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.

Archives form a valuable but under-researched resource for mapping the development of prehistoric archaeology as a discipline in post-war Europe. New work on the previously un-catalogued archives of Professor Paul Jacobsthal at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, exemplify the opportunities offered by archival research. Here, we focus on the correspondence between Professor Jacobsthal of Marburg University, who sought refuge in Oxford before the war, and his colleague, Professor Merhart, who remained in Germany. The surviving personal correspondence between Germany and Oxford from 1936 to 1957 illustrates the complexities, uncertainties, and challenges to personal and academic identities in the aftermath of the war, and show how the individual responses of archaeologists to their personal experiences impacted on the directions taken by archaeological scholarship in Europe and beyond after the war.

This article considers the results of an analysis undertaken on pottery recovered mostly from multi-phase Iron Age sites in the Trans-Urals region of Russia. It focuses on a particular project involving fieldwork and the subsequent analysis of archaeological contexts and the laboratory studies of pottery morphology, ornamentation, technology, and statistics, with an attempt to apply the concept of style. This type of research project is unusual for Russian ceramic studies and the article begins with a consideration of the formal typological approach to the study of artefacts, which is a traditional aspect of Russian archaeology and is still the primary focus of many research programmes.

In this article I discuss problems and possibilities connected with commissioned archaeology in wetlands. The cultural heritage of wetlands is threatened by large-scale infrastructure projects, and there is a need within commissioned archaeology to develop approaches and techniques for systematic surveying in wetlands. With examples from an on-going project in southern Sweden, different surveying techniques are presented together with some results and interpretations. Attempts to grasp the complexity of the wetlands right from the beginning of the project proved to be fruitful, in that the palaeoenvironmental interpretations were decisive for the selection of sites for trial excavations. Interpretation of peatland expansion through time was important for the reading of the landscape and the search for settlement sites. Some techniques for trial excavations in waterlogged peat are also presented.

In 2017, eight runestones on Bornholm were scanned in 3D and the microtopography of the grooves was analysed by multivariate statistical methods. One of the stones was previously not known to runological research. The aim of this paper is to compare the carving technique of the Bornholm runestones with runestones from Swedish regions to shed light on old issues concerning Bornholm's links with other regions in and around the Baltic Sea. The rune carvers are important agents in this, as the runestones are often related to issues including landholding, Christianization, possible Swedish influences, and the inclusion of Bornholm into the Danish realm. In addition, rune carvers as native writers were intimately connected to the introduction of literacy. The results of this study indicate that the rune carvers did not cooperate much with carvers from the islands of Öland and Gotland, whereas Södermanland, among the Swedish mainland provinces, was their first choice.

The authors set a relatively small and little-known corpus of human remains recovered from Iron Age wetland contexts in Norway in a wider theoretical framework of sacrifice and personhood. The material studied, fragmentary skeletal remains in wetland contexts, juxtaposed with the better-known bog body tradition of northern Europe, offers a base from which to query constructions and perceptions of personhood. Situating the discussion in a contextual framework and relational underpinnings of ways of being, the authors examine whether or not the assumption that personhood rests in a human body can be implicitly inferred when confronted with ancient human remains, and what this may imply for interpretations of human bodies in votive settings.

The coin series from sites in the Dutch River area show a break during the last three decades of the third century and the first decade of the fourth century AD. Coins minted for Aurelian and his successors to the throne up to Constantine I are very scarce for all sites. The break has been interpreted to indicate the end of occupation of castella and settlements around AD 275. When the site finds from the Dutch River area are presented in the form of an adapted histogram however, the coin series show a striking similarity to site finds from Roman Britain, where, on the whole, continuity was safeguarded during the third century. The article argues that this gap in the coin series – detectable all over the western part of the Roman Empire – is caused by the special character of coin circulation during this period in the west and does not indicate the end of activities on the site that provided the coins. Coin finds even seem to suggest continuity during this period for a number of sites in the Dutch River area.