In the Bronze Age, warriors are probably the best-known social class. Evidence for warfare and other violent encounters links them to aggression and bloodshed that could be translated into social status. This made warriors a potential two-fold threat to the social cohesion of their communities: not only did they risk threatening the integrity of communities as agents of death but also they could challenge local authority and cause internal conflict. Here, the author presents evidence that suggests that internal conflict was a major concern for Nordic Bronze Age societies, in that warriors constituted an internal social challenge, and proposes that local communities may have mitigated this threat in rituals such as the sacrifice of weapons and the construction of social narratives through rock art.

The last fifteen years have seen in France a rapid increase of Iron-Age archaeological studies, both as part of the development of ‘National Archaeology’ and of political changes. This neo-structural analysis aims to make Iron-Age archaeological studies objective. It underlines how the need for a national identity influences Iron-Age archaeological constructions and strategies. After describing the ‘total’ context of French archaeology, the analysis unveils the symbols underlying Iron-Age studies in France which fit familiar archetypes – including a common ancestor – contained in the collective memory, and enables one to apprehend how the permanence of archetypes may contaminate archaeological constructions, thereby reinforcing the original ideological/archaeological strategy.

Excavations at the small Chalcolithic site of Politiko-Kokkinorotsos in central Cyprus show that it was occupied around 2880–2670 cal BC. Fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica) form the major component of the substantial faunal assemblage. The structure of the animal population suggests a seasonal hunting site, an interpretation consistent with the lack of formal architecture and the range of stone tools. In this study, independent odontochronological analyses of deer and caprine are used to test and confirm the model of seasonal culling in spring and summer based on more general indicators. The results suggest a pattern of varied, specialized site-types and activities in different parts of the island and in different ecological zones, and add considerably to our understanding of cultural systems on the island in the early third millennium BC.

This study explores the impact of recent discoveries on our understanding of the transition from the Roman to early medieval periods in northern England. Using the Tees Valley as a case study, it shows how modern interpretations of this process have focused primarily on the afterlife of the military sites in the region. However, the increased identification of significant Roman civilian settlements forces us to reconsider the dominant narratives and rethink the underlying processes that influenced the move from Roman-controlled frontier society in the fourth century to a fifth century society comprising both culturally Anglo-Saxon social groups and sub-Roman successor polities. A wider consideration is also given to how the changing patterns in the use of space and in refuse disposal strategies can be used to shed light on wider patterns of changing social identity in the later fourth century AD.

This paper looks at conventional views of Dark-Age towns: abandoned or underpopulated and lacking economic vitality. Archaeological and textual evidence is used to suggest that numerous urban churches were required to hold a large population, that so many were outside the town walls because inside was heavily built up. The paper suggests archaeology can often accurately document the demise of Roman urban structures, but survival and upkeep leaves little archaeological record, and this ‘negative’ evidence requires especially careful evaluation.

It suggests that archaeologists regularly assume that towns cannot exist without trade, that towns must provide ‘functions’ to the countryside to exist. Moses Finley's view of the ancient economy is followed, and towns are seen as fuelled by the widespread exploitation of peasants by secular nobility and the Church. Much of that rural wealth was consumed in urban centres, indeed big monasteries formed the cores of many of our present towns.

This paper focuses on how the human body, and the dead body in particular, was used to create social categories and identities in prehistoric Cyprus. Specifically, it explores how a particular condition, such as death, was integrated into social processes, and how the treatment of dead bodies both created and reinforced social categories and identities. The material the paper focuses on is the mortuary evidence from Chalcolithic Cyprus (3800–2300 BC). In particular, it argues that the extensive, intentional manipulation of dead bodies and human remains visible in Cypriot Chalcolithic cemeteries was aimed at integrating the individual to communal, collective wholes on the occasion of death and during the time period that followed.

This article discusses the construction details of the mounds erected over large Viking ship burials in Norway and shows that they form an integral part of mortuary practice. Moreover, elements of the construction that are potentially unique to this type of monument are repeated, suggesting a knowledge of the properties of materials and their inter-relationships within the mounds. Here, referencing between and within the mounds is considered alongside the connections these soils, sediments, and other earth-sourced materials contained in relation to the cultural landscape. The selection of such materials and the location of the burials in the landscape were fundamental to the creation of a performative scene for the burial rites, and for establishing a desired, interlinked, social memory.

South-west Britain—Cornwall, Devon and west Somerset—has featured little in discussions of British rock art. However, although it lacks the complex motifs found in northern Britain or the rich ornamentation of the Irish passage graves, it has a growing number of sites with simple cup-marks and stands at a pivotal location in the wider distribution of this form of rock art within north-west Europe. This paper considers the cup-mark tradition in south-west Britain and its wider European context, drawing attention to comparable traditions in western France, Wales, and south-west Ireland where simple cup-marks occur in analogous contexts. We propose a chronology for cup-marks in the south-west, from suggested Neolithic origins associated with rock outcrops and chambered tombs through to their use in Bronze Age barrows and subsequently roundhouses in the second millennium BC.

The context of Childe's decade as Director of the Institute of Archaeology and Professor of Prehistoric European Archaeology in the University of London is described. Particular attention is given to the circumstances leading to his appointment; his participation in a conference on ‘The Future of Archaeology’ held at the Institute in 1943; his inaugural lecture, ‘Archaeology as a Social Science’, delivered in 1946; his and Frederick Zeuner's involvement in the beginnings of radiocarbon dating; and his contrasted contributions as administrator, excavator, and teacher during his 10 years at the Institute.

The archaeological study of recent periods in Malta is in its infancy. Despite the high potential for an historical archaeology of Malta contributing to broader issues, such as an understanding of Mediterranean trade and colonialism, as well as the cultural history of Malta, the archaeological resource has remained under-explored. The aim of this article is to address the situation and offer an initial classification and interpretation of local and imported red earthenware ceramics. It will demonstrate the need for such work in relation to answering questions relating to local production, international trade, and foodways.

According to a model of local cultural development, human adaptation to the specific conditions of the habitat in the third–late second millennium BC led to the appearance of a culture of the ‘mobile herders’ in the Eurasian steppe. Recent major studies of the key role of the horse and an increased mobility of these people provide the background for the origin and development of a new system of armament. The bow and arrow were at the centre of this new nomadic military equipment, A three-stage model for the evolution of the Bronze Age nomadic bow shows the existence of two types of bow in the Eurasian steppe during the Bronze Age: a traditional long bow of a simple type and a short composite bow. A new type of bow appeared in the first half of the second millennium BC, short enough to be used on horseback, and composite for extra power. The earliest evidence for such bows is clearly localised on the western part of the Eurasian steppe, but the technical innovation quickly spread throughout the steppe to the East.

Until recently, aerial reconnaissance in Europe was performed almost exclusively by British, German and French specialists. Under the influence of traditional paradigms in archaeology, this discipline was considered in almost all countries as a means of detecting new sites rather than an instrument for the study of spatial relations between past prehistoric communities and their areas, on the one hand, and between people and their natural environment on the other. At the same time, national campaigns in aerial reconnaissance have not been completed by systematic applications of other non-destructive field methods which help to evaluate the potential of air survey and which can bring its results closer to the solution of the principal theoretical problems of settlement archaeology. Since landscape archaeology has changed the archaeological paradigm during the last 25 years, data from aerial photographs have been increasingly evaluated. Since the beginning of this decade, countries of Central and Eastern Europe have started up aerial archaeological projects. A close cooperation between archaeologists from once-divided Europe in the field of aerial archaeology has stressed the feeling of common European roots among archaeologists of all periods.

A civil case is being tried in central Sweden today, centring on disputed reindeer grazing rights between Saamis with rights to use land since time immemorial and Swedish landowners. Expert reports from both sides utilise statements by historians and archaeologists, who are called on to interpret the ‘Swedish’ or ‘Saami’ nature of prehistoric and medieval settlement The paper shows how the ‘old school’ of scholars consistently minimise past Saami presence and depict Saami culture as ‘stagnant’ while the ‘new school’ accepts the implications of medieval texts that Saamis formerly occupied territories much further south than they presently do, that the hunting-gathering tradition that still existed in central Sweden in the Middle Ages was most probably Saami, and that their adoption of Nordic words and material culture for their own use is testimony of a long process of the extention of Swedish/agricultural impact on an alien culture.

From the late second century AD to the end of the fourth century AD, black, shiny materials were popular in Britain and the Rhineland for the production of jewellery. In the past, in the absence of accurate, detailed analysis, all these products, irrespective of composition, have invariably been described as being made of ‘jet’. A project at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, has used the non-destructive technique of reflected light microscopy to identify the various black materials used by the Roman craftsmen. Long used for petrographic studies of coals and fossil fuels, this technique has proved very suitable for the analysis of small artefacts. The project initially focused on black objects from the area of Hadrian's Wall but was extended to look at objects from Rhineland sites as well as finds from other parts of Britain and the Continent. The project has revealed that a wide range of ‘jets’ and shales and varieties of coal from a diversity of geographical sources were used, and that the Rhineland objects were not carved from Whitby jet but from an unidentified source.

This paper ‘engenders’ the prehistory of south-eastern Europe for the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods. It discusses theoretical aspects of a gender archaeology, including three prehistoric case studies, and applies the ‘theory of mutedness’ and the ‘theory of sexual insult’ - subordinate groups using alternative methods of expression - to the female figurines of the fifth-millennium south-eastern Europe. Archaeology reveals that males were dominant in the public sphere of funerary ritual, expressed in the amount and types of grave-goods; females dominated the domestic sphere, where figurines abound. An engendered tension existed between domestic and mortuary spaces. A third, asexual gender also existed at this time (documented by asexual figurines and cenotaph burials). The third gender transcended the existing bi-gender tension and strategies of spatial restriction. The sexual imagery in the figurines is interpreted as evidence of gender tensions, rather than as evidence of matriarchical societies.

Such a question would never have bothered an earlier generation of archaeologists and culture historians. In 1929 at University College London, Professor W. M. Dixon gave a series of public lectures on the distinctiveness of the English. In his lectures variously entitled The English Character, the English Soul, Shakespeare the Englishman etc., he described the generic ‘Englishman’ and his ‘genius’ and in his analysis he literally discovered that the talent of English individualism increased with degree of cultural hybridity (Dixon 1938:108):

Substantial pyrotechnological structures and large quantities of charcoal are rarely found on Early Holocene sites in coastal Norway. Nevertheless, information on the use of fire and fuel types is available and presented in this article, a survey of sites dating from 10,000 to 8000 uncal bp. Possible fuel types and preferences are discussed and it is argued that most fires would have been small and short-lived, making extensive use of low vegetation. This suggests that food must have been largely consumed raw, fermented, or dried. The distinction between the use of shrubs and trees must have had implications for the perception of their properties, which appear to have persisted even after the emergence of more forested landscapes.

The (re)occupation of hillforts was a distinctive feature of post-Roman Europe in the fifth to seventh centuries ad. In western and northern Britain, hillforts are interpreted as power centres associated with militarized elites, but research has paid less attention to their landscape context, hence we know little about the factors that influenced their siting and how this facilitated elite power. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide opportunities for landscape research, but are constrained by limitations of source data and the difficulty of defining appropriate parameters for analysis. This article presents a new methodology that combines data processing and analytical functions in GIS with techniques and principles drawn from ‘traditional’ landscape archaeology. A case study, focused on Dinas Powys, suggests that the strategic siting of this hillfort facilitated control over the landscape and has wider implications for our understanding of patterns of power in post-Roman Britain.

Far from being a simple annual round determined by the calendar, seasonality in human societies is a complex system of interdependence between humans and non-humans. It requires close attentiveness to the variability of soils, weather, topography, plants, and animals across both time and space. In this article, the author investigates mobile systems of interdependence that take advantage of topographical and seasonal variation. He uses a range of case studies from early modern Scotland and Cyprus, focusing on summer grazing in the uplands and lowland agriculture carried out by mountain communities. After a comparative discussion of seasonality, the article examines the role of topography and movement, and then puts the ‘margins at the centre’ in order to highlight the central role played by seasonal activity and movement in rural society.

This article suggests that the common appearance of cultural (‘midden’) material under barrows of the Trichterbecher culture is interpreted as the purposeful metaphor of continuity of the small-scale society that has just suffered the loss of one or more of its actors. The three stages of rites de passage as outlined by van Gennep are used to explain the mortuary rituals further. Separation was signified by the enclosure (ditch or palisade) around the future barrow site and a ‘facade’. The liminal stage may be marked archaeologically by the ‘cleansing’ of fire or dismantling of facades at the barrow entrance, and sometimes by ploughing, which destroyed the cultural material on the site. Reintegration was the ‘planting’ of the deceased under soil and the erection of the barrow. The paper concludes with implications for the growth of a lineage organisation of society.