This collaborative volume is concerned with long-term social change. Envisaging individual societies as interlinked and interdependent parts of a global social system, the aim of the contributors is to determine the extent to which ancient societies were shaped over time by their incorporation in - or resistance to - the larger system. Their particular concern is the dependent relationship between technically and socially more developed societies with a strong state ideology at the centre and the simpler societies that functioned principally as sources of raw materials and manpower on the periphery of the system. The papers in the first part of the book are all concerned with political developments in the Ancient Near East and the notion of a regional system as a framework for analysis. Part 2 examines the problems of conceptualising local societies as discrete centres of development in the context of both the Near East and prehistoric Europe during the second millennium BC. Part 3 then presents a comprehensive analytical study of the Roman Empire as a single system showing how its component parts often relate to each other in uneven, even contradictory, ways.

The fifteen papers in this volume cover a wide range of centre-periphery related studies, from the archaeology and history of the period to investigations into the intellectual millieux and religious thoughts and their contexts. Contributors include: L Hannestad (Greeks and Celts: The creation of a myth); F Kaul (The Gundestrup cauldron); B Cunliffe (Iberia and the Mediterranean); K Randsborg (Greek peripheries and barbarian centres); J E Skydsgaard (The Greeks in southern Russia); V Gabrielsen (Rhodes and Rome after the Third Macedonian War); S Alcock (Surveying the peripheries of the Hellenistic world); T Bekker-Nielsen (Centres and road networks in Cyprus); I Nielsen (Italic palaces); A Invernizzi (Centre and periphery in Seleucid Asia); G Shipley (World-systems analysis and the Hellenistic' world); P Bilde (Jesus and Paul and religious innovation).

There has recently been much interest among geographers, historians and political theorists in concepts of centre and periphery. In this book a wide range of studies consider how such concepts can be used to clarify our understanding of pre-capitalist societies.

This collection of papers is dedicated to the problems of centre and periphery in the ancient world in their historical and geographical aspects. These problems are discussed here within a broad chronological scope: from the Mycenaean period, through the flourishing of geographical science in Hellenistic times, to the Roman period, represented by the names of Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Pliny and Ptolemy. The papers embrace all parts of the ancient oikoumene, from Africa in the south and Ireland in the west, through northern and eastern Europe to Central Asia in the east. Several authors have devoted their contributions to ancient cartographic production and how this reflects Greek and Roman conceptions of the periphery of the ancient world. The authors are drawn from across Europe: France, Italy, Poland and Russia.

The historic long term economic interconnections of the world are now universally accepted. The idea of the economic 'world system' advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein has set the period of linkage in the early modern period but Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills think that this date is much too late. They argue an interconnection going back as much as 5000 years. In The World System, leading academics examine this issue, in a debate contributed to by William H. McNeill and Immanuel Wallerstein among others.

The first and only monograph available on the subject, The Roman City and its Periphery offers a full and detailed treatment of the little-investigated aspect of Roman urbanism – the phenomenon of suburban development. Presenting archaeological and literary evidence alongside sixty-three plans of cities, building plans, and photographs, Penelope Goodman examines how and why Roman suburbs grew up outside Roman cities, what was distinctive about the nature of suburban development, and what contributions buildings and activities in the suburbs might make to the character and function of the city as a whole. With full bibliography and annotations throughout, this will not only provide a coherent treatment of an essential theme for students of Roman urbanism, but archaeologists, urban planners and geographers also, will have an excellent comparative tool in the study of modern urbanism.

Ancient Economies, Modern Methodologies is a collection of essays which focuses on the art of questioning; it is about ideas and analytical experiment. Ancient economic history has developed enormously since the publication of M.I. Finley’s The Ancient Economy in 1973. Much new material has been brought to bear on the debate on the character of economic life in the Greek and Roman world. But, at the same time, discussions have been going round in circles. This is because not enough attention has been given to the questions ancient historians ask and the concepts with which they approach the economy. In this collection, an attempt is made to renew the terms of the debate by presenting a wide variety of new analytical approaches to ancient economic history ranging from literary theory, cross-cultural comparison, statistical analysis of archaeological data to neo-institutional economics and model-building.

Archaeological research on interregional interaction processes has recently reasserted itself after a long hiatus following the eclipse of diffusion studies. This "rebirth" was marked not only by a sudden increase in publications that were focused on interac tion questions, but also by a diversity of perspectives on past contacts. To perdurable interests in warfare were added trade studies by the late 196Os. These viewpoints, in turn, were rapidly joined in the late 1970s by a wide range of intellectual schemes stimulated by developments in French Marxism (referred to in various ways; termed political ideology here) and sociology (Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems model). Researchers ascribing to the aforementioned intellectual frameworks were united in their dissatisfaction with attempts to explain sociopolitical change that treated in dividual cultures or societies as isolated entities. Only by reconstructing the complex intersocietal networks in which polities were integrated-the natures of these ties, who mediated the connections, and the political, economic, and ideological significance of the goods and ideas that moved along them-could adequate ex planations of sociopolitical shifts be formulated. Archaeologists seemed to be re discovering in the late twentieth century the importance of interregional contacts in processes of sociopolitical change. The diversity of perspectives that resulted seemed to be symptomatic of both an uncertainty of how best to approach this topic and the importance archaeologists attributed to it.