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A complex view of the prehistory in southern Jordan emerges from the excavations of the Jagiellonian University team, which carried out in 2018 its second season of fieldwork at the sites of Munqata’a and Faysaliyya, even as analyses of finds from the previous season were underway. Human communities living here in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age practiced both sedentary and mobile lifestyles. The changing landscape around them, caused by natural erosion processes and periodical climate change, is also taken into consideration while interpreting the explored relics.

The lack of efficient digital data processing tools during field excavations is a major bottleneck affecting the delay between data collection and dissemination in archaeology. In this paper, we outline the fundamental methodology of ArchField, an integrated digi-tal field recording solution developed to overcome this bottleneck and translate field ex-cavations to virtual museums in real-time. ArchField records sub-centimetre accurate three-dimensional coordinates from Total Stations and RTK GPS units. Recorded field data and measured 3D coordinates are digitally processed to produce auto-generated dai-ly GIS top plans. The processing pipeline enables the generation of publishable online maps from the first day of excavation to the last. It is interoperable with many different GIS viewers and stores data in an online PostGIS database. Digitization of archaeological data in the field is streamlined to facilitate standardization, redundancy and storage that can be immediately made accessible online to the digital community. Consequently, ArchField integrates features such as synchronization, data formatting, re-projection, dy-namic labeling and symbolization. It provides immediate online accessibility of field ex-cavations for virtual museums of the future. ArchField enables any archaeological project to inexpensively adopt real-time 3D digital recording techniques in their field methods.

Honoring Jane Buikstra’s pioneering work in the development of archaeobiological research, the essays in this volume stem from a symposium held at an annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Buikstra’s redefinition of the term “bioarchaeology” to focus specifically on human skeletal data in historical and anthropological contexts, and the impact of her mentorship on developing scholars in the field, are acknowledged and celebrated by the wide-ranging contributions in The Dead Tell Tales.They highlight the dynamism of bioarchaeology, documenting the degree to which this discipline has become integrated into anthropological research, and has become essential to the interpretation of archaeological data. Sections organized geographically present topics in North America, Central and South America, and the Old World, and discuss such diverse subjects as animal effigies, the archaeology of cemeteries, childhood diets in Copan, an analysis of skeletal trauma in samples from a medieval to early modern Danish cemetery, the social aspects of leprosy, and the role and origins of individuals who labored in a Byzantine prison mining camp in southern Jordan.Series: Monographs 76