This paper is a considerably revised version of the 1992 British Museum Occasional Paper No. 73 by the same author. The book describes how, when and by whom Hoa Hakanai'a was collected. It also reconstructs the underlying Rapanui aesthetic and social structure that produced Hoa Hakanai'a , and which has been obscured by time and historic accident.

British Iron Age swords and scabbards are here catalogued in detail for the first time. They are grouped on the basis of typologies of components and are discussed with special reference to their decoration, context and chronology. Artefact studies have been neglected for many years, and this subject was last tackled in a paper published in 1950. Since then, the material available for study has tripled, from 93 to 274 items, and new archaeological discoveries include several elaborately decorated scabbards. Illustrations include 71 full pages of line drawings, while additional contributions examine the technology of some of the swords and provide a discussion of their enamelled decoration. Contents: Introduction; Typology and terminology; Group A: Swords of medium length and scabbards with open chape ends; Group B: Swords of medium length and scabbards with closed chape ends; Group C: Long swords and scabbards with campanulate mouths; Group D: Long swords and scabbards with straight mouths; Group E: Earlier swords and scabbards in the north; Group F: Later swords and scabbards in the north; Group G: Short swords in the south and the north; Group H: Swords and scabbards of mixed traditions; Discussion; Appendices; The technology of some of the swords; Weapons and fittings with enamelled decoration; The Isleworth sword: a note on the brass foils; A technical report on the Orton Meadows scabbard; The scientific examination of the Asby Scar sword and scabbard; The extraction of swords from their scabbards; Catalogue; Bibliography.

Discovered in 1992, the Hoxne Treasure is perhaps the richest cache of gold and silver coins, jewellery and tableware from the entire Roman world. The core of this volume is the catalogue of the 15,000 late 4th- and early 5th-century gold and silver coins, together with an in-depth discussion of the production and supply of late Roman coinage. Hoxne's silver coins are particularly interesting, and the book also contains ground-breaking discussions of the silver content of Roman currency as well as of the peculiarly British phenomena of coin clipping and copying. The value of the Hoxne Treasure in shedding light on an otherwise dark period of British history also calls for a broader, non-numismatic perspective, and the volume includes an important chapter dealing with the social significance of precious metals in the later Roman empire, particularly their role in the gift-exchange networks that defined and maintained late Roman imperial society.

This book focuses on the money of Eastern Central Asia to c. AD 800, a period of over 900 years, across a vast geographical area with a very diverse population of different cultures and traditions. The only relevant historical accounts are those found in the Chinese dynastic histories, yet these contain few references to money in Eastern Central Asia. This study therefore depends almost entirely on the archaeological evidence for money found at sites in the region, in the form of coins and contemporary documentary evidence. The book is arranged in four parts. The first part presents the background to the study, the second the numismatic evidence, the third gives the evidence for money in the contemporary documents excavated at sites in Eastern Central Asia, and the concluding part brings together the data from the numismatic and documentary evidence to create a new framework for money in early Eastern Central Asia.

This volume contains twenty-one fully illustrated papers by contributors to an international colloquium held in June 2001, jointly organised by the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art and the British Museum. It constitutes full publication of an iconic early major masterwork of Chinese figure painting which has been in the British Museum since 1903 but is rarely on display for conservation reasons. The illustrations make use of new high-quality digital photography of every aspect of the world-famous scroll.

The fragments of Greek painted pottery making up the 115 catalogue entries in this volume come from vases that were once part of Sir William Hamiltons prized second collection. About one third of that collection was lost when the ship transporting it back to England, HMS Colossus, struck a reef and sank off the Isles of Scilly in December 1798. The recovery of what remained of those vases, after almost 200 years on the seabed, took place between 1975 and 1979. The surviving fragments were formally acquired by the British Museum in 1981.

This catalogue describes in detail the collection of German printed books held by the British Museum. Five centuries of illustrated books are represented, by far the most numerous and interesting being those of the sixteenth century. The collection includes the work of many German artists, from the great, Albrecht Duerer, to lesser and anonymous figures, whose illustrative and decorative work in printed books can be studied alongside the Department's superb collections of German prints and drawings. Some of these books are rare, a few probably unique, and several are of interest also for their texts and provenances.

By means of introduction, Peter Mitchell and Alison Roberts outline the background to, not only the geography, climate and ecology of South Africa, but also its archaeology and the role of the British in terms of archaeological study, research projects, funding and the acquisition of artefacts by British individuals and institutions. This precedes a large gazetteer of sites and objects that derive from various sites in South Africa, Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, which are now held by the British Museum.

Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943) is renowned for his archaeological expeditions to Central Asia, India, Iran, Iraq and Jordan. The mass of books and correspondence that he collected during his lifetime are distributed among collections in Britain and his homeland of Hungary. Within the collection bequeathed to the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is a unique source of material including photographs, letters, documents, manuscripts, articles, offprints and reviews within the subjects of Indology, Iranian studies, Central Asian linguistics and archaeology and Oriental manuscripts. This important collection is discussed and presented here.

This volume is the first in the British Museum's Egyptian catalogue series to be devoted to ostraca, as oppose to other inscribed media. It publishes in full the hieratic ostraca of the Ramesside Period - a large, rich and varied collection covering the entire range of known text-types, documentary, literary and religious. It also includes the contemporary figured ostraca. Each ostracon is presented with a photograph and where the text is in hieratic, transcriptions are provided.

This sequel to the Archaic and Classical volumes publishes almost 1,000 Hellenistic terracottas, each of which is illustrated and described in full. Arranged geographically, most of the Mediterranean is represented, excluding Egypt, southern Italy and Sicily, with each figure presented in the area where it was probably produced. Each regional section is introduced with a discussion of the area's findspots and history and technical data is presented in appendices. The general introduction outlines general questions of the evolution of artistic styles, techniques and functions of Hellenistic terracottas. The black and white plates illustrate every example, while the colour plates offer a representative selection of the range of clays found in the terracottas presented here and also of the coloured pigments used in their decoration.

Gustav Friedrich Klemm was a 19th century scholar and collector of antiquities. Part of his collection which was purchased by the British Musuem in 1868, forms the subject for this book. It largely comprises a catalogue of material from the Old Germanic Confederation, with objects dating from the Neolithic to post-Medieval period. The catalogue is preceded by a discussion of the cultural and historical context of the objects and of the collection as a whole, along with some new analyses of items and comments on provenance and chronology. An important reference source since much of this material has not been properly published until now.

As the waters of the Saddam Dam rose in 1984-5 the British Museum battled to record an important Late Assyrian site on the east bank of the Tigris. Part of a 7th-century BC building was uncovered. Specialist reports on the ceramics, bones and shells recovered provide further clues to daily life outside the Assyrian capital cities. Due to the fragmentary nature of the evidence recovered, this report lacks any real discussion of the significance of the site or the meaning of the evidence.

This volume presents details of 57 coin hoards from Roman Britain, all but two of which were discovered within the last ten years. They include a unique group of 110 plated denarii from northern Suffolk, a rare hoard of 2nd C gold aurei from Didcot Suffolk, and a late 4th C hoard of nearly 7,500 coins from Bishops Cannings, Wiltshire. All the hoards are listed in detail and the catalogues are complemented by pot drawings, discussions where relevant and plates.

Since time immemorial, inhabitants of the Western Grasslands of Cameroon in west Africa have been evolving an educational system devoid of literacy. Teaching focused on traditional crafts, including weaving, stitching of traditional dress, carving, sculpture, pottery, smelting of materials and smithing. The skills the people learned served them well, as many of them followed trades, vocations and professions that helped in improving the social and economic life of the area. This book aims to document those crafts in order for the people of Cameroon to have a record of these skills which are gradually dying out and to encourage them to continue to practise these ancient crafts. Each craft is described in some detail; the areas it is practised in, materials used, techniques involved. Photographs document stages of production and examples of the end result.

Second in a series publishing the entire Babylonian and Sumerian cuneiform holdings of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities. Over 8000 examples acquired by the British Museum in the years 1892-8 are described including major archives of the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods.