In this latest publication in the TII Heritage series, the long prehistory of Kells and its hinterland is shown to be written on the landscape in foundation trenches and boundary ditches, pits, post-holes, hearths, and myriad other marks of human life, which were discovered along the route of the M3 Clonee to Kells motorway project and recorded by an archaeological team from Irish Archaeological Consultancy Ltd. The story begins with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and continues, chapter by chapter, over a span of c. 5,000 years, recording the homes, burial grounds, work and worship of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age communities and bringing us at last to the threshold of history, in the Iron Age/early medieval transition period. Kells was not yet the seat of a famous monastery at that time but had already become a central place in the region, with a tribal capital at Commons of Lloyd, on the hill that overlooks the town today. The Road to Kells: Prehistoric Archaeology of the M3 Navan to Kells and N52 Kells Bypass Road Project, is available now through Wordwell Books and Transport Infrastructure Ireland.

Fintan Walsh has been a professional field archaeologist for over 20 years. He studied Archaeology and Palaeoecology at Queen’s University Belfast, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1997. He has published numerous papers and reports on his fieldwork in Ireland and is especially interested in Early Neolithic and early medieval archaeology. Fintan currently works as a full-time archaeological project manager and lives in Limerick City.

Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher of the early medieval period, who is the Coordinator for Digital Engagement of the International Society of Medieval Art and an Adjunct Professor at Roger Williams University.

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The Remaking of Archival Values by Victoria Hoyle (Routledge, October 2022) posits that archival theory and practice are fields in flux, and that recent critical archival discourse that addresses neoliberalism, racism, and the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy represents a disruption not only to established principles but also to the values that underpin them.

Using critical discourse analysis and comparing theory and practice from the UK and the Anglophone world, Hoyle explores the challenges faced by scholars, institutions, organizations, and practitioners in embedding new values. She demonstrates how persistent underlying discursive structures about archives have manifested from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Qualitative and participatory research in the UK shows how conceptions of archival value arise, are expressed, and become authorized in practice at international, national, and local levels. Considering what might be learnt from similar debates in public history and cultural heritage studies, the book asks if and how dominant epistemologies of the archive can be dismantled amidst systems of power that resist change.

As Hoyle reflects in this interview, “I call the book The Remaking of Archival Values and I talk throughout about how my own archival values have been remade, but I don’t mean by that that we arrive at a new set of archival values. But rather: that we acknowledge that this process of remaking is fundamental to our practice, and that we enter this position of suspension in order to continue that process of remaking perpetually rather than expecting some kind of end point.”

The Remaking of Archival Values is relevant to researchers and students in the field of archival and information studies, as well as practitioners who work with archives around the world. It will also speak to the interests of those working in the fields of cultural heritage, archaeology, museum studies, public history, and gender and race studies.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia: A Reconstruction Based on the Safaitic Inscriptions (Brill, 2022) by Ahmad al-Jallad presents evidence for religious identity and ritual practices among the Safaitic-writing nomads of pre-Islamic Arabia. For this evidence, al-Jallad relies on a large corpus of rock-carved inscriptions in the Safaitic language. Unlike Islamic-period literary sources, this material was produced by practitioners of traditional Arabian religion; the inscriptions are eyewitnesses to the religious life of Arabian nomads prior to the spread of Judaism and Christianity across Arabia. Al-Jallad reconstructs this world using the original words of its inhabitants, interpreted through comparative philology, pre-Islamic and Islamic-period literary sources, and the archaeological context. In this episode we discuss the lifestyles, worldviews, belief systems, languages, and gender and social norms of the nomadic peoples of pre-Islamic Arabia based on the epigraphic evidence.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.

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In 1998, the Belitung, a ninth-century western Indian Ocean–style vessel, was discovered in Indonesian waters. Onboard was a full cargo load, likely intended for the Middle Eastern market, of over 60,000 Chinese Tang-dynasty ceramics, gold, and other precious objects. It is one of the most significant shipwreck discoveries of recent times, revealing the global scale of ancient commercial endeavors and the centrality of the ocean within the Silk Road story.

But this shipwreck also has a modern tale to tell, of how nation-states appropriate the remnants of the past for their own purposes, and of the international debates about who owns—and is responsible for—shared heritage. The commercial salvage of objects from the Belitung, and their subsequent sale to Singapore, contravened the principles of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and prompted international condemnation. The resulting controversy continues to reverberate in academic and curatorial circles. Major museums refused to host international traveling exhibitions of the collection, and some archaeologists announced they would rather see the objects thrown back in the sea than ever go on display.

Shipwrecks are anchored in the public imagination, their stories of treasure and tragedy told in museums, cinema, and song. At the same time, they are sites of scholarly inquiry, a means by which maritime archaeologists interrogate the past through its material remains. Every shipwreck is an accidental time capsule, replete with the sunken stories of those on board, of the personal and commercial objects that went down with the vessel, and of an unfinished journey. In this moving and thought-provoking reflection of underwater cultural heritage management, Natali Pearson reveals valuable new information about the Belitung salvage, obtained firsthand from the salvagers, and the intricacies in the many conflicts and relationships that developed. In tracing the Belitung’s lives and afterlives, Belitung: The Afterlives of a Shipwreck (U Hawaii Press, 2022) shifts our thinking about shipwrecks beyond popular tropes of romance, pirates, and treasure, and toward an understanding of how the relationships between sites, objects, and people shape the stories we tell of the past in the present.

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Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia.

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Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology.

Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins and the Uncanny (Amsterdam UP, 2021) asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern theological imperialism, most evident through the savior-scholar model that resurrects—physically or virtually—ships from wrecks. Instead of construing shipwrecks as dead, awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, this book presents them as vibrant if not recalcitrant objects, having shaken off anthropogenesis through varying stages of ruination. Sara Rich illustrates this anarchic condition with 'hauntographs' of five Age of 'Discovery' shipwrecks, each of which elucidates the wonder of failure and finitude, alongside an intimate brush with the eerie, horrific, and uncanny. 

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Two celebrated Egyptologists bring to vivid life the intriguing and controversial reign of King Tut's parents. Akhenaten has been the subject of radically different, even contradictory, biographies. The king has achieved fame as the world's first individual and the first monotheist, but others have seen him as an incestuous tyrant who nearly ruined the kingdom he ruled. The gold funerary mask of his son Tutankhamun and the painted bust of his wife Nefertiti are the most recognizable artifacts from all of ancient Egypt. But who are Akhenaten and Nefertiti? And what can we actually say about rulers who lived more than three thousand years ago? November 2022 marks the centennial of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun and although "King Tut" is a household name, his nine-year rule pales in comparison to the revolutionary reign of his parents. Akhenaten and Nefertiti became gods on earth by transforming Egyptian solar worship, innovating in art and urban design, and merging religion and politics in ways never attempted before. Combining fascinating scholarship, detective suspense, and adventurous thrills, Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth (St. Martin's Press, 2022) is a journey through excavations, museums, hieroglyphic texts, and stunning artifacts. From clue to clue, renowned Egyptologists John and Colleen Darnell reconstruct an otherwise untold story of the magnificent reign of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

John and Colleen Darnell are a husband-and-wife Egyptologist team. They have presented on the Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic, the Science Channel, and Smithsonian, as well as appeared in National Geographic's "Lost Treasures of Egypt."

John is Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. His archaeological expeditions in Egypt have been covered by the New York Times. In 2017, his Eastern Desert expedition discovered the earliest monumental hieroglyphic inscription and was named one of the top ten discoveries of the year by Archaeology.

Colleen teaches art history at the University of Hartford and Naugatuck Valley Community College; she has curated a major museum exhibit on Egyptian revival art and design at the Yale Peabody Museum.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History (NYU Press, 2022) is an exploration of particular sources of evidence on southern Africa’s early history. It gathers recent ideas about archives and asks the question: “How do we know, or think we know, what happened in the times before European colonialism?”

Historians use a wide range of source materials for this work. What are these materials? Where can we find them? Who made them? When? Why? What are the problems with using them? The essays by well-known historians, archaeologists and other researchers engage these questions from a range of perspectives and in illuminating ways. Written from personal experience, they capture how these researchers encountered their archives of knowledge beyond the textbook. The aim is to make us think critically about where ideas about the time before the colonial era originate and to encourage us to think about why people in South Africa often refer to this “deep history” when arguing about public affairs in the present. The essays will appeal to students, academics, educationists, teachers, archivists, and museum practitioners.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology, and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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The Japanese provincial city of Ichijōdani was destroyed in the civil wars of the late sixteenth century but never rebuilt. Archaeological excavations have since uncovered the most detailed late medieval urban site in the country. Drawing on analysis of specific excavated objects and decades of archaeological evidence to study daily life in Ichijōdani, Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge UP, 2022) illuminates the city's layout, the possessions and houses of its residents, its politics and experience of war, and religious and cultural networks. Morgan Pitelka demonstrates how provincial centers could be dynamic and vibrant nodes of industrial, cultural, economic, and political entrepreneurship and sophistication. In this study a new and vital understanding of late medieval society is revealed, one in which Ichijôdani played a central role in the vibrant age of Japan's sixteenth century.

Morgan Pitelka is Bernard L. Herman Distinguished Professor of Japanese History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945.

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In the strategy game Civilization VI, where players choose world leaders to be their avatar, Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor of China, has one goal in mind: building wonders (like the Great Wall of China). His workers can build wonders faster and more cheaply, and he hates leaders that build more wonders than he does.

That largely corresponds to how people in the West think of the First Emperor: powerful, responsible for unifying China, despotic–and focused on building great works like the Great Wall and the Terracotta.

Civilization VI isn’t one of the many works detailed in Anthony Barbieri’s most recent book, The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China (University of Washington Press: 2022). But it does explore the many ways the life of Qin Shihuang has been represented in books, historical works, mythology, political narratives, movies, tv shows and, yes, video games.

We welcome Anthony back to the show to talk about the First Emperor, and how different writers, politicians, and producers portrayed the different aspects of his life.

Anthony J. Barbieri-Low is professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara. His book Artisans in Early Imperial China won top prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, American Historical Association, College Art Association, and International Convention of Asia Scholars. He is also the author of Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture (University of Washington Press: 2021), which was also the subject of an Asian Review of Books interview last year.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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In Athena Itonia: Geography and Meaning of an Ancient Greek War Goddess (Brill, 2019) Gerald V. Lalonde offers a comparative study of the social, political and military aspects of the cult of Athena Itonia and its propagation among the four regions of ancient Greece where major evidence has come to light.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected].

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