: grave layout (types of interments, orientation, position of the deceased, age and sex of the individuals), main categories of grave goods (pottery, adornments, dress accessories, toilet implements, household tools, weapons). Based on this analysis, the main features of the funerary ritual are emphasized. The tendency to uniform the orientation and the position of the deceased individuals can be clearly observed. As regards the funerary inventory, not only the diversity of the categories of items is visible, but also their deposit in higher numbers in the burials. Dacian pottery is deposited even more often than the handmade Sarmatian pottery, but the Roman imports not only register the same low frequency, but also do not differ too much compared to the previous stage. A clear change in the display of the status during the period between the late 2nd century AD and the middle of the following century can be noticed: the tumuli lose their significance as status markers, grave goods with significant value disappear, possible higher status is emphasized by association of several items. Against a general background of diversification and increase in the number of items chosen to be deposited inside the grave, a real series of female burials stands out. The loss of the Roman control over Wallachia resulted in the sudden decrease, until almost extinction, of the number of Sarmatian discoveries here.

Holocene vegetation and land-use dynamics in the karstic environment of Inis Oı́rr, Aran Islands, western Ireland: pollen analytical evidence evaluated in light of the archaeological record

The Camulodunum 184 amphorae are one of the most well-known varieties of early Roman containers in the Mediterranean region. At the same time, such vessels are not believed to enter the Black Sea region, with the area of their distribution being limited only to the territory of the Roman Empire. The aim of this article is introduction and comprehensive study of the Camulodunum 184 amphorae findings from Tyras. This will allow shedding light on the issues related to Tyras’ trade contacts, as well as expanding our notion about the economic relations between the Pontic and Mediterranean regions in the Roman era. The findings of Camulodunum 184 amphorae in Tyras are few in number and represented only by fragments. Such vessels are characterized by high, straight and wide neck with rounded rim, elongated ovoid body, conical stem and «horn-shaped» handles. Their volume is mainly 13,6 liters, although a specimen is known, containing only 8,5 liters. The main product transported in such amphorae was passum – a raisin wine made from dried grapes. This expensive kind of wine was very popular in the capital of the Roman Empire and among the prosperous population of its provinces. The Camulodunum 184 amphorae were produced from the late 1st century BC till the late 2nd century AD, and their production reached a peak in the turn of the eras – mid-2nd century AD. Such vessels were produced in Rhodes, Rhodian Peraea, Kos, in some centers of Asia Minor north-west coast. The Camulodunum 184 amphorae came to Tyras from several workshops. Based on visual differences in composition of fabric and its color, the fragments found in Tyras can be divided into five groups, three of which appear to originate from Rhodes and Rhodian Peraea. The vessels attributed to the other two groups could also have been produced in the Eastern Mediterranean, possibly not far from Rhodes. The fragments of such amphorae from Tyras were found in the redeposited layers, making it difficult to establish the time of their entry to the city. Probably, the Camulodunum 184 amphorae were exported to the Black Sea region during their highest production intensity. Thus, fragments of similar vessels from Panticapaeum date to the 1st – second quarter of the 2nd centuries AD. Thus, in the 1st – second quarter of the 2nd centuries AD Tyras imports passum contained in the Camulodunum 184 amphorae. It was brought in from Rhodes, Rhodian Peraea and unidentified Eastern Mediterranean centers. These supplies were intended for the city’s prosperous population and were few in number. The entry of such amphorae to Tyras was most likely a consequence of the restoration of trade relations with Rhodes and Rhodian Peraea, incorporated to the Roman Empire by this time. However, these contacts were no longer as intense as during the Hellenistic period and were sporadic. The findings in Tyras allow expanding the distribution area of the Camulodunum 184 amphorae to the North-West Black Sea region.

In this chapter, the author deals with the formation of a concept by ancient commentators. A rudimentary universal concept falls short of the concepts required by an expert or by a scientist. In the restatement written by Aristotle, important new ideas are introduced about the contribution of sense perception. The commentators the author refers to include Alexander, head of the Aristotelian school in Athens at the end of the second century AD. The others are all Platonists, starting with the Middle Platonist Alcinous in the mid-second century AD, and continuing in sequence with Porphyry in the late third century, his probable pupil, Iamblichus, around 300 AD, Themistius in the late fourth century, in the fifth century the Athenians Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus and Proclus and Syrianus' pupil in Alexandria, Hermeias, then in the sixth century Philoponus, Simplicius and Olympiodorus and finally around 1100, Eustratius. Keywords: Alexander; Aristotle; commentators; Platonists

Abstract. The medieval city of Vlaardingen (the Netherlands) was strategically located on the confluence of three rivers, the Maas, the Merwede, and the Vlaarding. A church of the early 8th century AD was already located here. In a short period of time, Vlaardingen developed in the 11th century AD into an international trading place and into one of the most important places in the former county of Holland. Starting from the 11th century AD, the river Maas repeatedly threatened to flood the settlement. The flood dynamics were registered in Fluvisol archives and were recognised in a multidisciplinary sedimentary analysis of these archives. To secure the future of these vulnerable soil archives an extensive interdisciplinary research effort (76 mechanical drill holes, grain size analysis (GSA), thermo-gravimetric analysis (TGA), archaeological remains, soil analysis, dating methods, micromorphology, and microfauna) started in 2011 to gain knowledge on the sedimentological and pedological subsurface of the settlement mound as well as on the well-preserved nature of the archaeological evidence. Pedogenic features are recorded with soil description, micromorphological, and geochemical (XRF – X-ray fluorescence) analysis. The soil sequence of 5 m thickness exhibits a complex mix of "natural" as well as "anthropogenic" layering and initial soil formation that enables us to make a distinction between relatively stable periods and periods with active sedimentation. In this paper the results of this interdisciplinary project are demonstrated in a number of cross-sections with interrelated geological, pedological, and archaeological stratification. A distinction between natural and anthropogenic layering is made on the basis of the occurrence of the chemical elements phosphor and potassium. A series of four stratigraphic and sedimentary units record the period before and after the flooding disaster. Given the many archaeological remnants and features present in the lower units, in geological terms it is assumed that the medieval landscape was submerged while it was inhabited in the 12th century AD. In reaction to a final submersion phase in the late 12th century AD, the inhabitants started to raise the surface of the settlement. Within archaeological terms the boundary between natural and anthropogenic layers is stratigraphically lower, so that in the interpretation of archaeologists, the living ground was dry during the 12th and the 13th centuries AD. In this discussion, the geological interpretation will be compared with alternative archaeological scenarios.

This article aims at presenting a cereal cultivation history for the Iron Age (500 BC–AD 1100) in east-central Jutland (Vejle and Århus County). The developments in cereal cultivation are presented based on recent investigations of material from the Iron Age sites of Gedved Vest and Kristinebjerg Øst, as well as a compilation of 10 previously analysed sites. The combined data show that barley (Hordeum vulgare) was the dominant cereal throughout the period, with a seemingly rapid shift from naked barley (Hordeum vulgare var nudum) to hulled barley (Hordeum vulgare var vulgare) around the year 1 BC/AD. Rye (Secale cereale) is present in archaeobotanical assemblages throughout the period, but secure evidence of its cultivation exist only from the end of the second century AD onward. From the fourth century AD onward, the record indicates that rye may have been utilised as a dominant crop alongside barley. The cultivation of subdominant cereals, hulled wheats (Triticum dicoccum/spelta/monococcum), naked bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) and oat (Avena sativa), is also discussed. A reappearance of naked barley during the fourth to sixth century AD is also elaborated upon. Agricultural strategies are assessed based on the material and an interpretation is put forward that cultivation from the fifth century BC to at least the third century AD took place on manured, spring sown fields, which were slowly rotated between cultivation and fallow. The shift toward crop-rotation of barley and rye is also investigated; tenuous evidence of which are dated to the late second century AD and secure evidence occurring from the ninth century onward. The article also addresses issues of archaeobotanical interpretation, and a way of increasing the resolution of archaeobotanical investigations is illustrated by examples from Gedved Vest where plant macrofossil analysis was combined with geochemical (phosphate analysis and analysis of soil organic matter) and geophysical (magnetic susceptibility) methods.