Inspired by the biographical approach to the study of material culture, a radiocarbon dating programme was undertaken to explore the chronology and temporality of the megalithic monuments in south-eastern Iberia. Instead of one or two dates per tomb, the normal way of approaching this complex issue, we carried out a complete radiocarbon dating series of single tombs based on human remains. We focused our attention on four tholos-type tombs in the cemetery of El Barranquete (Almería, Spain). According to the new radiocarbon series modelled in a Bayesian framework, four main conclusions can be drawn: that the cemetery shows a very long period of funerary activity, which began in the late fourth millennium and ended in the last centuries of the second millennium cal bc; that continuity of ritual practices attained an unexpected importance during the Bronze Age; that interments, which fall into cultural periods that would be unthinkable if only the typological properties of the grave goods were considered, occurred; and that each tomb had a complex and very different biography.

There are three sources of information regarding the social, political, and economic status of women in the European Iron Age, and all three are problematic. First, there are the classical sources, which describe Celtic society from the ‘civilised’ Mediterranean perspective, whether Greek or Roman. These often tell us more about the observer's culture than about the Celtic societies being described. Second, there are the insular Celtic laws and legends, which are compromised by time, distance, and the transformative effects of Christianity. Third, there is the archaeological record, which can only produce answers if the questions asked are the right ones, and is often seriously flawed with respect to preservation and recovery. Unfortunately, archaeologists are still some way from developing a methodology of reconstructing gender roles on the basis of excavated material culture remains. I would like to discuss an archaeological example which may provide some useful guidelines for generating such a methodology, with reference to all three of the sources mentioned above. The approach presented here makes use of written, ethnographic, and archaeological sources in a way that is not always possible in all research contexts. However, there have been a few recent attempts at such a synthesis (Claassen 1992; Spector 1993; Robb 1994), which suggest that a partnership between the written, ethnographic, and archaeological records regarding the subject of gender yields more than any of these sources of information alone can produce. Where such complementary data sets exist they should be made to work in tandem, as this discussion will show.

The archaeological study of assembly practices in the medieval west is often met with scepticism. The reliance on late documentary records and place-names, and the difficulties inherent in defining what actually constituted an ‘assembly’, are just some of the issues that face researchers. This paper brings together some of the first collated and excavated evidence by the HERA TAP project 1, and offers a cross-European perspective, drawing attention to the great variety of systems and types of structure created for the purpose of assembly in the late prehistoric and medieval eras. Selected case studies emphasize the chronological variations in the inception and life-span of assembly places and underline the diverse relationships of designated assembly sites to pre-existing landscapes, resource patterns, and social structures. Connections between the ‘architecture’ and location of these sites, and their role in the creation, maintenance, and signalling of collective identities are suggested.

The Late Glacial, that is the period from the first pronounced warming after the Last Glacial Maximum to the beginning of the Holocene (c. 16,000–11,700 cal bp), is traditionally viewed as a time when northern Europe was being recolonized and Late Palaeolithic cultures diversified. These cultures are characterized by particular artefact types, or the co-occurrence or specific relative frequencies of these. In north-eastern Europe, numerous cultures have been proposed on the basis of supposedly different tanged points. This practice of naming new cultural units based on these perceived differences has been repeatedly critiqued, but robust alternatives have rarely been offered. Here, we review the taxonomic landscape of Late Palaeolithic large tanged point cultures in eastern Europe as currently envisaged, which leads us to be cautious about the epistemological validity of many of the constituent groups. This, in turn, motivates us to investigate the key artefact class, the large tanged point, using geometric morphometric methods. Using these methods, we show that distinct groups are difficult to recognize, with major implications for our understanding of patterns and processes of culture change in this period in north-eastern Europe and perhaps elsewhere.

With the commemoration of World War I (WWI) under way, a preliminary stocktaking can be made of archaeological research into the physical remains of this war. The question is to what extent the perspective on the study of WWI heritage, and consequently the way in which archaeological research into WWI remains has been conducted, has evolved over the last ten years. Are relics from WWI seen as a legitimate subject of inquiry or does its archaeology as a discipline still strive for recognition? This paper deals with the practices surrounding WWI archaeology in Flanders, Belgium, as well as the (methodological) problems concerning the study of WWI archaeological remains, based on the reports resulting from fieldwork carried out by professional archaeologists.

This paper considers the early copper and copper-alloy metallurgy of the entire Alpine region. It introduces a new approach to the interpretation of chemical composition data sets, which has been applied to a comprehensive regional database for the first time. The Alpine Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age each have distinctive patterns of metal use, which can be interpreted through changes in mining, social choice, and major landscape features such as watersheds and river systems. Interestingly, the Alpine range does not act as a north-south barrier, as major differences in composition tend to appear on an east-west axis. Central among these is the prevalence of tin-bronze in the western Alps compared to the east. This ‘tin-line’ is discussed in terms of metal flow through the region and evidence for a deeply rooted geographical division that runs through much of Alpine prehistory.

A critical evaluation of the appropriateness of traditional ‘Hellenization’ and recently popular ‘world-systems’ interpretive perspectives on the colonial encounter in Iron Age western Europe is offered. These approaches are shown to have some common flaws stemming from shared implicit premises resulting from a profoundly embedded cultural legacy of hegemonic Helleno-centrism that permeates interpretive discourse. This legacy is a result of the construction during the Renaissance of a European identity with ancestral roots in ancient Greece and Rome and the consequent importance of these classical cultures to the definition of ‘cultural capital’ in modem Euro-American society. Additionally, world-systems models have problematic tendencies toward mechanistic structural overdetermination and reductionism. An alternative interpretive strategy, grounded in the anthropology of consumption and the historical anthropology of colonialism, is applied to the initial phase of the colonial encounter during the Early Iron Age. This brief example illustrates the necessity and possibility of restoring a consideration of local agency and culture to the archaeological analysis of colonial situations and of developing a more subtle means of understanding the relationship between local practice and global structures and processes.

Hobby metal detecting is a controversial subject. Legal and policy approaches differ widely across national and regional contexts, and the attitudes of archaeologists and heritage professionals towards detectorists are often polarized and based on ethical or emotive arguments. We, the European Public Finds Recording Network (EPFRN), have implemented collaborative approaches towards detectorist communities in our respective contexts (Denmark, England and Wales, Finland, Flanders, and the Netherlands). Although our motivations are affected by our national circumstances, we base our work on an agreed set of goals, practices, and visions. This article presents the EPFRN's vision statement and provides insight into its underlying thoughts. We hope to create a debate on how to develop best practice approaches that acknowledge the inherent challenges of hobby metal detecting while realizing its potential.

I argue in this paper that monuments such as megaliths can be understood in terms of ‘prospective’ and ‘retrospective memories’. They were originally built as permanent and widely visible mnemonics in order to transmit a particular message to the future, but that message is now lost. Megaliths were then, and stayed for much of their later history, ‘sites of memory’. In later ages, people considered such ancient monuments as part of their ‘cultural memory’ and interpreted them within the framework of the ‘history culture’ of their given social context. Since such re-interpretations are often equally significant and also contain hopes for the future (prospective memories), they can be termed ‘subsequent origins’ of monuments. One example for a ‘subsequent origin’ is the way megaliths are studied and treated according to the academic values of present-day archaeologists. In the paper I discuss several case-studies of megaliths’ ‘life-histories’ in different European regions. I conclude with the wish that a true chronology of monuments may be developed that reaches beyond chronographical tables and includes theories about monumental time: the pasts and futures of monuments, in each present.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the neglected role of archaeological archives in Cultural Resource Management in particular and in the discipline of archaeology in general. Through reference to a major recent survey of the size, condition, usage and future prospects of archaeological archives in England, it is argued that the neglect of archives leads to fundamental questions regarding the purpose of archaeology in general. Why are archaeological archives generated and kept ‘for posterity’? If they are worthy of retention, how can they be better used and integrated into the discipline? It is argued that there is a need to recognize the ‘ex situ’ archaeological resource as a concept and that archaeology should recognize that the study of this resource should be a major area of activity alongside the generation of new information through fieldwork.

This article results from a series of visits by the authors to the 44 hillforts of south-east England. Our aim was to re-contextualize these hillforts in their landscapes. Analysis of the pottery assemblages and radiometric dates allows a three-phase chronological division of these hillforts. Assessment of the topographic positions and excavated evidence indicates that the enclosures may have functioned in distinctly different ways in each of the three phases. The data for south-east England offer a counter-analysis to the extant ‘Wessex-centric’ view of southern British hillforts.

The application of medical scanning technologies to archaeological skeletons provides novel insights into the history and potential causes of osteoporosis. The present study investigated bone mineral density (BMD) in medieval skeletons from England and Norway. Comparisons between the two adult populations found no statistically significant differences. This compares with a modern fracture incidence for the femoral neck in women from Norway that is almost three times that in the UK. The pattern of age-related bone loss in medieval men was similar to that seen in men today. In contrast, the pattern in medieval women differed from that of modern young women. On average, medieval women experienced a decrease in BMD at the femoral neck of approximately 23 per cent between the ages of 22 and 35. These losses were partially recovered by age 45, after which BMD values show a decline consistent with post-menopausal bone loss in modern western women. A possible explanation of the rapid decline in BMD in young medieval women is bone loss in connection with pregnancy and lactation in circumstances of insufficient nutrition.

This article reviews aspects of the development of animal husbandry in Roman Britain, focusing in particular on the Iron Age/Roman and Roman/early medieval transitions. By analysing the two chronological extremes of the period of Roman influence in Britain we try to identify the core characteristics of Romano-British husbandry by using case studies, in particular from south-eastern Britain, investigated from the perspective of the butchery and morphometric evidence they provide. Our aim is to demonstrate the great dynamism of Romano-British animal husbandry, with substantial changes in livestock management occurring at the beginning, the end, and during the period under study. It is suggested that such changes are the product of interactions between different cultural and social traditions, which can be associated with indigenous and external influences, but also numerous other causes, ranging from ethnic origins to environmental, geographic, political, and economic factors.

The main questions addressed in this paper are these: How can we conceptualise power? How can we identify power relations in the archaeological record? How can we explain the emergence of asymmetrical power relations?

These questions will be approached by discussing the creation of value and prestige in primitive societies, with particular emphasis on the practice of conspicuous consumption. I shall argue that an object's value is created not only through labour at the moment of production, but also during its circulation within gift exchange networks, and through its consumption (destruction, deposition) in ostentatious ceremonies. While both gift exchange and conspicuous consumption are central strategies for the creation of value and prestige, I suggest that there is a crucial difference between them: conspicuous consumption brings about the abolition of the reciprocal relationship on which gift exchange is based. The initiation (and indeed the institutionalisation) of conspicuous consumption is therefore an important strategy in creating, rather than simply expressing or legitimating asymmetrical relationships.

The theoretical discussion will be applied to a specific historical problem: the transformation of the largely egalitarian kin-based Middle Bronze Age societies of the southern Greek mainland into the hierarchical Mycenaean (i.e. Late Bronze Age) palatial system. I shall argue that conspicuous consumption in the mortuary sphere was not simply a symptom, but a crucial element of the deep structural transformation that swept the southern mainland at the transition to the Late Bronze Age.

In this article we outline some of the key characteristics of the social structure of the Climax Copper Age in the eastern Balkans and the contributions of the Varna cemetery to those developments. We continue by examining the implications of the new series of 21 AMS dates from the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, which represent the first dates for the Varna Eneolithic cemetery on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Representing the first phase of the AMS dating project for the Varna I cemetery, these dates have been selected to provide a range of different grave locations, ranges of grave goods, and age/gender associations. We conclude by addressing the question of the unexpectedly early start of the cemetery, as well as its apparently short duration and relatively rapid demise.

This article will investigate the phenomenon of urban decay and collapse, primarily using examples from the ancient Mediterranean world, but also through comparison with David Byrne's recent investigation of contemporary urban breakdown phenomena in northern England. The analytical approach I wish to introduce to shed new light on this phenomenon is Chaos–Complexity Theory, which has a growing attraction for many social scientists in its potential for resolving the oppositional stances of Modernism and Postmodernism.

Burial is a highly symbolic activity through which concepts of the world are reflected in the representation and treatment of human remains. While mortuary studies in archaeology and anthropology have had a long history, our understanding of Neolithic societies through such analyses is lacking. This article has attempted to broaden our understandings of one such society, focusing upon the megalithic tomb tradition in Ireland, through an integrated study of the burial practices taking place at several sites located on the Burren, County Clare. The Parknabinnia chambered tomb, Poulnabrone portal tomb, and Poulawack Linkardstown-type cairn are located within three kilometres of each other and date to contemporary periods. Several questions are explored through the use of archaeological evidence, osteological analysis, and taphonomy to allow for a broader appreciation of social practices in the past – most notably burial practices. What types of burial practices were taking place; how do the sites compare to each other; and how do they fit within the overall scheme of Neolithic practices we have come to understand?

Current debates on the ontology of objects and matter have reinvigorated archaeological theoretical discourse and opened a multitude of perspectives on understanding the past, perspectives which have only just begun to be explored in scholarship on Late Iron Age Scandinavia. This article is a critical discussion of the sporadic tradition of covering longhouses and halls with burial mounds in the Iron and Viking ages. After having stood as social markers in the landscape for decades or even centuries, some dwellings were transformed into mortuary monuments — material and mnemonic spaces of the dead. Yet, was it the house or a deceased individual that was being interred and memorialized? Through an exploration of buildings that have been overlain by burial mounds, and by drawing on theoretical debates about social biographies and the material turn, this article illuminates mortuary citations between houses and bodies in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Ultimately, I question the assumed anthropocentricity of the practice of burying houses. Rather, I suggest that the house was interwoven with the essence of the household and that the transformation of the building was a mortuary citation not necessarily of an individual, but of the entire, entangled social meshwork of the house.

This paper examines Gotlandic picture stones and their relation to death rituals in Scandinavia from AD 400 to 1100. The stones are shown to mediate, as ‘doors’, between the living and the dead, and their iconography can be related to a specific form of narrative which may also have been relevant to ship burial on the mainland. The interaction between this tradition of burial and Christianity is discussed.

This article considers the long-debated and thorny issue of the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Britain. The apparently polarised debate that has dominated this discussion is, we suggest, unhelpful, and rather than positing either total colonisation from abroad, or simple indigenous continuity, we propose a model where both incomers and autochthons had their part to play. To explore this further we trace continuities across the divide in practices of hunting and gathering, and place these alongside the demonstrable evidence for change.