The Hydrierwerke Pölitz AG was a synthetic-fuel plant of strategic importance to the Nazi war machine. The surrounding area contained labour camps, factories and other military infrastructure. The area was a target for sustained Allied bombardment causing extensive damage to the plant and nearby towns and villages. After the war, the plant's troubled past faded before interest was revived in the 1990s. Here, with the aid of historical aerial photographs and modern remote-sensing methods, the authors document the physical remains of the site, reconstruct its ‘dark history’ and reflect on the significance of the Hydrierwerke for the discourse on neglected and appropriated Second World War heritage.

Reconstruction of a nineteenth-century cobbled pathway in the village of Aristi provides valuable insights into the material culture and settlement archaeology of Ottoman-era Greece. The authors argue that such small-scale pairing of restoration and archaeological practices in ‘traditional’ settlements could enhance our understanding of Ottoman archaeology without undermining the lived experience of such places.

The authors report on ancient DNA data from two human skeletons buried within the chancel of the 1608–1616 church at the North American colonial settlement of Jamestown, Virginia. Available archaeological, osteological and documentary evidence suggest that these individuals are Sir Ferdinando Wenman and Captain William West, kinsmen of the colony's first Governor, Thomas West, Third Baron De La Warr. Genomic analyses of the skeletons identify unexpected maternal relatedness as both carried the mitochondrial haplogroup H10e. In this unusual case, aDNA prompted further historical research that led to the discovery of illegitimacy in the West family, an aspect of identity omitted, likely intentionally, from genealogical records.

Minimally invasive compositional analyses of glass trade beads have revolutionised the study of these highly portable and socially significant items. Here, the authors interrogate new and legacy compositional data to investigate how Indigenous communities in eastern North America, particularly Wendat confederacy members, obtained beads from European traders and connected to broader interregional exchange systems c. AD 1600–1670. Diagnostic chemical elements in glass compositions reveal down-the-line exchange and population movement into the Western Great Lakes region prior to the arrival of European settlers, which highlights active Indigenous participation in transatlantic economic networks during a historical period of dynamic reorganisation and interaction.

In the absence of written records, disease and parasite loads are often used as indicators of sanitation in past populations. Here, the authors adopt the novel approach of integrating the bioarchaeological analysis of cesspits in an area of medieval Leiden (the Netherlands) with historical property records to explore living conditions. Using light microscopy and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) they identify evidence of parasites associated with ineffective sanitation (whipworm, roundworm and the protozoan Giardia duodenalis)—at residences of all social levels—and the consumption of infected livestock and freshwater fish (Diphyllobothriidae, cf. Echinostoma sp., cf. Fasciola hepatica and Dicrocoelium sp.).

Modern and contemporary archaeology, the French equivalent of historical archaeology, emerged in the 1970s. Subsequent attempts at theorising this sub-discipline have been hindered by a lack of broad professional recognition and funding. While the archaeology of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is now more widely recognised in France, studies of the post-nineteenth-century period remain limited to a few specific contexts. Here, the author offers an overview for the Anglophone readers of modern and contemporary archaeology in France and argues that greater theorisation, cross-fertilisation with other archaeological traditions and a diversification of the range of themes considered might enhance recognition of this sub-discipline within and beyond France.

This article illustrates preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research project ‘Science for society, society for science at the Site of National Remembrance in Łambinowice’. It presents the material traces of prisoner-of-war, resettlement and forced labour camps that functioned between 1870 and 1946 in Lamsdorf (now Łambinowice, Poland) and explains their modern social significance.

Praia Melão, the largest sugar mill and estate in São Tomé, active from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, is the first archaeological site ever investigated on the island. It embodies the inception of the plantation economic system predicated on the labour of enslaved people and of local resistance.

Although conflict archaeology is now well established, the archaeological remains of many specific military confrontations are still to be explored. This article reports the results of fieldwork to document the site of the Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944–25 January 1945). The authors use drone-mounted 1m-resolution LiDAR and very high-resolution simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) methods to reveal more than 940 features within the forested Ardennes landscape, many of which were subsequently visited and confirmed. As well as highlighting the potential of the LiDAR-SLAM method, deployed here (both in this geographic region and in conflict archaeology) for the first time, the survey results emphasise the need for a debate on managing the heritage of a key modern conflict landscape in Europe.

Colonised societies often continue traditional practices in private contexts whilst adopting new forms of ritual in public. Excavations at the Mam centre of Chiantla Viejo in highland Guatemala, however, reveal a more complex picture. Combining archaeological evidence with early colonial documents, the author identifies a revival of Indigenous Maya religion following the Spanish conquest (AD 1525–1550). Despite appearing in colonial records as Christian converts, the Maya directed a sequence of destruction, reconstruction and remodelling of the monumental core of Chiantla Viejo to evoke the landscape of their ancestral settlement of Zaculeu. The results emphasise the importance of public spaces for the persistence of Indigenous religion in early colonial settings.

During the mid-first millennium AD, new kingdoms and states emerged across South Asia. At this time, land grants made to Hindu temples are thought to have led to wide-ranging societal transformations. To date, however, neither the land-grant charters nor the changes they are said to have driven have been studied archaeologically. Here, the authors present the results of the first archaeological investigation of the charters and their landscape context. Bringing together the textual record with a survey of 268 religious and residential sites, the results establish historical baselines against which the longue durée developments of South Asian social, political and economic formation can be profitably re-posed.

Geophysical survey and test excavations have located the remains of St Mary's Fort, the 1634 fortified settlement built by the European settler-colonists who founded the Maryland colony. The archaeological remains contrast with historical descriptions of St Mary's Fort, offering a unique opportunity to understand Maryland's earliest and most poorly documented period of colonial life.

While the Western Front of the Great (or First World) War is deeply engrained in the European historical consciousness, memories of the Eastern Front are less prominent. Here, events have been repressed, obscured by the subsequent experience of the Second World War and by heritage policy in the region. The authors present the results of archaeological investigations of a battlefield in central Poland, where static trench warfare was fought between December 1914 and July 1915. A unique landscape palimpsest was formed, the present neglected state of which is a material expression of contemporary attitudes to the legacy of the forgotten Eastern Front. The study illustrates the wider intersection of warfare, identity and memory.

For nearly 300 years, the Knights of St John forced a range of captives to labour on their galleys, with slave, convict and debtor oarsmen propelling the Knights’ navy in their crusade against Islam. This article considers how we can investigate these captives and the consequences of their presence in Malta by reconfiguring captivity as a process that extended into wider society. By seeking material traces of captivity at sea on board galleys and on land, the article opens new investigative avenues into early modern captivity in the Mediterranean. In addition, it brings to current debates a rare archaeological example of modern slavery within a European context.

The Koźle Basin in Poland was radically transformed by aerial bombardment during the Second World War. Today, the region has approximately 6000 well-preserved bomb craters with diameters ranging from 5–15m and depths often exceeding 2m. Combining remote-sensing data and fieldwork with historical accounts, this article analyses these craters, demonstrating that their varied morphologies derive from the weight of the bombs that created them, and on the type and moisture content of the soil on which the bombs fell. Based on their results, the authors issue a call for the official protection of the Koźle landscape, which has particular historical, educational and ecological value.