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Museums and Archaeology brings together a wide, but carefully chosen, selection of literature from around the world that connects museums and archaeology. Part of the successful Leicester Readers in Museum Studies series, it provides a combination of issue- and practice-based perspectives. As such, it is a volume not only for students and researchers from a range of disciplines interested in museum, gallery and heritage studies, including public archaeology and cultural resource management (CRM), but also the wide range of professionals and volunteers in the museum and heritage sector who work with archaeological collections. The volume’s balance of theory and practice and its thematic and geographical breadth is explored and explained in an extended introduction, which situates the readings in the context of the extensive literature on museum archaeology, highlighting the many tensions that exist between idealistic ‘principles’ and real-life ‘practice’ and the debates that surround these. In addition to this, section introductions and the seminal pieces themselves provide a comprehensive and contextualised resource on the interplay of museums and archaeology.

An overview is provided of ancient Egyptian perceptions of the various senses, and also of environments, in order to suggest possible approaches for modelling ancient sensations. A more detailed case study considers the sensory aspects, including performance, of literary texts from 1938–1755 bce and the implications of these for modern interpretation. Overall, the surviving data is limited to predominantly elite spheres, but it includes material, visual and textual cultures which can complement each other to enable an integrated analysis of the lived sensations of ancient Egyptians. une Egypte qui n’est pas dans les livres savants (Derchain, 1996, p. 1)

International audience

This article reappraises the place of archaeology in the contemporary world by critically engaging with old and new debates in the field of public archaeology. It evaluates the range of research strategies and methods used in archaeological heritage studies by identifying and contributing to key debates in this dynamic field, and critically explores the history of archaeological resource management. The article also addresses the fundamental principles and practices through which the archaeological past is understood and used today. In doing so, it enters into the overlapping domains of: ‘public’, ‘community’, or ‘engaged’ archaeology; heritage, or cultural resource management; and heritage and museum studies; as well as a wide range of related fields within the social sciences. In recent years, this subject area has seen a proliferation of published texts aimed primarily at the academic market, particularly in the UK and USA.

This chapter attempts to synthesize the available data relating to the human use of over 100 natural caves in Sardinia during prehistory, and to contextualize these caves and their occupations in relation to wider landscapes, lifeways and beliefs, over space and time. In the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, a few caves were used by mobile groups as base-camps and shelters within wide socio-economic territories. In the Early Neolithic, large inland caves continued to serve as residential bases for communities practicing a mixed economy, while other caves sheltered living – and now also deceased – members of mobile task groups. Between the Middle Neolithic and the Early Iron Age, the ritual use of the interiors of selected caves was elaborated, whereas large caves were increasingly abandoned as long-term dwelling places as the Sardinian landscape became more extensively settled, although a few caves continued to be used as convenient shelters.

According to James Ussher, the creation of the world began on Sunday 23rd October, in the year 4004 BC (Ussher 1658). Ussher (1581–1656) was the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh in northern Ireland, and he deduced this date from his interpretation of the Old Testament, as a contribution to the long-running Christian theological debate on the age and history of the Earth (Barr 1985; Ford 2007). His creation date of 4004 BC was widely accepted in England in the eighteenth century, particularly when it was included in annotated editions of the influential King James Bible, although it was increasingly rejected by geologists and theologians in the nineteenth century, and is now a classic date remembered by historians of archaeology (e.g. Daniel 1975: 27), not to mention American creationists. For my purposes, it is also a convenient date upon which to base an experiment to establish what we can (and cannot) say about Neolithic Italy at a very specific point in time, focussing on the archaeological data from a sample of radiocarbon dated sites, whilst not ignoring the long-term trends with which archaeology is usually concerned.

This book presents the methods and preliminary results of six Anglo-American-Sicilian archaeological landscape projects undertaken in the uplands of Sicily and Calabria: the Bova Marina Archaeological Project, the Gornalunga and Margi Valleys Survey, the Upper Simeto Valley Project, the Troina Project, fieldwork at Polizzello, and the Salemi Project. Highlights are Foxhall et al.’s clear summary of a thoughtfully conceived archaeological survey and excavation project combining the coastal lowlands and mountainous uplands of Southern Calabria; Ayala and Fitzjohn’s detailed evaluation of the methodology and results of the Troina Survey in terms of the preservation and visibility of upland archaeological sites and soils linked to particular (albeit undated) soil erosion processes; and Lucy Walker’s valuable synthesis of published literature on the political, ethnic and, to a lesser extent, economic history of Troina’s elite and their landownership, which complements some of the patterns identified by the related archaeological survey.

This article focuses on the relevance of trade and interaction in archaeology. It evaluates the definitions of these terms, provides a critical synthesis of the diverse ways in which successive generations of archaeologists have approached and interpreted these topics, and considers some of the ways in which people in the past may have communicated with each other, through trade and interaction. It explains that trade and interaction are commonly associated with two sets of interpretations: the first, of certain durable objects found on archaeological sites, as imported and exported commodities; the second, of past people, as traders and travellers engaged in long-distance networks of contact, supply, and redistribution.

The wide-ranging and thought-provoking contributions to this volume raise a series of questions regarding archaeological studies of early stamps and, more generally, of ancient artefacts. My aim here is to highlight these questions, using a critical perspective that is intended to draw out some of the key issues raised by the contributors at the same time as encouraging all of us to explore new ways of approaching these expressive but ambiguous objects. My simple but central observation is that the ways in which archaeologists have previously studied early stamps has had significant consequences for our understandings of them, and that we should therefore think carefully and critically about our role as authors and about the data-sets, terminologies, classifications, methods, theories and interpretations that we promote in future studies.

Across Europe, the genetics of the Chalcolithic/Bronze Age transition is increasingly characterized in terms of an influx of Steppe-related ancestry. The effect of this major shift on the genetic structure of populations in the Italian Peninsula remains underexplored. Here, genome-wide shotgun data for 22 individuals from commingled cave and single burials in Northeastern and Central Italy dated between 3200 and 1500 BCE provide the first genomic characterization of Bronze Age individuals (n = 8; 0.001-1.2× coverage) from the central Italian Peninsula, filling a gap in the literature between 1950 and 1500 BCE. Our study confirms a diversity of ancestry components during the Chalcolithic and the arrival of Steppe-related ancestry in the central Italian Peninsula as early as 1600 BCE, with this ancestry component increasing through time. We detect close patrilineal kinship in the burial patterns of Chalcolithic commingled cave burials and a shift away from this in the Bronze Age (2200-900 BCE) along with lowered runs of homozygosity, which may reflect larger changes in population structure. Finally, we find no evidence that the arrival of Steppe-related ancestry in Central Italy directly led to changes in frequency of 115 phenotypes present in the dataset, rather that the post-Roman Imperial period had a stronger influence, particularly on the frequency of variants associated with protection against Hansen's disease (leprosy). Our study provides a closer look at local dynamics of demography and phenotypic shifts as they occurred as part of a broader phenomenon of widespread admixture during the Chalcolithic/Bronze Age transition. ispartof: CURRENT BIOLOGY vol:31 issue:12 pages:2576-+ ispartof: location:England status: published

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been infecting humans for millennia and remains a global health problem, but its past diversity and dispersal routes are largely unknown. We generated HBV genomic data from 137 Eurasians and Native Americans dated between ~10,500 and ~400 years ago. We date the most recent common ancestor of all HBV lineages to between ~20,000 and 12,000 years ago, with the virus present in European and South American hunter-gatherers during the early Holocene. After the European Neolithic transition, Mesolithic HBV strains were replaced by a lineage likely disseminated by early farmers that prevailed throughout western Eurasia for ~4000 years, declining around the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. The only remnant of this prehistoric HBV diversity is the rare genotype G, which appears to have reemerged during the HIV pandemic., The research was funded by the Max Planck Society, the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (771234–PALEoRIDER, to W.H.; 805268–CoDisEASe to K. Bos; 834616–ARCHCAUCASUS to S.H.), the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme and Marie Curie Actions under the Programme SASPRO (1340/03/03 to P.C.R.), the ERA.NET RUS Plus–S&T programm of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (277–BIOARCCAUCASUS to S.Re. and S.H.), the Werner Siemens Stiftung (“Paleobiochemistry”, to CW), the Award Praemium Academiae of the Czech Academy of Sciences (to M.E.), the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences (RVO 67985912, to M.Dobe.), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (19-09-00354a, to M.K.K. and V.V.K.; 19-78-10053 to SSh), the German Research Foundation (DFG-HA-5407/4-1–INTERACT to W.H. and RE2688/2 to S.Re.), the French National Research Agency (ANR-17-FRAL-0010–INTERACT, to M.F.D., M.Ri., S.Ro., S.Sai., D.Bi., and P.Le.), the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (9558 to S.Sab.), and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan (AP08856654 to L.B.D., L.M., and E.Kh. and AP08857177 to A.Z.B.).

This study investigates to what extent Bronze Age societies in Northern Italy were permeable accepting and integrating non-local individuals, as well as importing a wide range of raw materials, commodities, and ideas from networks spanning continental Europe and the Mediterranean. During the second millennium BC, the communities of Northern Italy engaged in a progressive stabilization of settlements, culminating in the large polities of the end of the Middle/beginning of the Late Bronze Age pivoted around large defended centres (the Terramare). Although a wide range of exotic archaeological materials indicates that the inhabitants of the Po plain increasingly took part in the networks of Continental European and the Eastern Mediterranean, we should not overlook the fact that the dynamics of interaction were also extremely active on local and regional levels. Mobility patterns have been explored for three key-sites, spanning the Early to Late Bronze Age (1900–1100 BC), namely Sant’Eurosia, Casinalbo and Fondo Paviani, through strontium and oxygen isotope analysis on a large sample size (more than 100 individuals). The results, integrated with osteological and archaeological data, document for the first time in this area that movements of people occurred mostly within a territorial radius of 50 km, but also that larger nodes in the settlement system (such as Fondo Paviani) included individuals from more distant areas. This suggests that, from a demographic perspective, the process towards a more complex socio-political system in Bronze Age Northern Italy was triggered by a largely, but not completely, internal process, stemming from the dynamics of intra-polity networks and local/regional power relationships.

‘Representation’ is one of the key cultural practices through which meanings are produced and exchanged. This article undertakes a literary and art criticism of historic and contemporary representations of prehistoric Malta, with particular reference to the senses, in order to chart, historicize, and contextualize the sensory experiences and perceptions that have surrounded the development of archaeology in Malta over the last four centuries. It considers how different generations of antiquarians and archaeologists have represented or denied the senses in the texts and images that describe their experiences and understandings of the landscape, inhabitants, and prehistoric antiquities of the Maltese Islands. Based on these criticisms, the article offers the potential for such studies to be re-evaluated as culturally determined forms of representation that provide a wealth of information about the changing representational conventions, politics, and sensory perceptions of their creators.