Publishing deadlines mean that even though this issue is the first of 2024, I'm writing this editorial in late 2023, a couple of months removed from the very successful Belfast EAA annual meeting. One of the pieces of news announced at the meeting that the European Journal of Archaeology will be transitioning to a fully open access journal starting in 2025. This is a process we've been moving towards for years in close collaboration with our publisher Cambridge University Press. Our vision of Open Access is not just ‘Open To Read’ but also ‘Open To Publish’. Many EJA authors are already publishing OA articles with support from their institutions, grant funding, or through CUP's agreements with their institutions. But EJA also publishes students, museum professionals, field archaeologists, independent scholars, and people whose institutions do not yet have these agreements in place; and EJA must not become inaccessible to them. Thanks to the work of our colleagues at CUP, from 2025, all manuscripts accepted by the EJA will have a path to Open Access: if the authors have funding agreements (or government grant support) in place, those take priority, if not, CUP will apply a waiver. We're thrilled to be making this transition in a way that serves not just our broad readership but also our authors and the wider scholarly community, both within and beyond the university sector.
In this issue of the EJA, we feature six research articles. The articles have a broad spread, from the Mesolithic to the Roman period, to the conduct of archaeologists in Anatolia over the last few decades. Fretheim launches this issue with a detailed discussion of dwelling practices and structures in Mesolithic Norway. She compiles a database of over 150 dwelling sites drawn from research and commercial archaeology and performs quantitative analysis to identify regional and temporal trends. These, she links to shifting cultural practices and demographic changes from the start of the local middle Mesolithic and to increasingly regionalized ways of life in the local late Mesolithic. Her work offers a clear example of the detail and texture available to us about even highly mobile societies and their worlds, and demonstrates yet again, the value of drawing on the increasingly abundant grey literature.
Retaining our focus on mobility, but in a very different cultural and temporal context, Ortman and colleagues draw out a quantitative approach to understand the cost of transporting goods—here, ceramics—in the Romano-British world. They argue that a reduction in transport costs played a causal role in economic growth within Roman Britain as evident in the intensification and specialization of a variety of domains, from agriculture to masonry. Archaeology is going through something of a quantitative turn at the moment, and this article demonstrates the insights possible through careful, nuanced, and methodologically sound modelling.
Remaining in the Roman world, Dodd explores the interpretative potential of the late antique burghi, defended settlements, of the Lower Rhine valley. Although the burghi share architectural features and conformations, their uses are diverse and reflect a growing entanglement between civic and military spheres during the late Roman empire. Dodd suggests while some may have played a role in wider political or military control, the occupation of others reflected more local concerns; and he concludes by calling for further research, including better chronologies, for these intriguing sites.
Nichols presents a beautifully developed small study of dogs in three boat graves from Gamla Uppsala. His osteological analysis shows the dogs to be two sight hounds and an indeterminate smaller type, and close contextual study demonstrates a shared rite that he links to the status (but not gender) of the human decedents. This empirical foundation gives him ample grounds to consider the role of dogs in the life and death of high status people in Gamla Uppsala, among which is his suggestion that these were more than companions or signs of wealth, but their humans’ most trusted accomplices.
Shifting into the relatively recent past, Quade and colleagues present a bioarchaeological study of a partially excavated eighteenth or nineteenth century mass grave found at the Jičín Natural Sciences Centre and Observatory in Czechia. The region saw considerable military activity during these decades, so a key research question was to determine whether this was a battlefield grave or something else. While the excavations recovered buttons and other material indicative of military attire, the relatively low rates of perimortem trauma as well as the presence of infants and sub-adults in the grave led the authors to suggest it was more likely related to a military encampment than any specific battle.
The final research article in this issue turns our attention to the practice of archaeology in Anatolia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Baysal carried out painstaking archival archaeology to develop a clearer understanding of the position and perception of local workman and their relations to (often foreign) excavation directors. She reveals a shifting and ambiguous set of relationships, with little sense that workmen have gained any great recognition or status, despite mainstream archaeology's claimed desire to be equitable and multi-vocal. Archaeology is practiced and organized differently around the world; but, as Baysal makes clear, the work is uniformly difficult, skilled, and necessitating care. Those who do that work should be named, respected, and allowed to contribute more than just their sweat to the final outputs.
If you are interested in submitting an article on any aspect of European archaeology, or have recently published a book that you would like us to review, do please get in touch with a member of our editorial team or visit us on https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-archaeology
The Reviews team is also actively to increase the pool of potential book reviewers. If you would like to be considered to review for EJA, please e-mail Marta and Maria at [email protected] and [email protected] with a brief list of your topics of interest and a short CV attached. Advanced postgraduate students as well as those who have completed their PhD are able to review for EJA. Proposals to review specific books are considered, provided that they are relevant to the EJA's mission.
