Fire as an Instrument: The Archaeology of Pyrotechnologies

This volumes presents 13 papers based on a session held at the EAA meeting in St Petersburg in 2003, and offers a 'material' perception of fire, which will be approached as an artefact, together with its material support. Contents: 1) Hearth, heat and meat (Ulla Odgaard ); 2) A social instrument: Examining the chaîne-opératoire of the hearth (Silje Evjenth Bentsen); 3) Etude du profil thermique d'une structure de combustion en meule (pit kiln): four ou foyer simple ? (Claude Sestier); 4) Preserved in fire, Late Neolithic settlement structures in Western Hungary (Judit Regenye); 5) Chalcolithic pyroinstruments with air-draught - an outline (Dragos Gheorghiu); 6) A re-interpretation of a bronze age ceramic. Was it a cheese mould or a Bunsen burner? (Jacqui Wood); Chalcolithic copper source-material and end-products: Early trade between Israel and Jordan (Sariel Shalev); 7) Iron production in the Northern Eurasian Bronze Age (Stanislav A. Grigoriev); 8) Pyrotechnology of Titelberg Iron Age coin production (Ralph M. Rowlett and Dragana Mladenovic); 9) Fire cult? - The spatial organization of a cooking pit site in Scania (Jes Martens); 10) Ashes to Ashes: The Instrumental Use of Fire in West-Central European Early Iron Age Mortuary Ritual (Seth A. Schneider); 11) Roasters from the Early Medieval hillfort at Stradów, Czarnocin commune, South Poland, in the light of the results of specialist analyses (Bartlomiej Szymon Szmoniewski, Andrzej Kielski, Maria Litynska-Zajac, Krystyna Wodnicka); 13) Pyrotechnology and local resources in Chianti shire: from clay, limestone and wood to bricks, lime and pottery making. Some preliminary notes (Marta Caroscio).