Published in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

We report the results of drone lidar survey at a high-elevation archaeological site in the Chachapoyas region of Peruvian Amazonia. Unlike traditional airborne remote sensing, drone lidar produces very high-density measurements at a wide range of scan angles by operating at low altitudes and slow flight speeds.

Published in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Big data have arrived in archaeology, in the form of both large-scale datasets themselves and in the analytics and approaches of data science. Aerial data collected from satellite-, airborne- and UAV-mounted sensors have been particularly transformational, allowing us to capture more sites and features, over larger areas, at greater resolution, and in formerly inaccessible landscapes. However, these new means of collecting, processing, and visualizing datasets also present fresh challenges for archaeologists.

Published in the Asian Review of World Histories.

This paper examines five distinct events from seventeenth-century South Asia: a pirate raid, two battles and two more pirate raids, all of which represent varying acts of defiance committed against the great Mughal imperium.

During the first period of globalization medical ideas and practices originating in China became entangled in the medical activities of other places, sometimes at long distances. They produced effects through processes of alteration once known as translatio, meaning movements in place, status, and meaning.

Published in "Maritime Communities of the Ancient Andes," eds. G Prieto & D. H. Sandweiss.

These essays look beyond the subsistence strategies of maritime communities and their surroundings to discuss broader anthropological issues related to social adaptation, monumentality, urbanism, and political and religious change.

Published in "A Companion to World Literature," vol. 1, eds. K. Seigneurie & I. Ramelli.

Bucolic, a tradition of ancient Greek and Latin poetry deriving from certain works of Theocritus, emerges in a period of literary experimentation and reconsolidation of the Greek cultural past.

The ninth volume in the Joukowsky Institute Publication (JIP) series, Change and Resilience: The Occupation of Mediterranean Islands in Late Antiquity, edited by Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros and Catalina Mas Florit, is available from Oxbow Books.

In The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia, Shiyanthi Thavapalan offers the first in-depth study of the words and expressions for colors in the Akkadian language (c. 2500-500 BCE).

Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology & Assyriology Felipe Rojas is featured in the National Geographic series, Lost Cities With Albert Lin. In "Petra's Hidden Origins", Rojas and the Brown University Petra Terraces Archaeological Project (BUPTAP) team are interviewed about how Petra was part of a broad network of cities and cultures.

In this volume, Felipe Rojas examines how the inhabitants of Roman Anatolia interacted with the physical traces of earlier civilizations in their midst.

This volume, edited by Christine Proust and John Steele, explores how scholars wrote, preserved, circulated, and read knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia. It offers an exercise in micro-history that provides a case study for attempting to understand the relationship between scholars and scholarship during this time of great innovation.

Editors: Johannes Haubold, John Steele, and Kathryn Stevens

This volume of collected essays, the first of its kind in any language, investigates the Astronomical Diaries from ancient Babylon, a collection of almost 1000 clay tablets which, over a period of some five hundred years (6th century to 1st century BCE), record observations of selected astronomical phenomena as well as the economy and history of Mesopotamia and surrounding regions.

This book, by Professor Saul Olyan, the first to focus on ritual violence in the Hebrew Bible, investigates these and other violent rites, the ritual settings in which they occur, their various literary contexts, and the identity and aims of their agents in order to speak in an informed way about the contours and social aspects of ritual violence as it is represented in the Hebrew Bible.

This collection is the first concerted attempt to explore the significance of classical legacies for Latin American history – from the uses of antiquarian learning in colonial institutions to the currents of Romantic Hellenism which inspired liberators and nation-builders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

This study presents the results of visual and portable X-ray fluorescence (PXRF) analyses of botijas/olive jars from the 16th Century sites of San Miguel de Piura and Carrizales, north coast Peru.

How to Think about War presents the most influential and compelling of these speeches in an elegant new translation by classicist Johanna Hanink, accompanied by an enlightening introduction, informative headnotes, and the original Greek on facing pages.

Archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Parker VanValkenburgh is examining this question through the lens of the Spanish colonial reducción movement of the 1570s—a large-scale attempt to “modernize” over two million indigenous Peruvians by resettling them into planned towns. Although many written records of this movement remain, they often omit key details about the founding of the towns or the effects of the resettlement effort on inhabitants’ daily lives.

Published in Afghanistan.

The Sasanian rock-cut relief of Rag-i Bibi, located in northern Afghanistan, offers a unique opportunity to reconsider issues of audience, memory, and power in rupestral art. Found over 1,000 kilometers east of the nearest attested Sasanian rupestral relief, Rag-i Bibi is geographically and iconographically distinct, displaying elements of local subject matter, artistic style, and political symbolism.

This Fall, Professor Candace Rice joins Brown University as Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Classics.

Eight doctoral students were awarded Global Mobility Research Fellowships for the 2019-20 academic year.

Published in "World Archaeology 51.2."

Sometime in 2009, the make-up of the world population changed fundamentally, as the number of people living in cities surpassed that of rural residents for the first time. Today, already some 54% of the world’s inhabitants live in urban areas, and their numbers are set to reach 66% by 2050.

Published in the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture.

This article considers the emotional status of grave goods in medieval China. Its purpose is twofold.

This article presents a systematic methodological comparison of three archaeobotanical proxies (phytoliths, pollen and seeds) applied to an assemblage of dung pellets and corresponding archaeological refuse deposits from Early Islamic contexts at the site of Shivta.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale.

Published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.

This study utilises multi-isotopic analysis to reconstruct diet and source-water consumption from human remains collected at Carrizales, in the Zaña Valley of northern coastal Peru.

Published in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology.

Growing out of scholars’ engagements with the local dimensions of Inka and Spanish rule and the methodological and ontological divides that distinguish “history” and “prehistory,” the transconquest perspective attends to the affective connections that constitute polities and shape imperial transitions.

Published in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology.

This study explores the politics of indigenous foodways in early colonial Peru, examining the processes by which indigenous households adapted to demographic stress, resettlement, and evangelization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries CE.

The Joukowsky Institute congratulates Archaeology and the Ancient World's Professor Yannis Hamilakis on the publication of his latest edited volume, The New Nomadic Age: Archaeologies of Forced and Undocumented Migration.

Ever since the International Monetary Fund’s first bailout of Greece’s sinking economy in 2010, the phrase “Greek debt” has meant one thing to the country’s creditors. But for millions who claim to prize culture over capital, it means something quite different: the symbolic debt that Western civilization owes to Greece for furnishing its principles of democracy, philosophy, mathematics, and fine art. Where did this other idea of Greek debt come from, Johanna Hanink asks, and why does it remain so compelling today? The Classical Debt investigates our abiding desire to view Greece through the lens of the ancient past.

Judaism and the Economy, edited by Professor Michael Satlow, is a collection of sixty-nine Jewish texts relating to economic issues such as wealth, poverty, inequality, charity, and the charging of interest.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Christopher Ratté (University of Michigan), Felipe Rojas (Brown University), and Angela Commito (Union College) a $220,000 collaborative research grant for continued work in the port city of Notion (western Turkey), the organization announced on Wednesday, August 8.

The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN, by Hermann Hunger and Professor John Steele, contains an introductory essay, followed by a new edition of the text and a facing-page transliteration and English translation. Finally, the book contains a new and detailed commentary on the text.

Stephen Houston has been appointed as the inaugural Jay I. Kislak chair for the study of the history and cultures of the early Americas, at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, for the 2018-19 academic year. During his tenure at the Center, Houston will work on a project titled “Classic Choreography: The Meaning of Ancient Maya Movement.”

Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice, edited by Vera Tiesler and Professor Andrew Scherer, was published by Harvard University Press in 2018 as part of its Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Symposia and Colloquia series.

The Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards recognize Brown faculty members for sustained and continued excellence in teaching.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Parker VanValkenburgh has been awarded an ACLS Digital Extension Grant with Steven Wernke (Vanderbilt University) for their project, Extending GeoPACHA: Geospatial Platform for Andean Culture, History, and Archaeology.

This new volume includes ten original essays that demonstrate clearly how common, varied, and significant the phenomenon of supplementation is in the Hebrew Bible.

Supplementation and the Study of the Hebrew Bible, edited by Saul M. Olyan and Jacob L. Wright, is part of the Brown Judaic Studies Monograph Series, and is produced and distributed by the Society of Biblical Literature.

In The Young Descartes, Professor Harold J. Cook tells the story of a man who did not set out to become an author or philosopher—René Descartes began publishing only after the age of forty.

Professor Stephen Houston, Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and former Director of the Program in Early Cultures, was interviewed by the BBC regarding the discovery of more than 60,000 hidden Maya ruins in Guatemala through the use of Lidar technology. The full story, "Sprawling Maya Network Discovered under Guatemala Jungle," is on BBC's website.

The Cuneiform Uranology Texts: Drawing the Constellations, by Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Eckart Frahm, Wayne Horowitz, and Professor John Steele presents a newly recovered group of cuneiform texts from first millennium Babylonia and Assyria that provide prose descriptions of the drawing (eṣēru) of Mesopotamian constellations.

The topics of the articles in Studies on the Ancient Exact Sciences in Honour of Lis Brack-Bernsen, edited by Professor John Steele and Mathieu Ossendrijver, are linked by the themes that have been at the center of much of Lis Brack-Bernsen’s own work: the Babylonian observational record, and the relationship between observation and theory; the gnomon, sundials, and time measurement; and the relationship between different scientific activities in the ancient world, especially the connections between mathematics and astronomy.

Violence and Power in Ancient Egypt, by Associate Professor Laurel Bestock, examines the use of Egyptian pictures of violence prior to the New Kingdom.

Rising Time Schemes in Babylonian Astronomy, by Professor John Steele, examines an approach from ancient astronomy to what was then a particularly important question, namely that of understanding the relationship between the position in the ecliptic and the time it takes for a fixed-length of the ecliptic beginning at that point to rise above the eastern horizon.

Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium was edited by Professor Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret Mullett and published by Harvard University Press in October 2017, as part of its Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia series.

In Friendship in the Hebrew Bible, Professor Saul M. Olyan analyzes a wide range of texts, including prose narratives, prophetic materials, psalms, pre-Hellenistic wisdom collections, and the Hellenistic-era wisdom book Ben Sira.

On Human Bondage, edited by Professor John Bodel and Walter Scheidel, is a critical reexamination of Orlando Patterson’s groundbreaking Slavery and Social Death, assessing how his theories have stood the test of time and applies them to new case studies.

Cultural Contact and Appropriation in the Axial-Age Mediterranean World: A Periplos, edited by Baruch Halpern and Professor Kenneth Sacks explores adaptation, resistance and reciprocity in Axial-Age Mediterranean exchange (ca. 800-300 BCE).