In the first two centuries CE, commodities from Afghanistan and traded by way of Afghanistan held a prominent place in the maritime trade of the western Indian Ocean. This paper explores the maritime links between Afghanistan, ...

In the millennium after 300 BC, the western Indian Ocean emerged as a main hub of Old World exchange. Study of this commerce long depended on separate regional archaeologies and a handful of literary sources with Western/Roman ...

How do archaeologists understand the relationship between climate, climate change, and urban biographies? In this article, I argue that urban biographies should be approached as the life stories they claim to be, with ...

The ancient East African kingdom of Aksum gradually adopted Christianity from the early- to mid-fourth-century reign of Ezana onwards. The well-known narrative of the late Roman church-historian Rufinus relates a top-down ...

This article addresses the role of minerals and mineral products in general and gemstones in particular in Red Sea and Western Indian .cean trade in the frst millennium. It is argued that texts from the early part of the ...

In this proof-of-concept study we investigate the potential and chal-lenges of a formal network approach for the examination of 1st to 3rd century CE kinship networks in ancient Palmyra (in present-day Syria). The recent ...

The Indian Ocean is famous for its well-documented Jewish and Islamic trading networks of the medieval and early modern periods. Social networks that eased the challenges of cross-cultural trade have a much longer history ...

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is a Roman period guide to trade and navigation in the Indian Ocean. Justly famous for offering a contemporary and descriptive account of early Indian Ocean trade, the work has been subject ...