The presence of domestic animals is a key feature of the Neolithic. Their earliest presence in archaeological contexts across the European continent is often interpreted as reflecting farming practices. However, domestic animals often escape, survive, and become feral. Using the comparative example of colonial North America, this article's aim is to illustrate what happens when livestock are introduced to a new, continental temperate environment. Taking a dual historical and archaeological perspective, the author reiterates and elaborates on the suggestion that feral animals were almost certainly a feature of the European Neolithization process.

The earliest Bronze Age Mediterranean primate representations on frescoes are found at the Aegean sites of Knossos (Crete) and Akrotiri (Thera). By contrast, monkeys have so far been missing from Mycenaean frescoes in mainland Greece. A fresco fragment of a cultic scene from Tiryns changes this; it depicts a bipedal partial lower body, with a hanging tail. This image, previously interpreted as a human wearing an animal hide, had already been suggested to represent a monkey. A re-examination of this miniature fresco identified various features that seem to confirm the representation of a monkey, most probably of a baboon-like primate. Assuming that the fresco from Tiryns is part of a cult scene, similar to those from Akrotiri, this adds a further image to a small corpus of Aegean depictions connecting monkeys with important female figures or deities. Furthermore, the Tiryns fresco fragment indicates that primates were not entirely absent from local Mycenaean iconography.

Agricultural practices are key for understanding socio-economic change, community organization, and relationships with landscape and the environment. Under the Roman Empire, cereals were vital for supplying urban and military populations, yet cereal husbandry practices within villa landscapes remain underexplored. In this article, the author applies new methods to analyse a large assemblage of charred plant remains from an area of chalk downland in central-southern England in order to evaluate changes in cereal production strategies over the Middle Iron Age to late Roman periods. Archaeobotany, carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis, and functional weed ecology are combined to reconstruct crop husbandry practices, in order to establish the cereal production system of Roman villas and the preceding Iron Age settlements, and to consider the environmental and socio-economic impact of cereal production systems.

In this article, the authors investigate the effectiveness of glass and metal recycling in Roman towns. The comparison of sealed primary deposits (reflecting what was in use in Roman towns) with dumping sites shows a marked drop in glass and metal finds in the dumps. Although different replacement ratios and fragmentation indices affect the composition of the assemblages recovered in dumps, recycling appears to have played a fundamental role, very effectively reintroducing into the productive chain most glass and metal items before their final discard. After presenting a case study from Pompeii, the authors examine contexts from other sites that suggest that recycling practices were not occasional. In sum, recycling should be considered as an effective and systematic activity that shaped the economy of Roman towns.

The study of stonemasons’ marks in ancient constructions, a subject that has been systematically investigated since the 1980s to the present, tends to focus on a few standard uses and consider other seemingly random patterns as issues of preservation, leaving the archaeological potential of such marks largely untapped. This article presents a methodological approach to explain these apparently arbitrary patterns and a diachronic analysis of local labour organization at Sagalassos in south-western Turkey in four case studies: the Upper Agora, Lower Agora, Hadrianic Nymphaeum, and Makellon. The spatial analysis of the stonemasons’ marks and examination of the stone carving techniques and epigraphic data suggest that the different marks were either produced by the same individuals and/or formed part of the same construction process.

Wealth differentials in archaeological sites are a frequently studied topic, but social differentiation approaches are rarely applied to different contexts within a wider territory, especially in Portugal. In this article, the authors discuss the differences in wealth and inequality through the consumption of tablewares from fifteen sites across Portugal dated from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries ad. The archaeological evidence derives from two types of contexts: secular (houses and dumps) and religious (female and male religious institutions). Using a statistical similarity method to compare different consumption patterns in each context, the authors discuss how this can help us understand wealth differences in distinct social environments.