This book is a significant contribution to the field of survey pottery studies, which is not frequently theorised, and could also serve as a guide and provide inspiration to archaeologists designing their own survey projects and methodologies. Landscape archaeology has heavily relied on pedestrian survey as a field method for more than half a century. In most field projects, archaeological ceramics constitute the lion’s share among the finds and the amount of collected sherds is overwhelming. Survey ceramics provide the basis for understanding human activity in a landscape, and sherds serve as convenient chronological markers for the archaeological sites discovered in field projects. However, how this pottery is collected and studied determines the possibilities for using the sherds as a source material. Not only the collection practices, but also the process and practicalities of ceramic analysis are rarely made explicit, even though the archaeological interpretations of human activity in the landscape strongly rely on it. Most contributions in this volume provide an insight in collection, processing and interpretation practices in a specific survey project, and we hope this transparency is inspiring and contributes to a better understanding of surface ceramics as a basis for historical interpretations. Three themes run as a red thread through the contributions in this book: first of all transparency in ceramic collecting, processing and interpretation, secondly, improving diagnosticity, and thirdly, expanding the interpretive potential of survey ceramics. The chapters are geographically oriented towards Greece and Italy, two countries in which archaeological surface survey is widely practised. Chronologically, the contributions range from the Bronze Age to the Medieval period.

Why do we collect? Where does the urge to collect come from? This book explores the phenomenon of collecting in various contexts. Collecting is an illustration of a strong human-thing entanglement. It can be caused by psychological incentives that are deeply rooted in human doubts and anxieties. It is also related to building a pleasant, unthreatening, and even paradisical, environment to compensate for the uncertainties of everyday life.The chapters in this book range from psychological perspectives in the Habsburg empire to Rococo collecting in France, from a fanatic English book collector to a 16th/17th century encyclopaedic Dutch collector. And finally the fascinating story of Baron Edmond de Rothschild’s boxes.The contributions to this book were first presented as papers at the seminar "The Psychology of Collecting" in June 2022, organised by the Interdisciplinary Research Group “Museums, Collections and Society” of Leiden University, Netherlands.

Coins of England and the United Kingdom Pre-Decimal and Decimal volumes comprise the Standard Catalogue of British Coins, with the decimal issues under Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III listed in this separate volume. The 10th edition is of note as it contains all coins minted during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, also introducing the new coinage of King Charles III.The Decimal Issues gives a comprehensive overview of all individual coins and sets issued by the Royal Mint since 1971 (and in circulation since 1968), offering an authoritative catalogue of modern British coins.

This historic reference work for British coins is still the only catalogue to feature every major coin type from Celtic to the Decimal coinage of Queen Elizabeth II, arranged in chronological order and divided into metals under each reign, then into coinages, denominations and varieties. All decimal coinage since 1968 is listed in a separate volume, available as an independent publication.

Rural life and culture hold a practical and symbolic importance in American society. A central tenet to the survival of our cherished values - and of ourselves as a species - is the stewardship of cultural diversity and the places that foster it, like rural America. These may be the places that teach us to use land to make a living and to make a life, to forge and carry on our identities, and to feel history. They may yield a harvest of policies for managing an environmental balancing act that will preserve essential resources for America's children's children.   Power and Place: Preservation, Progress, and the Culture War over Land examines the ongoing culture wars that pit conservation against economic progress. For author Melinda Bollar Wagner, what began as a study of Appalachia's long-standing and continuing status as an energy sacrifice zone evolved into a twenty-four-year research project that sheds new light on the physical and emotional parameters of cultural attachment to land. Drawing on interviews with more than 220 residents from ten communities in five Appalachian counties, Power and Place gives voice to rural citizens whose place at the table is far from assured with regard to critical energy, environmental, and infrastructure decisions.

Traditional archaeological ideas about Neolithic societies were shaped by questionable premises. The modern concept of social and cultural coherence of residence groups as well as the ethnic interpretation of ‘archaeological cultures’ fostered ideas of static and homogeneous social entities with fixed borders. Farming – as the core of the Neolithic way of life – was associated with sedentariness rather than with spatial mobility and cross-regional social networks. Furthermore, the widely used (neo-)evolutionist thinking universally assumed a growing social complexity and hierarchisation during prehistory. After all, such ‘top-down'–perspectives deprived individuals and groups of genuine agency and creativity while underestimating the relational dynamic between the social and material worlds. In recent years, a wide array of empirical results on social practices related to material culture and settlement dynamics, (inter-)regional entanglements and spatial mobility were published. For the latter the adoption of the relatively new scientific methods in archaeology like Stable Isotope Analysis as well as aDNA played a crucial role. Yet the question of possible inferences regarding spatial and temporal differences in forms of social organisation has not been addressed sufficiently. The aim of this volume is therefore to rethink former top-down concepts of Neolithic societies by studying social practices and different forms of Neolithic social life by adopting bottom-up social archaeological perspectives. Furthermore, the validity and relevance of terms like ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘social group’ etc. will be discussed. The contributions reach from theoretical to empirical ones and thematize a variety of social theoretical approaches as well as methodological ways of combining different sorts of data. They show the potential of such bottom-up approaches to infer models of social practices and configurations which may live up to the potential social diversity and dynamism of Neolithic societies. The contribution shed light on spatial mobility, social complexity, the importance of (political) interests and factors of kinship etc. We hope that this volume, with its focus on the Neolithic of Europe, will contribute to the ongoing critical debates of theories and concepts as well as on our premises and perspectives on Neolithic societies in general – and the practices of social archaeology as such.

In 2020 and 2021 the Research Group on Storage in Ancient Egypt and Sudan organised two online workshops focusing on earthen storage buildings in ancient Egypt and Nubia. Following these two meetings, the nine contributions of this volume present often unpublished case studies (from the IVth millennium BCE to the Greco-Roman Period), as well as issues and perspectives of current research. They are authored by archaeologists working in Egypt, Sudan and Western Africa as well as architects specialised in earthen architecture.   The interdisciplinary approach adopted to investigate storage strategies along the ancient Nile Valley effectively address the subject’s complexity and the socioeconomic issues involved, which not only pertain to the ancient world but are also relevant to modern-day societies. Throughout the volume, functional and technical analysis of the architectural and archaeological remains helps understand how specific layouts, building materials and techniques were employed in the past to create suitable conditions for short-, medium- and long-term storage.   Ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological comparisons with West African vernacular traditions are used as a fruitful line of research for better understand of building practices, storage strategies and possible volumes of archaeological remains. Furthermore, extending the scope of the research to other geographical areas shows how different human groups may have used similar responses to overcome similar technical problems. Ancient and traditional practices and know-how, on the other hand, proved effective in a contemporary onion storehouse project in Senegal to find sustainable, low-cost solutions to protection and development of local products. The volume also include the preliminary results of an experimental archaeology project which led to the construction of a mud-brick silo – according to ancient Egyptian techniques – and further ensiling. The issue is highly topical since these ancient earthen facilities offer valuable information for the current debates on sustainable strategies for foodstuff storage.

Portraits of the Last Golden Age is the latest major monograph on the work of Budapest-based artist Attila Szűcs (b.1967, Miskolc, Hungary), one of the leading painters in Hungary today. Following on from his 2016 monograph, Specters and Experiments, published by Hatje Cantz, Portraits of the Last Golden Age features a substantial in-conversation between Szűcs and Sándor Hornyik, an art historian, curator and senior research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. ‘Mankind is in an extremely tense situation,’ Szűcs asserts, ‘with the escalation of natural disasters, with artificial intelligence getting out of hand, the world can easily take a dystopian turn.’ During the course of the conversation, the two men discuss topics ranging from portraiture to posthumanism, meditation to metaphysics, intuition to the irrational. In addition to presenting examples of Szűcs’ accomplished and haunting monochrome works on paper employing materials such as acrylic, charcoal and graphite, the publication features over seventy oil paintings made between 2019 and 2023 depicting dark dreamscapes and transcendental scenes of alternate realities. Disembodied hands grab or caress, as if apparitions from another dimension; sleeping figures exhale multi-coloured breath that verges on the supernatural; long golden hair flows down the side of a bed, pooling on the floor like an uncanny waterfall; heads float in dark water as if decapitated; otherworldly fires rage while apocalyptic explosions highlight environmental disasters and humankind’s seemingly unstoppable drive towards auto-destruction. Szűcs’ work is both an exploration into the human psyche and into the universe itself, much of which is as-yet unknown: quantum worlds and multiverses, the complexities of time and space, and the possibilities of an afterlife. Bleak yet beautiful, dark yet dazzling, Szűcs’ practice asks what painting can bring to twenty-first century thinking and image-making.Produced by Erika Deák Gallery, Budapest, and co-published by Anomie Publishing, London, the publication features texts in English and Hungarian (translated by Dániel Sipos), was designed by Géza Ipacs, and printed and bound by EPC Nyomda, Budaörs. Attila Szűcs (b.1967, Miskolc, Hungary) is an artist based in Budapest. Solo shows include Portraits of the Last Golden Age, Erika Deák Gallery, Budapest, 2023; Duplicated Dreamer, FL Gallery/Wizard, Milan, 2022; Transhuman Etudes, Centrul de Interes, Cluj-Napoca, 2020; Preparing for Lightness, Emmanuel Walderdorff Galerie, Düsseldorf, 2017; and Specters and Experiments, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2016. Group exhibitions include Becoming. The force of existence, HAB, Art Center Budapest, 2023; Men, The male body in Robert Runtak's collection, The South Bohemian Gallery, Hluboká nad Vltavou, Czech Republic, 2022; You know who, Ömer Koç Collection, Abdülmecid Efendi Mansion, Istanbul, 2022; and Ludwig-30-Costumize/Testreszabás, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2019.

The wide-ranging and largely ignored operations around Petersburg, Virginia, were the longest and most extensive of the entire Civil War. The fighting began in June of 1864, when advance elements from the Union Army of the Potomac crossed the James River and botched a series of attacks against a thinly defended city. The fighting ended nine long months later in the first days of April of 1865. In Volume I of The Petersburg Campaign, legendary historian Edwin C. Bearss detailed the first six major engagements on the “Eastern Front,” from the initial attack on the city on June 9 through the Second Battle of Ream’s Station on August 25, 1864. In Volume II, Bearss turns his attention and pen to the final half-dozen large-scale combats in The Petersburg Campaign: The Western Front Battles, September 1864 – April 1865, now available in paperback.Although commonly referred to as the “Siege of Petersburg,” the city (as well as the Confederate capital at Richmond) was never fully isolated and the combat involved much more than static trench warfare. In fact, much of the wide-ranging fighting involved massive multi-corps Union offensives designed to cut important roads and rail lines feeding Petersburg and Richmond. This second installment includes these major battles:- Peebles’ Farm (September 29 – October 1, 1864)- Burgess Mill (October 27, 1864)- Hatcher’s Run (February 5 – 7, 1865)- Fort Stedman (March 25, 1865)- Five Forks Campaign (March 29 – April 1, 1865)- The Sixth Corps Breaks Lee’s Petersburg Lines (April 2, 1865)Accompanying these salient chapters are two dozen original maps by Civil War cartographer George Skoch, coupled with photos and illustrations. Taken together, these two volumes present the most comprehensive and thorough understanding of the major military episodes comprising the fascinating Petersburg Campaign.

LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born into an affluent slave-holding family in Macon, Georgia. A horrific leg injury left him an invalid, but that didn’t stop the educated, inquisitive, perceptive, and exceptionally witty 12-year-old from keeping a diary in 1860 – just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country and his world apart. He continued his reading, studying, and writing even as his health deteriorated until both the war and his life ended in 1865. The Library of Congress considered his journal a masterpiece, and one of its premier holdings. This adaptation of The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865, edited for young readers, introduces a new generation to one of the most unique and important firsthand accounts to come out of our Civil War. LeRoy read books, devoured newspapers and magazines, listened to gossip, and discussed and debated important social and military issues with his parents and others. He wrote daily for five years, putting pen to paper with a vim and tongue-in-cheek vigor that impresses even now, more than 150 years later. His practical, philosophical, and occasionally Twain-like hilarious observations cover politics and the secession movement, the long and increasingly destructive Civil War, family pets, a wide variety of hobbies and interests, and what life was like at the center of a socially prominent wealthy family in the important Confederate manufacturing center of Macon. The young scribe often voiced concern about the family’s pair of plantations outside town, and recorded his interactions and relationships with “servants” Howard, Allen, Eveline, and others as he pondered the fate of human bondage and his family’s declining fortunes. Unbeknownst to LeRoy, he was chronicling his own slow and painful descent toward death in tandem with the demise of the Southern Confederacy. He recorded - often in horrific detail - an increasingly painful and debilitating disease that robbed him of his childhood. The teenager’s declining health is a consistent thread coursing through his fascinating journals. “I feel more discouraged [and] less hopeful about getting well than I ever did before,” he wrote on March 17, 1863. “I am weaker and more helpless than I ever was.” Morphine and a score of other “remedies” did little to ease his suffering. Abscesses developed; nagging coughs and pain consumed him. Alternating between bouts of euphoria and despondency, he often wrote, “Saw off my leg.” The War Outside My Window, edited by teachers Janet Croon and Kimberly Conrad, captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager recording the demise of his world and the early beginnings of another. Just as Anne Frank has come down to us as the adolescent voice of World War II, LeRoy Gresham will now be remembered as the young voice of the Civil War South.

The wide-ranging and largely misunderstood series of operations around Petersburg, Virginia, were the longest and most extensive of the entire Civil War. The fighting that began in early June 1864 when advance elements from the Union Army of the Potomac crossed the James River and botched a series of attacks against a thinly defended city would not end for nine long months. This important - many would say decisive - fighting is presented by legendary Civil War author Edwin C. Bearss in The Petersburg Campaign: The Eastern Front Battles, June–August 1864, the first in a ground-breaking two-volume compendium now available in paperback. Although commonly referred to as the “Siege of Petersburg,” that city (as well as the Confederate capital at Richmond) was never fully isolated and the combat involved much more than static trench warfare. In fact, much of the wide-ranging fighting involved large-scale Union offensives designed to cut important roads and the five rail lines feeding Petersburg and Richmond. This volume of Bearss’ study of these major battles includes: * The Attack on Petersburg (June 9, 1864) * The Second Assault on Petersburg (June 15 - 18, 1864) * The Battle of the Jerusalem Plank Road (June 21 - 24, 1864) * The Crater (July 30, 1864) * The Battle of the Weldon Railroad (August 18 - 21, 1864) * The Second Battle of Ream’s Station (August 25, 1864) Accompanying these salient chapters are original maps by Civil War cartographer George Skoch, together with photos and illustrations. The result is a richer and deeper understanding of the major military episodes comprising the Petersburg Campaign.

Personalities. Characters. History. John C. Waugh, the author of the popular and award-winning The Class of 1846, presents forty of the most memorable and impactful individuals he has come across during his three decades of researching and writing about the American Civil War - or as he calls them, his “Unforgettables” in the aptly titled, Unforgettables: Winners, Losers, Strong Women, and Eccentric Men of the Civil War Era. Waugh’s unique pen and spritely style bring to life a mix of the famous and the infamous, the little-known and the unremembered. He reintroduces us to Abraham Lincoln the writer, Jefferson Davis the losing president, and their fascinating and influential wives Mary and Varina. Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster (“three for the ages”) are juxtaposed with Presidents Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan - four chief executives who failed to avert the coming war. Military personalities include U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee with a nod toward their mentor, the nearly forgotten General Winfield Scott. The author cast a wide net to include “the seekers of equality,” African Americans Sojourner Truth and Lincoln’s friend Frederick Douglass, a half dozen women like Maria Mayo, Kate Chase, and Anna Dickinson who helped shape our understanding of cultural issues, and influential media mavens Horace Greeley and Adam Gurowski. Poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” She was right. Had she elaborated, she might have added that these stories are driven by the passions of their characters and are what history is all about. “My hope,” explains the author in his Preface, “is that these sketches and word portraits rekindle that passion and hook a few non-believers on the undeniable drama that is history.”

The second installment of Al Ovies’ The Boy Generals trilogy, George Custer, Wesley Merritt and the Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, from the Gettysburg Retreat through the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, encompasses a period jammed with tumultuous events for the cavalry on and off the battlefield and a significant change of command at the top. Once below the Potomac River, the Union troopers raced down the east side of the Blue Ridge Mountains but were unable to prevent General Lee’s wounded Army of Northern Virginia from reaching Culpeper. The balance of the 1863 was a series of maneuvers, raids, and fighting that witnessed the near-destruction of the Michigan Cavalry Brigade at Buckland Mills and the indecisive and frustrating efforts of the Bristoe Station and Mine Run campaigns. Alfred Pleasonton’s controversial command of the mounted arm ended abruptly, only to be replaced by the more controversial Philip H. Sheridan, whose combustible personality intensified the animosity burning between George Custer and Wesley Merritt. Victory and glory followed the Cavalry Corps during the early days of Overland campaign, particularly at Yellow Tavern, where Rebel cavalier Jeb Stuart was mortally wounded. The “spirited rivalry” between Custer and Merritt, in turn, took a turn for the worse. At Trevilian Station, the bitterness and rancor permeating their relationship broke into the open to include harsh official reports critical of the other’s actions. Merritt’s elevation to temporary command of the 1st Cavalry Division cemented their rancor. Just as their relationship worsened, so too did the tenor of the war darken as the sieges of Richmond and Petersburg ground on, and Confederate partisan Col. John S. Mosby intensified guerrilla operations that disrupted Union logistics in the Shenandoah Valley. When Gen. Ulysses Grant demanded that Sheridan escalate retribution, the cavalry commander delivered his infamous edict to “eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.” Much of the gritty task fell on the shoulders of the boy generals. Adolfo Ovies’ well-researched and meticulously detailed account of the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between Custer and Merritt follows the same entertaining style in the first installment. The Boy Generals changes the way Civil War enthusiasts will understand and judge the actions of the Union’s bold riders.

During the late summer and fall of 1863, the Civil War in the Eastern Theater was anything but inconsequential. Generals Meade and Lee continued where they had left off, executing daring marches while boldly maneuvering the chess pieces of war in an effort to gain decisive strategic and tactical advantage. Cavalry actions crisscrossed the rolling landscape, and bloody battle revealed to both sides the command deficiencies left in the wake of Gettysburg. It was the first and only time in the war Meade exercised control of the Army of the Potomac on his own terms. Jeffrey Wm Hunt brilliantly dissects this period of the war in Meade and Lee at Bristoe Station: The Problems of Command and Strategy After Gettysburg, from Brandy Station to the Buckland Races, August 1 to October 31, 1863.   The carnage of Gettysburg left both armies in varying states of command chaos as the focus of the war shifted to the Western Theater. Lee further depleted his ranks by dispatching his best corps commander, James Longstreet, and most of his First Corps via rail to reinforce Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. The Union defeat at Chickamauga forced Meade to follow suit with the XI Corps and XII Corps. Despite these reductions, the aggressive Lee assumed the strategic offensive against his more careful Northern opponent, who was also busy waging a rearguard action against politicians in Washington.   Meade and Lee at Bristoe Station is a fast-paced and dynamic account of how the Army of Northern Virginia carried the war above the Rappahannock River once more in an effort to regain the initiative and retrieve the laurels lost in Pennsylvania. When the opportunity beckoned Lee took it, knocking Meade back on his heels with a threat to his army as serious as the one John Pope faced one year earlier. As Lee learned once more, A. P. Hill was no Stonewall Jackson, and with Longstreet away Lee’s cudgel was no longer as mighty as he wished. The Confederate tide of the campaign broke on the shoals of Bristoe Station in a signal defeat. The next move was up to George Meade.   Hunt’s follow-up volume to his award-winning Meade and Lee After Gettysburg is grounded upon official reports, regimental histories, letters, newspapers, and other archival sources. Together, they provide a day-by-day account of the fascinating high-stakes affair during this three-month period. Coupled with original maps and outstanding photographs, this new study offers a significant contribution to Civil War literature.

As the American government began a disastrous mass evacuation of its Afghan allies, a group of American veterans saw the writing on the wall—the people who had supported them on the ground over the past two decades were going to be left behind. Instead of watching on the sideline, they sprang into action. The effort became known nationally as #DigitalDunkirk, in reference to the civilian aspect of the evacuation of soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940. As America's last days in Afghanistan came to a chaotic end, an ad-hoc group of veterans, intelligence assets and legislative aides undertook an extraordinary mission to honor the U.S. battlefield creed to leave no comrade behind. Relying on cell phones and satellites as their weapons, they worked feverishly around the clock to help evacuate as many Afghans who had supported U.S. troops over the past twenty years as possible. As the desperate mass of Afghans tried to flee brutal Taliban rule, Marines of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, worked at Hamid Karzai International Airport's Abbey Gate in conditions that brought combat-hardened veterans to tears. After an ISIS suicide bomber detonated his S-vest, killing 13 U.S. service members, operations came to a halt. Told through the eyes of Mikael, his Afghan friend Abdul and the 2/1 Marines on the ground, including a Marine squad leader who personally led the Afghans through the airport, Life and Death at Abbey Gate tells the story behind the story of the mass evacuation of over 124,000 Americans and Afghan allies during a two-week period in the summer of 2021. This is an important story that should be read by all Americans. A story of leadership, empty government promises and the convictions of our military to stand by our allies in their time of need.

This volume provides an authoritative and systematic account of the coins minted for Roman Egypt between AD 138 and 192. It is the first of four volumes, which will cover the provincial coinage of this crucial period of Roman history in its entirety.The coinage in this volume was produced at Alexandria, the commercial and cultural capital of the eastern Mediterranean. It is dated by the year, making it an invaluable guide to imperial presentation and to economic developments during this transitional period. Its iconography is of exceptional interest to scholars and collectors, combining fascinating aspects of Greek, Roman and Egyptian culture.The book gives a complete picture of the material, meeting the needs of numismatists and providing an essential reference for historians, archaeologists and other students of the Roman empire. The introductory chapters and extensive catalogue are accompanied by illustrations of virtually all known types.