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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Archaeology lends a critical perspective to research on social inequality due to the field's unique access to deep history, emphasis on materiality, and explicit incorporation of multiple lines of evidence. This paper offers a concise overview of archaeological approaches aimed at students and scholars in other fields. We develop a categorization of disciplinary strategies, arguing that archaeologists address institutionalized inequality through examining inequalities in the accumulation of goods or resources (economic differentiation); access to resources or knowledge (social differentiation), and inequalities in action, the ability to make decisions for oneself or others (political differentiation). We illustrate these categories with reference to the distinctions between material, relational, and embodied wealth. We draw upon a broad range of geographic, chronological, and cultural case studies to illustrate the flexibility and utility of archaeological methods for answering questions about inequality in human societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the death and unequal treatment of human remains in contemporary Brazilian society. It provides an innovative approach to documenting practices such as state inaction and structural violence from an archaeology perspective and explores concepts such as contemporary regimes of disappearance, state apparatus, violence and the 'right to memory' in a neoliberal context. Rather than merely using dichotomies such as repression and visibility, or oppression versus rights, the aim is to use archaeological evidence to problematize the dominant understandings of politics and question the ways in which class, race and gender are used in neoliberal policies by transforming human beings who were not 'profitable in life' into 'profitable in death'. [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]

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]

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 popular prioritization of climate change issues over biodiversity loss in environmental archaeology and palaeoecology has been argued to be in part due to agenda-setting created by the ripple effects of widespread media coverage of climatic change. In this paper, we argue that direct scientific evidence for past human landscapes can act as a powerful tool in modern conservation efforts to combat species loss when taking regional identities, historical ecology, and modern political ecologies into account. How to rank and prioritize conservation efforts in the Anthropocene and best make use of archaeological data are lingering questions within Anthropocene anthropology and archaeological science. By engaging with notions of deep-time enchantment and identity, archaeology can aid conservation biology with revealing the religio-philosophical dimensions that exist between humans and other species, in particular charismatic megafauna that lend themselves to high engagement at a local or regional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Birdstones are an enigmatic and diverse group of objects found across eastern North America with concentrations around the Great Lakes region. Via speculative interpretations of form, analogical comparison with other regions, and consideration of basic contextual information, archaeologists think of birdstones as parts of canoes, flutes, unspecified ceremonial assemblages, and, most frequently, atlatls. Discourse and debate about birdstones largely neglects issues of material vibrancy and semiotic process, including the processes by which archaeologists and others began to name and typify these objects in the late nineteenth century. This paper rethinks birdstones through a 'more than representational' approach that combines assemblage theory with Peircean semiotics. Although both lines of thought align with relational ontologies, non-representational critiques, and post-anthropocentrism, archaeologists rarely consider the two together. This approach helps us chart how birdstones emerged and evolved through a complicated set of human-nonhuman interactions that continue into the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding ‘counter archaeologies’ as taking a counterpoint and challenging normative perspectives, this paper considers infancy in Iron-Age Scandinavia through an examination of children deposited in settlements and wetlands. The paper reports on a data set of child deposition from Scandinavia in the first millennium CE, and compares the practices with cases from other Germanic areas. While a complex phenomenon where cause of death is mostly unknown, textual sources indicate that neither limited emotional responses to child loss nor infanticide was uncommon in the first millennium CE. Infanticide is widespread cross-culturally, yet is foreign to many researchers because it counters deep-held contemporary, Western perceptions of universal maternal instinct. The paper questions whether infant loss within Scandinavian and Germanic societies prompted emotional responses akin to Western, contemporary reactions. Were infants more closely related to animate objects than human beings? And did this ontological logic provoke the use of infant remains in ritual deposition? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The notion of counter-archaeology is echoed by the opposing faces of the volcanic plug of Dumbarton Rock, Scotland. On the one side is the ‘official’ heritage of Dumbarton Castle, with its upstanding seventeenth-century military remains and underlying occupation evidence dating back to at least the eighth centuryad. On the other side lies a landscape of climbing, bouldering and post-industrial abandonment. This paper develops counter-archaeology through the climbing traditions and boulder problems at Dumbarton Rock and brings to the surface marginalized forms of heritage. Climbers and archaeologists have co-authored the paper as part of a collaborative project, which challenges the binary trope of researcher and researched and provides a model for a collaborative, co-designed and co-produced counter-archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The archaeology of inundated cultural landscape sites is not new and is an important component of the global record, yet these sites are distinct from shipwrecks and other site types underwater. Just as on land, underwater sites are subject to a dynamic range of formation processes, which must be analytically controlled. However, there are lingering misconceptions about underwater sites, specifically how they are formed, how much has been preserved, and their contribution to the broader field of archaeology. This paper discusses issues of preservation, context, and formation processes using misunderstandings of the Pompeii premise in underwater research as a conceptual guide. Ultimately acknowledging that, just as on land, archaeological sites underwater are diverse and unique, with site-specific pre- and post-depositional transformations. Different sites supplement each other, and the unique preservation underwater makes them a particularly valuable complement to the terrestrial record and a vital part of world archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of the past 5,000 years, the North American Arctic has seen distinct cultural developments in its eastern and western regions, with the boundary between them located in the Amundsen Gulf region in northwestern Canada. This boundary was traversed by two major migration episodes that define the 'big picture' of North American Arctic archaeology, but for much of the remainder of prehistory, there are only rare indications of communication or movement across it. In this paper, we assess the reasons for this boundary, the evidence for interaction across it, and the implications for cultural developments on both sides. In order to approach these issues, we also attempt to understand the significant gaps in the archaeological record caused by the region's severe coastal erosion, currently accelerating due to warming climates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution of rural areas to the advent of globalization has been poorly explored from a historical perspective. In this paper, I explore how rural areas were involved in the shaping of colonialism and industrialization and contributed to globalization. The case study examined deviates from the pattern of self-sufficiency and situates the rural world at the epicentre of key historical processes of the recent past. This paper is primarily based on a farmhouse that played a significant role in these processes, despite its apparent isolation in the hills of the Basque Country, as it produced cider for ships involved in the colonial race and supplied nuts and iron ore for the British Industrial Revolution. With this case study, I hope to provide an example of a rural site that contributed to change in the wider world, while it was also being transformed itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The past decade has seen many calls for the development of unified ‘world historical archaeologies’ of the past 500 years. While the field benefits from growing international exchanges and collaborations, retaining the diversity of regional traditions is a major and emerging challenge. As the field increasingly tests the temporal, geographical and interdisciplinary limits of archaeological perspectives, engaging with the diversity of modern material, these complexities remain little discussed, and the situations and contingencies of disciplinary narratives, priorities and interactions remain unproblematized. Exploring these matters, this paper considers transatlantic interactions between British and North American traditions of historical archaeology over the past two decades, journeying between two garden landscapes – in Annapolis and Bristol. After considering Mark Leone's 1984 study of the William Paca garden in Annapolis, Maryland, and its subsequent reinterpretations, the paper discusses an eighteenth-century ‘eclectic’ garden at Goldney in Bristol. The paper argues that situational and ‘symmetrical’, rather than interpretative, approaches to archaeological material would aid the development of multi-vocal and inclusive ‘world historical archaeologies’, acknowledging and celebrating the archaeological complexities that are encountered in the past and the disciplinary present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objects given to supernatural powers have been remarkably neglected by archaeologists. This paper makes the case for the importance of such objects, whether they be described as votives, dedications, ritual deposits, ritual hoards, offerings or by some other term. It explores some archaeological reasons for their neglect, including the practice of publishing artefacts by type rather than by context, and argues that archaeologists should not assume that religious practices can be discussed only when there are texts available as guides. It summarizes the particular concerns of the papers which follow in this volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the tempo of celebration in prehistoric Malta through the deployment of new fieldwork data and comparison with ethnographic study of modern celebrations on the same island. The article commemorates the late Jeremy Boissevain and his stimulation of new ways of thinking about prehistory, assesses and updates the 1990 article in World Archaeology by two of the current authors, and deploys new computerized modelling of celestial alignments, in the context of new chronologies and sequential data of celebratory locales. The paper shows how contrasts between the tempo of celebration in modern times and prehistory emerge by comparing ethnographic and archaeological evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three medieval trading places in the Bothnian Bay region in northern Fennoscandia. As these sites were meeting places between overseas and local traders, they were sites of cross-cultural encounters, social tension and potential danger. By examining the archaeological evidence of the sites, it is suggested that in order to facilitate safe and predictable trading relations, feasting was used to lessen tensions and avoid potentially dangerous situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I build on the process philosophy of Whitehead and on enactive approachs to hermeneutics, to suggest that if we want to conceive of archaeological practice in terms of a process archaeology, then rather than characterizing it as 'digging up the past', it is better to think of it as digging up concrescences. From the perspective of enactive hermeneutics, no artifact (from past or present) is a completely determinate matter of fact; its meaning is enacted in an ecology of practices, and should be understood as part of a dynamical network (of uses and beliefs) that changes when viewed from different perspectives. To the extent that an artifact retains an affordance-related meaning, whether original or new, it remains a concrescence and is never reducible to a determinate matter of fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We can only understand what is it to be human by understanding the modes of human becoming. This paper looks at the creative aspect of human becoming taking hands and tools as the focus of reference. I advocate a process archaeology of mind where thinking is thinging. Human cognitive becoming is cast in terms of metaplasticity and creative material engagement. Humans are plastic creatures indeterminate and incomplete, or else, always about to become. Humans are also inextricably intertwined with the plasticity of forms that we make. I argue that hands and tools trans-act in the mindful handling of matter and that the mindful handling of matter is a condition for human becoming. Tools are made and used by the hands as much as hands are made and used by tools. Human intelligence is largely handmade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of clay to the heads of deceased hunter-gatherers within the Middle Neolithic burials of Finland and Latvia was originally identified by researchers working in these regions during the 20th century. This practice stands apart from the deeper-seated traditions of grave adornment which characterise the hunter-gatherer archaeology of the Baltic region during the Middle Holocene. However, the variable extent to which these 'death masks' are preserved and recorded has confounded attempts to discuss their meaning or significance in detail. This paper approaches the problem through a discussion of the materials involved in masking, rather than the forms represented by the masks themselves. Through this discussion, an understanding of the relationship between material ontology and cosmology emerges, which is subsequently situated within a socio-historical context through a review of the available radiocarbon dates and broader patterns of social change in the Middle Neolithic archaeology of the Eastern Baltic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of ‘deep time’ has recently gained attention in the field of environmental humanities. In contrast, heritage studies have a narrower focus on the role of the past in the present. This paper probes into how encounters with deep time, archaeology and heritage could play a role in environmental ethics and issues of intergenerational justice and care. People’s meetings with intermingled temporalities, and collisions of past and present, are highlighted through the peculiar and disruptive affect of exceptional preservation in crannogs, bog bodies, wetlands and lakes. It is argued that such archaeology has the potential to produce ‘enchantment’ effects, understood as energising moments of startling presence, which can be powerfully deployed to move people from ethical thinking and reflection towards ethical action. However, in order to acknowledge the particular power of deep-time archaeological effects, and to realise the potentialities of heritage, it needs to be approached differently. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Embroidery made and used in early medieval England (c. 450–1100) was considered fine art. Today 43 surviving examples known or believed to have been made in early medieval England have been stylistically and technically analysed, and placed within chronological timeframes. Recently the embroideries and their makers' positions within early medieval society have also been explored, and 'life' biographies have been written for some pieces. Until now, the viewers' experiences of encountering and interacting with embroidery have never been fully investigated. This paper uses sensory archaeology as a technique to access the early medieval 'mindset' in order to explore how people actually engaged with embroidery as opposed to what each piece was meant to show or tell them. The early 10th-century embroidered stole and maniple, which were rediscovered in the tomb of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral in the 19th century, are used as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologies of internment present unique challenges and benefits. Myriad aspects of human behaviour that stretch over temporal scales of generations and centuries at other archaeological sites are visible in ephemeral traces of short-term occupation at sites of internment such as prisoner of war (POW)camps; resistance, domination, the structure and scaffolds of authority, agency and identity are created, cast, and discarded into the soil. The paper examines some of these stories from the earth through military prisons of the American Civil War, and the ephemeral archaeology of selected case studies: Camp Lawton, Andersonville, and Johnson's Island. Themes explored are globalization and the intersection of the global at the local in prison camps, resistance, its forms, and function within POW camps; and how resistance intersecting with systems of structural violence within internment camps spurred the development of a masculinity in the 19th century during, and after the American Civil War, different from societal norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work deals with a set of internecine wars that took place in Spain during the nineteenth century. Generally known as the Carlist Wars, they represent a conflict that has barely been covered by archaeology. The aim of this paper is to briefly introduce these wars, analyse their material effects and reflect on their further consequences. In material terms, we take into consideration the influence of a growing globalization that can be clearly made out between the First and Third Carlist wars, both mediated by gradual industrialization and the American Civil War. In social and mnemonic terms, we examine the construction of a social memory that took place around this conflict and its effects to the present. In short, we provide a case of local internecine conflict that was at the same time inserted in worldwide social, economic and ideological processes underway during the nineteenth century and whose influence is still perceptible today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws attention to archaeologies of obscured events related to the disappearance of people in Brazil during the dictatorship period. It emphasizes the political and socioenvironmental nature of the conflicts that the dictatorship unleashed, focusing on the repression against the Araguaia guerrilla, an Amazonian movement that intended to start a revolution in the 1970 s. Mobility and landscape are explored in an attempt to understand the dispositive implemented to destroy things, people and stories and make them disappear. I argue that the struggle between the armed forces and the guerrilla took a strongly spatial dimension: the military mapped the guerrilla's landscape and its mobility flows through a heavy investment on a spatial dispositive aimed to intersect connections and suffocate resistance. Such dispositive successfully limited or exacerbated the guerrilla movements, fragmenting their supply systems and weakening their bonds with the local population. I explore the potential of archaeology to unveil hidden and suppressed phenomena and to build new narratives about the Araguaia guerrilla, which materialize the effects of the dematerializaing practices developed by the dictatorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Finnish Civil War in 1918 left the newly independent country (1917) scarred for decades. In this paper, we assess the difficult public memory, national narrative and memorialization of the war. We take as our starting point a public crowdsourcing organized by the State-broadcasting company about the material traces of conflicts in Finland. Themes raised by the public in the crowdsourcing are used as foundation to map heritage perspectives. Special attention is paid to the memorial landscapes of the war. In the past century, the remembrance of the war has gone through several stages, from the complete denial of memorializing the defeated side and the associated clandestine remembrance practices based on folk religion, to today's situation where the war is largely seen as a shared national tragedy. We outline the current status and importance of Civil War heritage based on public perceptions and stake out some directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in NGS sequencing technologies, improved laboratory protocols and new bioinformatic workflows have seen huge increases in ancient DNA (aDNA) research on archaeological materials. A large proportion of aDNA work now utilizes the petrous portion of the temporal bone (pars petrosa), which is recognized as an excellent skeletal element for long-term ancient endogenous (host) DNA survival. This has been significant due to the often low endogenous content of other skeletal elements, meaning that large amounts of sequencing are frequently required to obtain sufficient genetic coverage. However, exclusive sampling of the petrous for aDNA analysis introduces a new set of potential biases into our scientific studies – and these issues are yet to be considered by ancient DNA researchers. This paper aims to outline the possible biases of utilizing petrous bones to undertake aDNA analyses and highlight how these complications may potentially be overcome in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we outline a worked example of the combined use of genetic data and archaeological evidence. The project focuses on Queensland's Cape York Peninsula and has two goals. One is to shed new light on the population history of the region. The other is to develop a methodology to facilitate repatriation of the remains of Aboriginal Australians. After providing some background to the project and outlining its main activities, we summarize our key findings to date. Subsequently, we discuss what the project has taught us about the prehistory of Cape York, the potential for DNA research and isotope chemistry to assist research institutions and Aboriginal communities with the repatriation of unaffiliated remains, and the process of conducting combined genetic and archaeological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient DNA research is on a trajectory of rapid growth and is becoming an increasingly important part of the archaeologist's toolkit. In this paper, we situate the current relationship between ancient DNA and archaeology within the context of how other destructive scientific methods were incorporated into archaeological work. We discuss the need for discipline-wide standards for the destructive sampling of human remains for ancient DNA analysis and propose a set of best practices to aid collaborative teams in the challenging task of balancing the rich information provided by ancient DNA with the damage that sampling will cause to a skeletal specimen. Collaboration between archaeologists and ancient DNA specialists has contributed in new ways to the understanding of the human past, and the relationship between the researchers embedded in these disciplines will continue to develop and mature only through ongoing dialogue and engaged collaboration on topics such as destructive analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response to Stephen Oppenheimer's paper in the journal "World Archaeology" criticizing a 2003 article written by the authors that supposedly favors a model of "replacement" of indigenous hunter-gatherers in Island Southeast Asia by incoming Austronesian-speaking Neolithic agriculturalists.

Hunter-gatherer studies have often been at the forefront of feminist critiques in archaeology, and have remained a clear front on which feminist issues are still regularly raised. While these approaches have challenged the androcentric stereotypes upon which archaeological interpretations of hunter-gatherers have been based, current accounts continue to construct their interpretations based around modern Western heteronormative concepts of identity. By presenting an alternative interpretation of the construction of hunter-gatherer identity from the west coast of Scotland, this paper will demonstrate that, through the application of queer theory to hunter-gatherer studies, we may finally move away from the pervasive heteronormative stereotypes upon which they have been constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper briefly sets the scene for the articles that follow, introducing some key debates that have characterized the recent practice of historical archaeology. The definition of historical archaeology is explored according to parameters of chronology and methodology, drawing a distinction between New World traditions that define the subject as ‘post-Columbian’ and Old World approaches that establish broader connections with the ‘documentary archaeology’ of all literate societies. Current issues in European and American historical archaeology are highlighted, including the gradual breakdown of the medieval/post-medieval divide and the call for a global ‘modern-world archaeology’ to address the ‘grand historical narratives’ of the period, such as capitalism, economic improvement, and consumerism. The resistance to this global research agenda is explored with reference to archaeologies of diaspora and postcolonialism, which demand local perspectives to explore diversity and meaning. Finally, the innovative use of community archaeology and multi-vocality is introduced, with particular reference to the experimental narratives pursued by American historical archaeologists, in their new role as ‘storytellers’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clarifies the terminology used in describing past agricultural systems. Details on the archaeological recognition of different forms of cultivation; Differences in the intensity of cultivation with evolutionary stages of agricultural development; Link of the intensive cultivation of staple crops to food production.

There is a difference between archaeology that involves local communities and archaeology that is commissioned by and for the community. This paper describes the latter within the contemporary Fijian context of political and economic domination by an urban Fijian chiefly class. It shows how community archaeology provides a strategy by which disenfranchised rural communities in Fiji can reclaim the archaeological resource and use it to establish economic independence. Such projects fall within a Fijian definition of vanua development: a harmonious concept of environmental, social and economic well-being that includes an essential respect for tradition. The benefits extend to archaeology itself. The paper analyses how community projects in Fiji can help conserve the archaeological resource, broaden the pool of people with an active stake in Fiji's past, and thereby raise the profile of archaeology in the national imagination. The subtext is a post-colonial one: the past is a contested and socially structured thing. By relinquishing control over archaeology to the local communities, not only have political and economic relations in Fiji been equalized, so has the balance between local and scientific interpretations of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perspectives from the recent and ancient past are largely underutilized in modern sustainability or food systems studies. However, information about regional crop histories and land use systems through time can add essential value and context to debates concerning future agricultural strategies and food security. In particular, archaeological and anthropological research can provide long-term perspectives on adaptive solutions and agricultural resilience that could support strategies for sustainable agriculture, especially in developing countries. This paper explores this debate within a food systems framework and highlights the need for researchers to work across disciplines and sectors to share knowledge, exchange ideas and create solutions in order to meet the challenges of feeding the world in a healthy, equitable, sustainable and resilient way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following some definitions and etymologies of key terms – archaeology, history, prehistory, protohistory – the purpose of this paper is to review the history of Greek protohistories, chronologically beginning with the earliest writing in the Greek world, in the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1800 BC). Ironically, this early writing did not lead to a period that anyone would call 'historic' or 'protohistoric'. From there, the author traces the passage of writing through the 'prehistoric' period, into the Early Iron Age, and beyond, where we find the first constructions of narrative history. Several early historians will feature prominently in this story: Hekataios, Hellanikos, Herodotos and Thucydides, whose work follows on from that of the earliest Greek alphabetic writing in the eighth century BC in the time of Homer and Hesiod. By so doing, the author's aim is not just to problematize 'prehistory' and 'protohistory' as meaningful terms or appropriate categories of analysis, but to suggest that they are, for Greek antiquity, irrelevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question interrogated here, through the case study of agricultural resources, is whether the governance of collective rights of property in past non-literate communities can be explored through archaeological methods. Property rights and the structures for their governance are an expression of social relations. According to Alchian and Demsetz (1973, 16), the ‘techniques, rules, or customs to resolve conflicts that arise in the use of scarce resources’ that underlie property rights and their governance are likely to be consonant with each community’s perceptions of individual and collective relationships, rights and obligations in relation to others both within and beyond their own territory. This paper explores through seven brief illustrative exemplars the development of a methodology for inferring the practical details of collective governance of agricultural property in the non-literate past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]