Volume 10, Issue 1

Bronze Age sites in the coastal area of Sarrala, in Eastern Sardinia, have been subjected to survey and excavation over the last half-century. The study area, whose social and economic evolution and changing scales of interactions are traced through settlement patterns and building analysis, is interpreted in light of more general trends suggested by stable isotopes, archaeogenetics, and paleoclimatology. The local picture of progressive demographic growth and infilling of the landscape, with a subsequent concentration of population and labor, follows a sequence widely detected in Sardinia. More specific identifiable aspects include a comparatively higher fragmentation/competition (ratio of complex vs simple nuraghes; ratio of tombs vs nuraghes) and a consistent pattern in the distribution of non-local building materials in the latest phase at the sites showing archaic features, taken as a clue of a long-lasting authority at select sites. These elements are compatible with organized pastoral exploitation of the available territory, structured according to patrilocality and closeness to ancestral lineages and residences. The interplay of internal dynamics relative to constraints and opportunities is discussed, such as climate change and long-distance trade connections, with possible implications for interpreting Nuragic society.

The creation, maintenance, and modification of prehistoric built spaces and structural landscapes required communities that engaged and interacted collectively. Starting from the appearance of early monumentality and depositional behaviour in Funnel Beaker communities, we trace the variation in this phenomenon among three study areas in what is now northern Germany. In doing so, we build on a specific perspective and approach, namely that of work-expenditure calculations for megalithic graves and flint axe heads. In the process, variable dynamics of construction and deposition activities within the Early and Middle Neolithic are revealed, which we regard as differentiated translations of widespread impulses, adapted to the needs of different socio-cultural communities. The similar developments seen in flint axe head depositions and in the construction of megalithic monuments are indicative of evolving spaces of memory, landscapes of cooperative collaboration, and an increasing structuring of local environments that seem to follow a specific understanding of, and interaction with, space.

Suleiman the Magnificent died during the siege of Szigetvár in 1566, close to the battlefield in Turbék Vineyard Hill site, Hungary. On the place of his death, a memorial place was established with a tomb, a mosque, a monastery, and a deep moat system north of the building complex. After its destruction, the memorial place was covered with demolished material and soil. This significant site was re-identified and excavated during the archaeological, historical, and geoarchaeological research work that started in 2015. As a result of the correlative evaluation of previously published sedimentological and chronological data, the filling of the moat accumulated during the seventeenth century. Our goal was the natural and anthropogenic vegetation reconstruction of the adjacent region of the memorial place and the plant utilization of the community living there. During the analyses, more than 30,000 plant remains were identified belonging to 77 taxa. The results gave indications for ploughed lands, vegetable and fruit cultivation, vineyards, pasture lands, forest patches, and trampled areas related to active human activity. The lithostratigraphic and geochronological results of the moat sequence coincide well with our carpological and anthracological data.

In this work, we study salt-production settlement in central Italy with an exploratory application of centrality indexes, common in social network analysis: betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and degree centrality. These methods are not new, but they have never been applied to this type of site and the results are innovative and illuminating. In fact, the closeness and degree centrality do not yield particularly interesting results. However, the betweenness centrality, which indicates the most commonly used routes in a given region, provide powerful insights. By indicating shifting most common routes through time, from the terrestrial and sea route along the coast in the Bronze and Iron Age, to the use of the Tiber River and Tiber valley as route, in the Orientalizing and Archaic Period, they allow us to advance hypotheses about the shift between two different productions. The briquetage salt production technique was used in the Bronze and Iron Age on the costal sites, which was also the most common route used in the region. While the proper marine production at the mouth of the Tiber, both on the Etruscan and Latin side, might develop during the Orientalizing and Archaic Age, together with an intensified use of the Via Salaria, running from the coast to the mountains of Latium, along the Tiber River. It would be interesting to confirm these hypotheses with further analyses and also targeted excavations.

This study presents an in-depth archaeometric investigation of Iron Age ceramic assemblage dating from 950 to 750 BCE from the sanctuary at Polizzello Mountain, Sicily. The site, a key sanctuary utilized by indigenous communities for ritual activities, is examined for its strategic location, structural developments, pottery assemblages, and evidence of communal activities. The study employs petrographic analysis on thin sections, integrated with other analytical methods, to explore the technology behind pottery production. It investigates whether such production reflects a common technological knowledge shared by a broader community or if they represent a blend of different manufacturing traditions. The findings highlight that the pottery from Polizzello Mountain aligns with the well-established Sicilian tradition of combining calcareous components and grog, indicating a local tradition of pottery production with no significant compositional differences suggesting specialized production at the workshop level.

A systematic survey of Dehesilla Cave was carried out during 2017 in order to search for traces of rock art. Several panels with paintings were identified in the chamber next to the entrance (consisting of strokes, dots, stains, and remnants of shapes in red and black), which had remained unnoticed up until now and may provide relevant information towards the understanding of the prehistoric use of the cave and its seemingly symbolic topography. However, we cannot assume a priori a relationship between these paintings and the well-known Neolithic sequence of the site. To assess these paintings, we have analysed photomicrographs which have allowed us to determine their detailed characteristics, stroke morphology, and remnant features (for instance, hue, shape, density of paint, pigment grain size, micro-stroke traces left by the tools used). Taphonomic issues have also been considered and several physical and chemical techniques of analysis have been applied in order to identify the pigments and possible binders.

Rescue archaeology in urban contexts often opens small windows on ancient settlements that need to be combined to better perceive the history of these settlements. This article suggests that the same combinatory approach should be employed with survey data. Indeed, archaeological surveys can split single ancient settlements into multiple archaeological sites due to visibility changes. It implies that the perception we have of legacy datasets must change: errors in location data might occur in older, and especially pre-GPS, survey datasets, but the fact that more recent projects have not been able to find sites on the exact same spots might also be related to changes in visibility windows. Using a case study from central Crete, Greece, where two survey projects were conducted in the same area, this article suggests that the variability in location data of sites recorded during survey projects can provide new insights into settlement patterns and dynamics. Notably, evidence of grouped settlements is found, including for periods such as Late Minoan II and Late Minoan III C, previously known for a strong decrease in large settlements’ occupation.

In recent years, interest in the usage of computer-based methods in archaeology, especially regarding field documentation, has grown significantly. In 2021, Göttlich et al. presented a new large-scale three-dimensional (3D) capture method for the documentation of pottery using structure from motion. This method, however, was only tested on a very small sample set and never truly conducted in a large-scale documentation surrounding. Consequently, we decided to test this workflow on a large-scale basis during three field campaigns (March 2022, November 2022, and March 2023) in Lebanon, documenting more than 4,000 sherds in total. In this article, I will present the results and observations of these campaigns, critically discuss the workflow involved (documentation and processing), and propose a refined workflow for this methodology. This article focuses solely on the relevant documentation and 3D processing.

Archaeological data simultaneously serve as formal documentary evidence that supports and legitimizes chains of analytical inference and as communicative media that bind together scholarly activities distributed across time, place, and social circumstance. This contributes to a sense of “epistemic anxiety,” whereby archaeologists require that data be objective and decisive to support computational analysis but also intuitively understand data to be subjective and situated based on their own experiences as participants in an archaeological community of practice. In this article, I present observations of and elicitations about archaeological practices relating to the constitution and transformation of data in three cases in order to articulate this tension and document how archaeologists cope with it. I found that archaeologists rely on a wide variety of situated representations of archaeological experiences – which are either not recorded at all or occupy entirely separate and unpublished data streams – to make sense of more formal records. This undervalued information is crucial for ensuring that relatively local, bounded, and private collaborative ties may be extended beyond the scope of a project and, therefore, should be given more attention as we continue to develop open data infrastructures.

In this article, we present the results of the research carried out at the Gravettian occupation level of Cueva del Arco (Spain). For this purpose, a multidisciplinary investigation has been carried out in which all the elements recovered in the excavations carried out since 2015 at this site have been studied. The results are contextualised alongside all of the existing Gravettian sites in Mediterranean Iberia. The study of the material culture, the fauna, the landscape, and the dating has allowed us to approach the occupations of the site from many perspectives and has permitted us to conclude that Cueva del Arco was occupied sporadically at the beginning of the Gravettian period by a small human group in what would be the beginning of the consolidation of the anatomically modern humans (AMH) in this territory. Furthermore, these occupations were preceded by others belonging to the Aurignacian, which left hardly any remains in the cave. The data presented in this article lead us to believe that Cueva del Arco is a site of great importance for the knowledge of the beginning of the AMH settlement in the Iberian Mediterranean, both in its expansion towards the south and in its definitive consolidation in this territory.

Over its history, archaeology has seen a varied set of uses made of philosophy and philosophical concepts. A persistent critique has been that too often philosophical or more generally theoretical debates have made little difference in terms of empirical archaeological work and interpretation. In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary study on the operationalisation of the Capability Approach in archaeology. We trace some of its implications as regards the understanding of identity and social organisation in archaeology and represent a model by way of which the Capability Approach can be operationalised in archaeology with the Cucuteni-Trypillia societies from 5050 to 2950 BCE as our case study. An analytic scheme is developed that relates archaeological categories to those of the United Nation’s Human Development Index.

This article presents results that seriously challenge conventional frameworks regarding the time, course, and cultural context of the introduction of iron and steel in Europe, in turn central metals in the narrative of civilization development. From focusing on 2,000-year-old finds from 42 different sites across the national borders of present-day northernmost Norway, Finland, and Sweden, our study reveals advanced iron and steel production contemporaneous with Roman steel production within the hitherto unthinkable cultural context of hunter-gatherers. By employing archaeometric analyses alongside a lens that considers the Arctic climate and landscape, long-standing inadequate interpretative frameworks are challenged and we manage to shed novel light on the metallurgical practices and skills of the ancient Arctic hunter-gatherers. By examining local conditions, the research specifically reveals adaptation strategies and previously underexplored social and organizational aspects of early ironmaking. The implications of these findings are profound, urging historians and archaeologists to adopt similar methods and perspectives to potentially uncover additional “unthinkable” locations/regions or contexts with advanced and early metalworking.

Natives of the Low Rhine region, the Batavi were a community of ethnic soldiers engaged in a treaty with Rome, overseeing a heavy supply of men to the Roman auxiliary units. The present article examines the pottery discovered at and retrieved from three sites associated with Batavian auxilia : Războieni, Adony, and Romita. Their status as military sites shaped around the consumption habits of Batavian auxiliary troops makes them comparable. The comprehensive examination of pottery consumption patterns provides valuable insights into the dynamics of material culture in Dacia and Pannonia, facilitating our understanding of supply networks, consumption preferences, and cultural interactions within these frontier regions. The quantitative analyses of fabric and form distributions reveal distinctive trends at each site, reflecting variations in local production, regional trade networks, and social practices. The qualitative interpretations highlight the significance of certain vessel types and their cultural associations. While in the overall perspective, they emphasise the similarity between pottery consumption at the three forts shaped by military presence and regional trade networks, they also highlight potential markers of Batavian identity within the auxiliary units stationed there. By contextualising pottery within broader historical and archaeological frameworks, this research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the cultural aspects of auxilia .

The article examines the relationship between the Roman cult of Mithras and members of the publicum portorium Illyrici , the Roman customs office active in the Danubian provinces, who have been discussed in previous research as potentially important carriers of this cult. To investigate this relationship and its extent, spatial proximity analysis is performed with respect to documented portorium stations and confirmed Mithraic finds. For comparative purposes, the spatial proximity between portorium stations and finds relating to other selected Graeco-Roman deities was also examined. On the basis of the results of this analysis, it is possible to conclude that Mithraic finds are located significantly closer to customs stations than those of other Graeco-Roman deities (with the exception of Jupiter, the main Graeco-Roman god) and that the presence of a portorium station strongly predicts the presence of a Mithraic cult at a given site or in its immediate vicinity, especially in the Western cluster of portorium provinces. Thus, in a nuanced form and using a quantitative method of geographical analysis, the study supports previous conclusions about the importance of portorium officials as a social group significantly involved in the spread of the Roman cult of Mithras in the Danubian provinces.

In archaeological soil and sediment micromorphology, research is grounded in observations made with petrographic microscopes. These observations are recorded using standardised terms and microphotographs. The two-pillar database system allows a user-friendly recording of these observations with I-GEOARCHrec and the possibility to link these data to field pictures and microphotographs publicly available in I-GEOARCHive.

This article presents a series of recommendations for the publication of archaeological data, to improve their usability. These 12 recommendations were formulated by archaeological data experts who mined thousands of publications for different data types (including funerary practices, accelerator mass spectrometry dating, stable isotopes, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany and pathologies) during the initial construction of the Big Interdisciplinary Archaeological Database (BIAD). We also include data harmonisation vocabularies utilised for the integration of data from different recording systems. The case studies we cite to illustrate the recommendations are grounded in examples from the published literature and are presented in a problem/solution format. Though practically oriented towards the facilitation of efficient databasing, these recommendations – which we refer to as the BIAD Standards – are broadly applicable by those who want to extract scientific data from archaeological information, those who work with a specific region or theoretical focus and journal editors and manuscript authors. We anticipate that the use of the BIAD Standards will increase the usability, visibility, interoperability and longevity of published data and also increase the citations of those publications from which data were mined. The Standards will also help frame a unified foundation to support the continued integration of the natural sciences with archaeological research in the future.

This is an introduction to the Special Issue on Microhistory and Archaeology.

In this article, we study the contributions of the microhistorical approach to landscape and settlement archaeology in the French context. First, we outline the reception of microhistorical concepts in France. The micro-analytical scale allows a renewal of the questionings, of the approaches, and therefore of the vision of the studied societies. In the particular case of archaeological research on landscape and settlement, we argue that the microhistorical approach proposes the spatial micro-scale as a framework, but it must be surpassed by a comparative approach capable of discerning common trends and local particularities. This approach thus makes it possible to question major macro-historical questions that still lack clear and consensual answers, such as the modalities of transition between major historical phases, the nucleation of settlement into the medieval village, the extension of the finages and the possibility of agricultural growth in the early Middle Ages, or the modalities of management and exploitation of natural resources.

Microhistory is a part of historical research that focuses on the behaviours, practices, and perceptions of individuals and small communities, locating them in social, economic, and cultural frameworks. Although archaeology has already focused on similar attempts, microarchaeology seldom takes a female perspective. This article aims to discuss how microhistory can be used in historical archaeology, engendering past narratives, those which are usually so difficult to find from historical documents and archaeological sites, and introducing the concept of the ego-artefact , the artefacts we know to have belonged to specific people and which are almost biographical. By doing this analysis, we are individually reconstructing past narratives while including these stories in macronarratives.

This contribution delves into the ways of archaeological reasoning based on material remains, tackled as minute physical traces or signs capable of shedding light on underlying and otherwise unapproachable past phenomena. This is indeed the basis of Microhistory or the conjectural paradigm in History. This article identifies key characteristics regarding this way of inductive or “bottom-up” inference and demonstrates its prospects when applied to prehistoric contexts. To illustrate this point, the article draws on a case study from the protohistory of Iberia: The treasure of Aliseda (seventh–sixth centuries BCE). This one-off assemblage – a true anomaly in its time, past, and present – was accidentally found in 1920 and has thenceforth been subject to assorted interpretations – mainly as individual burial goods from a feminine tomb – using deductive reasoning constrained by strong prejudices. A recent and comprehensive revision of this issue from an inductive and multi-stranded approach – mobilising several independent lines of evidence – has led to a fresh, sounder, and finer-grained micro-narrative. This case exemplifies a successful microhistorical enquiry, which has tracked retrospectively an array of inadvertent observations – from legacy dataset, new fieldwork, and science-based analyses – to illuminate the deviant circumstances framing this occurrence.

In recent years, archaeological research has relied on large datasets, both temporally and geographically, with some archaeologists discussing that there should be a shift towards a more scientific form of conducting archaeological research called “macroarchaeology.” Ironically, and contradictorily, this shift towards large-scale research has involved the use of inductive approaches, which means that archaeological material needs to be converted into universal quantitative values. The inductive approaches used by archaeologists today, as argued by Karl Popper, and other authors in recent years, cannot be considered scientific in the strict sense of the word, since there is always a degree of uncertainty in inductive reasoning. This study suggests that archaeological data can be considered as traces of the past, clues that allow us to reconstruct past phenomena. As Carlo Ginzburg’s evidential paradigm demonstrates, thinking of the past in terms of traces and clues is much more scientific than appears at first. In addition to traces and clues, a second interpretative procedure can be conducted on data. Based on Ginzburg’s conjectural paradigm and discussion on fiction, we can recognize the past as real, while at the same time, conjecture the several ways past agents could have acted otherwise.

It is proposed that combining a microhistorical approach with the frameworks offered by household archaeology and posthumanism provides a way of rethinking what urbanity means in archaeological (specifically later medieval) contexts. This approach is deployed to challenge generalising approaches which obscure the complexity, vibrancy, and generative capacity of past urbanities. Focussing on the question of the fortunes of later medieval small towns in England, a posthuman household microhistory of two households in the town of Steyning (southern England) is presented. This demonstrates how a focus on the practices undertaken by, and relational constitution of, households can reveal difference and open new avenues for understanding past urbanity.

Following the proposal for the special issue, the aim of this study is to reflect on the potentialities and setbacks of a micro-historical approach to the archaeological record. This will be done by analysing the local organization of Early Modern husbandry in a territory in northwestern Iberia, where investigations have been carried out since 2017. I will apply the theoretical background of microhistory to four specific archaeological sites to delve into the social structuring and power relationships among the different agents involved in stockbreeding in the territory. In this regard, I will argue that one of the most compelling contributions of microhistory is to delve into the deep connection between the systemic and the quotidian, between structure and agency. However, this connection is not always straightforward and visible in the sources, and thus a deep theoretical and methodological background becomes necessary to understand questions such as how power was conceived and articulated at the local level and in daily life.

This article explores the challenges of translating the empirical data recorded in the microhistorical events documented in most archaeological sites into narratives that provide a deeper understanding of long-term historical processes. It specifically focuses on the importance of studying the history of subaltern communities through this microhistorical scale. Drawing on the concept of “subaltern debris,” the article proposes a new approach to analyzing archaeological deposits generated by the everyday life of subaltern communities. It argues that these deposits can offer valuable insights into the living conditions and agency of subaltern communities. The article presents two case studies from the late antique period in the Iberian Peninsula to illustrate the potential of this approach. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of recognizing the material agency of subaltern communities in reshaping historical narratives.

In this study, it is argued that a microhistorical perspective applied to historical archaeologies provides intelligibility to certain mechanisms of exercise of power and forms of resistance in the local sphere. Adopting a microhistorical approach, two primary mechanisms of social order consensus creation and contestation are explored through the creation and negotiation of symbolic capital. Micropolitics are understood as a set of poorly formalised but meaningful practices that define, model, and negotiate forms of social domination by integrating different communicative languages. Infrapolitics shape the forms of resistance and agency of subaltern groups and, by definition, are not easy to track and identify. Through the study of small empirical illustrations from the medieval period in the Basque Country, the aim is to argue that there is a correlation between the intensity and complexity of the political practices that develop in local societies and the forms of contestation of rights and cohesion mechanisms. To carry out this analysis, material, textual, mnemonic, and oral records are used.

Organic containers are rarely preserved in archaeological contexts. As a result, the work involved in their production and their functions remains invisible unlike other containers commonly better represented, such as pottery. The early Neolithic site of La Draga (5300–4900 cal BC), located on the shore of the Lake Banyoles (Spain), has provided several containers made of wood and plant fibres besides a significant amount of ceramic remains. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of the vessels at La Draga to assess the importance of organic containers in a context where pottery technology is well known and employed for several functions. The importance of the different types of containers in the context of this farming society is assessed through the analysis of the number of remains, their sizes and shapes, and their spatial distribution. The exceptional preservation of the organic vessels allows comparisons to generate hypotheses about their function. Wooden containers are associated with consumption, while baskets may have been used to transport or store foodstuff, and ceramic vessels also for cooking. The spatial distribution of basketry remains tends to show an area that could be linked to the storage of cereals.

This study aims to evaluate the functionality of a sample of lithic tools from a multiproxy perspective. The artifacts come from a mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers’ occupation of the La Mesada site in Patagonia. The perspective involves the examination of use-wear traces, hafting wear, and organic micro-residues. The experimental program that supports this perspective is presented. Use-wear traces and organic residues were recognized in the distal portion of the archaeological artifacts. Meanwhile, some tools, in the proximal and middle portion, present alterations attributable to hafting in combination with animal and vegetable residues. The production sequence of a particular artifact design is discussed, with distinctive aspects regarding regional trends. Practices related to plant management were identified that allow the evaluation of mobility circuits and interchange mechanisms of these societies.

Wooden material culture has traditionally been overshadowed in ethnographic and archaeological collections. However, its study has great potential to further our understanding of human–plant interactions. Carvings and crafts store information related to the trees and woodlands of provenance as well as about the people who shaped them. This article discusses the possibilities and difficulties of reconstructing the path from the museum’s objects to the trees by applying a multidisciplinary approach. One specific tree, the uggurwala tree ( Ochroma pyramidale ), is repeatedly selected by Gunadule people for particular carvings. The use of Ochroma has been observed in objects deposited in ethnographic collections and it was probably a Cultural Keystone Species for Gunadule communities and a potential one for the Isthmo-Colombian area. By exploring this concept and applying it to the study of these types of objects, new reflections on the role of wood material culture in past and present societies are raised.

The massive amount of rock-cut monuments along the slopes of the acropolis hill of Philippi in ancient Macedon has received scholarly attention since the first expeditions and following excavation and research campaigns conducted by the French School at Athens in the nineteenth century. The documentation of these peculiar monuments, comprising images in relief, etchings, inscriptions, and empty niches, consists of very few early drawings, photographs of single objects and sometimes of clusters of neighboring monuments, maps documenting the monuments’ location along the slopes of the acropolis rock ( intra and extra muros ) and brief descriptions leading to an iconographical categorization. Despite a variety of subjects, the depiction of a youthful huntress commonly denominated as Artemis/Diana is predominating. Based on the commonly accepted dating of these reliefs to the Roman era, the rock-cut monuments are generally interpreted as expressions of popular religion that went unregulated by the state; some even consider them as evidence for specifically female ritual practice. As part of the project “Rock-cut reliefs in Philippi: a microregional study on the religion of ancient Macedon,” a first on-site documentation campaign was carried out in March 2023. The presented case study of the rock-cut reliefs from Philippi aims at spatializing the religiously connotated depictions within the city-/landscape as a first step and applying the concept of religioscape. With this approach, it differs in the methodology used so far, namely the iconographical analysis of the objects as a first analytical step. This article at hand presents the method used to establish the first three-dimensional data sets of the reliefs for documenting as well as monitoring their condition and aims to demonstrate the immense value of these 3D models given the dangers natural corrosion and vandalism pose to the archaeological objects. Moreover, embracing the ability to capture the landscape setting in 3D allows us to visualize the three-dimensional embedding of the objects into the urban fabric of the city with its varied terrain profile. This allows for new analytical prospects, such as inter-visibility, reachability, or building economy.

Mount Akraia, located in the northeastern Greek Peloponnese, hosted an open-air worshiping site beginning in the tenth/ninth c BCE. The space gained popularity and was quickly transformed into a monumental sanctuary known as the Argive Heraion. The sanctuary is elevated and easy to spot from a distance; it provides unobstructed views of the surrounding region. The location is historically significant as well, overlying a Mycenaean cemetery and settlement. Ancient authors frame the Argive Heraion as a touchstone sacred landmark; contemporary scholars echo these descriptions. This article synthesizes the textual and material record, questioning which of the Argive Heraion’s visual characteristics captivated worshipers’ senses, and if worshipers’ perceptions shifted over time. My complete dataset spans the tenth–second c BCE and considers all other places where group worship happened in the Argive Plain. Using GIS and text analyses, I measure and compare an array of viewing experiences that were culturally meaningful for Greek worshipers. The resultant models compare the Argive Heraion’s visualscape over time, framed against the broader sacred landscape. I also look to the present day. Using contemporary tourist reviews, I unpack nuances that are missing in the archaeological and historical record. Personal histories shift what we see and how we see it.