Publications by Year: 2021

With a contribution by Richard Jones

*Please note that this publication was featured in our December 2022 Newsletter with an erroneous description. The following information is accurate*

The excavations on the Koukounaries Hill, Paros, Greece, conducted under the direction of Demetrius U. Schilardi for the Archaeological Society at Athens from 1976 to 1992, revealed a 12th century B.C.E. Mycenaean building, an Iron Age settlement, and an Archaic sanctuary. Koukounaries I: Mycenaean Pottery from Selected Contexts presents the pottery from five areas inside the building: three large storerooms, the main east-west corridor, and a small shrine, as well as the pottery from a limited reoccupation after the building’s fire destruction and abandonment. The ceramics from the main occupation phase comprise the largest and best-preserved domestic assemblage from the 12th century B.C.E. in the Cyclades and offer important evidence for the continuation of Mycenaean culture after the destruction of the mainland palatial citadels. The small deposits of pottery from the reoccupation phase, provide important stratigraphic evidence for defining the Late Helladic IIIC ceramic sequence. The volume also considers the function of the individual spaces within the building, based largely on the patterns of shape distributions and quantities, with the statistics for each context presented in a series of appendices. Other issues are also explored, including the evidence for itinerant potters, the trade in antique vases, and the place of origin of the settlers who founded and inhabited the Mycenaean building on the summit of the Koukounaries Hill.

The volume is authored by Robert B. Koehl.
For more information or to purchase the volume, please visit the publisher's website.

This is the report on the excavation of the secondary pits associated with the tomb of Marquis Yi, ruler of the state of Zeng, who died in 433 BCE. The tomb is located at Suizhou in Hubei province, China. Excavated in 1978, it is the richest tomb known from the entire pre-imperial period and one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made in China. The tomb contained ten metric tons of bronze artifacts—ritual vessels and, along with them, a tuned set of 65 bells weighing 2,500 kg and bearing inscriptions about music theory. The bell inscriptions constitute the earliest text on music theory known from China; they are hugely important for the light they shed on the rather different music theory of later periods in Chinese history and also for comparison with roughly contemporary texts from Greece. An archaeological report on Marquis Yi’s tomb was published in 1989, and most of the tomb’s furnishings are permanently displayed at the Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan. Temporary exhibitions of selected items have traveled to museums in many countries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Sackler Gallery of Art in Washington DC. 

In January of 1999, a row of five secondary pits was discovered 15 meters east of Marquis Yi’s tomb. The pits were excavated by Zhang Changping, the director of this publication project, who was a researcher at the Hubei Provincial Institute of Archaeology at the time. Pit No. 1 contained 465 bronze objects or object fragments of forms not previously known. Their patterned disposition in the pit suggests that they all belonged to a single structure. Our guess is that they are structural parts of a canopy, bronze fittings of wooden parts that have disintegrated. Some of them evidently were made so that they could be fitted together, dismantled for storage, and reassembled at need. As for the other four pits, they contained orderly rows of pottery urns, jars, pots, plates, lids, and so forth, many of which were found sealed with locking mechanisms and had held food. These perhaps were funerary offerings for the marquis’ consumption in the afterlife.

The Excavation Report of Burial Pits Associated with the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng was sponsored by the Shelby White and Leon Levy Program in 2015 and published in Sept. 2021 by the Science Press, Beijing, the biggest academic press in China. For more information or to purchase the volume, please visit the publisher's website.

Following BATSH 2 (2005) on the Post-Assyrian to Roman period, the three-part volume BATSH 12 on the Middle and Neo-Assyrian period (c. 1300–550 BC), also edited by Hartmut Kühne, concludes the publication of the excavation at the citadel mound of Tall Šēḫ Ḥamad between 1978 and 1988.
Part 1 (text) comprises 17 chapters. A thorough documentation of the topography of Tall Šēḫ Ḥamad at the dawn of the excavation in 1978 is followed in four chapters (2-5) by description and interpretation of the stratigraphy, architecture, cuneiform archive, and graves of the Middle Assyrian levels. Chapters 14 and 15 cover the Neo-Assyrian evidence in a similar way. Both can be checked against the field record summarized in chapter 18 (part 2) and ultimately against the field diaries published online. Selected Middle Assyrian objects groups are analyzed in chapters 6 to 10 (clay sealing devices, scarab impressions, early iron, glass, and ceramics). Aspects of Middle Assyrian administration and the etymology of Duara are treated in chapters 11 and 13. Chapter 16 evaluates the fragments of a Neo-Assyrian sculptured orthostat. The urban and socio-economic-environmental development and the historical role and significance of Dūr-Katlimmu in both periods are debated in chapters 12 and 17 respectively.
Besides chapter 18 part 2 covers the catalogues of the scarab impressions (19), the grave goods (21) and the remaining objects of the Middle (20) and Neo-Assyrian (22) periods. Each chapter is preceded by English abstracts/summaries on which the Arabic part is based. In addition, the publication is supplemented by a cassette with 57 colour plates and folding plans in part 3.
In collaboration with:
H. Kühne, P. Pfälzner, J. Rohde, S. Kulemann-Ossen/G. Preuss, H. Dohmann, S. Seidlmayer, K. Tantrakarn/T. Kikugawa/Y. Abe/I. Nakai, E. Cancik-Kirschbaum, C. Hess, J. Bussiliat/K. Gnybek/A. Kaeselitz/H. Kühne/J. Rohde.

The publication project was directed by Dr. Hartmut Kühne
For ordering information, please visit the publisher's website HERE