McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in the University of Cambridge was established in 1990. The Institute publishes the Cambridge Archaeological Journal three times a year, as well as the McDonald Institute Monograph Series which includes major fieldwork reports and conference volumes. In addition, the Institute publishes a smaller-format paperback series as part of the Prehistory of Languages project.

Cattle, Community and Place Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 300
ISBN: 9781913344184
Pub Date: 25 Jun 2024
Series: CAU Landscape Archives: New Archaeologies of the Cambridge Region Series
Description:
Detailing the results of excavations undertaken by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus between 2007 and 2016, this volume builds upon the work of previous large-scale projects within an area that now represents one of the most intensively investigated archaeological landscapes in Britain. Also included is a chapter contributed by Oxford Archaeology East concerning their excavations within the Biomedical Campus, which has enabled full publication of the site’s archaeology in a single volume.The excavations exposed three major sites: a Middle Bronze Age enclosure complex, a Late Iron Age–Early Roman farmstead with associated ring-ditch cemetery, and a first- to fourth-century AD Roman farmstead.
Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 348
ISBN: 9781913344146
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2024
Series: CAU Must Farm/Flag Fen Basin Depth & Time Series
Illustrations: 194
Description:
The Late Bronze Age pile-dwelling settlement at Must Farm is one of the most important and best-preserved prehistoric sites to have been systematically excavated in Europe. The settlement comprised a curving palisade enclosing five stilt-raised houses erected above a freshwater river channel at the edge of one most Britain’s most intensively studied and internationally renowned Bronze Age landscapes: the Flag Fen Basin. Built in the mid-9th century bc, the pile-dwelling was engulfed by a catastrophic fire less than a year after construction, sending the buildings and their artefact-rich contents into the sluggish waters below.
Ancient Egyptian Gold Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 524
ISBN: 9781913344122
Pub Date: 26 Jun 2023
Description:
This volume presents detailed results on the manufacturing technology and elemental composition of some 136 objects in the collections of six European museums, with discussion of the findings in historical and cultural contexts. The starting point was the remarkable jewellery buried with a woman and a child who lived about 1650-1550 BC at Qurna, the West Bank of ancient Thebes in Upper Egypt. The questions generated from this find led to investigation of assemblages and individual artefacts from earlier periods in varied social contexts, from the rural environment of Qau and Badari, to sites connected with urban or royal centres, such as Riqqa, Haraga and Lahun.
Interamna Lirenas Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 172
ISBN: 9781913344108
Pub Date: 26 Jun 2023
Description:
This volume provides the results of the application of non-destructive archaeological methods (geophysical prospection and systematic surface collections) to the study of the urban site. It includes a review of what was known of the town and a discussion of the development, potential and limitations of the kind of high-resolution, extensive ground-penetrating radar survey which was carried out. Special emphasis is placed on the earliest colonial phase as well as later transformations, and explores how the inhabitants of Interamna Lirenas responded to the challenges and opportunities presented by a growing Roman world.
Temple People Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 512
ISBN: 9781913344078
Pub Date: 15 Jan 2023
Series: Fragility and Sustainability - Studies on Early Malta, the ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project
Description:
The ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, culture change and collapse in prehistory, 2013–18) led by Caroline Malone has focused on the unique Temple Culture of Neolithic Malta and its antecedents. This third volume builds on the achievements of Mortuary customs in prehistoric Malta, published by the McDonald Institute in 2009. It seeks to answer many questions posed, but left unanswered, of the more than 200,000 fragments of mainly commingled human remains from the Xagħra Brochtorff Circle on Gozo.
Temple Landscapes Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 484
ISBN: 9781902937984
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2020
Series: Fragility and Sustainability - Studies on Early Malta, the ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project
Description:
The ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, cultural change and collapse in prehistory, 2013-18), led by Caroline Malone (Queens University Belfast) has explored issues of environmental fragility and Neolithic social resilience and sustainability during the Holocene period in the Maltese Islands. This, the first volume of three, presents the palaeo-environmental story of early Maltese landscapes. The project employed a programme of high-resolution chronological and stratigraphic investigations of the valley systems on Malta and Gozo.
Temple Places Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 552
ISBN: 9781913344023
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2020
Series: Fragility and Sustainability - Studies on Early Malta, the ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project
Description:
The ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, culture change and collapse in prehistory, 2013–18) led by Caroline Malone (Queen’s University Belfast) has focused on the unique Temple Culture of Neolithic Malta, and its antecedents and successors through investigation of archaeological sites and monuments. This, the second volume of three, presents the results of excavations at four temple sites and two settlements, together with analysis of chronology, economy and material culture. The project focused on the integration of three key strands of Malta's early human history (environmental change, human settlement and population) set against a series of questions that interrogated how human activity impacted on the changing natural environment and resources, which in turn impacted on the Neolithic populations.
The Isola Sacra Survey: Ostia, Portus and the port system of Imperial Rome Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9781902937908
Pub Date: 01 Oct 2020
Description:
The Isola Sacra occupies the land between Ostia and Portus at the mouth of the Tiber, and thus lies at the centre of the massive port complex that served Imperial Rome. The area has been the focus of archaeological research since the 16th century, but has never before been the subject of an integrated survey. This volume focuses on the results of a survey completed between 2002 and 2012 as part of the Portus Project.
Hinterlands and Inlands Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 350
ISBN: 9781902937892
Pub Date: 05 Apr 2020
Series: CAU Landscape Archives: New Archaeologies of the Cambridge Region Series
Description:
Thinking Hinterlands – Spanning 25 years of fieldwork across a 3 sq. km swathe on the west side of Cambridge, this and its companion volume present the results of 15 sites, including seven cemeteries. The main focus is on the area’s prehistoric ‘inland’ colonization (particularly its Middle Bronze Age horizon) and the dynamics of its Roman hinterland settlements.
Pattern and Process Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9781902937939
Pub Date: 05 Apr 2020
Series: CAU Must Farm/Flag Fen Basin Depth & Time Series
Description:
The King’s Dyke and Bradley Fen excavations occurred within the brick pits of the Fenland town of Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. The investigations straddled the south-eastern contours of the Flag Fen Basin, a small peat-filled embayment located between Peterborough and the western limits of Whittlesey ‘island’. Renowned principally for its Bronze Age discoveries at sites such as Fengate and Flag Fen, the Flag Fen Basin also marked the point where the prehistoric River Nene debouched into the greater Fenland Basin.
Medieval to Modern Suburban Material Culture and Sequence at Grand Arcade, Cambridge Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 495
ISBN: 9781902937786
Pub Date: 31 Oct 2019
Series: Cambridge Archaeological Unit Urban Archaeology Series
Description:
This is the first volume describing the results of the CAUs excavations in Cambridge and it is also the first monograph ever published on the archaeology of the town. At 1.5 hectares the Grand Arcade investigations represent the largest archaeological excavation ever undertaken in Cambridge, significantly enhanced by detailed standing building recording and documentary research.
The Marble Finds from Kavos and the Archaeology of Ritual Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 600
ISBN: 9781902937779
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2018
Series: The Sanctuary on Keros and the Origins of Aegean Ritual Practice
Description:
During the 1960s large numbers of Early Cycladic sculptures of marble, often broken, appeared on the illicit market. These were usually of the strikingly simple form of the folded-arm figure of marble long-known from the Early Cycladic cemeteries. Excavations at Kavos on the island of Keros revealed a location later named the ‘Special Deposit North’, from which these had been looted.
An Age of Experiment: Classical Archaeology Transformed (1976-2014) Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 250
ISBN: 9781902937809
Pub Date: 15 Sep 2018
Series: McDonald Institute Monographs
Description:
What is Classical Archaeology’s place within the overall study of antiquity and the history of humanity? And what is its relationship to its kindred disciplines of ancient history, art history and Mediterranean prehistory? Forty or so years ago Classical Archaeology appeared to be a very conservative and rather niche area of scholarly endeavour.
RIVERSIDES Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 484
ISBN: 9781902937847
Pub Date: 01 May 2018
Series: New Archaeologies of the Cambridge Region
Description:
The 2010–11 excavations along Trumpington’s riverside proved extraordinary on a number of accounts. Particularly for its ‘dead’, as it included Neolithic barrows (one with a mass interment), a double Beaker grave and an Early Anglo-Saxon cemetery, with a rich bed-burial interment in the latter accompanied by a rare gold cross. Associated settlement remains were recovered with each.
Boeotia Project, Volume II: The City of Thespiai Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 414
ISBN: 9781902937816
Pub Date: 01 Oct 2017
Series: Boeotia
Description:
Few major Classical cities have disappeared so completely from view, over the centuries, as Thespiai in Central Greece. Only the technique of intensive field survey, carefully adapted to a large urban site and reinforced by historical investigation, has made it possible to recover from oblivion much of its life of seven millennia.
RRP: £70.00
Archaeological investigations in the Niah Caves, Sarawak, 1954-2004 Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 592
ISBN: 9781902937601
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2016
Series: McDonald Institute Monographs
Description:
This book is the companion volume to Rainforest Foraging and Farming in Island Southeast Asia: the Archaeology of the Niah Caves, Sarawak. Together they present the results of new fieldwork in the caves and new studies of finds from earlier excavations, a project that has involved a team of over 70 archaeologists and geographers. Rainforest Foraging and Farming told the story of human activity in the caves over the past 50,000 years and how that story throws light on the history of our species in Island Southeast Asia from the time when modern humans first arrived to recent centuries.
RRP: £65.00