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This article collected papers published by Chinese archaeologists in Chinese and World core journals (CCJs and WCJs for short) in the past century. Based on bibliometric analysis, the general characteristics and trends of Chinese archaeology were summarized. In a macroscopic perspective, historiography-rooted archaeology focusing on historical periods and central areas of China and preferring traditional archaeological methods (mainly a culture-historical paradigm) will continue to occupy a leading position in China. Simultaneously, interdisciplinary research and internationalisation will likely continue to develop and diversify Chinese archaeology, though the speed is unknown due to the impact of the pandemic. In comparison, more attention needs to be paid to theoretical research and to publishing more results of historical archaeology in WCJs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 19th century, French youth detention was a necropolitical enterprise aimed at controlling precarious social classes. Built in the 1840s in Normandy, Ferme Neuve is a rare example of the first generation of public youth penal colonies in France. First an annex to the prison of Gaillon, from 1862 to 1868, it then formed the core of the youth penal colony of Les Douaires. This paper reconstructs the history so-far disregarded of Ferme Neuve, demolished in the 1960s, and produces a 3D digital reconstruction of what its built environment might have looked like. It then goes on to discuss the high mortality at Ferme Neuve, emphasizing the responsibility of the French state in this surplus of deaths and arguing that this system prefigured contemporary processes of othering poor and racialized youth in France. The paper ends by discussing the need to politicize archaeologies of incarceration in the recent past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 2021 sentence condemned a retired Major of the Military Police of Minas Gerais on charges of genocide against the Krenak people. Between 1969 and 1979, that state’s Military Police established two prisons of exception. The sentence is crucial on the grounds of the enormous human and cultural damage endured by the indigenous peoples of Brazil during the Military Dictatorship of 1964–1985, as established by the Brazilian Truth Commission. This paper discusses an archaeological and anthropological approach to the conditions prevailing at these prisons and attested by some of its survivors. By addressing their form of internment, the slave labour and torture committed at them, this paper will discuss the extent to which such prisons can be considered concentration camps. This article on their archaeological study hopes to make a useful contribution to the archaeology of repression and resistance to that dictatorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the plans and layouts of Chinese ceramic workshops from the Tang to Ming periods (seventh to seventeenth century AD) to understand how ceramic production was organized and how organization developed over time. Through the comparative examination of 254 workshops from 96 workshop sites, two workshop types have been defined based on the spatial arrangement of their production facilities. This paper argues that each workshop type reflects a different degree of labor specialization, and despite some regional differences, the organization of ceramic production developed in a consistent way across China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given that culture involves some form of transmission from one generation to the next, the question of its origins must necessarily involve activities that do not depend on its pre-existence. Dancing is significant in being simultaneously an individual and a spontaneous activity, dependent on biological underpinnings that are instinctive, for example, in human children. It is also a phenomenon present in almost all human societies and cultures as an activity that can exist both within and without specific cultural context. In this paper, we examine dance from the point of view of cultural evolution, both as a spontaneous activity independent of any pre-existing culture and as transmitted patterns of behaviour within and between generations. The paper offers ideas as background to a model which we then briefly outline in our conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the Early Neolithic phase of activity on an axehead quarry at the Eagle’s Nest, Lambay, a small island off the east coast of Ireland. The site is best known for activity in the later Neolithic and its cultural connections with the developed passage tomb tradition. One area of the site has produced evidence for quarrying from the thirty-eighth or thirty-seventh century cal BC, supplying secure evidence that axe production was integral to the Neolithic material world in Ireland from the beginnings of this period. Porphyritic andesite would seem a counter-intuitive choice to make stone axeheads, its naturally occurring internal fissuring resulting in a high likelihood of failure during working. On the other hand, when ground and polished it has a very distinctive visual appearance and texture with a lustrous quality. This paper examines the ontological significance of this transformation from source to special objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a historiographical approach to review the allied fields of Egyptology and Egyptian Archaeology in relation to studies of disability and bodily differences in ancient Egypt. We incorporate critical disability studies and embodiment theories to consider whether ableism is prevalent across these disciplines. The focus of this study has been inverted from 'identifying' disability. Instead our primary driving question is: are Egyptological approaches to bodily differences and disabilities contributing to a production and maintenance of ableism in Egyptology? Here we first identify ableist narratives within numerous methodologies highlighting the need to reconsider existing approaches, terminologies, models, and assumptions regarding studies of disability in the ancient past. We then challenge readers to recognise ableism as a form of inequality in the existing scholarship, and in turn, call for better awareness of assumptions relating to bodily norms, terminologies, and inclusivity in ancient world studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dolia were the largest type of pottery in the ancient world, capable of holding hundreds to as much as three thousand liters. Their shape and size facilitated wine fermentation, and also made them the most expensive and difficult type of pottery to produce. This paper discusses the production of dolia to explore the specialized skills, which consisted of both free and enslaved labor, necessary for the craft. Dolia were also produced alongside brick and tile products in workshops that supplied the building industry of Rome. Craftsmen trained to make dolia acquired considerable skills and usually advanced in the workshop. As a result, a type of professional identity developed, one that both reified and defied conventions since some workers were enslaved and/or manumitted. Finally, this paper briefly discusses the enslaved potter David Drake from nineteenth-century South Carolina to consider the limits of our knowledge about skilled and enslaved craftsmen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Longquan celadon industry, located in Zhejiang province in China, which flourished mainly between the Southern Song and early Ming dynasties. The products of this industry are found on archaeological sites across China and the Indian Ocean. This paper attempts a quantified analysis of the development of the industry based on archaeological data, focussing on four aspects: production, domestic consumption, overseas consumption and, to a lesser degree, workshop organisation. Although much of the data is still problematic, and many of the conclusions drawn are necessarily, therefore, tentative, these are the only data available. They allow us at least to demonstrate the value and timeliness of the approach by charting the development of this industry and by arguing that the close integration of the four aspects examined indicates that the Longquan celadon industry was an industry of considerable economic significance across much of the Indian Ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluating the links between South American Amerindian ontologies and the contextual study of knapped lithic technology is the main goal of this paper. To this end, we focus on a study case from eastern Catamarca province, Argentina, during the 1st millennium A.D. We identified projectile points in only one context, a rock art rock shelter (Oyola 7), while in other archaeological sites in the area, we have not recorded this type of stone tool. Drawing on ethnohistoric and ethnographic data regarding the connection between arrows and shamanic practices of illness and healing, we propose considering the agencies of these objects, as well as their intrinsic danger and their multiple possibilities of affecting beyond their traditional functional interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the role and meaning of grinding artefacts in Handoga (Djibouti), a medieval town that flourished between the 13th and 16th centuries in a territory previously occupied by nomadic communities. The technical-morphological and morphological-functional studies conducted on the sample suggest that the management of tools related to agriculture followed an approach characterized by minimal care through the different stages of the objects’ lives. This situation, contradictory to what could be expected in a town that had been sedentary for centuries, has been used to reflect on the interrelations between these objects and their users, following Hodder’s concept of entanglement. The analyses conducted on Handoga’s tools point that contrary to what could be expected, some processes such as sedentarization, which are usually conceived as univocal or inevitable can be negotiated or even rejected, and the material-human interactions built around them can also be untangled, if desired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is proposed that an approach to difference through repetition, inspired by the writing of Gilles Deleuze, provides a conceptual approach to understand the endurance of urban life in medieval England. Perceptions of urban decline in later medieval England are contradicted by the persistence of urban places and communities. A tension, whereby persistence implies repetition yet decline implies discontinuity and difference, is evident. By developing a framework for understanding medieval urbanity as a series of repetitive processes of differentiation, this paper outlines how we might shift our approach to understanding past urban lives, with implications for how we engage with critical issues in urban studies, including the multiplicity, resilience and sustainability of urban lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing rate of global inequality, on the one hand, and hyper-consumerism, particularly among higher socio-economic classes in developed countries, on the other, have resulted in the emergence of new forms of subsistence, lifestyles and settlement types where subaltern groups and populations live and work. This paper investigates the emergence of two of these kinds of settlement in Tehran, Iran, that have developed based on the intersection of two factors: garbage and undocumented migration. In these places, undocumented Afghan migrants sort and sell dry garbage. At the same time, these places shelter the workers, chiefly teenage and underage undocumented Afghan migrants. This paper is a preliminary effort to archaeologically categorize and conceptualize these garbage-based settlements. Archaeology is among the best methodologies to investigate the materiality and inequality faced by such transient subaltern groups in the short and long term. Here I discuss how several factors, beyond absolute poverty, participate in turning garbage into a livelihood and generate garbage-based settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the available vertebrate record from the Lesser Sunda Islands to explore the effect the Last Glacial Maximum had on human subsistence strategies. By focusing on vertebrate assemblages from Laili and Matja Kuru 2 in Timor Leste, Tron Bon Lei in Alor Island, and Here Sorot Entapa in Kisar, this paper investigates biodiversity and resource availability in these nearby islands through the application of standardising indices and statistical testing. Results indicate that vertebrate biodiversity remained fairly stable through and after the Last Glacial Maximum, suggesting that in terms of available mammals, birds and reptiles, this period did not led to severe resource depletion. Hence, potential variations in human subsistence practices or occupation dynamics might not be due to changes in vertebrate diversity. As such, this analysis contributes to investigating anatomically modern humans' subsistence adaptation in the Lesser Sunda Islands pre- and post-Last Glacial Maximum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a cross-comparative examination of how tropical forested islands were populated by humans. It first describes the unique ecological conditions of these environments, how they fluctuated during glacial cycles, and the challenges and affordances they provided people. The paper then explores the global archaeological record, classifying modes of colonisation that led insular tropical forests to be populated. These modes include terrestrial colonisation followed by insularisation (Mode A), maritime colonisation followed by major landmass reconfiguration (Mode B), maritime colonisation of uninhabited islands that always remained insular (Mode C), and maritime colonisation of already inhabited islands (Mode D). Finally, the paper discusses how, amongst Homo sapiens, ongoing dynamism between human adaptive behaviours and environmental flux stimulated processes of diversification, specialisation, and connectivity in these crucial ecologies; by contrast, archaic hominins like Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, and Homo luzonensis may have found changes associated with forest expansion and insularity extremely challenging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Roman writers wrote about Pre-Roman Central-Italy, they consigned to History a picture made of epic wars and brave warriors. Indeed, the Archaic period is the golden age of the Pre-Roman aristocracy and warrior ideology played a crucial role in building it. In this paper, I will focus on the specific case of the Vestini Cismontani, a Sabine tribe of modern Abruzzo, in order to define the role of war and its display within communities of the same ethne. The high number of weapons and warriors, along with the widespread fortification of the territory, even in areas supposed to be within the borders, are indicators of a society where fighting and rivalries are part of the wider diplomatic balance of the region. In this paper, I will explore settlement patterns and archaeological evidence in order to define the role of war and inter-communal aggression in a mountainous and harsh landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of news media in the dissemination of archaeological research is beginning to receive some attention, but this is inadequate when considering the scale of the news media as a tool for public archaeology and mass-distribution of archaeological research in digital news sites. Archaeology needs to urgently address this oversight and begin to construct appropriate and sustainable working relationships with the news media, founded on a critical evaluation of current strategies, to regulate the information that is disseminated through this medium. This paper takes a British perspective, though the themes and necessary improvements have global significance. I suggest that we begin to appreciate the role of the archaeologist in the construction of knowledge through the mass media by embracing ‘archaeo-media’- a neologism here proposed to explore the intersections and interactions between archaeology and news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few decades, Italy has been at the forefront of mass migration flows. Starting from the late 1990s, facilities for the detention and expulsion of undocumented migrants have been established. In this paper, we analyse one of the earliest examples of such structures in the Mediterranean: the former temporary holding facility (or C.P.T. Centro di Permanenza Temporanea) ‘Regina Pacis’ located in south-eastern Italy. In 1997, the structure was repurposed into one of the largest C.P.T in Italy until its closure in 2005. Through an approach that combines archaeology and ethnography, we aim to understand the role that material culture played in subjugating and controlling the life of the migrants, attempting to evaluate, at the same time, the impact that the facility had on its hosting community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the impact of modern land use and climate change on mounded prehistoric sites, considering the evidence from Kur River Basin (southwestern Iran). By applying remote sensing and GIS techniques to historical and recent satellite imagery, we monitored an assemblage of 45 Neolithic mounds in order to map and quantify their taphonomic signatures over the last 53 years. Our results highlight that the deterioration of sites occurred as a result of landscape transformation due to land use and socio-economic dynamics that were exacerbated by current climate change. Increasing demands for fertile land and water led to the over-exploitation of sources, resulting in changing hydrological regimes and ecological systems and loss of the archaeological record. By contextualizing these processes over a historical perspective, our findings contribute to archaeological heritage management efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culturally modified trees (CMTs) are a unique form of archaeology and cultural heritage. There are several factors affecting the survival of culturally modified trees in Australia, and these will all likely be exacerbated by climate change. Boab trees (Adansonia gregorii), which are endemic to northwest Australia, have been subject to modification by Indigenous people both prior to and following the settlement of the Kimberley region by European and Anglo-Australians. Many of the potential impacts of climate change on boab tree survival are yet to be determined, but a range of new threats are emerging as potential endangerment. Through the insights of Indigenous knowledge, this paper discusses one particularly significant boab tree in Nyikina Country and how its demise may be linked to erroneous human actions in the recent past. This provides a unique perspective on how the complexities of climate change may be conceptualised through living knowledge and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological heritage is under threat by climate change all over the world and its resulting impacts are happening so quickly and within so many different physical and socio-cultural contexts, that it is impossible for any single organization or discipline to combat. For this reason, researchers have developed various methods and options in engaging the public’s help through community-based and citizen science research, including community archaeology and community heritage projects to better preserve our cultural heritage. This paper presents five diverse case studies from Alaska, Scotland, Florida, Australia and Guadeloupe to highlight how collaboration and community archaeology are building better practices to manage coastal archaeological heritage. The case studies are compared and analysed based on underlying components they all share. In the end the most common factors attributing to a successful community archaeology project will be determined and reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of scholarship exploring Cambodia’s cultural-religious environment alongside reinterpretations of ancient Angkorian epigraphy has illuminated the enduring sacredness of Cambodia’s ancient religious places and objects. This assertion comes despite apparent dissociation of these elements from their original ascribed identities (Brahmano-Buddhist) and disuse as focal points of politico-religious congregation at some point in the past. Although documented within Cambodian archaeological studies since the 20th century, fieldwork conducted at ancient Theravāda Buddhist monasteries (vihāra/praḥ vihār) within the Khmer civic-ceremonial center of Angkor Thom between 2017 and 2023 have substantiated that these ancient statues and holy spaces continued to serve as equivalently spiritual, highly localized arenas of ancestral animist practices and cultural-historical negotiation over time. This paper assesses several categories of these archaeological data within the framework of reidentification, reuse, and transformation beyond initial discard, including the deposition of statuary and acts of place-making in the vicinity of older ruins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including the role and significance of ethnoarchaeological research in contemporary archaeology, and working with Indigenous communities in Australia and Southwest U.S. to understand local rock-art tradition.

Using multidisciplinary literature, this paper takes a multispecies approach to human-termite interactions across the tropics to demonstrate how termites exploit ecological effects of human behaviours and in turn provide humans with significant ecosystem services. These provisions are deeply entangled within cultural practices and ideologies. Conceptualisations of human and landscape fertility, and the role of termites in facilitating life, create gendered interactions that are manifested in ecological knowledge and praxis relating to termites and termite mounds. The strong association between termites and farmers in particular, may offer insights into past human settlement patterns and their relationships with ecosystems. This paper proposes the use of geomorphology, thin-section ceramic petrography, and stable isotope analysis to investigate these relationships across the tropics. A multispecies approach creates new possibilities for a diachronic understanding of human ecology and raises important questions for the Anthropocene and the future of farming in the tropics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rebuilding of the US South following the US Civil War was only possible through widespread forced prison labor formalized as part of the Southern convict lease system. The convict lease system cemented an ideological and practical link between incarceration, forced labor, and race as a means to uphold white supremacy and white financial security. However, while the convict lease system resembles prior US iterations of slavery, convict labor acted as a totalizing form of enslavement that departed significantly from those earlier forms. The transition from forced laborers as private property to forced laborers as state property brought with it a host of reconfigurations related to laborers' identities vis-à-vis capitalist needs. Using a labor framework, this paper explores how laborer identities related to race, gender, and class were reinterpreted within the convict lease system and how those changes manifest in the material record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Madame Montour, the child of a union forged by an Algonquin woman and French settler, leveraged her fluency in multiple indigenous and European languages to emerge as one of the most prominent interpreters in colonial New York and Pennsylvania. As the fur trade developed and new material culture was introduced in colonial North America, the labor of intercultural interpreters was invaluable as the interactions of diverse peoples, both settler and indigenous, intensified. This paper examines the distinguished career of Madame Montour as an interpreter engaged in intercultural diplomacy during an increasingly tumultuous and violent time that was marked by shifts in the relationship between gender and labor identity. I consider how payments in the form of cash, cloth, and clothing were entwined in the negotiation of an emerging colonial identity and how Madame Montour advocated to be recognized for her labor and to receive timely compensation for her skilled work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent discovery of a bakery in the Casa Rustio Vero at Pompeii has revived a discussion about forced labor and punitive incarceration in Roman-era bakeries. The bakery was hidden in the back of the house and had bars on windows between the house and the bakery, restricting access into or out of the bakery. The excavators interpreted it as a 'prison bakery'. The nature of forced labor in Roman bakeries is, in fact, as complicated as the actual bakeries themselves which vary from city to city and workshop to workshop. This paper explores the evidence, both textual and archaeological, for forced labor, punitive labor, and enslavement in bakeries, imagining how those different phenomena might graft onto bakeries employing varying sorts of production models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a richly-documented historical case study, Islamic period Southwest Asia provides useful insights into the archaeology of mining and metallurgy. Labor, however, is more difficult to reconstruct from available historical sources, and its study requires a more directly archaeological approach. This paper presents a series of approaches to mining and metallurgical labor, drawing primarily on case studies of copper, silver, and gold mines in Southwest Asia, to address issues of labor provisioning and organization, the social identities of laborers, and the ways in which laborers deployed and transmitted specialized knowledge of metallurgical practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the archaeological and geographical criteria, as well as ethnographic paradigms used to write the history of the agrarian communities of the eastern Mediterranean. It combines anthropological research and archaeological evidence to examine the socio-economic dimensions of rural cooperatives, and subsequently attends to their formative role in increasingly complex agrarian economies. This paper argues for a middle ground between enduring top-down vs bottom-up perspectives to consider alternative views that highlight agency and entrepreneurship coexisting with cooperation and consensus in agrarian production. It subsequently discusses the contentious evidence for rural cooperatives by considering evidence for their presence within a more nuanced rural history, using the case of Cyprus in the 2nd millennium BCE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the study of four late to middle to late Tang Dynasty (781–907 CE) and one Song Dynasty (907–1279 CE) Buddhist sites which are set within a kilometre of one another to the south of the ancient centre of Rongxian (荣县), Zigong, Sichuan. The question addressed is whether these five religious sites could have existed as distinct entities, or if over time they became part of a unified whole. Traditionally such sites are considered as independent works of art divorced from their landscape and social context. Since the connections demonstrated in this paper indicate a unity of purpose we suggest that a more holistic approach to the study of such monuments is worthwhile. This paper proposes that although these sites were originally distinct entities during the Tang, they came to be connected by a pilgrimage route defined by the construction of a pagoda in the Song Dynasty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1959, the politics of assimilation led to the creation of a set of municipally organised camps for Roma people in the Stockholm area. The camps were to function as controlled settlements of transition for Roma families awaiting proper homes. This paper focuses on one such camp – the Skarpnäck Camp – which existed longer than anticipated, to the point that its continued operation was criticised as being inconsistent with the government's assimilation policy. This paper represents an analysis of historical archaeological fieldwork at the former Skarpnäck Camp in southern Stockholm and is based upon interviews conducted with former inhabitants of and visitors to the camp. It uncovers aspects of Roma history on the margins of Swedish society and how marginalisation of the Roma group was given physical form in the creation of sanctioned camps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa has thus far contributed little to debates in the field of island archaeology. This paper explores the potential of São Tomé and Príncipe, a small island state in the Gulf of Guinea that may be the only country in the world where no archaeological fieldwork has yet been undertaken. This contrasts sharply with its importance as a focal point in the development of plantation economies based on unfree labour, campaigns of resistance to these, the transfer of crops between the Old and New Worlds, and the emergence of new, creolized societies, as well as with its enmeshment in systems of international trade and exploitation foundational to global capitalism. This paper discusses the contributions that archaeological research in the archipelago could make to these and other themes, including the environmental impacts of human settlement, and identifies parallels with work on islands in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of publications, including a recent paper in World Archaeology, have developed theories on why stone suddenly became a popular material for tomb construction in Han Dynasty China and how foreign masonry techniques were brought to China from across Eurasia. The object of this paper is to examine further the reception of foreign masonry architectural techniques through an analysis of stone-carved tombs from early China. It argues that the reception of foreign masonry techniques was based on the demands generated by using stone as the primary tomb building material during the Han Dynasty. Through the introduction of advanced masonry techniques, new understandings of the material world were incorporated into masonry architecture in a Chinese cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where do Chinese gender norms come from and how did they culturally evolve through time? This question receives ample debate in the context of Warring States, pre-Imperial, and Imperial China. Many archaeologists and interdisciplinary scholars contend that earliest China treated its women relatively well. This paper's interdisciplinary examination of bioarchaeological evidence from Neolithic and pre-Imperial sources synthesizes new information to enrich this debate. Discussed are studies of sex-linked DNA drawn from human remains, sex ratio data from burials, and indicators of diet quality including isotopic studies of nitrogen and carbon as well as dental pathologies. The paper focuses on data drawn from polities within the phylocultural cultural trunk leading to Imperial China. Evidence indicates that women in pre-Imperial China were treated less well than in other early societies. Comparative lessons about the cultural evolution of Chinese gender norms in the context of norms in other early civilizations are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plastic pollution is a global phenomenon offering a vivid illustration of the scale of anthropic impacts on the environment, a key characteristic in defining the Anthropocene. Plastic pollution not only contributes to the current climate crisis but is also accentuated by extreme events caused by climate change. The scale and omnipresence of the issue of plastic pollution makes it a relevant object of study for archaeologists, as well as an object of concern for heritage and archaeological sites marked by plastic pollution. In this paper, I advocate for an archaeological consideration of plastic pollution, by exploring plastics as artefacts (through visual analysis and archaeological science), as chronological markers in the stratigraphy and eventually as components of waste landscapes. While the issue of plastic pollution can be studied archaeologically, I argue that it must be considered by archaeologists, especially as natural and cultural heritage sites are threatened by the presence of plastic pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shanghai region is home to millennia of archaeological cultures and a massive modern metropolois. Until recently, this regional history has remained within the overarching framework of a north-China centric archaeology. Throughout the emergence of archaeological cultures in Shanghai and its periphery, however, we can observe striking adaptations to the vulnerability of its landscape, as well as ingenious technical and engineering solutions. This paper uses archaeological data to explore how this fragile environment was treated in the past and how people adapted to it, offering insights into the long-term human-environment interactions with the Lower Yangtze area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kingdom of Koguryŏ was one of the so-called Three Kingdoms of Korea in the 1st millennium AD. According to the Samguk Sagi (Historical Records of the Three States), it was founded on what is now North Korea and northeastern China. Not only are the archaeological remains a cultural asset that should not be underestimated, they are powerful enough to be claimed for political purposes today. Overland connections from the Chinese mainland east to Japan and Korea are long recognised. These empires were extremely rich and powerful at the time of the Tang (617/18–907 AD) – Nara in Japan, as well as Koguryŏ, Silla and Paekche on the Korean Peninsula. This paper considers the impressive remains of the Koguryŏ culture, not least in China's Jilin Province along the North Korean border and explores the historical and archaeological legacy and power of the Koguryŏ Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the international stage, discussions on theoretical and methodological aspects of settlement archaeology tend to be dominated by Anglo-American scholarship associated with the emergence of the New Archaeology's systemic view of culture and its ecological outlook in which settlement pattern analysis became a crucial approach. Few people are aware that a scholar of Chinese origin, K.C. Chang, contributed substantially to these debates already since the 1950s and introduced western practices of settlement archaeology to China in the 1980s. Since then, numerous international collaborative projects in China have provided a fruitful basis for an exchange of ideas between different scholarly traditions and providing opportunities for methods developed in the West to be tested in a different cultural and environmental context. The present paper traces these developments, highlighting the extent of the Chinese contributions and concluding with some thoughts on the standing of Chinese archaeology within the field of archaeology worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Later prehistory in Eurasia is characterised by a suite of radical new technologies that include metallurgy, writing, and the wheel. Their emergence has often been attributed to the dramatically improved efficiencies they offer. This paper argues that instrumental accounts underplay the aesthetic qualities of technical action that have considerable bearing on how technologies emerge. In archaeology, the aesthetics of techniques finds limited recognition. Here, thinking on 'cultural techniques' from media theory, the French tradition in the anthropology of techniques, and notions of skill and learning from ecological psychology are combined to develop the aesthetic perspective required for exploring the relationship between technical action, the experience of technological wonder, and the formation of lasting infrastructures. The paper concludes that some emergent technologies create a convergence of different zones of activity, generating the growing infrastructural integration that characterises later Eurasian prehistory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I seek to explore how a particular aspect of process philosophy can offer us new ways of thinking through time in archaeology. In contrast to current archaeological debates, which counterpose a model of archaeology as driven primarily by history and sequence with one of memory and contemporaneity, the process approach taken here develops a different account. Drawing on the three syntheses of time set out by Gilles Deleuze, the paper explores how habit, memory and difference allow us to think about time in new ways from both passive and active perspectives. Explored through the work of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project, the paper sets out how these syntheses allow for a multiplicity of times situated within a consistent ontological approach, one that lets us understand the processes by which narratives of both history and memory emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the generally acephalous landscape of the Igbo society of southeastern Nigeria, forms of hierarchy are noticeable, with certain criteria traditionally established to rank some villages higher than or 'senior' to others. This paper drew from ethnographic research in two Igbo towns to explore ways in which masks and oral tradition were deployed to advance the ranked orders of lineages and villages. Contemplating this scenario in such a place like the Igbo society well known for its acephalous landscape is the broader perspective the paper raised. In the village groups studied, oral tradition and ranking of masked performances were seen to co-extend from existing lineage- and village-based hierarchies. Masking and oral tradition were major tools that ritualized and ratified the prevailing hierarchies, endowing them with supernatural legitimacy, in order to ensure their sustenance. The benefits accruing to the advantaged lineages and villages would tend to motivate a tendency to sustain the established structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of recent publications, including a recent special issue of World Archaeology, have engaged with museum collections as assemblages that can be studied productively. This paper attempts to refigure 'collection' and 'assemblage' as action nouns, in order to explore the role these processes can have in generating understandings of the past, especially within museum settings. While nineteenth-century projects involving collecting and assemblage contributed fundamental disciplinary frameworks to archaeology, museums have increasingly been regarded as institutions exclusively focused on the archival storage of excavated material, and the display of archaeological knowledge generated through fieldwork. This paper makes the case that a creative and reflective reengagement with collection, as a process of assemblage and reassemblage, including in forms made possible by electronic media, has the potential to refresh museum archaeology for the twenty-first century, realigning it with other archaeological practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors reply here to the recent paper by Delage on Leroi-Gourhan and the concept of the chaine opératoire. Leaving aside the excessive nature of his accusations, they show that his confusion of the chaîne opératoire concept and method, ignorance of the developmental context of the 1950s and the 1960s, and his pretence to 'straighten' a story without looking at the pertinent archives and interviewing the surviving participants results in a highly biased argument and several misrepresentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses events following the 1878 discovery of a rich Lower Palaeolithic 'living floor' at Stoke Newington, London, to explore the social and economic relationships and imbalances that existed within Palaeolithic archaeology in the mid to late nineteenth century. It explores in particular the role of the British working classes in amassing the extant record, the biases they might have introduced and the value of this archaeology to their own lives and livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]