This volume celebrates the work of Dr. Phil. h.c. Gerhard Milstreu in his 40th year as director of Tanum Museum of Rock Carving and Rock Art Research Centre, Sweden. A feast of scholarly contributions pay respect to and acknowledge Gerhard’s achievements in the fields of rock art documentation, research, international collaboration and outreach.

Like previous series entries, this volume covers rock art research and management all over the world over a 5-year period, in this case 2015-19. Contributions once again show the wide variety of approaches that have been taken in different parts of the world and reflect the expansion and diversification of perspectives and research questions.

Discusses new evidence of interactions between Scandinavia and Iberia during the Bronze Age and cross references warrior iconography in both societies. Recent research has uncovered new evidence of long-distance interactions between Scandinavia and Iberia during the Late Bronze Age. Advances in various lines of inquiry, such as 3D recording of rock art, iconography, metals and amber sourcing, linguistics, and, to some extent, more indirect indications from human remains, as reflected by strontium and aDNA results, have made this possible. The main goal of this book is to cross reference Iberian Late Bronze Age warrior iconography with Scandinavian warrior iconography. However, we will also account for links based on archeometallurgical evidence, linguistics, and other lines of inquiry, such as Baltic Amber, and metal artifacts. The results have been produced within the framework of the RAW project, an international undertaking funded by the Swedish Research Council. The RAW project is motivated by the discovery of isotopic and chemical evidence for Nordic Bronze Age artifacts made of copper that originated in the Iberian Peninsula. These findings led to re-opening two long known, but poorly explained, phenomena: 1) numerous shared motifs and close formal parallels in the rock art of Scandinavia and Iberian ‘warrior’ stelae, and 2) a large body of inherited words shared by the Celtic and Germanic languages, but not the other Indo-European branches. An integrated explanation for the three phenomena (Iberian metal in Scandinavia, parallels in Bronze Age rock carvings, and Celto-Germanic vocabulary) could now be formulated as a testable hypothesis: an episode in the Bronze Age when materials and ideas were exchanged over long distances between Scandinavia and the Atlantic West, including the Iberian Peninsula.

This study explores what we as people can do with our bodies, what we can use them for, and how we can alter and understand them. With analysis based on artefacts found in graves, anthropomorphic images, and written sources, it considers the ways in which human groups from the Neolithic to the Migration Period have perceived and treated the body.

In The Gospel of Matthew and Judaic Traditions, Herbert W. Basser, with the editorial help of Marsha Cohen, utilizes his encyclopaedic knowledge of Judaism to navigate Matthew’s Gospel. This close, original reading explicates Matthew’s use of Jewish concepts and legal traditions that have not been fully understood in the past. Basser highlights Gospel sources that are congruent with a wide swath of extant Jewish writings from various provenances. Matthew affirms Jesus’ end-of-days—the coming of the Kingdom—salvation message: initially meant for Jews, it is the Gentiles who embraced his message and teachings that encouraged their faith and simple trust. Matthew’s literary art manages to preserve the Jewish details in his sources while disclosing an anti-Jewish and pro-Gentile bias.

The Sanskrit Puranas and epics are replete with stories of the avatars, incarnations of the god Visnu in various forms to rid the universe of malevolent forces and to restore the proper cosmic balance. As Narasimha, half-man half-lion, Visnu finds a loophole in the pact of invulnerability the demon Hiranaipu has received from god Brahma, and rends the demon apart with his claws. As the brahmin dwarf, Vamana, Visnu deceives the demon Bali with his diminutive appearance and thwarts Bali's attempt to gain universal sovereignty. After carefully analyzing the myths of Vamana and Narasimha, Deborah Soifer grounds her study in the textual history of each avatar and its myth, in their religious contexts, and in the intricate cosmology of the classical period of Hinduism. Contrasting the bestial persona of Narasimha with Vamana's priestly appearance and his associations with early cosmologic themes, she finds complementarity and significance in this pair as they are viewed in the larger context of periodic cosmic destructions and recreations. While focusing primarily on these two mythological figures, Soifer's work explores the relationship between dharma and the 'devious' acts of gods; the interplay between cosmic and 'sociocosmic' levels of reality; and the relationship between cosmology, theology, and soteriology in a religious worldview.

Rock art is a global phenomenon with an enormous variation in shapes and figures and the research interest is wide and inclusive. The volume aims to explain differences observed in rock art through time and space, synchronically or diachronically. Differences can for example be in form, content, space (macro and micro), where explanations might relate to a large variety of factors such as political, societal, beliefs and rituals. Issues connected with authenticity and presentation where efforts and choices taken to preserve and present rock art are indeed many sided and complex are discussed. The wide-range papers in this volume are by scholars from across the globe with different perspectives on differences in Rock Art. This volume will be of interest to students, archaeologists and researchers from related disciplines.

Past Landscapes presents theoretical and practical attempts of scholars and scientists, who were and are active within the Kiel Graduate School "Human Development in Landscapes" (GSHDL), in order to disentangle a wide scope of research efforts on past landscapes. Landscapes are understood as products of human-environmental interaction. At the same time, they are arenas, in which societal and cultural activities as well as receptions of environments and human developments take place. Thus, environmental processes are interwoven into human constraints and advances. This book presents theories, concepts, approaches and case studies dealing with human development in landscapes. On the one hand, it becomes evident that only an interdisciplinary approach can cover the manifold aspects of the topic. On the other hand, this also implies that the very different approaches cannot be reduced to a simplistic uniform definition of landscape. This shortcoming proves nevertheless to be an important strength. The umbrella term 'landscape' proves to be highly stimulating for a large variety of different approaches. The first part of our book deals with a number of theories and concepts, the second part is concerned with approaches to landscapes, whereas the third part introduces case studies for human development in landscapes. As intended by the GSHDL, the reader might follow our approach to delve into the multi-faceted theories, concepts and practices on past landscapes: from events, processes and structures in environmental and produced spaces to theories, concepts and practices concerning past societies.

How may Bohusl_n rock art and landscape be perceived and understood? Since the Bronze Age, the landscape has been transformed by shore displacement but, largely due to misunderstanding and certain ideas about the character of Bronze Age society, rock art research in Tanum has drawn much of its inspiration from the present agrarian landscape. This perception of the landscape has not been a major issue. This volume, republished from the GOTAC Serie B (Gothenburg Archaeological thesis 49) aims to shed light on the process of shore displacement and its social and cognitive implications for the interpretation of rock art in the prehistoric landscape. The findings clearly show that in the Bronze Age, the majority of rock art sites in Bohusl_n had a very close spatial connection to the sea. Much rock art analysis focuses on the contemplative observer. The more direct activities related to rock art are seldom fully considered. Here, the basic conditions for the production of rock art, social theory and approaches to image, communication, symbolism and social action are discussed and related to palpable social forms of the ñreadingî of rock art. The general location and content of the Bronze Age remains indicate a tendency towards the maritime realm, which seems to have included both socio-ritual and socio-economic matters of production and consumption and that Bronze Age groups in Bohusl_n were highly active and mobile. The numerous configurations of ship images on the rocks could indicate a general transition or drift towards the maritime realm. Marking or manifesting such transitions in some way may have been important and it is tempting to perceive the rock art as traces of such transitions or positions in the landscape. All this points to a maritime understanding of Bronze Age rock art in northern Bohusl_n.