Digital technology increasingly pervades all settings of archaeological practice and virtually every stage of knowledge production. Through the digital we create, develop, manage and share our disciplinary crown jewels. However, technology adoption and digital mediation has not been uniform across all settings or stages. This diversity might be…[Read more]

Mobilizing the Past is a collection of 20 articles that explore the use and impact of mobile digital technology in archaeological field practice. The detailed case studies present in this volume range from drones in the Andes to iPads at Pompeii, digital workflows in the American Southwest, and examples of how bespoke, DIY, and commercial software…[Read more]

An archaeological comic introducing ‘Sarsen Country’, the area of central-southern and eastern England where sarsen stones can be found and have been used by people since the Neolithic period. The poster is drawn and laid out in the style of a railway poster from the inter-war years. It takes the viewer on a journey around the country, calling in…[Read more]

Based on a case study, the paper analyses the possibilities of social media as a tool for science communication in the context of information and communication technology (ICT) usage in archaeology. Aside from discussing the characteristics of digital archaeology, the social networking sites (SNS) Twitter, Sketchfab, and ResearchGate are…[Read more]

There is a thriving trade, and collector community, around human remains that is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay. In this article, we examine several thousand Instagram posts and perform some initial text analysis on the language and rhetoric of these posts to understand…[Read more]

For over a decade the Historic Land-Use Assessment Project, a partnership between Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, has undertaken the challenge of mapping the character of Scotland’s historic landscape. By 2015 the Project will have delivered 100% coverage and, for the first time, S…[Read more]

Social network analysis as a distinct field of study had its genesis in the anthropological
revolt against structural-functionalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was born through
an awareness among a new generation of scholars that structural- functional models failed
to make adequate space for human agency. Attention to personal…[Read more]

The growth of the city of Rome was dependent on its ability to exploit successfully the human and natural resources of its hinterland. Although this hinterland eventually extended to incorporate the entire Mediterranean seaboard, the resources of the Tiber valley originally nourished the city and continued to do so despite the growth in imports…[Read more]

Agent-based modeling presents the opportunity to study phenomena such as the emergence of territories from the perspective of individuals. We present a tool for growing networks of socially-connected settlement structures from distribution map data, using an agent based model authored in the Netlogo programming language, version 3.1.2. The…[Read more]

For historians, agent-based modeling (ABM) methodologies allow us to formalise our thinking about how the past worked and explore those assumptions in a way previously limited to thought-experiments. In ABM, numerous autonomous, heterogeneous agents are allowed to interact in a digital environment according to rules of behaviour directly drawn…[Read more]

An appendix to my MA thesis, ‘Satisfied with a Knowledge of the Totals: Labouring to Build the Claudian Aqueducts’, Reading, 1998. In this appendix, I tried to match Ashby’s descriptions of the remains of the aqueducts with Van Deman’s descriptions. From these descriptions, I crafted a volumetric model of the quantities of materials used in the…[Read more]

The Neolithic period is well known for its stone and earth monuments. However, the cropmark record and a small number of excavations demonstrate that monuments, in a variety of different forms, were also built of timber. Although timber monuments have been photographed from the air since aerial survey began in Scotland and, as a result, the…[Read more]

Proximity to rivers, streams, lakes and bogs has been emphasized almost stereotypicallye as a specific Slavonic trait of character, but does this fit reality? We try to get further with the solution of this problem by a.) calculating the surface distances on basis of a Local Drainage Map and b.) using the Topographic Position Index.

In 2004 the research training programme “Interdisciplinary Environmental History. Natural environment and societal behaviour in Central Europe” at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, funded by the German Research Foundation was launched. By that time 13 post graduates from six faculties of the life sciences, the natural sciences, and the…[Read more]

A review article commenting on discussions and papers presented at the international workshop.

This chapter argues for an alternative approach to the study of regions in archaeology by proposing to view regions as networks of relevance with permeable and changeable boundaries reflecting social choices.

This dissertation proposes a social analysis of the Early Christian basilicas (4th-6th century) of Southern and Central Greece, predominantly those in the Late Roman province of Achaia. After an introduction which places the dissertation in the broader context of the study of Late Antique Greece, the second chapter argues that church construction…[Read more]

In der Antike spielte Gabii eine wichtige politische und wirtschaftliche Rolle in Mittelitalien. Es stand in beispiellosem diplomatischem Kontakt zu Rom, und der Historiker Dionysios von Halikarnassos berichtet von einem Zustand politischer Gleichheit – isopoliteia – beider Städte. Gabii lag südlich von Rom am Krater von Castiglione und erstr…[Read more]

This course offers a thorough introduction to archaeological field methods, including field survey, geophysical prospection, excavation, and post‐excavation analysis. Topics include survey, mapping, excavation, documentation, stratigraphy, typology, scientific analyses, visualization, and heritage management. We will also address the m…[Read more]

An archaeological comic telling the story of the sarsen stones at Whiteknights.

Whiteknights is now the main campus of the University of Reading. It used to be the gardens and park of Whitenights House, at one time owned by the Marquis of Blandford. The Marquis spent his fortune on his library and his gardens. He even shipped sarsens stones…[Read more]