Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (92 page)

Female leader of the
ICENI
tribe of eastern England after the death of the client-king Prasutagus who had attempted to bequeath his kingdom jointly to his daughters and the Roman state. Roman officials ignored this claim and abused his queen, Boudicca, and her daughters. As a result, Boudicca led revolts against the Romans in ad 60–61) which included assaults on the settlements at Colchester (Camulodunum), St Albans (Verulamium), and London (Londinium). The Iceni forces were eventually defeated at the hands of the governor of Britannia, Suetonius Paulinus , and Boudicca reputedly poisoned herself.

 
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The council chamber of an ancient Greek city.

 
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An archaic method of writing, found on some inscriptions, for instance in Gortyna in Crete, where the code of laws is written not in lines from left to right, but as an ox turns with the plough at the end of the furrow, so that having gone from left to right, it returns from right to left.

 
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A term used to describe well-made sub-triangular bifacially worked core tools of the Mousterian industry.

 
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An offensive weapon used in hunting and war since early times. The earliest actual examples preserved in peat bogs date to the Mesolithic, but the presence of small projectile heads on sites extending back into the Middle Palaeolithic suggests that the bow is a much more ancient technology. There are essentially three kinds of bow: first,
simple bows
comprising a basic flexible wooden core with the draw-string fixed at either end and a hand-grip in the centre; second,
reinforced bows
where the wooden core is strengthened by sinew and bark; third, the
composite bow
made from various combinations of wood, bone, horn, and sinew. The composite bow is generally more compact and its development in the southern Russian steppe in the early 3rd millennium is generally associated with archers needing to fire arrows from horseback.

 
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A neckless metal, wooden, or ceramic vessel, which can be defined as having a height more than one-third of, but not greater than, its diameter.

 
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