In considering the history of regional archaeological projects, I propose to use a long-term perspective. Rather than surveying relatively recent examples and inductively working out the differences between them, I should like instead to venture some historical generalisations about the mental and practical traditions in which such projects are set. I want to suggest that two contrasting attitudes and approaches have presented themselves, largely as alternatives, throughout the history of archaeology; and that these choices are still offering themselves today. While this is perhaps a rather long perspective to take, the alternative is a very short one. If we take the description ‘regional projects’ to mean the integrated investigation of sites in landscapes, then the concept is effectively post-1945 and really post-1965. The reason is very simple: money. Archaeologists at earlier periods just did not have the size of budget which now seems essential for what we call ‘regional projects’. Of course there were earlier examples of landscape studies in Europe, and excavations of two or more complementary sites; but it would be hard before the 1960s to find the degree of integrated investigation which is today the defining characteristic of a regional project. (Perhaps archaeologists in the Near East, by using very cheap labour, had the equivalent of a modern regional budget; but they had whole abandoned cities to investigate, so the regional label scarcely applies.)

This article is based on the results of a project on social change in the Early and Middle Bronze Age in the north-eastern Netherlands, which ended in 1991. Although the project originally focused on the possible development of social stratification, here, the emphasis will be on the relationship between burial ritual and social change in general. Before embarking on the main argument, it should be understood that the link between burial ritual and social change by no means implies the view that burial ritual reflects all social changes which take place within a society, nor that the changes observed in the burial ritual are essential to an understanding of the society concerned. The burial ritual offers us no more than an opportunity to study past social changes. The resulting interpretations should be supported and tested by other expressions of material culture, such as those concerning economy and settlement patterns.

This paper offers a critical evaluation of the debate on agency and personhood in archaeology. Despite some very interesting and sharp discussions, the debate has suffered from the projection of anachronistic definitions of the person and an overreliance on specific ethnographic readings. In addition, little attempt is made to integrate abstract theoretical discussions with close analyses of empirical data. I would like to suggest that this should be our priority. In the second part of the paper, I will apply these ideas by examining notions of personhood and agency held by the inhabitants of the southern Greek mainland between ca 1800 and 1600 B.C. The analysis will be based on the mortuary practices and imagery of the period.

The cause of the Viking Age is one of our longest-lived debates. A combination of push and pull factors and a catalysing environment instigated the late 8th-century escalation in maritime activity that ultimately led to social, political and religious transformation. Recent discussions have focused on the macro level, with little consideration of the individual gains to be made by raiding. This paper argues that rewards consisted in more than portable wealth. In the flexible hierarchies of the Viking Age, those who took advantage of opportunities to enhance their social capital stood to gain significantly. The lure of the raid was thus more than booty; it was about winning and preserving power through the enchantment of travel and the doing of deeds. This provides an important correction to models that focus on the need for portable wealth; the act of acquiring silver was as important as the silver itself.

Investigations into the upper palaeolithic settlement history of Europe have made significant advances over the past decades in several fields. As a result of the reappraisal of old collections and the excavation of ‘new’ sites, an extensive data set has become available which can be used to study aspects of the organization of palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The improvement of absolute and relative dating methods has provided the archaeologist with a more solid chronological framework. Additionally, innovations in archaeological theory and methodology have led to the exploration of new directions of inquiry. This paper focuses on a well-known example of these new directions: the study of regional settlement-subsistence systems of palaeolithic groups, incorporating the systematic evaluation of archaeological data recovered from substantial areas. A growing number of archaeologists dealing with the upper palaeolithic record and active in various regions throughout Europe is currently engaged in this particular form of analysis (Audouze 1992; Hahn 1987; Julien 1987; Straus 1986; Weniger 1987, 1989).

Drawing on relational theoretical perspectives in archaeological discourse, this paper considers how we can address the undervaluation of pedagogy and pedagogic research in archaeology. Through examining the relationships between fieldwork, teaching, and research, in light of Ingold's concept of the meshwork and DeLanda's assemblage theory, the division between teaching and research is undermined, and students and pedagogy are recentred as fundamental to the production of archaeological knowledge. This paper provides a theoretical grounding for resituating our current practices, suggests practical means for change, and highlights the benefit to the archaeological discipline arising from a revaluation of archaeological pedagogic research and an enmeshed understanding of archaeological practice.

The narrative structure of Roman archaeology places a particular emphasis on the acculturation of the newly conquered provinces. This ‘process’ known as Romanisation has been found wanting by many commentators on Roman archaeology. Although rejected, it can still reappear and influence the narrative structure of many studies. Reference is deliberately made to the publications of the ‘Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference’ to highlight the revision of the usage of ‘Romanisation’ by British scholars during the 1990s. The paper identifies the cultural assumptions underpinning the revisionist views of Romanisation and the key problem of a narrative based explicitly or otherwise on textual evidence. Here, an attempt is made to account for the uniqueness of Roman archaeology as practiced in Britain – in comparison to that of prehistory or medieval archaeology. The paper suggests that there is a need to move on from Romanisation to alternative narrative forms drawing on recent revisionist agendas within the social sciences.

This article asks whether there is a role for weather in archaeological narratives. In archaeology, ideas of weather have been expressed almost solely through the aggregated measure of climate. A number of theoretical and practical problems arise from this, specifically in questioning how climatic change can be related to social change. The article reviews how other disciplines have developed a sense of climate that is more embedded in the human experience of landscape. A case study of a township in Cumbria uses the inhabited perspectives of two 18th-century diarists to explore how we might develop and apply these ideas in an archaeological context. The conclusion outlines some of the challenges for future research, arguing that we should consider weather as a material condition of the landscape – something as much open to archaeological investigation as any other aspect of the past.

Archaeology has to re-think the terms of its practice, because current debate tends to intervene at the level of theory, which leaves the discipline ungrounded in a theory of practice or a conception of the historical coming into being of archaeology as a discipline. From a South African perspective, its grand narrative is primarily concerned with the development of social theory in the West but it does not provide - it cannot provide – an account of the formation of the discipline as a social and signifying practice situated in a broader social and political context. Central to this re-thinking, I argue, are questions of social value, and the role played by archaeology in projects of restitution, social justice, memory and identity.

Þóra Pétursdóttir raises the point that archaeology is limited regarding what it can achieve, including the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, by a series of theoretical assumptions. She challenges the ‘traditional’ archaeological ‘key tropes’ in matters of this new epoch, namely the concepts of culture history, deep time/distant pasts, and the nature–culture divide. Instead, she proposes a number of new guiding points to orient archaeological inquiries, framed as part of the object-oriented ontological (OOO) philosophies. In reply, I claim that the use of OOO theories is rather unhelpful for addressing the topic of the Anthropocene, given that they lead to important ethical and political consequences: a fetishization of things, an abandoning of responsibility and an alienation of humans. They are also based on the confusion that analytical distinctions are in some way the ones responsible for the existence of inequalities, ecological destruction, racism or discrimination. Paradoxically, precisely through their annihilation, there is no room left for acknowledging the alterity of the past.

Recently, voices have been raised regarding the challenges of Big Data-driven global approaches, including the realization that exclusively tackling the global scale masks social and historical realities. While multi-scalar analyses have confronted this problem, the effects of global approaches are being felt. We highlight one of these effects: as classical scholarship struggles to decolonize itself, the ancient Mediterranean in global archaeology pivots around the Graeco-Roman world only, marginalizing the non-classical Mediterranean, thus foiling attempts at promoting post-colonial perspectives. In highlighting this, our aim is twofold: first, to invigorate the debate on multi-scalar approaches, proposing to incorporate microhistory into archaeological analysis; second, to use the non-classical Mediterranean to demonstrate that historical depth at a micro level is essential to augment that power in our interpretations.

‘Reflexiveness’ is a term used for the growth of discussions in archaeology on its history, epistemology, and social relevance. While much of this reflecting refers to the relation of archaeology and nationalism, leading to insights into the politicisation of archaeological research and presentation to the public and the use of the past for ideological purposes, still we can witness many parallels to the use of prehistory for the creation of a European identity. After briefly commenting on discussions on different nationalisms and national and cultural identity, I will present a short history of ideas of Europe, followed by a consideration of two examples of the attempt to create the lacking founding myth of post-cold-war Europe. In the end, it is argued that a ‘Reflexive Theory’ should necessarily replace current rather politically motivated ‘reflexiveness’ and is needed to examine critically the Europeanist notion of European archaeology.

This essay explores everyday practices as sites of memory-making, arguing that such practices have the potential to serve as markers and makers of cultural identity. I use frameworks of social memory to interpret 19th-century butchery practices on the Eastern Pequot reservation in North Stonington, Connecticut. Colonialism meant change for Pequot peoples, including shifts in family structures and the adoption of mass produced material culture. I argue that, within these abrupt changes, social memory and memory-making practices played a central role in maintaining and congealing indigenous identity. I examine evidence of changing butchery practices on the reservation as they related to the adoption of metal tools. Archaeological investigations demonstrate that even though the Eastern Pequot increasingly used metal tools for butchery, they also continued to use chipped tools made of either stone or glass. I suggest that this pattern is significant because of the ‘mnemonic’ qualities that chipped-tool usage might have carried on reservation grounds. These mnemonic practices served as binding ties for the reservation community.

The paper ponders the object of archaeology, called here ‘the archaeological’. It argues that the existence of such an object is a necessary premise of the field and that ultimately it is on this object that the validity of all claims and arguments must rest. The paper suggests that the archaeological be conceived as a cultural phenomenon that consists in being disengaged from the social, an understanding that positions archaeology as a counterpart to the social sciences and the humanities, rather than a member in the same milieu. The first part of the paper focuses on the position of the archaeological with reference to the concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, which eventually leads us to a confrontation between archaeological statics and the dynamics of the world. Efforts to justify and understand archaeological statics consequently lead to the recognition of a constitutive distinction between buried and non-buried conditions, upon which the differentiation of the archaeological from the social is established.

This paper argues that material culture should be brought even more to the forefront in post-colonial archaeology. At present, post-colonial analyses start from a baseline of pinned-down, delineated things as processed through artefact analysis, to proceed to interpretations of how these things were used in fluid, multidirectional, ambivalent social and cultural interactions. But what if things themselves can be fluid rather than bounded? Can we look into the various ways in which things were defined in the past, and the various relations they enabled? Such a change of perspective can also help redress the imbalance within post-colonial studies between, on the one hand, consumption as the field in which meaning is negotiated and, on the other hand, production as offering merely a template for the inscription of that meaning. A case study of so-called pre-sigillata production in southern Gaul articulates the benefit to be gained from considering these issues.

In the contributions that follow seven archaeologists, of different backgrounds and working in different ways and places, attempt to answer the question ‘Can an archaeologist be a public intellectual?’ This discussion follows a special forum, sponsored by this journal, held at the European Archaeologists’ Association annual conference in Helsinki in 2012. The participants in that forum were Åsa Larsson, Layla Renshaw, Ghattas Sajey, Audrey Horning and Thomas Meier, who was unfortunately unable to offer his contribution for publication. The published discussion is supplemented by contributions from Cornelius Holtorf, Fredrik Svanberg, Nathan Schlanger and Jaime Almansa Sánchez. We hope that this special section captures some of the spirit of lively debate that characterized the forum.

We have no choice: we must excavate, first because whole continents are still barely known from an archaeological point of view, and second because thousands of archaeological sites disappear every day as a result of economic development. Rescue or preventive archaeology is thus an ethical duty. Nevertheless, there is a serious risk of a split between academic archaeology, with its wealth of thinking but poverty of funding, and commercial archaeology, where the situation is the opposite and the goal is, above all, financial profit. So the question is not just to know why one excavates, but also how.

This paper suggests that the goddess movement is becoming increasingly intertwined with mainstream archaeology, an illustrative case being Çatalhöyük. This is another salient example of the public's avid consumption of archaeology and its multivalent imagery. Yet there are additional, fundamental issues of a more philosophical nature to consider. For example, feminist practitioners might consider interrogating the very ontological bedrock on which goddess narratives are layered. They reinforce three pervasive dualisms which feminists have sought to dispel: nature:culture, mind:body, reason:emotion. Additionally, masculinist theorists might find many of the underlying concepts sexist against men, since they seek to highlight and restore the primacy of women. Despite the positive overtones of the movement, I argue that it is often reactionary, anti-feminist and it essentialises the roles of women and men.

Value is one of the concepts which are of importance in the way people structure their material surroundings. According to the philosophy of Georg Simmel, value finds its origins in the tension between the desire for objects and access to them. The dimensions of desirability and accessibility may be investigated archaeologically, in order to approach the concept of value. Such a perspective is taken in this article with reference to three different classes of imported Mycenaean pottery, which have been found in the Late Bronze Age levels of the site of Ugarit at the Mediterranean coast of Syria. It is concluded that various vessel types were appreciated differently at the city. The meanings imposed on these imported objects derived from the roles they played in the local cultural context.

Digital archaeologists claim that their practices have proven to be an important tool for mediating conflict, ensuring that the digital turn in archaeology entails engaging in current political issues. This can be questioned by analysing a copy of the Syrian Arch of Triumph. The original was destroyed in 2015. A year later, a copy was carved out of Egyptian marble; the replica was constructed thanks to digital documentation, which allowed archaeologists to create a 3D model. The arch was placed in various Western locations; however, it never reached Syria. Hybridity, the cultural and political significance of the arch’s replica and its ‘Grand Tour’ invite us to think about different interpretive layers of this artefact of ideological discourse (ontological, epistemological, ethical). In this paper, the replica of the Syrian arch will be analysed through the frameworks of post-colonial theory and technology studies. Both perspectives provide an insight into promising advantages and alarming drawbacks of such digital practices. This paper argues that the case of a copy of the Syrian Arch of Triumph on the one hand reflects the contemporary colonial technocracy in heritage politics (an ethical dimension), and on the other demonstrates that an ideological aspect of its digital reconstruction emerges from a speculative anticipation of what might constitute the universal value of world heritage in the future (an onto-epistemological dimension).