Animal meat, fat, and other animal-derived materials have been essential for human adaptation since the Early Palaeolithic, forming a crucial foundation for many hunter-gatherer societies until rec...

Drawing on insights from contemporary urban theory, this contribution questions where medieval urbanization took place. It is proposed that urbanization is a process which extends beyond towns and cities, which are merely a representation of a more expansive and transformative process. Through discussion of building stone, grain production, salt extraction, woodland management and mineral exploitation

This study considers the role played by Teotihuacan in the emergence of the office of the Classic Maya ajawtaak, or ‘lords’. I argue that the synthesis of this office at the site of Tikal was influenced by the building of Teotihuacan's Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent between about 180 and 230 ce. Prior to and in concert with this building's construction, Teotihuacanos orchestrated the sacrifice of

This article uses tensions over the construction of a flow-regulation infrastructure built to control outflow from Lake Titicaca into the Desaguadero River, on the border between Peru and Bolivia, as a case study to explore the ways that relationships to water emerge and are contested. We argue that a nuanced understanding of tensions arising from this infrastructure requires us to recognize the long-term

Many years ago, I taught a course at the University of Aberdeen on the ‘4As’ of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (Ingold 2013). As we had been discussing flint-knapping, I invited the master-knapper, John Lord, to give a demonstration. We watched in awe as he skilfully detached flakes from a flint nodule of irregular shape to reveal the classical, bifacial form of an Acheulean handaxe

I want to preface this response by noting that, while I think Bentley, O'Brien and I fundamentally differ in how we approach the archaeological record (2024), I am also convinced that the more perspectives on the past we can cultivate, the richer our interpretative garden will be. Moreover, the more narratives of past worlds we develop, the more nuanced and complex our image of the past will become

I thank Bentley and O'Brien (2024) for their cogent review of issues associated with inheritance and intention in cultural evolution. Intent is, of course, present in cultural process and that begs the question as to when and how we concern ourselves with it as a factor in cultural evolution (Rosenberg 2022). Intent underlies our understanding of both micro- and macro-scale processes of cultural evolution

We appreciate the respondents’ comments on our debate article ‘Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions’ (Bentley & O'Brien 2024). We all agree that traditional cultural practices—such as manufacturing Acheulean handaxes—often take considerable amounts of time to learn; as Gladwell (2008) popularly proposed, it takes 10 000 hours of practice to make an expert. We also appear to agree that

The authors of this book are archaeologists who want to create a field they describe as ‘critical paleoeconomics’. Their quest is promising in several ways. For example, they are not averse to grand narratives and believe modern economic theory can offer insights into various features of ancient economies, including markets, trade, money and debt.

Throughout the twentieth century, considerable research has been dedicated to understanding the rise, development and end of ancient cities. In recent years, there has been a remarkable upsurge of new methodological and theoretical approaches applied in urbanism studies, which enables us to improve, validate or question our knowledge about ancient urban life. The three books reviewed here concern the

In this paper the history of one house and a human burial in the prehistoric settlement of Monjukli Depe, Turkmenistan, serves as a case study for the use of Bayesian chronological modelling to approach the reach of past memories. The method combines relative and absolute chronological data and aims not only at a more precise and robust chronology of past events, but also allows estimations of duration

This edited volume by Mark Hauser and Julia Jong Haines aims to bring together local narratives within the context of the Indian Ocean in modern times, from c. AD 1500, and establish how these narratives can inform historical archaeology. As the editors highlight in the introductory chapter, historical archaeology has been greatly informed and inspired by the Atlantic world and its colonial histories

Today, Neolithic circular enclosures are generally regarded as evidence of the first monumental architecture in Europe. They are undoubtedly a topical subject in Neolithic research and also attract great interest from a broader audience. This has not always been the case. Just over 40 years ago, the few examples known then, mainly from Bavaria and Bohemia, were regarded as exotic and of no particular

This article delves into the contemporary social perception of the three abandoned Soviet Cold War tactical nuclear bases in Poland, focusing on often overlooked phenomena in archaeological studies such as the contemporary myths (folk tales, contemporary legends, modern folklore, etc.) and nostalgia that have emerged around these sites. While contemporary myths and nostalgia are distinct phenomena

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 ea...

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 firs...

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 tw...

Although historians and archaeologists have been quick to point out the political and economic conditions that tend to foment sea piracy, less attention has been given to the ecology of ‘blue crime...

The first few months of Second World War were marked by numerous mass crimes against humanity committed by Third Reich civil servants on citizens of the Second Polish Republic – local intelligentsi...

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 nomad...

This article collects the preliminary results of the SEXLAVES project focused on the archaeological study of the materialities generated by the sexual exploitation of women in the northwest of Spai...

Through a commingled, fragmentary assemblage of skeletal remains (MNI = 9) recovered from a 1999 salvage excavation, this article explores the lives and deaths of individuals interred at the Brentwood Poor Farm, Brentwood, New Hampshire (1841–1868). This work demonstrates that bioarchaeological analyses of smaller samples can provide nuanced accounts of marginalization and institutionalization even

Archaeologists in North America and elsewhere are increasingly examining long-term Indigenous presence across multiple colonial systems, despite lingering conceptual and methodological challenges. We examine this issue in California, where archaeologists and others have traditionally overlooked Native persistence in the years between the official closing of the region's Franciscan missions in the 1830s

The present analysis focuses on the material component of time, the devices used for measuring and counting it. The biological basis for subjective, experiential time is first reviewed, as are early strategies found cross-culturally for measuring and counting time objectively. These strategies include timekeeping by natural phenomena, using tallies to keep track of small periods of time, harnessing