Despite the large number of well-preserved domestic contexts in Bronze and Iron Age sites, household archaeology has not been a common approach to studying the material culture of Ancient Israel. Until recently, the dictates of “Biblical Archaeology” led to a narrow set of questions that ignored issues such as gender, status and production within the household. The present volume, which grew out of a session at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, attempts to redress this issue. The seventeen papers herein reflect innovative viewpoints on the theory and praxis of household archaeology in this region. The next step in household research is presented here, with the use of tailor-made data collection strategies designed to answer specific questions posed by household archaeology. "The neglect of households and the archaeology of the activities of its members are ambitiously attended to in this volume. Its exceptional breadth of various modes of inquiry coupled with the application thereof justifies the household as a topic of discussion. I would highly recommend this book for institutions, libraries, scholars, and students interested in any aspect of daily life in the southern Levant, and I very much look forward to the future research projects it will inspire." Cynthia Shafer-Elliot, William Jessup University "...as a whole the work is impressive, and most contributions are commendable for their sophistication in engaging interdisciplinary research in order to understand the nature and function of households in ancient Israel and surrounding areas." Carol Meyers, Duke University

Covering major theoretical and methodological developments over recent decades in areas like social institutions, settlement types, gender, status, and power, this book addresses the developing understanding of where and how people in the past created and used domestic space. It will be a useful synthesis for scholars and an ideal text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in archaeology and architecture.

This book had its genesis in a series of 6 popular and well-attended ASOR conference sessions on Household Archaeology in the Ancient Near East. The 18 chapters are organized in three thematic sections: Architecture as Archive of Social Space; The Active Household; and Ritual Space at Home.

Dura-Europos, on the Syrian Euphrates, is one of the best preserved and most extensively excavated sites of the Roman world. A Hellenistic foundation later held by the Parthians and then the Romans, Dura had a Roman military garrison installed within its city walls before it was taken by the Sasanians in the mid-third century. The Inner Lives of Ancient Houses is the first study to consider the houses of the site as a whole. The houses were excavated by a team from Yale and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters in the 1920s and 30s, and though a wealth of archaeological and textual material was recovered, most of that relating to housing was never published. Through a combination of archival information held at the Yale University Art Gallery and new fieldwork with the Mission Franco-Syrienne d'Europos-Doura, this study re-evaluates the houses of the site, integrating architecture, artefacts, and textual evidence, and examining ancient daily life and cultural interaction, as well as considering houses which were modified for use by the Roman military.

The essays in this volume represent substantially revised versions of papers presented at the conference "Household Archaeology in the Middle East and Beyond: Theory, Method, and Practice." This three-day meeting took place between February 19 and 21, 2009 at Fort Douglas on the campus of The University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

This innovative volume evaluates the theories, methods, approaches and history of Mesopotamian archaeology from its origins in the 19th century up the to present day.

This title provides comprehensive overviews on archaeological philological, linguistic, and historical issues at the forefront of Anatolian scholarship in the 21st century.

The interdisciplinarity between the biological and human sciences is here to serve a daring objective: to decipher, by means of a logical chain, the explanatory factors of human trajectories and imbalances between societies and nations. To do this, The World’s Construction Mechanism is based on an unprecedented analysis of the dynamics of the human species, combining the contributions of anthropology, archeology, biology, climatology, economics, geography, history and sociology. This book analyzes the roots of societal disharmony and presents ways of realizing a clear-sighted human project that is in step with the general interest of humanity.

The only critical guide to the theory and method of Mesopotamian archaeology, this innovative volume evaluates the theories, methods, approaches and history of Mesopotamian archaeology from its origins in the nineteenth century up to the present day. Ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), was the original site of many of the major developments in human history, such as farming, the rise of urban literate societies and the first great empires of Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria. Dr. Matthews places the discipline within its historical and social context, and explains how archaeologists conduct their research through excavation, survey and other methods. In four fundamental chapters, he uses illustrated case-studies to show how archaeologists have approached central themes such as: * the shift from hunting to farming * complex societies * empires and imperialism * everyday life. This will be both an ideal introductory work and useful as background reading on a wide range of courses.