Topoi – Berlin Studies of the Ancient World/Topoi – Berliner Studien der Alten Welt – serie

The ceremonial centers of the Syro-Hittite city-states (1200-700 BC) were lavishly decorated with large-scale, open-air figurative reliefs – an original and greatly influential artistic tradition that has captivated the imagination of its contemporaries as well as that of modern scholars. This volume explores how Syro-Hittite monumental art was used as a powerful backdrop to important ritual events, and it opens up a new perspective by situating the monumental heritage in the context of large public performances and civic spectacles of great emotional impact. The first part of the volume focuses on the sites of Carchemish and Zincirli, offering a close reading of the relevant archaeological contexts. The second part of the volume discusses the embedment of monumental art in ritual performance and examines how change in art relates to change in ceremonial behavior, and how the latter relates in turn to change in power structures and models of rulership.

In the past decade a range of formal spatial analysis methods has been developed for the study of human engagement, experience and socialisation within the built environment. Many, although not all, of these emanate from the fields of architectural and urban studies, and draw upon social theories of space that lay emphasis on the role of visibility, movement, and accessibility in the built environment. These approaches are now gaining in popularity among researchers of prehistoric and historic built spaces and are given increasingly more weight in the interpretation of past urban environments.Spatial Analysis and Social Spaces brings together contributions from specialists in archaeology, social theory, and urban planning who explore the theoretical and methodological frameworks associated with the application of new and established spatial analysis methods in past built environments. The focus is mainly on more recent computer-based approaches and on techniques such as access analysis, visibility graph analysis, isovist analysis, agent-based models of pedestrian movement, and 3D visibility approaches. The contributors to this volume examine the relationship between space and social life from many different perspectives, and provide illuminating examples from the archaeology of Greece, Italy and Cyprus, in which intra-site analysis offers valuable insights into the built spaces and societies under study.

This book, consisting of 12 contributions, amalgamates the most recent results from archaeological research in the Upper Mesopotamian piedmont. Under the growing influence of expanding territorial states which had become established during the 2nd millennium BC, this region experienced a substantial change in social and political life during that time. The discussion is centered around settlement shapes, developments in the material culture, as well as written documents that attest to this change. In summary, this book emphasizes the significant roll of archaeological research in the reconstruction of models concerning the formation and transformation of political space in the ancient world.

Migrations and population dynamics are considered very problematic topics in the fields of ancient studies. Recent scholarship in (pre)historical population has generated new impulses by using scientific approaches using radiogenic and stable isotopes, and palaeogenetics, as well as computer simulation. As a result, the state of migration research has undergone rapid change. Several research groups presented papers at a conference held in Berlin in 2010, addressing specific historical aspects of population dynamics and migration, with no chronological or geographical restrictions, in the light of cutting-edge bio-archaeological research. This volume, divided into three larger thematic sections (isotope analysis, population genetics, and modelling and computer simulation), presents experiences and insights about methodological approaches, research results and prospects for future research in this area in a varied collection of papers. Scholars from widely diverse scientific disciplines present their approaches, findings and interpretations to an audience far broader than the circles of the individual disciplines.

This book contains a collection of papers discussing questions related to space and movement in the framework of computational archaeology, landscape archaeology, historical geography and archaeological theory. The contributions, written by recognized experts in the field, show how the study of settlements pattern and movement has been dramatically transformed by the use of technology like Geographic Information System (GIS). The papers focus on the ways to approach past movement using GIS in archaeological landscape studies: theoretical, technical and interpretative issues are addressed and explored. They provide the state of the art in theory and methodology and show, by using case studies, the potential of the developed approaches for the understanding of factors and effects of landscape formation and transformation in the long term.

The series: Topoi. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World brings together contributions from all fields of classical studies, from pre- and early history and classical archeology to ancient philosophy, theory of science and theology. Monographs and volumes which present the research results of the Excellence Cluster Topoi form a major focus of the series. Additional topics are currently being planned.The Excellence Cluster Topoi examines the formation and transformation of space and knowledge in ancient civilizations. Topoi is the joint responsibility of the Freie Universität Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Partner institutions are the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the German Archeological Institute, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Furthermore Topoi is interlinked with several university institutes as well as other institutions. For further information see www.topoi.org.Selected titles from the series Topoi. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World will be freely accessible in digital form on the Internet at the date of print publication. The series regards itself as a pilot project on how to combine open access with the support of professional publishers in the publication of current research.See press release June 23rd, 2 9 .

Questions concerning mobility and migration as well as subsistence strategies of past societies have always been of major importance in archaeological research. The West Eurasian steppes in the Eneolithic, the Early Bronze and the Iron Age were largely inhabited by cultural communities believed to show an elevated level of spatial mobility, often linked to their subsistence economy. In this volume, questions concerning the mobility and potential migration as well as the diet and economy of the West Eurasian steppes communities during the 4th, the 3rd and the 1st Millennia BC are approached by applying isotope analysis, specifically 87Sr/86Sr, δ18O, δ15N and δ13C analyses. Adapting a combination of different isotopic systems to a study area of vast spatial and chronological dimension allowed a wide variety of questions to be answered and establishes the beginning of a database of biogeochemical data for the West Eurasian steppes. Besides the characterisation of mobility and subsistence patterns of the archaeological communities under discussion, attempts to identify possible Early Bronze Age migrations from the steppes to the steppe-like plains in parts of Eastern Europe were made, alongside an evaluation of the applicability of isotope analysis to this context.

This volume presents new research by the Topoi group "The Conception of Spaces in Language" on the expression of spatial relations in ancient languages. The six articles in this volume discuss static and dynamic aspects of the spatial grammars of Ancient to Medieval Greek, Akkadian, Hittite, and Hieroglyphic Ancient Egyptian, as well as field data on eight modern languages (Arabic, Hebrew, English, German, Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish). Among the grams discussed are spatial particles, motion verbs, case and, most prominently, spatial prepositions. All ancient language data are fully explained in linguistic word-by-word glosses and are therefore accessible to scholars who are not themselves experts on the respective languages. Taken together, these contributions extend the scope of research on spatial grammar back to the third millennium BCE.