New Books in Archaeology

Olga Tufnell (1905–85) was a British archaeologist working in Egypt, Cyprus, and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, a period often described as a golden age of archaeological discovery. Tufnell achieved extraordinary success for an “amateur” archaeologist and as a woman during a time when the field of professional archaeology was heavily dominated by men, typically with university training. Olga Tu...

In December 1936, a villager was led by a dream to the ruins of the West Mebon shrine in Angkor where he uncovered remains of a bronze sculpture. This was the West Mebon Visnu, the largest bronze remaining from pre-modern Southeast Asia, and a work of great artistic, historical, and political significance. Prominently placed in an island temple in the middle of the vast artificial reservoir, the W...

In the second half of the 19th century, both professional and amateur archaeologists, surveyors, and explorers of the “periphery” of the Russian Empire became increasingly interested in the perceived ancient nomadic histories of Siberia, Central Asia, and Ukraine. Their excavations of “nomadic sites” associated with the Scythians or the Mongol Empire were aimed not just at scientific investigation...

In The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (Yale University Press, 2022), Yonatan Adler pursues the societal adoption of recognizable Jewish practices by Judeans in antiquity with the ultimate aim of establishing a particular terminus ante quem (temporal limit before which) these practices must have become widespread. Sifting through both textual and archaeological evidenc...

Blending travelogue, history, and archaeology, Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand (SUNY Press, 2023) unravels the various avatars of India's most famous emperor, revealing how he came to be remembered—and forgotten—in distinctive ways at particular points in time and in specific locations. Through personal journeys that take her across India and to various si...

Timothy R. Pauketat’s Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America (Oxford UP, 2023) is a sweeping account of what happened when Indigenous peoples of Medieval North and Central America confronted climate change. Few Americans today are aware of one of the most consequential periods in North American history—the Medieval Warm Period of seven to twelve...

Clonmacnoise was among the busiest, most economically complex, and intensely sacred places in early medieval Ireland. In Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland: Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise (Lexington Books, 2021), John Soderberg argues that animals are the key to understanding Clonmacnoise’s development as a thriving settlement and a sacred space. At this sanctuary city on t...

In Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica (U Texas Press, 2023), Claudia Brittenham unravels one of the most puzzling phenomena in Mesoamerican art history: why many of the objects that we view in museums today were once so difficult to see. She examines the importance that ancient Mesoamerican people assigned to the process of making and enlivening the things we now call art...

Mark Axel Tveskov and Ashley Ann Bissonnette's Conflict Archaeology, Historical Memory, and the Experience of War: Beyond the Battlefield (UP of Florida, 2023) presents approaches to the archaeology of war that move beyond the forensic analysis of battlefields, fortifications, and other sites of conflict to consider the historical memory, commemoration, and social experience of war. Leading schola...

Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology (Cornell UP, 2022) examines a world famous yet critically underexamined event—UNESCO's International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960–80)—to show how the project, its genealogy, and its aftermath not only propelled archaeology into the postwar world but also helped to "recolonize" it. In this book, William Carruthers...

In Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (Oxford University Press, 2022), a sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Dr. Amanda Podany takes readers on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchant...

Katharina Galor, an archaeology professor at the at the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University who has done a lot of excavation in Israel, is the author of The Archaeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins to the Ottomans (2013). She takes us through the history of Jerusalem from its Canaanite beginnings to the capital of Israel today. We discuss the foundations and geography of this fortified...

Where people are killed and abused in warfare and violent conflict, artifacts of cultural heritage are often destroyed and mistreated as well. Indeed, in the World War II-era efforts to promote the then-novel idea of genocide, the Polish lawyer and activist Raphael Lemkin sought to codify the notion that genocide was both personal and cultural. What has come of his efforts? In this episode of Inte...

The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire (Yale UP, 2021) is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China's early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China's agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland....

Throughout much of history, the Jewish way of life has been characterized by strict adherence to the practices and prohibitions legislated by the Torah: dietary laws, ritual purity, circumcision, Sabbath regulations, holidays, and more. But precisely when did this unique way of life first emerge, and why specifically at that time? In The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal...

Archaeologist Ilka Knüppel discusses her master's thesis—The Search for Jesus's Final Steps: How Archaeological and Literary Evidence Reroutes the Via Dolorosa—and how she came to write it. To use both ‘archaeological and literary evidence’ requires digging in both the earth and in books, and to ‘reroute’ the Via Dolorosa reveals that many of the traditional fixtures are pious inventions of later...

In Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space (U Washington Press, 2020), Padma Kaimal deciphers the intentions of the monument’s makers, reaching back across centuries to illuminate worldviews of the ancient Indic south. By focusing on the material form of the complex—the architecture, inscriptions, and sculptures, along with the spaces they carve out that guide li...

The "Black Desert" in the northern Arabian Peninsula is home to thousands of pieces of rock art - both written inscriptions and figural images - left there by the region's nomadic inhabitants during the Hellenistic and Roman periods ca. 2,000 years ago. Dr. Nathalie Brusgaard received her PhD (Leiden University, 2019) for her research into this rock art, exploring their content and themes and what...

A conversation with Dr. Salah Hatem and Dr. Jaafar Jotheri, professors of archaeology at al-Qadisiyah University, about their research project documenting the intangible cultural heritage of the Bedouin in southern Iraq.  This episode covers topics ranging from the lifestyle of the Iraqi Bedouin to their indigenous knowledge (how to find water in the desert; plants that can be used as medicine) to...

In Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Harvard University Press, 2022 for paperback edition), Samuel J. Redman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, uncovers the equally fascinating and disturbing history behind the vast collections of human remains assembled by medical and natural history museums since the mid-nineteenth-century across...

In this latest publication in the TII Heritage series, the long prehistory of Kells and its hinterland is shown to be written on the landscape in foundation trenches and boundary ditches, pits, post-holes, hearths, and myriad other marks of human life, which were discovered along the route of the M3 Clonee to Kells motorway project and recorded by an archaeological team from Irish Archaeological C...

The Remaking of Archival Values by Victoria Hoyle (Routledge, October 2022) posits that archival theory and practice are fields in flux, and that recent critical archival discourse that addresses neoliberalism, racism, and the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy represents a disruption not only to established principles but also to the values that underpin them. Using critical discourse analysi...

The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia: A Reconstruction Based on the Safaitic Inscriptions (Brill, 2022) by Ahmad al-Jallad presents evidence for religious identity and ritual practices among the Safaitic-writing nomads of pre-Islamic Arabia. For this evidence, al-Jallad relies on a large corpus of rock-carved inscriptions in the Safaitic language. Unlike Islamic-period lite...

In 1998, the Belitung, a ninth-century western Indian Ocean–style vessel, was discovered in Indonesian waters. Onboard was a full cargo load, likely intended for the Middle Eastern market, of over 60,000 Chinese Tang-dynasty ceramics, gold, and other precious objects. It is one of the most significant shipwreck discoveries of recent times, revealing the global scale of ancient commercial endeavors...

Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology. Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins and the Uncanny (Amsterdam UP, 2021) asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern theological imperialism, most evident through the...