The study of the Bom Santo Cave (central Portugal), a Neolithic cemetery, indicates a complex social, palaeoeconomic, and population scenario. With isotope, aDNA, and provenance analyses of raw materials coupled with stylistic variability of material culture items and palaeogeographical data, light is shed on the territory and social organization of a population dated to 3800–3400 cal BC, i.e. the Middle Neolithic. Results indicate an itinerant farming, segmentary society, where exogamic practices were the norm. Its lifeway may be that of the earliest megalithic builders of the region, but further research is needed to correctly evaluate the degree of this community's participation in such a phenomenon.

Innovation transfer can be described as a process of communication and integration. Its success depends on two conditions: first, the information flow itself and, second, the acceptance and implementation of this information. In this article, it is assumed that both aspects are influenced by certain factors that can stimulate or constrain the transfer of innovation. This hypothesis is tested in a case study concerning the spread of copper metallurgy in Central Europe. A contextual analysis shows that its transmission can be reconstructed as a slow integrational process. Further, the spread of copper metallurgy occurred in fits and starts, with repeated breaks that, in some cases, lasted for several hundred years. These halts are key for analysing the mechanisms of innovation transfer. In this context, the role of those variables which influenced this transfer will be analysed.

Several regions in Britain saw the construction of large, linear earthworks of banks and ditches during the later Bronze Age and in the Iron Age, often extending for many kilometres. In the light of recent theoretical discussions of materiality and relational agency within archaeology and other social sciences, and through an avowedly discursive poetics of place, examples of these earthworks are re-assessed as actants, capable of affecting and directing the lives of people, animals, and plants. These linear earthworks were not static monuments, but were active assemblages or meshworks of materiality, movement, and memory.

Domestic livestock were a crucial part of Mediterranean communities throughout later prehistory. In the first millennium BC, livestock mangement changed, and was changed by, the rise of cities in Italy. Italian prehistory has a rich zooarchaeological tradition, but investigation of the Iron Age has been regionally divided and synthetic works on the Po valley comparatively few. This article presents a pan-regional review of late prehistoric and protohistoric livestock exploitation that considers Northern and Central Italy together for the first time. Zooarchaeological comparison reveals an increase in the use of sheep/goat for secondary products, while cattle and caprines were subject to size changes that distinguish their management from that of pigs. A marked increase in pig husbandry is visible in both regions, but this shift took place earlier and more emphatically in Northern Etruscan centres than in Central Italy. After defining the main changes in animal management during the period under review, this article looks beyond population density to explore the wider environmental, economic, and cultural context of pork consumption and its relation to the development of urbanism in Etruria padana.

As an academic discipline, archaeology is deeply rooted in the cultural, social, and political practices of Western Europe of the nineteenth century. The emergence of local scholarly communities in other parts of the continent tends to be described as a process that saw the even spread of ideas and concepts in their original form. This further implies a uniform, unilinear sequence of paradigms (culture-historical, processual, postprocessual), each with their own internal logic. However, more often than not, these transfers of disciplinary knowledge from one academic community to the other have introduced distortions of the original concepts, designed to meet the demands of the different cultural and intellectual traditions and research agendas. In this article, we explore the foundation of academic archaeology in Serbia and of the pivotal figure in this process – Miloje M. Vasić, educated at German universities and considered to be the first academically trained archaeologist in the country. His adaptations of the German tradition of Classical scholarship applied to the study of the Balkan past have marked the theory and practice of archaeology in the country up to the present. This example indicates that we should seek to explore the ways in which the concepts we apply in our study of the past are articulated in particular local settings if we are to achieve a better understanding among various academic and professional communities of archaeologists across Europe.

This article examines the location and context of archaeological investigations in England between 1938 and 1945. The analysis of sources, including national inventories and contemporary journals, dispels any notion that archaeological practice was suspended during World War II, despite the absence of some leading practitioners, and reveals that a surprising amount of salvage and research fieldwork took place. Fieldwork was primarily in the south of the country; it reflects pre-war investigative trends, contemporary knowledge, opinion of the archaeological resource, and the increased threat of war-related construction work, but also the impact of immediate post-war concerns such as housing and infrastructure. Although primarily undertaken by established excavators employed by the Ministry of Works, a substantial amount of rescue work was carried out by small groups, local societies, and individuals often outside State funding, which reflects an independent culture of fieldwork that continues to the present day.