In this second issue of the European Journal of Archaeology (EJA) for 2020, our authors and reviewers cover a considerable amount of ground. The six articles and nine book reviews span Palaeolithic to twentieth-century archaeologies and propose or review new methods and new forms of public collaboration. This is a distinctly forward-looking issue, with many authors and reviewers thinking about old problems in new ways—perhaps a taste of what the 2020s hold in store for European archaeology.
Livija Ivanovaitė and colleagues conduct a detailed and rigorous analysis of the many interrelated cultures of the eastern European Upper Palaeolithic. Their aim is to determine whether the diversity of cultures identified in this region reflects the lived reality of ancient people or more recent archaeological traditions. Based largely on a careful application of geometric morphometrics to the type artefact of many of these cultures, the large tanged point, they suggest that there are far more similarities than differences among many of these groups. This novel application of geometric morphometrics, until now largely associated with osteological studies, makes clear how new methods can help answer old problems and serves as a provocative addition to the increasingly sophisticated literature on Upper Palaeolithic Europe.
Depictions of boats in Bronze Age Swedish inland—as opposed to coastal—rock art are the focus of research by Nimura and colleagues. They link the appearance of engraved boats on inland lakes to transit zones and transit points connecting riverine and maritime networks. They identify differences in art making between inland networks to the east that were part of the Atlantic interaction sphere and those to the west that formed part of the Baltic zone. The authors adopt the political economy framework that currently characterizes much Scandinavian Bronze Age research, discussing trade networks and exotic ‘commodities’ with little qualification, despite the anachronism of this terminology. Nevertheless, the novelty of this article is clear in the way it brings together landscape-scale analysis, close study of rock art sites, and an overview of mobile materials.
Remaining in Scandinavia, Christian Løchsen Rødsrud examines ideas of land tenure, memory, identity, and the role of ritual via two Iron Age mounds from Norway. That mounds are often built over ard-marked soil is a long-recognized phenomenon, with interpretations running the gamut from ritual ploughing to the incidental use of previously farmed land. In this article, Rødsrud uses the frame of social memory to connect farming activity to the subsequent construction of two mounds several centuries apart and demonstrates the complex interrelationship between cultivation and ritual through a detailed environmental analysis of the soils used to build the mounds. This article builds on work in other periods that emphasize the thick temporality of prehistoric and early medieval landscapes and serves as a potent reminder to archaeologists that our sites exist across our periodization, retaining power and playing active roles even as their primary function might change or be forgotten.
Complex environmental sampling regimes also play a central role in Chapman and colleagues’ article. They propose a shift in approach to bog bodies from forensic sites to environmental contexts, with the wider aim of increasing knowledge about their taphonomic and depositional histories. Three case studies walk us through the various scales and methods embedded in their approach, providing an easy to follow and compelling argument that even sites with poor excavation and research histories can yield considerably more information. Bog bodies are a topic of great interest to archaeologists and non-specialists, and I hope this new approach to their context and excavation will eventually lead to more and more complex stories about both the individuals buried in bogs and the worlds in which they lived.
Uroš Košir offers a compelling and poignant discussion of the excavation of Romani mass graves in Slovenia dated to the Second World War. Through a combination of oral history, archival research, and meticulous archaeology, he is able to identify specific victims and begin to tell the stories of their lives as well as their deaths. Conflict archaeology is increasingly a lens through which we study the archaeology of the twentieth century; and, in this case, it provides a powerful one to focus on people often left out of mainstream war stories. This is a particularly well-illustrated article, and I strongly encourage readers to access the many images—photographs and diagrams—provided in the supplementary material.
The final research article in this issue is Dobat and colleagues’ strident proposal for a new infrastructure to encourage collaboration between archaeologists and metal detectorists. Based in the authors’ own experiences of public archaeology and working with amateurs and detectorists (admittedly only in northern Europe), the article presents the vision statement behind their newly launched ‘European Public Finds Recording Network’. Among the many aims and objectives, they hold firmly to an idea of archaeology which is fully enmeshed with public participation and promote Open Access databases for finds made by metal detectorists, such as the British Portable Antiquities Scheme or the Danish DIME scheme. However, both the examples and the authors’ countries of origin underscore a rather regionalized approach to public archaeology, metal detecting, and collaborative projects. Although the goals of more and more engaged public archaeology are laudible, they do not fully answer how this sort of scheme might operate in national contexts with different political and economic realities or different cultural attitudes to archaeological heritage.
Our reviews section is equally diverse. The latest Neolithic Studies Society edited volume—this time on Neolithic mining—is deemed thought-provoking, if uneven, as is Jørgensen and colleagues’ edited volume on creativity in the Bronze Age. Two monographs exploring Bronze Age cultural interaction in the western Mediterranean and Adriatic, respectively, come in for strong praise; while the latest volume on Celtic origins by Barry Cunliffe and John Koch receives a bit more critique. Kristiansen raves about Cameron's new world history of captives and slavery, as does Díaz-Zorita about a new edited volume exploring and promoting the bioarchaeology of care; though Smart is somewhat more reserved about Middleton's comprehensive textbook on the archaeology and ancient history of cultural collapse. Particularly worth reading, even for those working on other topics, is Wickstead's review of Doug Bailey's new monograph on art and archaeology. In a lyrical short essay, she examines the changing relationship between archaeologists and artists, artistic output/intervention, and archaeological sites and data.
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.
