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.