Hélène Sader gathers and synthesizes the archaeological and textual evidence from excavations conducted during the past fifty years at Tyre and its far-flung settlements. In addition to her analysis of the material remains, soundings, and surveys, Sader includes a thorough discussion of the main Tyrian gods and the practice of cremation introduced at the beginning of the Iron Age. More than seventy-five images and maps illuminate the development of Tyre and its cultural heritage. The result is a more complex picture of the history of Tyre than that known from its description in the Hebrew Bible, ancient Near Eastern sources, and classical histories.

Sex and Cohabitation Among Early Humans: Anthropological and Genetic Evidence for Interbreeding Among Early Humans explores the available information regarding interbreeding among different ancestral human species. In addition, it reviews evidence in support of cohabitation as well as cultural and technological interactions and exchanges among early humans, particularly Neanderthal-sapiens interactions. The fields of archaeology, anthropology, genetics, linguistics and molecular evolution have provided a wealth of information on the complex processes involved in human evolution. The book will help readers will develop knowledge on the complexity and multiplicity of hominins, including Homo heidelbergensis, Homo sapiens, and Homo floresiensis. Moreover, the book will help them reach a greater understanding of major topics, such as introgression, migration from Africa, the origin, development and extinction of Neanderthals, interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans, and trait continuity.

This book is a significant contribution to the field of survey pottery studies, which is not frequently theorised, and could also serve as a guide and provide inspiration to archaeologists designing their own survey projects and methodologies.

Landscape archaeology has heavily relied on pedestrian survey as a field method for more than half a century. In most field projects, archaeological ceramics constitute the lion’s share among the finds and the amount of collected sherds is overwhelming. Survey ceramics provide the basis for understanding human activity in a landscape, and sherds serve as convenient chronological markers for the archaeological sites discovered in field projects. However, how this pottery is collected and studied determines the possibilities for using the sherds as a source material. Not only the collection practices, but also the process and practicalities of ceramic analysis are rarely made explicit, even though the archaeological interpretations of human activity in the landscape strongly rely on it.

The research presented in this book results from an international interdisciplinary research program in Hayonim cave (Israel) from 1992 to 2000, directed by Prof O. Bar-Yosef (Harvard University) and L. Meignen (CNRS, France), and focusing on a long archaeological sequence dated to circa 300-140 000 years ago. The intensive fieldwork and research following it allowed us to document an essential period of human history in the Levant: the end of the Lower Palaeolithic and Early Middle Palaeolithic, during which recent discoveries showed that the early H. sapiens, expanding out of Africa, reached SW Asia around 180-190 000 y ago.

This book brings together the impressive findings of nine years of excavations and analysis by an interdisciplinary team of well-known scholars from US universities (Harvard, Boston, University of Arizona), Weizmann Institute (Israel) as well as from the French CNRS.

Several complementary approaches are implemented to understand early human economic, cultural and behavioral changes observed at this crucial period. It is based on detailed studies of lithic artifact technology, the remains of systematic fire use and cave occupation by early humans, and foraging strategies that include the early development of human adaptations for hunting large prey. In the context of the highly debated cultural break observed at the end of the Lower Palaeolithic, we propose new interpretations based on these innovative results.

This volume showcases cutting-edge research in digital archaeology, presenting 27 chapters that explore how computational methods are transforming archaeological fieldwork, analysis, data management, and interpretation. Topics range from AI applications in artefact classification and spatial modelling, to 3D reconstructions, machine learning, remote sensing, and natural language processing. The contributions highlight the integration of digital tools with archaeological theory, demonstrating how this synergy is reshaping the discipline and expanding its methodological frontiers.

Spanning case studies from Jordan to Northern Italy, from Viking silver hoards to Roman roads and Pompeian neighbourhoods, the volume offers an international and interdisciplinary perspective. Whether dealing with digital archiving, coin hoards, funerary networks, or bioarchaeological workflows, each chapter contributes to a nuanced understanding of how archaeologists are leveraging digital technologies to ask new questions and revisit old data.

The book originated as the proceedings of the 50th annual Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) conference, held in Amsterdam in April 2023, celebrating half a century of innovation in computational archaeology.

מובנו המילולי של המונח "אנתרופוקן" הוא עידן האדם. המושג מתייחס לטביעת החותם של המין האנושי בטבע, שיוצרת הבחנה בין עידן האדם לעידנים גיאולוגיים קודמים. האנתרופוקן מייצג משבר עמוק. עד כה, האנושות מעולם לא התנסתה בשינוי נרחב ועמוק כל כך של סביבת החיים. במובן זה, החיים בעולם כיום הם בגדר ניסוי שמבוצע על הפלנטה ועל כלל יושביה. האם שוכני הפלנטה, ובהם האדם, יצליחו לשרוד בסביבת החיים העוינת של האנתרופוקן?

מול תחושת ההלם לנוכח הרס כדור הארץ, ההגות האנתרופוקנית במדעי החברה והרוח מבקשת להצביע על שינוי יסודי של רבות מההנחות המוכרות בדבר היחסים בין האנושי לטבעי. מקורן של הנחות אלו בעידן הגיאולוגי הקודם, ההולוקן, שבו התרחשה כל ההיסטוריה האנושית המוכרת. בניגוד לחשיבה ההולוקנית, שבה האוויר, הקרקע והמים הם גורמים נתונים שנמצאים ברקע הפעילות האנושית, החשיבה האנתרופוקנית מתפתחת מתוך פריצתם של גורמים אלו אל לב ההיסטוריה. אי-אפשר עוד לתאר את ההיסטוריה רק כמאבק בין אידיאולוגיות או צורות חברתיות; כדור הארץ הופך לגורם בעל תפקיד היסטורי מרכזי ואף גורלי, והאדם עצמו הופך לכוח טבע.

המקראה אנתרופוקן: עידן האדם מציגה טקסטים יסודיים פרי עטם של הוגות והוגים, חוקרות וחוקרים מובילים בחקר האנתרופוקן בעולם, בהם ברונו לאטור, אליזבת קולברט, טימותי מורטון ואליזבת פובינלי. המאמרים עוסקים בתמות מרכזיות במחשבת האנתרופוקן, בכללן "ההכחדה השישית", "ההאצה הגדולה", תפיסות זמן וטבע, היפר-אובייקטים ותפיסות אפוקליפטיות של משבר האקלים.

Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age offer a nuanced exploration of the scribal practices behind the Canaanite Amarna Letters and wider scribal culture of the Levant during the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE).
The book features a summary of the historical and scribal contexts of the Canaanite Amarna Tablets—a corpus of diplomatic letters between Canaanite and Egyptian rulers of the later 18th Dynasty—and provides a synthesis of research on cuneiform scribalism in the Late Bronze Age. It also offers a methodology for the multimodal analysis of Canaanite cuneiform tablets, which can be applied to other ancient corpora. Specifically, the proposed “code-alternation” approach offers a more accurate description of the range of linguistic, orthographic, and marking systems in the Canaanite Amarna Letters. The book sheds light upon the use of the cuneiform script and written Akkadian in diplomatic communications in the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, broadening our understanding of this period which was pivotal to the development of writing, scribal culture, and West Semitic literary traditions.

In the 7th and 8th centuries, numerous new cities were founded in what is now Iraq, often in the vicinity of existing settlements. The international conference, whose contributions are presented here, examined this phenomenon and the accompanying processes of transformation, using the case study of al-Hira as a starting point. The volume combines source-based contributions on the history of events and historical topography with the presentation and analysis of the results of settlement archaeological investigations and excavations that have been carried out in the area of historic al-Hira since 2015. Supplementary papers use comparisons to place the case study of al-Hira in a supra-regional context.

This volume presents a die-based analysis of a small yet significant segment of medieval Islamic coinage, representing the result of a long-term research by a specialist in the field. It is issued as a pre-print - the first in a planned series of publications entitled Numismatic Die Studies - and is devoted to the systematic registration of coin dies.

Acclaimed archaeologist Thomas Levy’s new autobiographical graphic memoir, The Boomer Archaeologist, follows Levy from his childhood to recent retirement, tracing his path from globe-trotting archaeologist to tenured professor at the University of California, San Diego. The memoir—told through quirky, comic book-like illustrations—recounts Levy’s life and career during a series of imagined phone conversations between Levy and the book’s illustrator, Levy’s niece and U.K.-based artist, Lily Almeida.

As the book’s title makes clear, Levy is part of the “boomer” generation that came of age when the “American Dream” promised citizens they could rise to the pinnacle of their chosen professions and pursuits. His Jewish identity also weaves its way through the memoir: his values learned from his family, which left Russia because of anti-Jewish pogroms, his service in the Israel Defense Forces, and his marriage to a woman of South Asian descent who converted to Judaism. (The book’s postscript also takes on recent anti-Semitism in the U.S., which Levy sees as an unfortunate harbinger of societal collapse.)

This study presents a new and updated edition of the Great Hymn to Šamaš, a two-hundred-line Akkadian hymn that stands out for its remarkable poetic sophistication and the wisdom section embedded in its center. The edition, originally prepared by the author for the Electronic Babylonian Literature (eBL) project led by E. Jiménez at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, incorporates all the manuscripts of the Great Hymn to Šamaš discovered so far. The recent identification of numerous fragments, which were unknown at the time of the text’s first edition (in W. G. Lambert’s Babylonian Wisdom Literature, 1960), has allowed for an almost complete reconstruction of the hymn that corrects previous readings and erroneous restorations. The present study also includes an in-depth introduction to the text, covering both formal aspects (e.g., the hymn’s structure and poetic devices) and content-related aspects (e.g., the wisdom section). It provides the reconstructed cuneiform text, a transliteration, and a translation by B. Foster. Additionally, the edition is accompanied by a commentary that discusses relevant philological features, along with a glossary and sign list.

Thanks largely to the introduction of new methods of recovery and analysis, archaeology is increasingly treated as a science. Yet, it should continue to ask questions that are founded in the humanities. This is especially true of social archaeology, which forms the core of this volume. Being based on the notion that ‘the social’ permeates all areas of life, the chapters gathered here give priority to archaeological data and contexts, which in turn form the prerequisite for analyzing how, at particular times and places, people negotiated or reaffirmed the society around them. Case studies from the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean sit alongside selected comparative cases from other parts of the world and assess issues such as the development of cultural characteristics of societies, societal continuity and collapse, religious beliefs and rituals, and the role of social memory, as well as interactions within and between societies. The volume is dedicated to the memory of our colleague and friend, Dr Sharon Zuckerman, who embraced the quest for ‘the social’ throughout her career.